A big, fat thank you to Jacoby Ellsbury

Wow, can you believe how worked up we all got way back during the 2007 World Series when Taco Bell announced that free taco giveaway thing if someone stole a base, and then Jacoby Ellsbury stole a base in game 2? Remember how all those streets and middle schools got renamed, and the mayors of all towns everywhere signed declarations praising Taco Bell and its parent corporation, Yum Brands, Inc.? And then how it all went bad and there were those taco riots, and people were stealing other people's free tacos at knifepoint by like 3:30 in the afternoon on Taco Tuesday, and how big tacos were burned in effigy while children cried in their mothers' arms? Remember all that footage of those crying children and those burning taco effigies on the news? And remember how some of us were pissed that they weren't giving away something better, like a bucket of KFC chicken or free copies of Adobe Photoshop, and how we lobbied Congress and got that resolution passed condemning Taco Bell and Major League Baseball (and those assholes from Yum Brands, Inc. too) for having such a rotten idea in the first place?

Me neither.

In other news, free tacos!

The biggest sand trap in Ocean City, Maryland (also known as "the state of Delaware")

What does it mean when a beachful of rednecks from the Delaware-Maryland border have the common sense to use SUVs with air let out of the tires for driving on the sandy roads, while two young gentlemen educated at a major northeastern university take a Honda Civic and end up spending an hour digging a two-foot-deep pit with the front-wheel drive until they're rescued by another redneck - this one armed with a truck-mounted winch - to pull them 50 feet to safety for the bargain price of $100.00?

I'll tell you what it means. It means I spent last weekend golfing in Ocean City, where such things are par for the course. Pun intended.

It also means that in the midst of 36 holes in which we managed to successfully steer clear of every on-course sand trap, my friend Laszlo and I got marooned in more than our fair share of beach on Saturday morning, which coincides oddly with the fact that, between the two of us, we had only one sand wedge. Perhaps it was the golfing gods themselves exacting revenge on us for such an act of hubris. "One sand wedge between two people? Blasphemy! Strand them on a beach access road in the hot midday sun in metrosexual clothing! Let them put those history and communication degrees to good use!"

The golf gods can be so cruel.

Basically, what happened was this: we golfed Friday and Sunday. Saturday was an off-day for half of the group, so Laszlo and I decided to drive up to Rehoboth Beach and check out the outlet stores at 11:30 in the morning. After a lively discussion about the distance from Ocean City to Rehoboth Beach, I yanked my iPhone (whose name is Knickers, by the way) out of my pocket and started doing some Google Maps work, made more complicated by the lack of included GPS.

I'm talking to you, Steve Jobs. If that is your real name.

I heard Laszlo say, "ooh, let's turn off here while you're looking." But, thanks to the painfully slow Edge network, I still had my eyes trained on Knickers when I heard him add, "this sand looks pretty soft. We should probably turn around."

I pulled my head out of my Knickers, but it was too late. Like a horny walrus errantly chasing after a PT Cruiser driving along a coast road during ebb tide, we were beached.

Here are some pictures:

This is after we had been digging for 45 minutes.

This is Laszlo operating the jack, while Knickers and I stand idly by, documenting the process for posterity. Before you go thinking I'm some sort of heartless jerk, though, take a look at the two men standing in the background. What you probably can't see from this resolution is that both of them are frowning, which is only because their facial muscles were so exhausted from laughing at us already.

This is the tow truck that came to rescue us. Laszlo claims he pulled us 20 feet, although it was really more like 50. 50 feet at $100 equals $2 per foot towed. I'm no mathematician, but that seems like a lot compared to, say AAA, which offers three miles of free towing for its initial membership fee of $59.95 annually.

This is a picture of Abe Vigoda.

$100.00 for 50 feet. And the friendly state parks official who didn't lift a finger of his sculpted muscularity to help us also informed us that we were lucky not to have gotten a ticket, which would have cost us $45 or $50. He said, "$45 or $50," which sounded an awful lot to me like he was just going to pull an amount out of thin air. In fact, a lot of the characters in the episode seemed extemporaneous and smug about getting us out, like the no-toothed gentleman in the teal GMC truck who showed up with a tow rope just after the hapless park ranger had committed us to using the towing service. The timing could not have been less sincere.

Incidentally, I spoke to Sarah after the show was over. Sarah is my new girlfriend, who just happens to be from Maryland. Her advice? "You could try letting some air out of the tires." So brilliant. So timely. I almost wonder if she wasn't in on the whole thing...

Update (10/25/07, 9:16PM)

Sarah wasn't involved. I retract that statement. See, there's no need to go calling your park police friends in Delaware, okay, sweetie?

Return of the Banantelope News (But for how long?...)

I don't often bother publicizing it when I remember to update YATOPNRTB's sister site, Now Is The Time For All Good Antelopes to Come to the Aid of Their Banana, but it's just been so rare lately that I pretty much figure people have stopped reading. What, like none of those people have ever run a website for four years with only sporadic posts, then taken four months off for no good reason and re-emerged with a three-paragraph fake news story? Is that really a reason to give up on me?

Okay, fine, it is. But since I updated NITTFAGATCTTAOTB, I think maybe you should swing by.

That is all.

Matt Reads Nude at Kettle of Fish! Pictures Included!

I'm not above using an attention-grabbing headline, even if it means resorting to the tactic of blatantly lying. It's true that I read at Kettle of Fish last night, but the nude part and the included pictures are lies. If it helps, however, here are some pictures of kittens to ease your anguish - nude kittens.



Aww... Sick, isn't it?

So yes, the first chapter of The Brass Ring has now been read, and a firestorm of publicity has been unleashed upon the island of Manhattan - that glorious jewel of the eastern seaboard - as has rarely been seen there in lo these many years. The 22 people in attendance must have been talking, because I was absolutely inundated with phone calls and emails today, all seeking autographed copies future readings, and all offering me copious sums in exchange for just minutes of my time. No fewer than sixteen prominent literary agents are now beating down my door. And the women... my god, the women. They just won't leave me alone.

And the volcanoes... my god, the volcanoes. They just won't leave me alone either.

And the giraffes... Okay, the giraffes are leaving me alone.

And did I say sixteen literary agents? I meant 60!

So it looks like sayonara, suckers. I'm off to claim my fame and fortune and become a writer like you read about. Only... no, none of that is true. Except for the part about the giraffes leaving me alone. Those dudes are totally frosting me, and I'm not even sure why. I mean, it's not like I didn't share my birthday cupcakes with them.

Okay, the real story.

What really happened was simply that I read chapter one of my book in front of the aforementioned 22 people. To any of you that happen to leaf through these pages (or whatever the web equivalent of leafing through a page is called... browsing, maybe?), again, my sincere thanks to you for being there. You are definitely getting moved to the front of the line for an autograph if and when this book ever gets published. I won't even pretend that I don't know you.

Okay, I probably will.

I had an absolute blast last night, with just one tiny exception. I followed the inimitable Perry Moore, executive producer of the Chronicles of Narnia movie and author of a New York Times best seller along with a new Young Adult novel called Hero. Perry had clearly stood in front of an audience once or twice before. He led off by giving us some of the poignant and well defined social commentary underlying his most recent work, then he cracked the spine on one of the complimentary copies and crapped out a chapter onto us in his smooth, slow, quasi-Southern drawl.

It's not that I disliked him or what he read, mind you. I guess I found his mannerism a little bit affected is all. I mean, it was smooth to the point of being smarmy, as if maybe this basement, with unlit Christmas lights arranged in the shape of a snowman in a corner of the ceiling, a Yankee game on the widescreen television in the corner, and attention-hungry roaches creeping steadily toward the spotlight and the microphone, were somehow beneath him. I doubt very much that Perry was grateful for the opportunity to share his work, and I'm taking as evidence the fact that he couldn't be bothered to spare an extra half hour from his day to hear the other two readers who shared the bill with him.

Sorry if that offends you, Perry. But thanks for reading. Trust me when I tell you that the chapter I read last night was a hell of a lot more compelling than this.

Anyway, to those of you who came, my thanks. To those of you who didn't come, I'm sure it hurts you more than it hurts me. But feel free to send bribes in the hopes that I might once again receive you into my good graces. You never know; you might get lucky.

All Dressed Up, Nowhere to Go

Something close to fifteen people gathered in Greenwich Village last night to witness the historic unveiling - at long last - of the first chapter of my (eventually) forthcoming book, The Brass Ring, as part of an event that ultimately did not take place. Which begs the question, if a man spends almost five years working on a novel, and no one gets to hear a word of it, does that novel really exist?

Damned if I know.

For those that showed up despite my last minute attempts to divert them, I tried to be unreservedly apologetic while taking my lumps from them. Certainly, I can only imagine the postmortem discussion/make-fun-of-Matt session that must have gone on at Pennyfeathers, just a short distance down 7th Avenue from where I was attempting to wash away the taste of my ignominious humiliation with pomegranate beer, which is a lot tastier, and not nearly as pomegranate-y as it sounds.

For the record, what happened was that, after last minute cancellations from the other, higher profile readers scheduled to speak last night, the agent at Writers House who runs the Kettle of Fish reading series was forced to pull the plug. And I suppose since I was the low man on the totem pole, he figured that giving me an hour and a half's notice was adequate, which it most certainly was not. So to those who came, I am horribly sorry, and thanks very much for your support.

It was suggested that I should offer to read the piece in various states of undress, or at least to make personal appearances at the homes or offices of my prospective attendees. And while these are all good suggestions, to be sure, would anyone feel remotely assuaged by simply seeing the first chapter and reading it themselves? It is part of a book, after all...

The Move-Out, Part III: The Change

I've been keeping my loose change in a drawer in my nephew's bedroom in my mom's house, in a dresser that backs up against a navy blue wall with a larger-than-life-sized picture of Mariano Rivera with his teeth gritted and his right arm behind him, poised to uncork a devastating 90+-mile-an-hour cut fastball at some unlucky hitter. I was keeping my change right out on top of the dresser for a while. But my mother has cleaning people who come to the house every week, and I started to feel vulnerable about letting it sit where it could literally be nickled and dimed away from me, even though the cleaning people - from what I'm told - are very well paid.

So now my change is vigilantly guarded by a shut drawer and the legendary Yankees closer.

I'm weirdly hung up on this change. $10.00 of it is a roll of quarters from the day before I moved out of New Brunswick. I went to the good people of Commerce Bank (stop by and tell them I sent you - there's money in it for both of us), turned in my blue ceramic pot o' coinage (actually, I poured the coins into a machine called the Penny Arcade; Commerce is tres self-service that way...), and walked out with $20.00 in quarters and another $20.00 in plain old American greenery. I'm talking cash.

The cash is long gone, along with half the quarters. The other half I'm hording like a miser.

It's not generally in the realm of what I consider my style to hang onto money so tenaciously, particularly money made of metal. Change is eminently ignorable. I even met a girl recently who gave all the change she had in her purse to a homeless person while we were walking in the East Village, and in so doing, presented me with an option that I had never before considered, and that felt pretty damned amazing once I tried it on for size. More on the girl in later posts - hopefully a lot more.

My frivolity with less dense forms of currency is well known among my peeps. It's the predominant reason why both of my attempts at early retirement didn't last too long. Ask me about my sunglasses sometime, which do not have prescription lenses and are therefore useless if, along with protection from harmful UV rays, I need to see any of the things I'm looking at. I paid the whopping and irresponsible sum of $375 for them back in 2002. But the kicker is this: I bought them to replace a pair that cost me $275, which had slipped from their perch in the frenulum of my shirt in the parking lot of a country club near Donegal, Ireland and been flattened by a Mercedes sedan registered from Warwickshire. $650 on two pairs of sunglasses, which annuitizes to a little more than $100 a year since the original purchase. This is not, how you say, the emblem of financial responsibility.

And now you don't have to ask me about my sunglasses sometime, since I just told you. In fact, please don't ask. I don't like that story.

In the cosmic scheme of things, money is the most replaceable commodity I know of. I have a job now that directly deposits a paycheck into my bank account every two weeks with postal service reliability. It has an enormously cleansing effect at times, like the night in June when I took several of my coworkers to a margarita bar and bought the entire first round - nineteen margaritas - only to have a replenishing supply of dollars show up in my online balance the very next morning. I kind of wish the post-that-night hangover had been as easy to take care of, but oh well.

So why am I hung up on this change?

The ex, when we left New Brunswick, was into yours truly for two debts. One was half of a $140 utility bill, and the other was the agreed upon sum of $50 for breaking my bed. It's true. The girl dismantled the delicate latticework of the headboard for no good reason, vowed to replace it, and then never even tried.

That bed cost me $300 back in 2002, which annuitizes to right around $75, since I only slept on it through 2006 when the ex and I broke up. I moved from a bed I had bought and owned to a saggy blue couch covered with dust and fabric pills, and I slept on that too narrow, too short piece of... furniture for seven months.

It's not that I care so much about the bed. I had already been considering replacing it before ol' Exey decided to rape the headboard and run away. But in an odd burst of frugality, I had also been considering keeping it in the hopes that having one less piece of furniture to buy might, you know, actually save me some money. And it's not that I particularly care about the $50 either, which is precisely why I only asked for $50 to begin with. "Okay, how about this," I had said, "you're gonna fix it, right? So let's just say if you can't fix it, then you can just give me... I don't know, fifty bucks?" That all sounded perfectly reasonable. Hands were shaken. Deals were made. Enchiladas were served to everyone.

What bugs me is the trail of correspondence concerning the $50 and her half of the utility bill, which add up to the lackluster sum of $120. In her typically passive aggressive fashion, she nodded in a pretend display of blank-eyed capitulation every time I asked her if she was going to be writing me the check any time soon. She disappeared the last four days of our cohabitation, leaving me and her cat behind, and still omitting to pay me what she owed me. After she handed in the keys to the apartment, along with a letter directing the management office how to disburse our security deposit, she sent a text message to tell me everything was done, clean, and handed in. I text messaged her back, "you can mail the check to my PO box. Let me know if you need the address." Then I texted her again to ask if the refrigerator was emptied and cleaned.

Her response: "the refrigerator is clean. Take care Matt"

You may notice, much like I did, that these words do not constitute a cash payment, stock option, or line of credit of any kind.

It was easy enough to get over the loss of the money. I have even come to give the ex a great deal of credit for having toyed so viciously with my expectations. I get surprised by people all the time, but I think it takes a great deal to leave me gaping in slack-jawed wonder, which is what she did. But I'm still clinging to this plastic bag full of change, stowed next to the amazingly comfortable mattress where I've been sleeping every night.

There are two somewhat poetic epilogues to this story. The first one was the paycheck that arrived a few days after I moved out of New Brunswick. My job pays overtime, but because my hours fluctuate slightly, the amount of the overtime is usually hard or impossible to gauge. But I had an idea, a figure around which I had prepared my monthly budget for June. The paycheck exceeded said figure by exactly $121.

The second was concerning the final utility bill at the apartment, which in the most technical sense, was also half of the ex's responsibility. PSE&G, New Jersey's friendly neighborhood utility company, deducts your final payment out of an initial deposit that they force you to give them, then they refund you the balance. I had paid that deposit and forgotten about it until a notice came in the mail that my final bill, in the amount of $141.62, had been paid automatically. I called up PSE&G so they could reassure me about my refund check, and they told me they had just put a check in the mail to me that morning in the amount of $118.38.

I know neither of these are evenly $120, but I still find it pretty remarkable that, with a little bit of change, it ends up panning out perfectly. As for the bag of change in my dresser, maybe it's time to let that go. I'm getting ready to move to New York, which can list among its inventory plenty of homeless people who could use it more than me, as well as the lovely girl who reminded me of that. And anyway, I'm sure I'll get it back when I need it.

The Move-Out, Part II: The Fish

If you consult wikipedia, the lifespan of the Siamese fighting fish (or Betta splendens) is somewhere from 2-5 years, with the note that the age of Bettas purchased at pet stores can sometimes be hard to discern. The plumage on the male Betta apparently comes into "full flower" when the fish are about 9 months old. This is when they're the most attractive, and therefore the easiest to sell. So you never really know.

You never really know with relationships either.

Now, I realize that jumping from a sushi-centric story to a story about pet fish might give some readers the creeping horrors, so let me preface the the rest of this tale by mentioning that no animals were harmed in the making of it, and that none of the fish discussed herein, now both deceased, were eaten by me or anyone else.

I have owned two Bettas in my life, and for all that, I really couldn't comment empirically on their average lifespan. The first one lasted roughly six weeks before its distended belly was pointing upward, and its demise so colored my impressions of Betta ownership that I didn't even bother paying attention to the date the second one came home from Petco with me.

The second one survived its uncounted months largely in a pool contaminated by its own sewage. I fully admit fault here. I neglected my fish. But despite living in water that was commonly colored a sickly shade of green, this second Betta exhibited a hardiness I wouldn't have thought possible outside of a wild pack of ravenous wolves. I used to double up his feedings on the days after I had forgotten to feed him in the hopes that his 2-inch metabolism might regulate itself in the aggregate, a lot like skipping the cable bill in January and paying twice as much just as the shutoff notice arrives in the mail around Valentine's Day.

There is no wikipedia entry on relationships with me, but I can certainly report that they have an average lifespan of almost exactly 18 months. With proper care and feeding, they can live to the ripe old age of 2 1/2 years. But even with my best attempts at regular maintenance, and even with repeated changings of the water, I haven't ever managed to make them live any longer. So my second Betta fish and I were forced to pack up our shit and go.

The day before the fish and I left New Brunswick, New Jersey for what would prove to be his final time, I changed his water. The next day, I wrapped his bowl with Saran wrap, poked holes in the top of it, and suspended him as best as I possibly could away from my torso for the hour-and-a-half trip to the storage space in Glen Rock, New Jersey that currently houses thousands of dollars worth of my possessions. A little later, I brought the fish to his new living quarters on top of my mother's mantel, and less than a week after that, I took the unprecedented step of changing his water again. He wasn't looking particularly well. I thought two water changes in two weeks might do him some good.

But I guess some things are beyond saving. The fish died on a Sunday morning. He died far away from the aged white kitchen walls where he spent the lion's share (or Siamese fighting fish's share?) of his days swimming semi-contentedly through sage-colored water. He died at an unknown age, which I would speculate was somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen months. But you never know; he might have lived 2 1/2 years.

The Move-Out, Part I: Chopsticks

The day after I moved out of New Brunswick, I returned to my still relatively shiny job in New York City and noticed, not for the first time, the arising of a specific craving for sushi, which the area near Grand Central Station is more than happy to nurture. What made the craving odd, I guess, was the profusion of cheaper fare in most of the other establishments within easy reach. After all, I had just spent several hundred of my best and most cherished dollars to extricate myself from the city that has, on and off (mostly on), been my home for the last 13 years. Lunch from Subway would have run me in the neighborhood of $6.00. Soup and salad from Cafe Bistro sits at a flat and even $7.00, and they throw in a drink too. There was pizza at a couple bucks a slice if I felt so inclined; there was Wendy's and its value menu. And I'm still omitting, literally, dozens, of other potential candidates.

Uh uh. I wanted sushi.

$12.50 later, I got back to my desk and went through the careful ritual of pouring packets of soy sauce into a small plastic cup amid stacks of documents that were reasonably important - or at least, important enough not to have soy sauce accidentally spattered on them. Care was of the essence. But that's how I treat my job.

I wish I could say the same for whoever's job it was to slice the chopsticks with which I ate my meal. These were chopsticks of the cheap, splintery variety that really looked more like overgrown toothpicks blunted at the edges. Or only sharp enough, anyway, to pick the teeth of some creature whose dental dimensions were on a Jurassic scale relative to mine. Not that creatures that size have ever developed with opposable thumbs, mind you, making toothpicks sort of a moot point.

But getting back to these particular chopsticks, I have to say that I was a little bit disappointed - maybe even slightly hurt - to land with these instruments which had somehow slipped by quality control with a jaggedly cut incision that veered, country-road style, from the shallow pre-stamped canyon bisecting the wood.

I don't normally take such shoddy workmanship personally, but I was at the time considering one (or two) of the many better alternatives to these specific utensils. For instance, the countertop compartment of plastic forks that I had passed over at the sushi joint. Or the upright display of plasticware in the office kitchenette down the hall, which stood in much easier reach of my desk. Or for that matter, the pair of really nice black chopsticks etched with some colorful and vaguely oriental design that had come, paired with another pair, as a stocking stuffer in December, and were now residing in a six-foot-tall Dumpster in central New Jersey.

One pair of said chopsticks had been packed in a cardboard box with several pounds of other miscellaneous kitchenwares. The other pair, however, I had left behind at the request of my ex-fiancee, who had specifically asked me for them when they made their first appearance in our broken home last December. I had no reason to grant her the favor, but I had no reason not to either. And being a reasonably genial and somewhat courteous person, of course I said yes.

I ate my spicy tuna roll, frowning at the chopsticks all the while, and contemplated the sad and arduous circumstances of my Memorial Day weekend that had resulted the ignominious disposal of chopsticks that I otherwise would have kept. The problem was really timing (but isn't it always), and I mean that in the sense that if I had known on Friday what I knew on Tuesday, I would have strongly reconsidered ever being genial or courteous to a girl who turned out to be a boorish and disappointing thief.

It's not so much that the stocking stuffer chopsticks were left behind. Things like that happen all the time when people move out of places. And ultimately, these were just chopsticks after all, clearly available in the sub-$10 section of any Kitchen Kapers or Bed, Bath, & Beyond anywhere in New Jersey. I could have replaced them, but that's not really what this was about.

It was about my ex, who made a blanket decision to throw out the chopsticks (along what seemed like a ton or two of her garbage) after she asked me specifically if she could have them.

She didn't even show up at the apartment to go through the drawer full of kitchen items I had organized and left for her as a byproduct of my packing - to say nothing of large pieces of furniture, an entire set of French country style dishes, pounds and pounds of food, and whatever else it is that my outrage won't permit me to remember.

I don't mean to sound so parsimonious here, but goddammit, I do not appreciate when my weeks worth of planning and hard work are summarily ignored at the expense, literally, of hundreds of dollars worth of household goods that could have found a better home somewhere than a fucking Dumpster. And for the record, I also don't appreciate it when I am forced to Spackle and paint walls; sweep and scrub entire rooms; and haul leftover couches, tables, and shelving units with zero assistance, all in the interest of getting back my half of the security deposit.

The chopsticks were the tip of an iceberg of disappointment and sadness so large that it could tip the balance of global warming in favor of the next ice age, if the iceberg existed anywhere outside of this metaphor.

Essentially what it boiled down to was this: while I spent the lion's share of the month of May sorting my belongings, listing and cataloging all the things I needed to keep and could afford to replace (I hope), and packing until my fingers were chafed and my shoulders were aching, I didn't expect my last weekend in New Brunswick to be such a fucking marathon. But since the ex decided that her plans in the Poconos were more important than being a basically decent and responsible human being, I ended up getting screwed.

And so did my chopsticks.

I don't know if I'm the most well-adjusted person in the world. I doubt I am. So I'm not entirely sure if there was a Freudian basis to my desire for sushi the next day, whether it was the power of a very subliminal suggestion that nested itself as an armful of cheese knives and chopsticks clanged their way into the trash, or whether it was just some arbitrary thing that prompted a too-deep examination of things.

Do You Want A Banana?

Closing in on two months of commuting into New York now, I've experienced a host of things that, although they are only mildly weird, are weird nonetheless. I’m always tempted to take video of the men and women of New Jersey running from the escalators to the train platforms in the Secaucus station at the sight of a New York-bound train, even though there are New York-bound trains about every four minutes. People running at that hour, in business casual attire, with their mouths hanging open and their brows furrowed in concern, all while suffering from the thickening that comes from having had desk jobs for years bear a striking resemblance to a flock of really awkward birds being chased, and trying to decide whether or not they should put a little more feather into it, or maybe attempt flight.

And I’m not kidding about the four minutes thing either. The platform between tracks A & B in Secaucus lists the following trains at 7:30 in the morning:

7:33 to New York Penn Station
7:38 to New York Penn Station
7:42 to New York Penn Station
7:45 to New York Penn Station
7:51 to New York Penn Station
7:57 to New York Penn Station

That’s six trains from 7:33 to 7:57. You do the math.

This is less weird, but I still can’t understand why the inbound morning commute should have such a somber, almost crypt-like cast to it. And yet it does. There are days when the hum-screech-rattle soundtrack of the train is only interrupted by the occasional snippet of that gratingly cheery badada bing bong bing sound of someone’s Blackberry receiving a text message.

It’s not like I don’t understand that everyone is sleepy, grumpy, or another of the seven dwarves while they’re on their way to work. It’s just that the difference is so profound on the way home. A lot of the time, there are recognizable characters from the morning, somehow reanimated, awakened from their zombie-like stupor so they can chat away on their cell phones and laugh with the guy in the ill-fitting polo shirt who gets off at the Radburn station in Fair Lawn.

Me? I spent most of May playing travel Scrabble with my friend Christine on the Northeast Corridor train from New Brunswick to Penn Station. We got sugar highs from donuts and cupcakes and spent more than one ride laughing hysterically all the way to the office. Clearly, we were the weird ones, not to mention a distinct minority among the grumbling would-be sleepers who were kept awake by our inane twittering. But whatever. It's hardly average, but it’s still a better way to spend your ride, in my opinion.

This is all a circuitous way of mentioning the bit of oddness that occurred this morning, when the crowd emerging from the pits of Penn Station onto 7^th Avenue were greeted by girls of various ethnicities, clad in loud-colored bikinis, handing out bananas for free. That is weird.

But hey, free banana.

I'm thinking about saving the peel for the aisle of the 7:02 AM train out of Ho-Ho-Kus tomorrow morning, just to throw a little hint of anarchy into everyone's morning.

Tic Tac Toe

The best kind of anger, I have always believed, is the kind of anger you can direct at someone - particularly when you can do it in letter form. Angry letters are an art unto themselves. My college roommate and I devoted an unhealthy portion of our otherwise squeaky clean youths channeling rage and frustration into just the right combination of adjectives and sentence construction to deliver that verbal slap in the face that people and institutions sometimes need. Especially in America. Especially nowadays. Any country that thinks six editions of CSI and fourteen Law and Order franchises are necessary is more than a few quarters short of a dollar.

Frankly, I have strong suspicions that our sad devotion to angry letter-writing might have a little something to do with why neither my roommate nor I graduated on time from Rutgers on time. But that's another story. A much longer, much more boring story, with not nearly enough sex involved.

And it has nothing to do with the point of this post, which is this: what do you do when you're pissed off, but there's nobody to write a letter to?

With apologies for the dangling participle, the question relates to a series of train rides I recently took into New York City via the vaunted rail service of New Jersey Transit. I'm a big fan of New Jersey Transit. The fact that their trains are often filled with degenerate lowlifes and self-absorbed, narcissistic, Blackberry-enslaved commuters is hardly their fault. Nor are they responsible for the piles of drunk human wreckage draped across the benches like yesterday's clothes on the 1:41 AM Northeast Corridor trains on Friday and Saturday nights - the last ride home for the Bridge-And-Tunnel crowd. I know this.

For let's say 15 years now, I've been at least a somewhat regular rider of the rails, with a streak of amazingly good luck where my co-passengers were concerned. Once on a night in July, a very attractive Asian woman in a black-and-white checkered dress offered me what amounted to six months of guilt-free sex. "I'm in town on a development project till the end of January," she said, "why don't you give me a call some time?" And I, being the genius that I am and always have been, threw away her fucking number instead of framing it.

More recently, I struck up a conversation with a trio of gregarious lesbians on their way from Metropark to a Melissa Ferrick concert. That was 40 minutes of my life well spent, right up until the point I found out they were lesbians. Still, at least it was entertaining.

Sure, there were the odd spots of trouble, like the time in October 1998 when, on my way to a Nashville Predators-New York Rangers hockey game, I was forced to sit next to a gentleman who smelled overwhelmingly of coriander and smoked halibut. In a restaurant setting, maybe I would have found such scents delightful and promising. In the close confines of a cushionless two-person vinyl seat, however, I found my companion's odors suffocating and, as it turned out, portentous of other awful things. (Nashville lost the game 5-1, and then first-string goalie Mike Dunham was taken out early in the 2nd period with a strained groin. Also, I paid $60 to a scalper who had bought the ticket from my eventual neighbors for $10. And someone threw a beer at me for wearing a Predators jersey. Or possibly it was that jilted Asian girl exacting some small measure of revenge.)

On the whole, I led what I would consider a charmed existence on the train.

Then I started commuting.

Even the commute started off inauspiciously enough. My first day, with New Jersey in a state of emergency, enough people stayed away that I managed to procure a seat alone on an express train, which is the commuting equivalent of digging in your flower bed and finding a cache of rubies, or so I'm led to believe. Toward the end of my first week, I ran into a girl who used to work for me as a host when I managed a restaurant in New Brunswick. We strolled up 7th Avenue and gossiped like teenagers. I barely noticed how gray it was outside.

A week into my commuting career, I was having a blast. Then came the fateful weekend when I bit the bullet and bought my first weekly pass, having exhausted all the one-off tickets I had in my wallet.

It was a freelance project meeting on a Saturday that compelled me to go to New York for the sixth straight day. I never did that before. And I won't lie, I was feeling confident. Maybe it was hubris even, and the gods of train riding had had enough of my amiable smiles and relentless unobtrusiveness toward the other passengers. I'm not sure.

All I know is that I had never been stuck in a two-person seat next to a crying baby before, and I'm still not entirely convinced I deserved it.

But I am entirely certain that I didn't deserve to have the mother jiggle the seat with her legs and ass in a vain attempt to calm her screaming brat. Clearly, children have no business on trains, especially when those trains are packed with Mets fans and politely inconspicuous gentlemen who just want to be left alone to listen to their iPods without feeling like they just stuck quarters in a motel room bed.

But I wasn't truly angry. I made a token display of my outrage with a series of sideways glances and scowls at the baby's parents. I never looked at the baby itself, not even out of the corner of my eye. I stopped well short of dealing with this in a remotely courageous or head-on manner. I wussed out.

Two days later it was back to the grind, and my Monday morning trip into New York furnished me with a companion who was actually skinnier than I am. I thought it was a stroke of good luck - plenty of room for both of us to knock into each other sideways like melting ice cubes in a glass every time the train lurched. Then my string bean companion fell asleep, and my immediate seating area was beset by an odor that had me checking my armpits for stray tendrils of B.O. Turns out it was the guy's breath.

The train ran significantly late that day, all thanks to a breakdown in the tunnel under the Hudson River which we had to use to get to Penn Station. So I had to contend with the fire-breathing dragon and his stank-ass pie hole for an additional 40 minutes. But here's where it gets weird : I turned this into a mental exercise. I can't control this man's breath, I thought, and I can't control the speed of the train. But I could control the itch on the back of my neck that had started when we left Newark Penn Station. So to test myself, I decided not to let myself scratch until we reached New York

My reasoning was that until I could accept the things I couldn't control and stop letting them stress me out, I didn't deserve to take care of the thing I could control. Add this to the list of reasons Matt Hooban belongs in an institution.

The ride from Newark to New York took 52 excruciating minutes. Ordinarily, it takes 14. I stepped out onto the platform under Penn Station and scratched like I had fleas.

I actually thought the self-immolation would have been enough to appease whatever karmic force I had run afoul of. I was wrong. On my way home that day, I got crammed against the wall by a generously proportioned gentleman who helped himself to the other half of my seat with the gusto that fat men usually reserve for barbecue ribs or birthday cake. I would have expected him to attack a ham sandwich just the same way.

What I didn't expect was for him to look at me, leaning precariously off the edge of the bench, and tell me with a straight face, "you could move over."

I looked him dead in his piggy eyes and said, "what, into the wall? I'm already leaking off the bench."

But even though my outrage had finally hit a boiling point, I still stopped short of making it personal. I felt like saying, "yeah, I could move over, or maybe you could skip a meal from time to time. You don't see me asking your fat ass to go on a diet so I can be more comfortable do you, John Candy?" or "oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were supposed to be sitting in first class on this flight, asshole. That's actually three cars up, just past the conductors booth. Tell you what, why don't you wait out on the platform and I'll have one of the valets come pick you and your luggage up - and don't worry if you see the train start moving without you. We wouldn't leave a valued customer behind."

Seriously, who did this jerk think he was?

But more importantly, who was I supposed to write so I could complain? It hardly falls within the vast purview of New Jersey Transit's authority to discriminate against ticketed passengers. But I got the raw end of the deal three straight rides. Isn't there some sort of grievance hotline for that? Dear Abby?

The story at least has a happy epilogue. My new corporate home inadvertently put me back in touch with an old acquaintance of mine - a girl I had known since my days in middle school and high school without ever sharing as much as a two-sentence conversation. Not only did we both land at the same company, but we also live in adjacent towns in central New Jersey. And unbeknownst to me, she was on the very same train as the fire-breather, and possibly also on the same train as the Louie Anderson look-alike.

Christine - that's her name - has been a delightful train buddy so far. We ride in at the ungodly hour of 7:19 in the morning and walk from Penn Station to our building, and it's a stroll through storytime the entire way. But if you see her, don't mention that. She's a senior copy editor with a 16th-floor office overlooking Park Avenue. The last thing this chick needs is a bigger ego. Instead, focus on the fact that she's short and bad at crossword puzzles.

Back To Work

There's a new post over at YATOPNRTB's sister site, Now Is The Time For All Good Antelopes To Come To The Aid Of Their Banana. Check it out.

Meanwhile, I have gone back to work.

Gone are the days of sleeping till 3 in the afternoon, intermittent showering, and endless time to correspond with the far-flung Matt Hoobans of the world. Man, do I miss those days. It's been one week, and I think I'm ready for retirement already.

My new job is with a great big French company that makes books. (I've removed the name in the interest of my own safety. Thanks for the tip.)

Bookmaking (not making book) is right up my alley, although I was surprised to discover that my alley is located on 50th Street in New York City, and I live in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And despite the fact that the company is populated by hordes of fascinating people with a keen interest in what they're doing (most of whom are female too, which doesn't hurt a bit), they still adopt the relatively conventional stance that it's easier to do business from 9 to 5 than overnight. So instead of going to sleep at sunrise, I'm getting up then. There are now trains involved in my day.

On the bright side, it does mark the first time since I started writing my book that I'll have access to health benefits. (My mom is already sleeping easier.) Be warned, computer keyboards of the world: I'm done taking it easy on you now! Remember those years when you basked under the lightest, most delicate pressure from my fingers, when you luxuriated to be little more than caressed or brushed? Say goodbye. It's eighteen pounds of pressure per keystroke from now on, bitches!

I'm sincerely hoping this job turns out to be amusing too, unlike my last job which was in food service. Working in a restaurant seemed like a great place for comedy - not to mention temper tantrums, broken dishes, and creamy garlic dressing poured down customers' blouses every now and again. But there was always so much pressure there. Servers would end up in tears after customers yelled at them for not getting a salad order right. (Seriously though, how hard is it to get a salad order right?)

I've never known another industry that turned so many good people to smoking, alcohol abuse, and hardcore drugs - not counting American higher education in the last 30 or 40 years, that is. Maybe restaurants should stop hiring college students, or waiters and waitresses should quit going to college. It's kind of a chicken-egg thing. (Speaking of which, I once heard a customer tell a server, "uh, I'm pretty sure I ordered chicken salad and this is egg salad." The server's response: "you want some advice? Give it a little while and see if the egg salad hatches into chicken salad." I had to fire that server on the spot. But I was proud of him.)

Anyway, so far, my new company isn't that funny, but it's only been a week. Give it time.

In the meantime, it's now close to 9:15 PM, which means I need to start packing it in for the night. My god, what have I become? It's like I'm a totally different person. Maybe I'll go break my leg, just to try out my new benefit package. That'll show 'em.

The Other White Matt

I have known of the existence of another Matt Hooban for some time now.

It's a strange sensation, going through the day-to-day business of your life with the knowledge that somewhere else in the world, someone else is going through the day-to-day business of his life being called the same name as you. Just the fact of Matt Hooban's existence used to sit there in my brain like a splinter. "What am I up to today?" I used to wonder, and "could the other Matt Hooban be having more fun being me than I'm having?"

But it wasn't until my obsessive need to take control of my identity hit a fever pitch after my 31st birthday that I decided to track him down and find out.

Now, when I say "take control of my identity," I'm talking about being the first Matt Hooban that comes up when you search for "Matt Hooban" on Google. For years, the other Matt Hooban had that honor, thanks to a stage production called "Soiled" for which he apparently designed all the way back in '03, when I was busy writing online tours of the flora in my backyard.

But it's not exactly like I've been slouching here. My highly acclaimed website, Now Is The Time For All Good Antelopes To Come To The Aid Of Their Banana has been up, running, and updated on a completely irregular basis for four years now. So why was the imposter Matt Hooban still beating me in the Google listings?

Part of the problem was the name of my website itself. Notice that it makes no mention of "Matt Hooban" anywhere in there. As it turns out, this was a critical mistake. Live and learn, I guess.

Anyway, Matt and I jockeyed for years as the top Matt Hooban in the Google results, and my frustration continued to grow. Who was this masked Matt? Why had he made no attempt to contact me when I had clearly gone out of my way to make myself both popular and accessible? Was he really so secure or just not vain enough to even bother Google'ing himself? "What," I asked myself, "is going on in America?"

But Matt Hooban - and by Matt Hooban, I mean the other Matt Hooban - doesn't live in America. He lives in Leeds. I'm pretty sure that's in England, but I only have an American public school education, so it could be anywhere. And I know he lives there because he told me.

See, Matt made a fatal error in judgment, and decided to post some Hooban-related information on a genealogy website, where he left his e-mail address as well. The genealogy site appeared on page 2 of the Matt Hooban Google results listing - territory into which I had previously been shy about venturing. But turning 31 will do some weird things to your brain. It'll make you go insane. Just to relieve the pain.

So I e-mailed him.

And as it turns out, he seems like a nice guy. Doesn't that just figure, though? Before I met Matt Hooban, I can safely say that all the Matt Hoobans I knew were right on the top of my list of the nicest guys in the whole wide world. So far, I think we're 2-for-2.

Matt's response e-mail to me was also laden with this very interesting fact: bananas, according to Matt Hooban, can walk up to six feet every year. It may sound hard to believe, but I have no problem assuming that Matt Hooban is a credible source. Frankly, I believe just about anything Matt Hooban tells me.

This Is Not An April Fool's Day Joke

This is an actual video on YouTube. I'm not kidding.



So basically, this particular creationist is making a case that evolution is false because spontaneous life doesn't ever erupt in a jar of peanut butter. Apparently, the lesson here is that primordial earth was made of peanut butter. Yup. Makes perfect sense.

What makes even more sense is that a magical man in the sky snapped his fingers and made a great big world for us to play on, then got mad at us for violating his rules (which he must surely have anticipated, since it was all part of his plan after all), and gave us the rest of the universe basically as a nighttime light show.

And then a few thousand years later, our mysterious creator blessed us with factories that mass produce lifeless plastic jars of peanut butter, just to prove he was behind everything in the first place. How did I not see the logic before?

I'm pretty sure the peanut butter isn't the only thing around here that's made from nuts. God, do I wish this was a joke.

Hayley Morgenstern's Cat

So about me...

I'm a writer. And that's really what this is all about, is all this writing I keep compulsively doing. It's such a pesky habit. I keep meaning to find a way to get paid for it. But in the meantime, I've whiled away the majority of the Bush presidency working on my first novel.

Now, a lot can happen to a project after you've been at it for as long as I have. For instance, you might completely change your mind about setting part 1 in 1992 and move it to 1993 instead, causing massive tidal shifts in the plot and all the action. You might decide that one of the main characters has a steady boyfriend that you completely forgot to mention. You might have a notebook computer (or two, or three even) crash on you, causing you hair-pulling agony, along with the loss of a few months' work each time.

You could lose heart along the way. You could regain heart along the way. You could lose heart again, regain it again, spend three years working in a restaurant in central New Jersey, lose heart, quit that job, regain heart, lose heart once more, go broke, and finally force yourself to regain heart with a frantic proclamation that you'll finish the book before you turn 31, which you won't quite manage to do. (But at least you won't lose heart again.)

I'm speaking purely hypothetically, of course.

Anyway, one of the sad byproducts of so much work is that sometimes, a really great story snippet ends up being tossed into a file folder somewhere on your computer because there just isn't room for it within the framework of the story. That's what this post is about.

What you're about to read is a background piece I wrote about one of the characters in the book - a curly-haired girl from Connecticut named Hayley Morgenstern. Hayley grew up with three older brothers that took no end of delight in making Hayley's childhood as miserable as possible. Eventually, like all little sisters, Hayley learned how to turn the tables on them. But not yet.

This story takes place the day that a young Hayley, all of eight years old, got a cat.

When Hayley Morgenstern was eight-and-a-half years old, she felt she had accumulated enough wisdom and experience to manage the responsibility of a pet. So with all the earnestness that an eight-and-a-half-year-old can muster, she set about brokering a deal with her parents to allow her to get a cat. The terms of the deal were that if they let her get a cat, she would feed it, take care of it, and clean its litter, and it would never be a bother to them in any way. About the only concession she asked for was naming rights to the cat. She had tentatively settled on two: Phoebe, if the cat was a girl, and if it was a boy, Glen.

Parents are notoriously susceptible to the charms of their children in moments of greatest cuteness, a fact of which the young Hayley was well aware. She made sure to make her eyes as big as possible, to pull in the corners of her mouth so she looked serious (but in an adorable way), and to keep her hands folded neatly and sincerely on the kitchen table in front of her. She even had the good sense to brush her outrageously curly hair and to wear her most decent pair of corduroy overalls, all in the interest of putting her best foot forward.

It worked like a charm.

Sadly, however, the naming of the cat did not go quite as smoothly for young Hayley. The cat turned out to be a boy, but because Hayley had three older brothers (and more to the point, because her brothers were jerks), the cat's full name ended up being Glen The Cat.

It was a Tuesday in the early summer, just after the end of Hayley's tenure in the second grade when the Morgensterns brought Glen The Cat home from the Ledyard Animal Shelter. Hayley's mother was quick to remind her daughter of the terms of their agreement, and Hayley was equally quick to remind her mother about the naming clause in her contract. The naming of Glen was a rare moment of glory for her. It lasted almost a full five minutes before her brothers changed, or rather, extended the cat's name to its present state.

"What's his name?" said Randy. Randy was the oldest, but only the second biggest jerk among the Morgenstern boys.

"Glen," Hayley said. "I got to name him."

"You named him Glen The Cat?" asked Howie, who held the distinction of being the biggest among the jerks. Howie was the second oldest.

"No, just Glen," Hayley insisted.

"Aw, Glen The Cat is kinda cute," Randy said.

"Yeah," said Hayley, "he's really cute." He was too. He was a pretty black and brown cat with white paws and big, green, luminous eyes.

"No," said Randy, "I meant the name 'Glen The Cat' is kinda cute. Glen The Cat is ugly. Look at his paws. They don't match the rest of him."

Last among the jerks was Ricky, the youngest of the three brothers. Ricky's role in this kind of hijinks was usually restricted to background laughter, but it was still enough to qualify him for jerk status. Ricky was cracking up on the living room floor behind them.

"He is not ugly, Randy, you’re ugly!"

"Not as ugly as Glen The Cat," said Howie.

“Leave the cat alone!” Hayley yelled.

"You mean leave Glen The Cat alone," said Randy.

Ricky kept on cracking up on the living room floor. It was vintage Ricky. He cracked up so often he ended up with asthma. That was why Howie and Randy loved having Ricky as an audience. Hayley thought he deserved it.

"Mom!" Hayley yelled. "Howie and Randy keep calling the cat 'Glen The Cat'."

Hayley's mom's voice cut into the argument all the way from the kitchen. "Howie and Randy, stop bothering your sister," said Hayley's mom. Already, this pet thing was turning into a bad bargain for her. It was evident in her tone.

"We’re not bothering her, Mom," Howie yelled, "we’re just trying to figure out why she named Glen The Cat 'Glen The Cat.' I mean, it's obvious he's a cat. It's not like anyone's calling him 'Glen The Dog'."

Ricky's wheezing laughter in the background wasn’t doing a whole lot to buy Howie any parental sympathy.

"Yeah," said Randy, "but what if we got a dog, and I wanted to name him Glen?"

"No!" Hayley yelled. "You can’t do that, Randy! I already named the cat Glen!"

"...The Cat," added Randy, that jerk.

"Actually, 'Glen The Dog' is a much better name," said Howie. "Maybe we should call Glen The Cat 'Glen The Dog' instead."

Hayley's eyes started to well up at the same moment her mom emerged into the living room from the kitchen, peeling rubber gloves off of her hands. There must have been a causal relationship between the daughter's agony and the mother's arrival (and possibly, although doubtfully, the glove peeling too), but it was entirely unclear in what direction that causality went.

"Howie, Randy, please, for Pete's sake," said Hayley's mom.

"No, come on, Mom, this isn’t fair," said Howie, who loved to overplay his hand. "I didn’t even want a cat. I wanted a dog, and I was gonna name him Glen."

"You were not!" Hayley said. Her quivering lower lip joined her watering eyes in the early stages of what could only turn into crying. Parents are also susceptible to their children crying, especially when their children are as adorable as Hayley was.

"This sucks, Mom," said Randy. "Me and Howie were gonna get a dog and name it Glen and now Hayley's trying to steal the name."

Howie sighed in mock disappointment. "I guess we could name the dog 'Glen The Cat' just so we can tell him apart from Glen The Dog here.”

"He's Glen The Cat!" bellowed Hayley. Ricky practically choked in the background.

"See, there you go," said Howie.

"I hate you!" Hayley shouted.

Ricky's laughter was turning into an asthma attack. At the same time, Hayley's quivering lower lip and watering eyes were giving way to full-fledged, four-alarm crying. Glen The Cat, for his part, seemed nonplussed by all of it. He sniffed at the living room furniture, his tail low.

"That's it!" yelled Hayley's mom. "All three of you go to your rooms right now before I wash your mouths out with soap!" (She was never terribly creative with punishment. "And I don’t want to hear another word about Glen The Dog or Glen The Cat or whatever his name is!"

Hayley's brothers laughed all the way up the stairs and into their rooms. Ricky had to race to the inhaler on his dresser so he could breathe again. And despite Hayley's tearful protests, and despite the contract she had so carefully and diligently negotiated, Glen The Cat's name stuck.

Incidentally, you may notice that my avatar has a picture of me with a cat. Rest assured, the cat in the picture in no way inspired the character of Glen The Cat. When I wrote about Glen The Cat, I was in the midst of cultivating a deep and lifelong disdain for all things feline, which I have since gotten over. Whether felines get over their deep disdain for me, however, is another matter entirely.

Dillehay'd

This is not a post about me. This is a post about a word that doesn't exist, but should.

Anyone who lives in or near a big city, or who has spent time in or near a big city might be familiar with the odd phenomenon of running into someone unexpected and familiar literally in the midst of thousands of strangers. Obviously, it doesn't only happen in big cities, it just tends to happen more there. I once ran into an old friend of my father's - a man from Wisconsin named Steve Tomassi - in the lobby of the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was spending my summer undergoing a rigorous deconstruction of all the good parts of my self-image. They call the job "bellhopping," but don't be fooled.

But this isn't a post about my checkered employment history either, or about old friends of my father's from Wisconsin. I'm just very bad at staying on topic.

Getting back to the premise of running into someone familiar in an unfamiliar location: it's jarring enough when it happens in a place like New York, where there are always millions of people and you should really sort of half-expect it. Lots of folks visit New York at one time or another. It's not such a big stretch to imagine two of them (or more) might know each other.

Now imagine that happening on the internet. Not in the traditional way where you go looking for someone and find them (stalker!), but in the random way where you're browsing semi-pornographic sites and you happen to run across the face of a girl you knew pretty well in college, and you had no idea this was how she was paying the bills now. Last you heard, she was a teacher in southern California. Now she's masturbating on camera. And you, pervert that you are, found out completely by accident.

Not that that's ever happened to me, of course. All I did (yes, let's finally get to the story) was stumble onto a YouTube video featuring a guy I acted with in high school.

His name is Sam Dillehay, and I don't know a whole lot else about him. I met him doing a summer production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in 1992, and I remember he smoked Marlboro Reds at the tender age of 18. I also remember a comment that he made to me when I asked him why he smoked Reds: "I like the pleasant tugging in my chest," he said. Sick bastard.

I never really gave Sam a second thought after that summer. We shared none of the same friends, we didn't exchange e-mail addresses or phone numbers, and both of us were straight so there was no prospect of any funny business. It's just that I have a pretty decent recollection when it comes to names, faces, dates, and numbers. So when I saw this video, I was mildly stunned to see that it contained someone I knew in it.

Okay, maybe mildly stunned is an understatement. Maybe "totally fucking floored," would more accurately capture the mood. I just don't like to swear is all. It's ungentlemanly.

The point is that there isn't a word for when something like that happens. "Coincidence" isn't big enough. Even "big coincidence" only sort of hints at what's really going on. It seems bigger than a big coincidence, like "wow, that is a really truly amazing coincidence." But I just think that given the versatility of English and the long hours already spent creating words, there ought to be a more punchy way to get that across. Let's say something with a four-syllable limit. That's what I'm talking about.

If that word exists, though, I don't know it.

Incidentally, this story is true. If you don't believe me, here's Sam's video. Sam is the guy in the video.

hello? is there anybody out there?

personally, i would stop reading this right now. any blog that begins by titling its inaugural post after pink floyd lyrics from 1977 is either pretentious, seriously flawed, or both.

seriously, that song is 30 years old. what does it say that i couldn't come up with something fresher? it says everything.

and yet you still came this far.

this will be my attempt at putting a somewhat serious side of me on the internet somewhere, for the zero members of my reading public to pay attention to. in the coming days, weeks, months, and yes, years, i intend to give anyone who gives a crap a little something to read about yours truly.

for now, all i'll tell you is that my name is matt.

that is all.

now you have to stop reading because there's nothing else to read. i win.