Bathroom bound bumpkins bouncing off bros...in pajamas, are coming down the stairs.

Sweet shit I've consumed far too many relaxing chemicals and i need to pee so 

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY

Was all i could think as i tried to wade my way through the well groomed obstacle coarse of human road-blocks others might call bar goers.  

I am, i have been informed, too gentile for this city.

Ha. Ha.

I just don't feel like it's necessary for someone to line-backer their way through a crowd to get places in the indoors of this city...

though i do like the image of Hiring a line-backer and latching onto his back like some kind of mustachio'd lemur (isn't there some kind of simian who's mustache is so mighty it's revered as an Emperor?) to ride to my destination.

I need to become a bro-bender; subtly brushing aside the otherwise immovable mass of blood-hungry poon/pecker hounds who populate the much coveted, rarely appreciated (til you’re a resident of a city where such a thing as

                                                            ELBOW ROOM

 Well…dance floor

only exists in myth and fable)

Anyhow, that particularly harrowing bladder-venture was only a snapshot of an otherwise delightful evening out with my Dan-ppleganger. 

His name is of no importance (Hi, Brett), all you need know is that he is my auxiliary-double and shall be brought in only as a replacement in the event of my untimely death or dismemberment.

I’ve started collected books.

This is not a ‘beginning’ so much as a ‘picking up where we left off’ with a rather bibliophilic impulse to collect and rarely read the interesting and available.

I have a bookshelf of nerdy, well bound ambitions to prove it.

But that’s back in West Virginia.

So the cycle begins again; see book, covet book, purchase (or, in this case, and more to the eventual point, abscond with off the street) book, and then take book home to collect dust and guilty sidelong glances from my couch, where I am ever more invested in my love affair with X-Box and Internet hilarity.

BUT NOT N’MORE

I have a goal.

Or maybe a mission.

Perhaps a quest.

Quixotic though it may be, I’ve never been one to pass up a lively tilt with any kind of well-trod metaphor, so windmills and book reviews it is!

I am going to continue to pick up books on the street, and then I’m going to read them-

BEAR WITH ME-

And then, I’m going to write about them here.

I am not a literary scholar, as much as I wish I were, and I’m far from any kind of authority on the qualities that define a book as ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ or even ‘better than campfire kindling’ but I think this might be fun.

I’ll take a picture of where I got the book(with a fun note on the location, he said brazenly), be it table vendor, a deliberately laid out box on the side of the street, or the top of someone’s trash bin.

I’ll then read the damn thing.

And then I’ll talk about it.

On the Internet. 

To be mercilessly judged by all those with the credentials to do so.

And maybe I’ll make people laugh, too.

So, I need to get back to reading; I’ve got a small collection going already and a big ol’batch of the Bacchae to cram into my brainpan.

Wish me luck, and thanks for reading.

A tangent.

Some of the best moments of my life seem to have felt, in retrospect, like tangents.

Or, something like a tangent...

A sidenote

An interlude

An addendum to the everyday movings i have through my life.
...

You know what i mean!

You've had these days; any kind of day, where for just a minute you're mind can be elsewhere because the task you're involved in is Simple. 

Going for a run.

Doing the dishes.

Walking getting home from work.

Walking in a residential neighborhood to or from the subway.
Getting groceries.
Any of these fit.

Thus far, and most recently, i have two very sweet city tangents i'd like to share, and then maybe i'll talk about the goddamn holidays.

So.
I have a confession to make.
I don't much like the Greeks-
PLAYS, people, Greek PLAYS-
and i never thought to really give them the chance.
Oh, sure, when my guidance counselor told me I had the reading comprehension of a college student (so much smoke up my ass it's a wonder i wasn't made of brick), you're damn right i got a copy of Homer's 'The Odyssey' and try to drudge my way through it.
And i did, and with gusto.
And then i put it down and never after that so much as touched a page of greek verse if i could help it.
I got spoiled doing Shakespeare!
More accessible themes and characters; a sense of goddamn humour i could understand; acting direction written into the text...a metric system that makes sense.
Go ahead, call me a fool and an uneducated surf and tell me that my analysis of whatever is etc.
I am only setting up all of this as a kind of prelude to an apology letter to the Greeks.
So, if you'll excuse me, i'm addressing them now.
Ahem
"Dear Greek Tragedy,
I am Sorry for spending so much of my life avoiding you.
I didn't know.
I had never read The Bacchae.
No one has ever forced me to sit down and actually Try to like you.
And, apparently, that's all it takes.
A little effort, and being cast in a student project centric to a scene out of the Bacchae where a guy shows up, tells the Chorus an immensely disturbing story about a woman tearing off her son's arm and parading his disembodied head around her home town like a trophy.
And then leaves.  The guy leaves.  I leave.
The Messenger just had a MISERABLE day, and he's getting right the hell out of town.
Thanks for waiting until I had the attention span to read a classic,
Love,
Dan

thanks, guys, i think i'm done now.

So, there it is; a new friend of mine(Maridee is her name), in the true spirit of sharing good when good can be shared, is bringing me in to do the messenger rhesus from The Bacchae for an in-class assignment over at Columbia.
And I couldn't be more pleased, but i could've sworn i was going somewhere else with this...
Tangents!
I was coming home from Maridee's apartment, walking a Bronx street i'd never seen before that evening, on my way back to the long ass subway ride that would later take me home, head abuzz (with a new language, a new tragic vocabulary, a new reason to celebrate being so goddamn ignorant that Everything is novel and exciting) when i see, discover, a dancing red on the side walk ahead of me.
The hell?
Looks like the smallest police lights i've ever seen, too close to the dirt.
Mouse police?
Wait, wasn't there a cadre of boistrious young men on a stoop not ten feet behind...oh, it's a lazer pointer.
They're fucking with me.
And, of course, I see that a decision must be made.
Do I, the grown ass man that i am, keep walking and teach these young men that teasing grown ups is inappropriate by simply ignoring them?
Or, do i (of course i do) take this opportunity to play, to encourage a harmlessly rambunctious approach to...
so i start dodging the lazer pointer.
and they chase me.
and i run.
and it was so goddamn fun.
that i almost regret leading them into a busy street to be run over by a toys'r'us truck.
sad coincidence, this close to the holidays...

Tangent  TWO(coming soon)!

Because why wouldn't I love it here.

Absence really can make a heart grow fonder.
Yes, dear reader(s), I speak a kind of practiced, well tread truth.
I have been without my voice. I tried looking for it in work and teaching and travel but for all of that, I knew that I wasn't really settled until I was bellowing my brain into the vast, two way mirror of expression that is the blogosphere.
I cannot see myself unless someone is looking, and I cannot be honest to their view unless I can't see them, so here goes nothing.
Again.

In which we discuss:
Shameless (if slightly self-aware) use of tired sentiment to re-boot a pet project;
A retrospective on recent life happenings and what all I think pertinent;
The joys and terrors of transitioning into a metropolitan inevitability;
Why it is a transplant country bumpkin cannot help but love his new home;
The romance of want;
And, of course, feet... Or is it toes?

My hearts fondness for blathering about whatever I damn well please being the result of that catharsis' absence notwithstanding, I have missed this. I tried cooking and taking pictures, and may again, but I am not a photographer nor a cook.
Better or worse (much fucking worse) I identify as a writer.
I will keeping cooking and photographing, but they will always just be silly funtimes.
Whatever this is is, on some fundamental level, a necessity for me, so I'll share it with strangers to see if they like it.

Busy boy has been busy.
I was camping out with Shakespeare nerd-genius-babies for a summer which lead to teaching general-theatre-nerd-genius-babies, which gave way to pensive unemployment which lead to now; I'm a resident of the city I chose, about to start a job to pay the bills so I can live enough to make the career I choose.
This has all happened over the course of but a few fast months. So fast, I feel windswept and whiplash and worldly and weary and wacky and weirdly welcome.
Here.
The city.
My city. If you're asking anyone who lives here, I feel like they'll claim the place like an emperor of an ancient, well established dynasty.
A dynasty build on a heap of rat shit and exotic pornographies.
But how exotic they are.
How exotic everything seems to be here.
I make no show of being anything other than a doe eyed tourist, drinking this city's scummy cool aide like a man lost in a Dixie dry dessert of bible belts and buck hunting.
Some days I leave my apartment (and some days I don't. Some days I just hide behind my door and never leave. Desperate to conserve capitol and calories, I hibernate until I can begin my life as one of the gainfully employed) , and every minute I spend wandering these streets is a new adventure in why this place was the right decision.

Beauty lives here. Did you know that?
Of course this city is filthy.
Unrepentant. Unwashed. Ugly.
But in that is has found the grace of the Uncaring.
In Mellville's timeless classic Moby Dick (oh, christ, here we go), our narrator suggests that anything done 'cooly' is a thing done admirably.
This city is 'cool' in it's filth and depravity (scum and villainy, dear reader!) and for being so, it is beautiful.
That, and the people are impossible.
The architecture breathtaking.
The fashion questionable.
The food ravenous.
And the subway incomprehensible.
I'm lost in the pulsing, bilous bowels of a technorganic monster called a city, and I'm not sure if I'm a virus or just a persistent turd.

Persistent Turd; my next indie band.

Going to bed hungry is something new for me. I'm far from starving (calm down, mom), but I'm not the glutton I know myself capable of being.
But it's ok: I planned for this.
When I worked as a professional Summer Camp oddity, I was just as much the glutton I could be, and for so being, I put on my winter coat.
When I took happy advantage of my family's unquestioning hospitality, I was a more controlled kind of glutton, so I kept but grew no further my winter coat.
Winter has come, ye nerds of WinterFeels, and this summer son can smile for that I am layered thick enough to Revel in a tighter belt and a leaner cheek: it means I'm earning my place here.
If I can't walk into that audition room with some gleam of a starved, well honed attack dog, how will they ever respect my ruthlessness enough to want to pay me?
Maybe I'll just drink more coffee.

My feet hurt.
Not all the time.
Not until I come home.
Not until I let them tell me how terrible I've been to them.
So I'll sit on my little floor, turn on music, or maybe some Internet funnies, and GRIND MY SOUL until everything feels a little more balanced.
And then I lull myself to sleep with the sound of my neighbor-bar and my own steady, expectant breathing.
It's all still new enough that even a day fraught with fear and self doubt is made better for that, at time of writing, I am one of Three people on my subway train with either a computer, journal or phone (I blog on my phone. What, wanna fight about it?), all trying to capture something incredible about themselves to share with...
Someone.
Anyone.
Thanks for reading.
More soon.

Forcing a little perspective on the subway

Did i mention that i'm reading Moby Dick at the moment?