In 2003, I made a list of every book I read that year. I haven’t done this since for a few reasons, although laziness is the biggest one.  Also, I don’t read as much as I should, and these lists are never accurate.  It’s like every top-100 record list by rock snobs that have Captain Beefheart on the list.  I can guarantee you that far more people listen to Boston’s first album than Don Von’s, and but people put him on the list because they want to look superior or act like they have a refined taste.  (For the record, I am listening to “More Than a Feeling” on repeat as I write this, something I do for hours at a time, until I decide to switch to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” or “Freebird”, or the Oakland SWAT team knocks my front door off the hinges because my neighbors have phoned in a potential Waco standoff, because there’s no other possible reason for someone to listen to side 1/track 1 of Boston - Boston 483 times in a row.)

Okay, so here is a partial list of the books I read in 2010 that you should read but probably won’t, because this post itself just broke the 200 word mark, and that’s way too long for anyone not on near-lethal amounts of ADHD medication.  Oh, in no particular order.

• Loner: Stories by John Sheppard - This is a story collection by my pal John Sheppard that contains three stories previously released in Air in the Paragraph Line, plus a story entitled “Loner” that completely blew me away.  John’s an incredibly underrated writer and the book is worth it for this one story.
• Meat Won’t Pay My Light Bill by Kurt Eisenlohr - Kurt is better known in these parts as the artist who painted the AITPL 13 cover, but he’s also an awesome writer.  This is a very Bukowskian novel about a punk named Lupus who wants to quit working and spend his time painting, and all hell breaks loose.  If you liked Post Office, this book is totally up your alley.
• There Are a Million Stories in the Naked City by Fiona Helmsley - This is a cool-sized pocket book that consists of 120 pages of creative non-fiction stories about Fiona’s days world of punks and strippers and heroin and a dirty, pre-Giuliani New York City.
• Awkward 1 - I first met Awkward Press editor Jeffrey Dinsmore during my brief stint in LA in 2008, which was right before he got Awkward up and running.  They’ve since done a more substantial second issue in 2010, which tells you something about my reading backlog.  This episode has five short stories about awkward occurrences, all of them great.  Each one is pretty innovate in how the story unspools, like Honor Rovai’s “Housesitting”, which starts off as a letter to a housesitter that quickly morphs into a crime confession.
• The American Book of the Dead by Henry Baum - A high-concept thriller about the end of the world as brought on by a far-right conspiracy by religious fundies in a Cheney-type style.  It’s a good plot that would (or will?) make a great movie, but is also noteworthy in that it was self-published and isn’t just another SKU number regurgitated from the entertainment-industrial complex.
• Air in the Paragraph Line #13 - I know I published it, and I wrote two of the stories, but I also read a metric fuck-ton of stories before selecting these, and I re-read everything here a million times during the production of the issue.  Todd Taylor’s “Banjo Alien Zen” is one of my favorites in here, as is Rebel Star Hobson’s piece about the insanity of working in a redneck-infested convenience store.

I didn’t buy as much this year because I re-read a lot of old books.  I moved, and in the process of moving, I tried to tightly prune my collection and dump books that had followed me across the country multiple times that I should have read but didn’t.  Also, I tried to nail down what I was supposed to be writing, or what I wanted to write, and a lot of that involved re-reading books important to me.  Here’s a partial list of what I re-read, all books worthy of purchase, if you’ve got that Amazon gift card from xmas burning a hole in your pocket:

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson - A panic Kindle purchase when I realized I was on the way to the airport for a cross-country flight and had nothing to read.  I practically inhaled this on the plane ride home, and it was just as good as the first half-dozen times I read it.
• The Risk Pool by Richard Russo - This is pretty much becoming an annual read.  Nobody paints a picture like this guy.
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick - Alternate reality we-lost-to-the-Nazis fiction at its finest, especially since all alternate reality fiction currently written is some right-wing wonk trying to get across some point about how paving roads is socialism.
• The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian - One of my favorite books about New York, even if there is a geographical goof about every five pages.

So what should I be reading in 2011?

One of my new year’s resolutions is to get a reality show of mine picked up on the upcoming motorized combative sports channel that Viacom is trying to get off the ground in 2012.  I’ve been reading all of these bullshit Syd Field books, and trying to figure out this new Mac software package ScreenFuckerPro, which is supposed to have some wizard mode where you enter a noun, a color, and a verb and it spits out a perfectly formed 120-page screenplay.  Over half of the stuff on UPN or whatever it is called this week uses this program.  I think my copy is broken, because I downloaded a torrent and used a fake serial number, and now no matter what nouns and verbs I put into it, the result is always the pilot episode of Felicity.  I’ve spent the last 200 hours trying to figure out the key macros and wizard screens and pull-out side palettes, and I probably could have just written the damn treatment in notepad by now, except that involves work, and I still can’t figure out if I’m supposed to use notepad or wordpad on a Windows machine, and no matter which one I use, the thing ends up unwrapping and putting the entire damn thing on one line with \874 and \262 and Ä instead of quotes and dashes.

So I’ve been trying to wrap my head around some kind of “green” demolition derby - something that captures the essence of classic motorized combative sports and their ability to transfer the pent-up sexual frustration of middle America into twisted metal and bent-up mid-70s shitheap Buicks and Chryslers with some angle that will get idiots who buy Green everything to shell out money on pay-per-views.  And the answer is not just to have an all-Prius demolition derby, although if you’ve ever seen a Kammback body car get rear-ended when it’s nosed into a wall, it’s probably as tasty an instant replay as any self-defecation Taser scene from COPS. (And yes, I have tried to pitch an all-pants-shitting/all-Taser COPS spinoff or special, but getting John Langley to return my phone calls is like trying to book Kanye to play at a Klan rally.) The Green-buying public is too into the notion that their priceless hybrid will run for four million miles and won’t ever age or die young; they are not cool with seeing Japanese plastic and metal on jackstands in some hillbilly’s garage, getting the glass punched out, the frame pre-notched, and the precious Toyota high-gloss Driftwood Pearl covered with spraypaint flames.

Don’t get me wrong; an all-Prius demolition derby would sell.  There are enough people in red state America that hate hybrid cars and would love to see them get smashed to pieces in an orgy of ZEV destruction.  There are millions of people that would foreclose on their houses and sell their children to sex predators just to keep filling up their 2-MPG pickup trucks at four bucks a gallon.  In the flyover states, the hybrid is seen as The Enemy, much like homosexuals, the Macintosh computer, and “rap music” (which hasn’t been called “rap” music for something like twenty years, just like nobody calls “alternative” music “alternative”, but the second you ask some mouth-breather in Arkansas about MTV, which hasn’t played any music for at least fifteen years, they will always, without fail, tell you “well, I’m not really into that rap or alternative music.”)  Woodrow Wilson didn’t drive a hybrid, and nowadays, it’s all about looking back and glomming onto whatever dumb ideals got us stuck in two world wars and a great depression, because that’s how things are Done Right.  And of course, the best way to spread the word on how we shouldn’t embrace progress is to use a complicated modern computer network that was invented by communists, Jews, socialists, pederasts, sodomites, ivy-league academics, and Californians.

That, in a way, is an example of what I need to do.  The internet is a modern, progressive breeding ground of ideas and hope and communication and change, and yet every damn time I read an article about a wildfire or a tsunami, there’s at least a dozen redneck Patriots blaming the whole thing on Obama and socialism.  All computer networks that don’t involve two machines you personally own connected to each other with a loopback cable are intrinsically socialist; if you pay $39 a month for a DSL or cable connection, do you think that you and every one of the other millions of subscribers are using exactly $39 of bandwidth?  Either you are downloading torrents of every episode of The Dukes of Hazzard at a gig a clip and relying on the fact that your neighbor is an idiot who only downloads a quarter-meg of emails from his brother-in-law every month and leaves most of his bandwith unused, or you’re not using the entire potential of your connection and you’re essentially doing the same damn thing as someone who pays thousands of dollars into Medicare and never gets sick.  I would argue that the internet is the most successful form of socialism ever implemented.  What magic mojo gets the most radical fundamentalist conservatives to embrace an entirely socialist technology created by companies that pay their workers to give their gay atheist pets sex change operations?  That’s the nut I need to crack to be able to sell the destruction of hybrid cars to a population that largely fears cars and feels that any form of motor sports is a misogynistic affront on humanity in the same vein as hunting puppy mill-bred dogs with a sniper rifle and raping their corpses.

Fuck this is hard.  If someone would have bought my Who Wants to Be a Prophet show back in 2007, I’d have a foot in the door and a half-dozen spin-off shows where I’d show up to one meeting, change one adverb in the title, and get an Executive Producer credit fat enough to keep my beak wet in this sports steroid abuse memorabilia hobby.  (Do you know how much a game-used Barry Bonds HGH suppository goes for on eBay?)  Maybe the demolition derby will use all Priuses, but all the drivers will be hot lipstick lesbian types with lots of tattoos and rockabilly clothes.  I’ll get some BMX bike or street skate has-been to host, and maybe a British-accented supermodel wannabe to cohost.  Gotta go write this up - wish me luck.

2010 has come to a close, and I am getting a slow trickle of end-of-year letters and holiday cards in the old fashioned paper format, both things I always wish I would do, except I think about them roughly two days before xmas and all of my postal addresses are years out of date and in sorry shape.  Maybe I should put a reminder in iCal around mid-July that says something about thinking about this.  Another option is not giving a shit, which is more appealing.

But here I am, and here’s a year in summary for those who were not paying attention:

• January brought about another trip to Vegas, my tenth trip there for my birthday.  I brought along my brand new DSLR, which I still know next to nothing about.  Highlights of the trip include paying for a dinner that cost roughly as much as my first four cars combined (although admittedly I used to drive some pretty shitty cars) and seeing Marc get so drunk that he sang “Turbo Lover” with great enthusiasm.  Photos of the trip, whittled down to a mere 100 photos (I took 49,324) is on flickr.
• In February, I quit my job at the Korean status report company that happens to also make mobile phones.  During my tenure, I did all of the things a high-priced technical writer is most adept at doing, such as working at trade shows answering questions about said company’s televisions and washing machines, maintaining a bug database that was hardly used because the company preferred to use ten-meg excel spreadsheets mailed to the entire division to keep track of bugs, and daily maintenance of a farm of cell phones that nobody used that required battery-out reboots.  You can read more about my departure at Three stars in the sunset.
• I published the 13th and probably final issue of Air in the Paragraph Line, which included two of my short stories, and lots of other great stuff by John Sheppard, Timothy Gager, Hassan Riaz, and a dozen or so others.  Check it out in paperback on Amazon - only $9.95 for 240 pages of excellent reading.  Or if you’re a Kindle person, it’s only $1.99 for the e-book version, which is a steal.
• I got a tech writing job at a company nobody has heard of, which sells a pricing software solution that I could explain in maybe four hours with a whiteboard and a lot of markers, provided you have at least a minor in economics.  The good news is that I got on a team with three other writers and two more open positions (I have been working solo forever), met some good folks, and got to work in Java again.  The bad news is that when you have a product that only a couple of dozen companies use, you tend to do stuff like make the interface only work in IE6 and have a configuration situation that’s roughly as intuitive as being given nothing but air, earth, fire, and water and having to build a B-2 stealth bomber.  But the pay was good and the Cokes were free, so I planned to hang out there a bit and slog away at 600-page config guides.
• After roughly six months at the new job, I got a call from my old boss at my job in New York where I worked from 2001-2007.  They offered to let me work at home doing what I did back then, and I accepted, bringing the job total for 2010 up to three.  The new job has been a great situation, albeit a bit weird to be back editing things I wrote years ago.  It’s great to be back with the band after so many years apart, but of course the best part is I no longer spend two to three hours a day in my Toyota stuck on traffic on the I-880.
• We bought another house, the unit four doors down from our previous one, to have more space and to give me a home office.  It’s roughly twice as big as the old place, and after a few months of insanely high stress, it’s a pretty decent situation.
• My seasonal allergy situation got progressively worse, and I went on a whole armada of pills, sprays, and inhalers to combat it.  I briefly tried acupuncture, which I found to be a crock of shit.  I then got allergy tested and started allergy injections, so we’ll see how that goes in a few months when I get up to maintenance levels.
• We went to Denver in August to see the Rockies.  I spent more money than I have ever spent for a pair of seats right behind home plate, and of course they lost that game.  But we had a good time, and I shot roughly 847,231 photos.  I also found out Prince Fielder does not like being called Cecil, especially when he is at bat.  There’s some non-baseball pics of Denver here, along with the Coors Field tour, and the first and second game against the Brewers.
• I saw a total of six baseball games this summer: Rockies @ Giants twice, Brewers @ Rockies twice; Cardinals @ Giants, and Rangers @ A’s.  Photos of a lot of those are here.
• I got a new MacBook Pro, the highest-spec’ed i7 15” model, the day the new rev came out.  It is a sweet piece of machinery and I love everything about it, except the fact that it has not made me write more or better.
• I also got an iPad in October.  The world is divided into two types of people: those who have no idea who the hell would ever want an iPad, and those who realize that they will forever change the way you use a computer.
• I went back to New York for the first time since leaving in 2007.  They’ve cleaned the subways since I left.  Once.  See also this and this for the full report.
• I guess I read a lot over the year, but a good chunk of that was re-reading.  Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City was probably one of the more enjoyable books I read in 2010; Jerry Stahl’s Pain Killers was also a good read.  I also, thanks to the Kindle, got through a big chunk of Philip K. Dick’s older works, with Ubik being a great work and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch completely blowing my mind.
• I’ve realized I had all but given up on being timely or in style with music, and I probably listened to mostly crap I’ve had for twenty years.  I think the new 2010 album I enjoyed the most in 2010 was A Star-Crossed Wasteland by In This Moment, although I am the only person in the world who liked their previous album better, but you can’t argue anything with a metal fan, which is why I have given up on ever reviewing albums.  The new Devo was okay, and BT released eleventy billion remixed tracks, which were decent but nowhere near This Binary Universe, which still probably remains, to me, as one of the best albums ever recorded.
• I have big plans for 2011, and none of them involve writing more dumb bulleted lists, so I hope this gets it all out of my system.

I wish I was a stand-up comedian.

I have trouble saying that, because I feel like the many or most people would reply with “you’re not funny.” And I’ve probably spent a lifetime trying to make other people laugh, and maybe I have, but the only thing that sticks in my mind are the too-serious people who reply with “you’re not funny.” And that’s probably why I couldn’t become a comic - it takes a certain amount of confidence to get up on the stage and talk to people like that. But lately, there has been something compelling to me about the whole comedy world.

Last night, I saw this documentary I am Comic on netflix.  It’s sort of about comedian Ritch Shydner, who had a ton of old Carson appearances, and then graduated into bit acting roles and staff writing jobs.  In the movie, he decides to make a comeback to stand-up after 14 years, and it documents his appearances at open mics and small gigs, both the horror of bombing in these small places where people are more interested in the pool tables and TV sets than the comedians, offset by the total high you get from running a show like that.

But the movie is more of a primer on stand-up, the process, the lifestyle, and the good and the bad, told through interview clips with at least 40 top-rate comics.  The wide swath of appearances is awe-inspiring, from household names that we forget got their start in stand-up (Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen, Jeff Foxworthy, Tom Arnold) to the current a-list (Sarah Silverman, Dave Attell, Lewis Black, Margaret Cho), and lots of other great cameos.  It talks about middling, and comedy club condos, and life on the road, and jokes versus bits versus chunks versus sets, and worst shows ever.  It’s a great movie if you’re a huge comedy nerd, and I am.

There’s a huge comedy boom going on right now.  I can’t quantify it and show you a Gartner report with pie charts or anything, but all the indicators are there:  there’s a whole world of podcasts and twitter feeds and web sites dedicated to stand-up; there are all of these shows like Last Comic Standing; there are tons of venues and shows; there are a bunch of stand-ups crossing over into movies and TV shows; there are something like 79 late-night talk shows now, every one employing a dozen staff writers and spotlighting a hundred comics a year.  It’s huge right now, which in my pessimistic mind means that there are orders of magnitude more people trying to break into the business, and I’m sure there are thousands and thousands of unemployed actors and directors and agents who are thinking “I need to start doing sets at open mics so I can segue that into a line producer job at Two and a Half Men.”  It also makes me think that if I decided today to become a stand-up and started writing jokes full-time, I’d just start to get momentum around the time 90% of the comedy clubs in the US shuttered and all of the trend-hop fans who are into Patton Oswalt today will move on to becoming professional salsa dancing fans, or whatever the hell the next trend will be.

I look at the huge growth of the comedy world as I look at the ever-dying world of publishing and wonder why the hell I got into a craft that’s so hugely unrewarding and impossible to crack.  As I try to study how to make it as a literary fiction writer, all I hear are horror stories about how there are now more MFA candidates trying to sell stories than there are readers of literary fiction, and there’s no money in publishing.  And yes, I could write genre fiction and make money writing hack murder mystery crap and publishing it myself, but you can’t choose your voice, it chooses you, and I can’t even read stuff like that, let along write it.  I write what I write, and I try to convince myself that someday the trend will change and people will trade in their vampire and zombie books for Kerouac and Wolfe.

But comedy has such an appealing ecosystem.  For one, you get up on stage at an open mic and go - there’s no trying to finagle blog followers and spamming your stuff to these lit e-journals in hopes that someone will pick it up.  You get on the mic and go, and there is immediate feedback.  I write a book, and maybe a year later, someone will read it and maybe I will hear back from them.  But comedy is immediately absorbed; you tell a joke, a person hears it, they laugh or they don’t.  And people seem to seek out comedy, go to clubs and pay money and see comics, and seek out these podcasts and XM Radio shows and live CDs.  I think in any art, there are two different cycles: either you follow the potential fans, or the fans follow you, and I feel like writing is very much the former right now, and comedy is the latter.  And maybe that’s not entirely true, and I’m sure a lot of comedians bust their asses trying to find Facebook friends and grow their mailing lists and post one-liners to twitter constantly.  But there’s not a huge audience of literary fiction fans out there eager to snap up anything you produce.

I recently took a comedy writing class, to see if I could do it.  And I found that I could and I couldn’t.  I mean, one of the assignments was to write something like 30 monologue-type jokes, which was hard only because I had to actually read the news, and I hate reading the news.  And after carving away at 30 jokes over the course of a week, I found that writers at Kimmel or Letterman have to write at least 40 or 50 jokes a day.  And their pay ranges somewhere between dick and shit.  I think I could hack away at being a comedy writer, or punching up scripts, but it’s probably as unrewarding as hacking away at user manuals all day.  And I don’t mean to knock the tech writing career, which pays more than all but the top tier of fiction writers on amazon, and gives me health insurance and paid vacation and pays me every day, whether or not I scare up sales.  But I remember that feeling when I hit ‘send’ and launched the final, final manuscript of Summer Rain to the publisher, after five years and a quarter-million words of pain and torture, knowing that it would be a 650-page chunk of my life and other peoples’ hands, and it was not the same feeling I get when checking in the final PDF of a developer’s guide for a software product that will literally sell a million times what my book does.

I wish there was a writing community more like the comedy community.  I mean, I look at stuff like the people taking UCB classes who are working with each other and building their careers and doing awesome things, and then I look at any number of literary sites where people are talking about their head shots or whether or not they should change their names to market to the Young Adult romance genre.  I’m slowly finding more authors that subvert this paradigm, but I need an order of magnitude of readers that do the same.  And lately, it’s hard to get people to pay attention to 140-character updates, let alone 140-page novellas.  But I think that will eventually change.

Oh yeah, I did standup once.  It was 1988 and I was in the Catskills and I did a talent show/open mic in some bar in East Windham, in front of maybe 20 people.  I don’t remember a single joke I did, but I vividly remember between the time I put down my name and the time I took the “stage” (really just the same floor as the bar), I went on this long walk in the upstate New York summer night, and listened to the bugs and talked to myself and tried to write a set on the spot.  I remember the smell of the August night, and the cool feeling when it was like a hundred all day and all you could really do is sit in the pool or hide in the AC of the motel, and the temp would drop to like 75 at night, and it would feel almost cold.  And I’m walking by myself, muttering “okay, no, start with that, then go into this, and then, no, then say this, and then mention I’m not from here, and go into that, and, and, and…”  And the set completely bombed; I think one joke got laughs.  But I did it.

Good to be back.  I spent all day Friday in airports and on airplanes, immersed in the world of roller suitcases and $9 bottles of water in newsstands filled with every single tabloid featuring pictures of a recently-adultified Miley Cyrus and rumors of tattoos and nipple slips and not a single piece of readable material outside of maybe a moldy Baseball Insider hot stove report with 48 pages of circle-jerking over Jeter’s next big payday, and maybe a 4-point type mention of Tulo’s big $160-million dollar deal somewhere under the mandatory required notice of circulation numbers and where to contact the publisher on page 96.

Actually, Friday was a marathon day, mostly because I could not sleep at all in New York, even with the help of all of the various pharmacological cures my Doctor Feelgoods give me.  (One advantage to a full-bore PPO plan in the hot potato days of plausible deniability-seeking doctors who pass you off to every specialist known to the medical profession any time you have a complaint even slightly off from their knowledge core is that opportunities abound for you to drug-seek elsewhere.  Not that I doctor-surf for Oxy like a right-wing hillbilly talk show host with an itch to scratch, but every time I go to see a new specialist, he or she will immediately rattle off a script to some new wonder-drug that may or may not help my ails but will surely get them another step closer to that Aruba junket with their pharmacy sales rep.)  I forgot that sleep in New York is a careful balancing act of drugs, white noise generators, and the learned ability to tune out the sounds of a garbage truck’s BEEP BEEP BEEP backup alarm at three in the morning, punctuated with the occasional siren bouncing off the buildings.  A decade of guidos, gunshots, and garbage trucks outside my first-floor window always made sleeping an annoyance, but when I’d leave and end up in the middle of nowhere, in a hotel where there wasn’t a shouting match ten feet from my head every hour, I found myself tossing and turning like it was the day before some big event (audit, wedding, presentation, sale on some Apple product I didn’t need, etc.)

My hotel suite cost roughly what I paid for a car back in college, per night, and had the two-bed setup, each bed just big enough for me to roll over once before I fell on the floor.  I remember decades of having a twin bed like this, even on occasion sharing it with someone for various acts of fun, and I never had issues.  Now, even a queen bed is a tight fit for the mountain of pillows and blankets I encase myself in every night.  Was this trip damned to be one of those “the more that things change” reminders?  I don’t know, but I did enjoy the iPod/iPhone dock built into the clock radio.  I had some fears because most of our team was on the same floor, and I didn’t want everyone to hear me at three in the morning, singing along to some Venom song about Satanic sacrifice at top volume while playing Angry Birds in a fit of insomnia and checking my facebook hourly on my $34.95 per day WiFi connection.  The room was barely bigger than the two beds, and when I got there, I thought it didn’t even have a bathroom like one of those cold-water shooting pads you’d rent out in Spanish Harlem in the 70s when you needed to kill a prostitute, but then I saw it hidden around a corner, a low-flow den of sample-sized soaps and a toilet that took around 45 minutes to flush each time.  At least the place had a standard bible AND a Mormon bible, which made it that much easier to smash allergy pills into snortable chunks of powder.  (I took the copy of the Mormon bible, with some vague idea to either read it and write a parody, or use it in some sort of art project, although I’m sure I will forget all about this and in two years, when I’m digging around for books to dump on Amazon (probably every “get over writer’s block in 56 seconds or less” book I bought in a tirade in the last year) and wonder why the hell I had a copy of the LDS book in my collection.)

So yes, New York.  I didn’t do as much walking around as I wanted, mostly because it was December, which meant the time of year I usually spent every waking moment trying to find a heated astronaut suit on some Russian eBay ripoff so I could make the ten-block walk to the subway every day without further aggravating my constant upper respiratory infection with that wind that whipped through every seam and zipper of every coat I ever owned.  I wondered if the city grew or my memory of the city shrunk, but then I realized as I wandered up and down Lexington in the middle of the night, I realized that I never looked UP when I lived in the big smear.

That sounds stupid, but it’s true - when it’s your daily penance to hustle up and down the sidewalk from subway to work to lunch to work to subway, you keep your head down and barrel forward at top speed, cursing every mouth-breather and inbred from a flyover state that stops on the sidewalk to look at a massive foldout map and see how far they are from the statue of liberty or ground zero or whatever the hell tourist spot they are ambling toward.  Even zen pacifists that never step on ants will, within fifteen minutes on a New York sidewalk with stuff to do and places to be, turn into a bloodthirsty offensive tackle of NFL caliber and look to plow down every single person not sprinting at top speed in front of them.  This aptitude came back to me quickly, as I knocked over nuns and old ladies on the way to the subway, but I noticed this look up/look down thing when I pulled out my camera for a quick picture to prove I actually was in the city and not on some Vegas strip club junket (you need as much evidence as possible with these new expense report systems - receipts are never enough; I’ve been bringing a pro HDV broadcast camera and taking video of waiters and hotel desk clerks holding up a copy of that day’s newspaper just to make sure I don’t get burned on reimbursement checks.)

And when I looked up, I saw this massive city, buildings climbing in every direction, and not a hint of economic downturn.  I mean, you look in almost every other American city, and it’s nothing but boarded up stores, closed restaurants, vacant lots for sale that will always remain barren.  The last time I went to Elkhart, I started playing this game while driving around where I would take a shot of tequila every time I passed some retail location of my youth that was either shuttered or turned into a Mexican grocery, and within fifteen minutes, I was blackout drunk.  But in New York, there’s stores opening inside stores, every corner of office building lobbies and subway tunnel filled with people selling wares.  The only thing I saw closed were the subway token booths, which were apparently shut down so they could afford to raise prices again.  (Wait, what?)

I went back to my old office for a half-day; most of my work stuff involved training-type meetings in the hotel convention center, but on Thursday, I had a morning of open time, so I got on the 6 and headed down to NoHo to work at the old digs.  First, taking the subway brought back so many strange memories.  Just the feel of that yellow plastic card going through the stainless steel slider on the turnstile (and of course, 1 in 2 times saying “please swipe your card again at this turnstile” at the exact point you push your entire body weight against the still-locked metal bar preventing you from advancing in the rat race) - that reminded me so much of my daily trip in the germ tube to the office.  I did remember to grab onto something when the car started so I didn’t get launched across the car, but I did keep forgetting which side the doors opened on and how you needed to get the fuck out of people’s way when they needed to exit at their stop.  When I got to 632 Broadway, I was too early and locked out of the elevator, so I got to hang out in the lobby and talk to the doorman about how many tens of millions Jeter would need to get.  I also went to the deli across the street for a Diet Coke and balance bar, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the mass of office workers getting their caffeine and bagel fix.  I always forget how personal space is a premium in the low-10000 ZIP codes.  In most other cities, you’d end up in a domestic partnership if you stood this close to other people for this long.  Here, it was standard operating procedure.

Stepping into the old office felt so — weird.  I mean, I spent every weekday of 2001 to 2007 in this place, hunched in a cube in the back corner, typing away at user manuals consuming mass amounts of Coke while downing heavy doses of DayQuil during the cold season.  (This was, thankfully, before the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 stifled everyone’s creative juices and prevented us true artists from buying Sudafed by the case.)  My old cube was still open, so I crashed there with my laptop and entered this strange time travel vortex, my muscle memory relaxing straight into the position I assumed for so many years.  And then I opened the filing cabinet under the desk, and found damn near every printout I made in those six years, carefully filed in my haphazard organizational system (files like “MIR space junk,” “fake celebrity porn,” “government conspiracies,” “failed Microsoft projects attempting to topple Java,” “standards documents I will never use,” etc.)  Talk about a mindfuck - it was like that insane recurring dream where you’re back in high school, except there’s no chance of hooking up with that cheerleader you may have secretly been into back in the eighties, before she had nine kids.

But yeah, that lack of sleep really killed me.  Thursday night, after a trip up to the Bronx to visit a guy who used to machine lower receivers for M-16s at his cousin’s bowling alley (he’s making a lot more cash now turning out bootleg $60 iPad stands), I think I went to bed around 2:00 and woke up at 4:30, unable to sleep but unable to stay awake, doing nothing but cruising various photo sites on the iPad, looking for some good Kim Jong Il snaps for an art project in the event that the shit does indeed go down in Han-Bando.  I went outside early, hoping to scare up a danish cart or cold bagel, and ran into a contingent of EMEA sales and service guys, who informed me that there were no good diners in all of the UK, so we went to one of these gastro-hipster places that probably used to be a Thai-French fusion restaurant three years ago but was now a fake greasy spoon with some of the appeal but none of the grime of its 80s counterparts you used to find littered all over the city.  We bitched about work and ordered rich food that promised diabetic comas in short order; I got 5000 calories of corned beef hash that must have contained an entire pound of butter (i.e. perfect) and got all nice and lethargic for a morning of training.

And yeah, a day of airports and airplanes.  I didn’t get the TSA Operation Grab-Ass everyone’s been talking about, but then again, I didn’t get Ebola when every 24-hour news alarmist said all five billion of us were going to get it back in the 90s, either.  I did enjoy the new (newly redone) terminal at JFK, and spent an hour perusing the used DVDs at some electronics store and almost considered dropping $60 on some super ultra 3-disc Apocalypse Now box set before I realized that the only machine I had with me with a DVD drive was my work Windows laptop, and I wasn’t even sure if Windows 7 plays DVDs out of the box without 200 hours of studying every aspect of DVD authoring and toggling a million registry settings and downloading several $100 versions of all of the crippled “lite” drivers and programs bundled with the computer.  Instead, I stuck to the kindle and got cover-to-cover on another fine book during my trip west.  I then bailed out the Toyota from its short stay at the long-term parking lot, and bumbled home the ten miles on the 880, driving like you’d expect someone to drive after being awake for 24 hours with only the good parts of a CPK Cobb salad (i.e. the meat, bacon and cheese and not the lettuce) from the Phoenix airport and two rolls of Certs to eat in the last ten hours.  I then gave the missus a $25 box of chocolates from the airport gift shop, said my hellos to the four-legged terrors, and slept a solid eight in the confines of my queen-sized cocoon.  Good to be back.