Confrontations

Part of embracing my dudeness involves doing things that adult dudes do.

Last night at 3:30am, my next door neighbor gets on the phone and has a very loud conversation. Thanks to the walls of this building being paper-thin, I'm able to hear his beautiful Spanish quite clearly.

"OH COME OOOOOOOOOON," I say at the wall.

"Paquito conchillo se jabla."

"DUUUUUUDE! It's 3:30 in the f*(#!#g morning!!"

"Con queso el dorado chile vamos ahora."

So I did what every frustrated New Yorker does at this point.

I tapped on the wall.

TAP.

TAP.

TAP.




"Ocho sinco sies con Santa Maria."

Maybe he didn't hear me. Okay. You wanna play rough???

TAP.

TAP.

TAAAAAAAAAAP!!



His reply:

SLAM

SLAM

SLAAAAAAAM!!

As if to say, "Ey mang! I hear choo! Chut up!"


For some reason this filled me with dread. I pulled the covers over my head, cranked up the white noise app on my tired iPhork and rolled over.


I decided I needed to confront him about this. Oh sure. I could have done the immature thing and given him a massive taste of his own medicine. But if my years in therapy taught me anything, it's that now we handle things like adults. We do not do things like scared little boys anymore.

Now, by "confront" I don't mean "throw down" (although I did make sure my beard was fluffed and I wore my construction worker coat to make myself look as imposing as possible). What I mean is give this guy a face to associate the nebulous "next door neighbor" with. After all, if he SEES me, he'll be more likely to acknowledge subconsciously that a real person actually lives in the room next to his.

But one must also take into account that he'll probably be none too happy to see me. How does one navigate so treacherous a mine field?

The thing is, I'm a ridiculously considerate neighbor. I have so successfully applied the Golden Rule to apartment living that people either don't know I'm there or they think the walls are so thick they can be as loud as they want.

I don't want to hear them at 3 in the morning, so I make sure they never hear me. That's why all parties at Studio Forty-Fork always end well before midnight. Because what if my neighbor has to get up early tomorrow? I wouldn't want to be kept up all night if I were in his shoes.


I knocked on the door to his apartment. It took him forever to answer.

When he opened the door, I was met with a massive CLOUD of cigarette smoke.

"Jes?"

He crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame. He looked pissed.

"Hey, I'm from next door. Listen..."

"Jes?" He said.

"I just wanted to say, I'm REALLY sorry about last night. It was late and the walls in this stupid building are so thin that I--"

"I wus beein quiet, mang. I was on de phoneg. I wussin' makeen inny noiss."

"I know. I know. I'm saying I'm sorry--"

"I am always bee-een as quiek as I cang mang. I wus jus on de phoneg. Why joo gatta tap tap TAP on my wall like that mang?"

"That's what I'm trying to say. I'm SORRY. I could tell I pissed you off and I was all--oh shit, I pissed him off (threw that in for added "buddy-buddy" effect! Sorry Mom!) and I shouldn't have done that. I won't do it again."

".........oh."


It worked. I knew it would. The ol switcheroo! The tried and true "It's not YOU. It's ME. I'M the bad one! Can you ever FORGIVE me??"

This guy was expecting the Alamo. Instead, he got San Jacinto'd. And he didn't even know it.

"So no hard feelings, right? I swear I'm not gonna blast my music to get revenge, okay! Ha ha ha!"

"Uhh...Okay. Jes. That's okay. Jes. Jeah mang. Iss okay."


I realized something through this. Even if he does occasionally keep making noise at stupid hours of the night, I can thank the good Lord above for something even more precious:

That billowing cloud of cigarette smoke somehow manages to stay on his side of the wall. And considering how miserable the last apartment was because of cigarette smoke, that is no small blessing.

And besides, if he doesn't shut up I can always call 311.

Whoops

You know, heh heh... I'm known to get carried away sometimes.

I'm a passionate sort of guy.

So imagine my surprise when I should discover just now that a DRAFT of a post about Pat Robertson--one which I didn't intend to post until after I'd given it a little more thought--actually made it onto the blog?

Heh heh. Heh.

Whoops! Looks like everybody hates me now!! Maybe my stone-age friends are right--maybe all these blogs and facebooks are a really really BAD idea.


In other news, here we are at the end of January. I'm about to wrap up a two month pose at Hoity Toity School for Gifted Artists. I'd be working on the Jesus Painting (the JP) but the sides of my beard are taking a while to come in so the painter decided to postpone till March.

Which is okay. I've got another gig at Hoity Toity lined up for February. No harm in stretching things out a bit, is there?

So that's pretty much the update gang. I'm scruffier than ever before (it feels funny but I like it), still got gigs lined up a couple of months in advance, 'Hamlet' rehearsals starting soon... Yep. Things are just cookin' along.

Except for the fact that the hippie lady in the sculpture class has tried to educate me about the dangers of food. All kinds of food. Bad. Bad bad bad.

Heating food in plastic = poison (I'd actually heard that one before)
Cooked/roasted nuts, especially peanuts = cancer
Toasted food or food that's browned or blackened in any way = cancer
Flouride hidden in America's drinking water = calcium deposits in the brain
Meat of any kind = Duh. She's a hippie after all
Milk and cheeses = cancer
Wheat = poison
Vegetables that aren't fresh = worthless


The list probably goes on but those are all I can think of off the top of my head. The arguement for a lot of this stuff is that many of these things aren't actually BAD for you. It's that our food isn't fresh anymore. It's all processed.

And that sucks. Because I like food. I like eating things that taste good. I hate super-organic health snacks because they all taste like how hamster pellets smell.

Happy New Beard

It's 2010. And I'm going into the tens (or is it teens?) with facial hair.

I love having a goatee. I don't think I can express how much I enjoy it with words alone, so here's a song.

There's something about it. I don't know. I look at pictures of myself with it and think my face looks complete.

It's not purely vanity. There's the Jesus painting. There's the Orion painting. There's Polonius in the upcoming 'Hamlet'.

So I NEED facial hair.

I've been able to do a really good goatee for years. But the hair on my cheeks is still rather sparse.

So as I was scouring the internet for tips on how to handle this, I came across

THE BEARD BOARD.

It's basically a support group for dudes growing beards. They post about how their wives and girlfriends do or don't like their facial hair, "No man, don't shave it...you can do it. Give it one more month", that sort of thing. Also, pictures of their faces from the nose down.

It's intense.

And there's big drama right now.

Some 22 year old Muslim with bad English just joined the board. He's decided he's tired of ignoring Allah's commandment that men must never shave. And since all of us on the board like beards, we should look into Islam because Allah likes them too.

Yeah. Seriously.

More later...

Christmas 2009

We survived the blizzard of 2009 and the streets have turned to sludge. The cold wind and sidewalks packed with tourists and piles of snow make walking around the city unpleasant. And here I am, scrambling to do SOME sort of Christmas shopping before I leave for South Cuhlina on Xman Eve.

But the Christmas shopping song goes a little something like this:

"Oh boy! I've got GREAT ideas for Christmas presents!

I hope everybody likes their gifts.

I hope they do.

What if they don't?

They probably won't.

Nobody's going to like what I'm getting them. It's a bunch of junk they don't need.

They probably won't really know/care about work I'm putting into this.

It's not like I have a car, you know. I'm trudging through this gross winter weather to gather all this stuff...

And I could be using this money to buy food and pay rent!

And it's so cold outside! MAN!

Why won't these people walk faster?? The sidewalk is on the ground, not up in the sky! Freakin' tourists!

I HATE New York! If I didn't have waterproof boots I would be SO pissed off right now!!

This is STUPID! I HATE CHRISTMAS!

I'm going to Chipotle and then I'm GOING HOME."

So I haven't gotten much shopping done.


In other news, tomorrow a group of us is caroling for a bunch of sick children at the Cosmopolitan l'hopital. And by "group of us" I mean two people. Since everybody who originally signed up bailed.

So I'm back to my original thesis that, during the holidays anyway, people are generally undependable and the idea of being generous at Christmas is well-intentioned but kinda stupid because, well, honestly, there's too much going on and everybody's busy trying to create picturesque Christmas memories for themselves.

Hey, I do not blame them. We all want lovely Christmases. And if you can pull it off, go for it. Deep down, if I'm totally honest with y'all, I'm still looking for a way I can get out of this.




Sorry to be such a Debbie Downer, gang.

I think it has to do with that first Christmas I spent here in New York, all alone. Something died inside of me as I cried into my Pad Thai noodles. Or maybe it woke up.

The next Christmas was in Texas with Mom and Dad. I managed to make it home this time. But it was minuscule. It was a little bit lonely. The Grandparents weren't with us. Forkette was working at the hospital in SC as she always seems to do. Forko and Waffelle were over in Europe. It was us. Just us.

And you sort of realized the warm, gang's-all-here Christmas that you thought was magic and would last forever wasn't real.

Hence, having passed through the Vally of the Shadow of Christmas Death still standing, I no longer try to take comfort in Bing Crosby or hope for cool Nintendo games under the tree or count on a curiously quiet Baby Jesus being born to a pristine mother with manicured nails in a barn that doesn't smell like poop.

I find the current state of Christmas--that is, the Christmas most Americans celebrate...you know, the one with rows of beautiful girls doing synchronized high kicks--to be empty and utterly unsatisfying. Words cannot describe the horrors of Christmas 2008 and seeing, as if for the first time, "After Christmas Sales" on the 26th.



Are we all such suckers that we can't see the Greed Machine plowing its way through our lives, teaching us to be discontent and to hurriedly move on to the next shopping spree? Christmas, that holy time in which we celebrate the birth of a person who came to rescue a bunch of lost, lonely, forgotten, and screwed up people, lasts for twelve days and yet, thanks to TV commercials and newspaper ads, the sun doesn't set on the 25th before people declare the entire holiday to be dead and buried.

That's one of the reasons I've tried so hard to get my family to observe SOMETHING of the Twelve Days. To stretch out this season of joy. To snap them out of the secular consumerist zombie mode that grips even the very buckle on the Bible Belt, where people wearing Scripture verse t-shirts stand in line at Gift Returns on "Two Turtle Doves".

I know what this sounds like. This sounds like one of those young, holier-than-thou rants where, in five or ten years I'll look back on this and think, "Oh how cute. I used to be such a fiery idealist."

But there's something deeper here. The point is Christmas. The point is that, in a world that's perpetually on the verge of blowing itself up, people are confused because, no matter how many gifts they buy at discount prices or how many times they listen to 'Mele Kalikimaka', they don't have that magical mix of anticipation and nostalgia they usually feel at this time of year--thanks, no doubt, to the generally accepted notion that, sooner or later, a nuke is gonna go off and WWIII will finally begin.

And in the midst of ALL this...

...Christ comes.


Bethlehem is packed with tourists. Mary and Joseph, dirty, tired, and with no hotel reservations, are just another couple of faces on the sidewalk. They don't have iPhones. They drink street vendor coffee instead of Starbucks Christmas blend. Joseph says tomorrow night they'll stay on his friend's futon. But the baby is coming now. There's no room at the hostel. So Mary has her baby on a subway platform without drugs. They put their baby in a cardboard box after dumping out the rat droppings. And out in New Jersey, angels appear to a drag queen and a couple of Muslim taxi drivers who barely speak English. Good tidings of great joy.

The Savior has come. And everything is about to change. Nothing will be the same.

Celebrate that.

Christmastime

Hey gang. Apologies once again for not posting much lately. Been super busy with gigs and all that sort of thing.



This past Thursday I participated in the Nyah Nyah Academy's Christmas party. 600 people in attendance. And there, in the middle of the room, they'd set up what amounted to "art school entertainment".

Three models dressed in Santa costumes and four easels set up with artists working on paintings of us. The idea, of course, was to provide the guests and patrons (lots of student pieces were for sale that night) with a chance to see a painting go from blank canvas to fully realized.



I thought it would be funny to try a Michelangelo's David pose, what with all the Santa stuff on. I worked with an excellent painter named Steve and, well, this is what we came up with.

Nice to know that I've still got it in spite of all those Hot Pockets.

Pudge

What a week. This Thursday I spent a grand total of ten hours without any clothes on. After the 6th hour, it becomes such a nothing thing. There's gotta be a way to make this interesting again...

Christmas fever has hit New York. It's time to buy, buy, buy. Tourists are here in droves. Meanwhile, I continue to be 7lbs heavier which is very apparent in the sculpture room as the love handles I worked so hard to be rid of are now making an extended cameo in the sculptures. But that's the trade-off, right? You wanna get bigger, you've gotta get a little fatter first.

And this was lit on Wednesday.





-- Post From My iPhork

Location:8th Ave,New York,United States

Sculpture Room

And this is where I'll be working for the next two months. Fun times abound. All I want for Christmas is for the heater to keep working.



-- Post From My iPhork