Other Boston Pics

The Prudential Building, Boston, MA

View from Prudential Building, Boston, MA (cont. 2)

View from Prudential Building, Boston, MA (cont.)

View from Prudential Building, Boston, MA

Trinity Church, Boston, MA

Leaving Colorado

View from Lost Gulch Overlook (Boulder, CO)

My Old Apartment, Boulder, CO

My Favorite Used Books Store, Boulder, CO

More Colorado Pics

Long's Peak

Long's Peak stands 14, 255 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park here in Colorado (just outside of Estes Park, where I spent some time today).

I climbed (hiked is the more appropriate term; I bore no equipment for scaling rock faces) this mountain in 1999 with my then-supervisor and friend Silas.

I had lunch with Silas and his three-year-old son today at Mountain Sun on Pearl Street in Boulder. Good to see how well he is doing. He is a bona fide 100 percent milkman; you know, like delivering bottles to your doorstop milkman. NO shit. It's a good living and I wish him and his family all the best.

When I was nearing the end of my Bachelor's degree in Baltimore (2000) at Towson University, I walked into the new Barnes and Nobles and spent some time scanning the titles in the poetry section. One title stood out: Long's Peak by Chester Wickwire. The cover had a picture of Long's Peak. Applying the logic that I once hiked this verysame mountain, I purchased the book. After I fininshed reading, I noticed that it was published by a Baltimore press, BrickHouse Books. The publisher of BHB was listed on the title page: Clarinda Harriss. The name was familiar; I had an inkling she worked at Towson University. So I looked her up in the TU directory, sent her an e-mail inquiring about any internhip possibilities, heard back from her soon thereafter, and thus began my on-again off-again tenure as an Assistant Editor with BrickHouse Books.

This past year, I was reading manuscripts for BHB and came across a unique and lively book of poetry: The General Is Asked His Opinion by Omar Shapli. I wrote up a brief review of the book and told Clarinda that she should publish this title next. Her reply was the she didn't have the funds to do so. My reply: What if I published it? With her blessing, I wrote Omar a letter offering to publish his book, and thus was born twentythreebooks. The General Is Asked His Opinion will be available for online purchase in the next few weeks.

I park, therefore I am....

a fuckhead.

(Baltimore, MD)

Boulder Revisited

This is the bagel shop I worked at for about a year and a half. Up every day at 5 am ('time to make the bagels'), I staggered into this place, by the back door, and ruled like a tyrant over my food prep area.

I am writing this post in a Best Western a few blocks from the bagel shop (or as my friend and former co-worker Eric likes to call it, "The Bagel Hut"). One block up and across 28th Street is a Target.

When my friend Drew and I first moved out here, we had no friends here, no jobs lined up, no place to live, so we slept in our sleeping bags just outside of town at the foot of the Flatirons, fending off cops, foxes, and morning dew. We spent a few days looking at apartments and applying for jobs. City Street Bagels pretty much hired us on the spot and we were to begin working immediately: Drew as counter help, me as the prep guy. I did everything from prepare the dough for the bagels to making a variety of cream cheeses (which I do not eat, and thus I never, ever taste-tested my own whippings) to slicing tomatoes and onions and turkey for the lunch crowd. The night before our first day I went into Target (across the street) and purchased a cheap alarm clock to wake us up at 430 am so we could sneak into a park and use their showers before anyone woke up and was the wiser.

Drew didn't last long at City Street Bagels; I held on until March 1999.

Being back here reminds me of all the reasns why I loved this place; conversely, it reminds me of exactly why I left. I have a lot of great and not-so-great memories tied to this place and I am grateful I had the opportunity to come here in the first place and grateful for the opportunity to revisit.

I haven't eaten a bagel since I left here 7 years ago. Eating 5 to 7 of them a day will do that to you. But I also have not hiked in the mountains since I left, and I miss that tremendously. The Rocky Mountains make this grown man well up a little. Hopefully tomorrow I will get off my lazy sit-in-front-of-the-computer ass and make my way to the trails I once knew.

The gathering flab concurs with this hope.

Bush's Vietnam Tour Duty

At long last, Mr. Bush faces the communist enemy in Vietnam.

A Good Night

November 4, 2006 - A night of so-so boxing, but with a great setup.

For fans of HBO's The Wire

Order Carcetti products by clicking on the kowinkydinks store link.

Ear-Biting Endorsement

Tyson endorses Steele

Mike Tyson is enthusiastically endorsing Republican Michael Steele for a Maryland U.S. Senate seat.

Paging Mr. Cardin: Time to call "The Rock" Rahman. Tyson says he would go so far as to climb in the ring and fight again in support of Steele. Well, let's get him in there with Rahman (in support of Democrat Ben Cardin).

Winner takes my vote.

Nevermind - 15 Year Anniversary

Never Your Old Mind Again

When Nirvana first released Nevermind, I didn’t even own a CD player. Soon after the release, though, I bought one of those all-in-one 5-disc changer/tape decks from Circuit City, and I was on my way to amassing quite the CD library (don’t get me started on the process of ripping them all to mp3 format).

The first CD I owned? Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. Why? Well, it was on the shelf near the cash register at CC; it had a parental warning sticker on it; and my mother offered to buy me any CD I wanted so I could test my new equipment out.

The second CD I owned—Nevermind; though, it did come as part of the first 12 CDs I ordered through Columbia House. But for the purposes of the quasi-myths of your youth, it was number 2, alright?

Up until the Nirvana era, my musical tastes ranged from the skaterpunk music I picked up on from the neighborhood baddies to the heavy metal noise I picked up on from the other baddies (the alcoholic versions, though there was a lot of cross-pollination) to the rap music I was turned on to by my city-dwelling wigger cousin to listening to Lite 102 torch songs and ballads, calling in to make requests for songs to be played for all those girls in my class I had quiet crushes on.

Then came Nirvana.

And never again did I stay up late at night making embarrassing requests. Crushes: “oh well, whatever, nevermind.” It was time to accept that the prettiest girls in class (even the mid-range ones I settled for—in my mind) would view me as nothing more than an odd curiosity (not to be confused with a curious oddity: that came about when I discovered Aphex Twin years later)—a rather short-lived odd curiosity.

Instead of hanging my head in dejection, my head would be bowed only out of spite, a disdainful gesture for all those I now considered unworthy of my time. If I’m invisible, then so are you.

This attitude (which has been oh-so all been done before, has been commodified, has been ironically vilified, absurdly embraced, etc.) still didn’t change the fact of how alone I was. Nirvana’s Nevermind was the soundtrack that made it all too clear that ‘alone’ was just an illusion; I was alone because I was around all the wrong people; I was trying too hard to be part of all the wrong people.

Nevermind helped the Disaffected find each other. Say what you will about Nirvana’s artistry, or lack thereof: paradoxically, Nevermind, Nirvana, and particularly Kurt Cobain probably inspired FEWER suicides.