Monday, July 31, 2006

i am watching this one like a hawk

this whole floyd landis thing is fascinating. somehow i have yet to get as mad about cycling cheats as baseball cheats, but seriously...is he totally lying his face off? was palmeiro lying his face off? is that even a phrase?

yay stickpins

I will be going to a gregcity stickpins game tomorrow. they were originally named after one of the signature products of the bic corporation, but linguistic change led the name to evolve a bit. this year has been relatively good to the stickpins, but i am not at all a fan. so when i saw yay stickpins, i don't mean i want them to win. sports are a really bad waste of time anyway. lying about your life online is much more entertaining and could even be more fulfilling.

4 mill backpack. sinking barge

no idea what that means, but it's a note i saved on my phone. perhaps those are lyrics to a song i heard out somewhere, but i don't really know.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

new favorite

thing about gregcity is lying on the roof of my bldg in a hammock talking on the phone.

oh capn my capn

Says my roommate "Women don't like to be the adult in the house," and he is about to get slammed for it by all of our wonderful female friends who are over visiting. Please don't hate me for sharing his weirdness, courtesy of the book Manhood.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

employment

It's not just the title of a Kaiser Chiefs album anymore. Seriously, I have a job and that's the real reason for me being here in Greg City, Statestate. I am working at a highly acclaimed soda company, the Metafizz Carbonated Soft Drink Corp. Metafizz is about a lot of things, but fun is certainly part of it. How many times have you been at work and someone asks for a rubber band? Well, it happened to me last week and two of us started looking around like "ok, well they usually fly in this direction, so that's where one should be" as we inspected window sills and other likely landing places. That's what makes Metafizz so great. Or it could be the gallons of free diet soda we drink. They actually buy us water, too. I have never before worked somewhere that actually had a water cooler. Incidentally, for those wondering, I think "I Predict a Riot" is the only song I have ever heard by the aforementioned band.

proving once again

the nytimes can make anything uncool.

Friday, July 28, 2006

Some rules

I fully intend to lie. Seriously, some embellishment, if not total fabrication, of postings is in the works. Friday is a good time to make things up, I think. Tonight I ate a few bowls of cereal, watched most of "French Kiss" and went for a run. It is hot in my apartment and I am feeling queasy. Lunch today was an event. I sent out email invitations last week, and the whole department was invited. No one from the other team came at all. We had two directors and a manager, but not a single analyst from their team. The VP was giving them a hard time about it after I told him. He had wanted to go but couldn't.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

sometimes when i'm all alone i wish you were cooler

That's a quotation from working hours. Not from my own mouth, mind you; I can't always come up with things that impressive. Wrote it down on the same envelope I used to verify my New York mailing address and obtain a library card. I sense some serious synergy going on. Another quote, same day at work: "There's no reason to sink your own ship, you know." Seems appropriate for the island song, but mixing metaphors might be confusing.

Wherein it all beginneth

Ok, so I realized I already have like two blogs - one at myspace, one at ourmedia.org - and obviously I can't even be bothered to update those. Still, I write plenty of stuff on other people's blogs and certainly it gets old waiting for other folkses to post replies to your comments etc. I am still holding out for a guest author gig somewhere; teamred put up with me until that site's alleged demise. I have considered applying for a writing position at cokemachine glow, but they're probably going to tell me to get lost. Rejection, it's part of life, and they reject plenty of folks. The point is, I got nowhere to write and it was high time I staked a claim to some new turf.

So the title of yon blog, plus the url and whatever else I care to glean, is a reference to my scattershot songwriting efforts. Those who were in the curators with me will recall that I am prolific when I'm in the right frame of mind, but that I really don't know what I'm doing. One of my most recent efforts, about being on an island, is written, in draft form, on the back of a receipt for some stamps. The tablature for part of the melody is on the envelope from one of my birthday cards. The envelope seemed such a handy carrying device that I slipped that receipt right on in. I wrote "lyrics inside" to remind myself what I'd done. Tonight, I went back to the lyrics in search of a good title or phrase, and "lyrics inside" it is. That being said, this is not about lyrics only. I may enter some one-sentence posts here and there instead of writing my fascinating new lyrical ideas on some scrap of paper somewhere. Oh, and "find a captain and trust him" is an excerpt from the chorus, of course; I added "or her" because it seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe that can go in the song too.

Anyway, I began reading a book today, after getting my library card. I originally planned to go to Trader Joe's but decided against it. Then I planned to walk up to the 59th street station from 5th Avenue, but there was this branch library there inviting me in. My life goes like that; seriously - I had no plan to get a library card today and that's exactly what I did. It's somewhat daoist of me, I think. So I needed proof of my home address, and that was basically it. How many people normally carry around a piece of mail with their address on it? Well, I was lucky to have one on hand. Sweet. I found two books right away - an Ibsen collection with several plays I had never read, and a collection of new Scottish writing. I was feeling super psyched about my literary taste, but had a hard time finding another book to round things out. I ended up returning to the same area in search of some literariness, and picked up Ben Yagoda's The Sound on the Page. Yup, I'm reading a book about "style and voice in writing." I believe I like to shift my style and voice - if you read my journals you would know what I'm talking about - but I do like to ramble and then break out an "anyway." You better believe it.