Squalid Americana: it's Wednesday

• Today I decided I'm going to write a book. Non-fiction, disjointed stories, random observations, things like that. A memoir if you will of the first few decades of my life. I've always wanted to write a book, but today I decided I truly need to. I have so much stuff I need to compile and so much more I need to download from my head and immortalise on pulp before I get really old and forget even more details. I have a few publishing routes I could take which I plan to exhaust and if those don't work, I'll try something else, but I need to be published. Today is Wednesday, June 27 2007. Let's see how long it will take me. Wish me luck!
  
  
• Attention fellow inhabitants of Manhattan island: Starbucks coffee isn't really all that great. You are in midtown Manhattan. There are six million people dying to sell you a cup of coffee; six million avenues you could take to get a cup of coffee in SECONDS but for some bizarre reason unknown to me you'll stand on line in the sweltering summer boil for an exalted cup of exorbitantly overpriced and truly not-that-great Starbucks coffee. I think there needs to be a modern addendum to the holy commandments; an eleventh commandment which will say: Thou Shall Not Wait In Line For More Than 1 Minute For A Cup Of Black Water. Maybe I'm not the coffee connoisseur but for the most part, coffee is coffee is coffee. I prefer Dunkin Donuts coffee over Starbucks and I prefer a cup of diner coffee over both of them and I'd take a cup of coffee from a coffee cart over them all but I certainly would not wait in a LINE for 10,15,20 MINUTES for the HONOUR of BUYING a cup of coffee from anyone. I just don't get this phenom. These people over here make millions of dollars, they play in sandboxes of shredded hundreds all day; could they really be this dumb? Cattle, all.
  
  
• Express Bus Etiquette; The Silent Code: Everyday I take an MTA express bus from Brooklyn to 48th street in midtown Manhattan. In the morning, I get on the bus pretty early on its route; I think my stop is the second or third stop, so when I board the world is my oyster; any seat in the house is mine for the taking. By the time the bus reaches the eighth and ninth stop it starts getting crowded and people start getting cagey and territorial. A commonly employed method of discouraging someone else from sitting next to you is to choose the outside seat in the row. That way if someone dares sit next to you when there are no more empty rows, they'll have to commit to asking you to get up so they can take the window seat which you assume is a big hassle and fuss. Its exactly like arming your home against burglars: you hope they'll just give up on your fortress and move on to an easier target. Another classic age-old deterrent is the ole make yourself as big and mean as possible trick (also good for scaring away bears and tigers); cover as much area as humanly possible with your body and then stack bags on your lap and on the seat next to you, creating a mound of luggage and flesh. Chances are that new passenger, that late-to-the-party motherf*cker (who's only fault is that they happen to live further down on the bus route) will move on down the line and sit next to someone else. I need to befriend a pocket-size psychologist and take him or her with me everywhere I go because everything I see has some sort of deep rooted trip to it. These people guarding their seats and surrounding them with virtual firewalls; its very 'call of the wild'; very primitive. Which blows my mind because no matter what year it is, no matter how far along we've come with modern technology, humans will always be the same. You can put us in a $200,000 car with every Jetsons amenity available and we still won't let people cut in a line waiting for a bridge or a toll; we're still wild, territorial, human animals in spaceships.
  
  
• Anthony Bourdain's "Nasty Bits" is the quintessential bathroom reader. It's written in beautiful short and concise stop-start chapters and it's all over the place. It's perfect, it never gets old and its way more hip than grandma's Readers Digest. Which leads me to ask, has Readers Digest ever published an issue without including a story about a guy pinned under his own car who cuts his arm off to escape? Maybe in their Xmas issue they'd leave that one out, otherwise, it's always there, they must have a giant file of those stories because its always either that or a story about a woman summoning superhuman strength and lifting a jackknifed 18-wheeler off of her trapped Lhasa Apso.