September 2003 Archives

It was waiting for me just inside the door when I came home this evening. A cardboard box, three feet by two feet by one, weighed at least twenty pounds. My wedding present from my soon-to-be-wife. I lugged it upstairs, cut away the box around it to discover the other box inside, and gaped with awe and wonder. It was a glorious thing, truly. I dug inside and came up with the instruction manual, a weighty tome that clocked in at an two-hundred-and-thirty pages. Over the years of my life, I'd seen a lot of instruction manuals of this sort, minor staple-bound incidentals, pamphlets at best, which resembled the wire-bound sheath I held in my lap as the little black-and-white comics Jehovah Witnesses give out resemble the King James Bible.

I reveled. Reveled, I tell you. And that was just at the instruction manual.

This is not why I love my soon-to-be wife. This is one of many, many reasons, which at some point, for some occasion, I will do my best to document and detail as thoroughly as the two-hundred-and-thirty page manual details the construction of the best wedding present ever ever ever.

The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload,
And nobody's gonna go to school today,
She's going to make them stay at home,
And daddy doesn't understand it,
He always said she was as good as gold,
And he can see no reason
'Cause there are no reasons.
What reason do you need to be shown?

Man, I forgot how much I loved this song...

Okay, married people, I get it now.

Grooms-to-be, I understand why, when I ran into you on the street, you looked like you'd just returned from your second tour of 'Nam and mumbled something about place settings before stumbling off in the opposite direction. Brides-in-waiting, I get why you would greet me at random encounters with big smiles and shouts of joy, then abruptly fall into heaving sobs and run to the nearest restroom. Fianc駸, I know now why you brushed off every invitation to a drink, or a flick, or a four-minute telephone conversation with excuses that seemed, at the time, so flimsy as to be effectively nonexistent. Fianc馥s, I realize why, when I called your home to extend these invitations to your soon-to-be-betrothed, you shot down these invitations instantly and mercilessly, leaving me talking to an empty phone line before three words had escaped my mouth.

I understand the cardinal sin of not returning those little RSVP cards that, in my pre-pre-marriage life, I loved to use for bookmarks and coasters.

I understand why and how you could drop off the earth so suddenly and completely that you may have well enrolled in the FBI's Witness Protection Program.

I get it now. You were getting married.

Why haven't I updated my website in a week? Why haven't I returned that email you sent me a week ago, that call you gave me two weeks ago? Why haven't I watched that Beatles Anthology you loaned me? Listened to that CD? Taken me up on my open invitation to see JASON VS FREDDY? I mean, c'mon, man! It's JASON VS FREDDY!

Why? Why why why?

Um, no particular reason...

Yeah, it sucks to have to change your honeymoon plans last-minute because a hurricane comes along and wipes out your destination. But I can't really feel sorry for myself, because it sucks even worse for the people who live there. Cool pictures, though.

Here we were, with the season almost over, and I'd only just discovered the magic that is a Brooklyn Cyclones game at Coney Island...

I love baseball. Well, more truthfully, I couldn't care less about baseball in general. But I'm a sucker for a good ballgame. Photo taken with my new favorite toy, the Canon G2, which gets my vote for the best consumer-level digital camera ever made. Make with the clicky for a full-size image.

One of the things I've always admired about my friend Michael Malice is that, if he wants to meet someone, no matter who that person may be, he finds a means of contacting them, then contacts them. Direct. To the point. No nonsense. So when he was forwarded an email with Harvey Pekar's phone number, he had no qualms about simply calling up the semi-legendary writer of underground comic books and subject of hit indie film AMERICAN SPLENDOR and asking him if he wanted to hang out. The result being a meeting of the minds if ever there was one, and the great photo below...

No, I don't think it's intentional that they're wearing matching outfits, but it's hilarious nonetheless.

• The Kingdom, DVD

• Don's Party, DVD

• Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, DVD

• Cash: The Autobiography, nonfiction

• Bones of the Moon, by Jonathan Carroll, fiction

• So Much for the City, by the Thrills

• Jack Kirby's New Gods