apartment roulette

After living in Chicago for three years, and in Minneapolis for eight years before that, when I came back to Minneapolis I was kinda freaked to realize that I had turned into—a midwestern guy. Sweet Jesus at the State Fair! Grew up in SoCal, always loved New York, and apparently finding my true home simply required splitting the difference, geographically.

By the way, I loved Chicago. It had everything I liked about New York, but was cheaper and had nicer people. Granted, I could never find a decent deli that knew how to make egg salad like Murray’s, but Chicago has a heart and a soul that feels just about right. Besides, my two favorite spectator sports are baseball and politics, and there ain’t nothin’ like Chicago for sheer surrealism in both. Following the Cubs AND livin’ in the land of Daley—now that’s a veritable carnival of weird, and as a writer, it was like gold.

I was a bit put off by the notion of settling, once and for all, in Minneapolis. I don’t mind Minneapolis, in the way one doesn’t mind eating a casserole (sorry–‘hot dish’), or a comfortable pair of Dockers—they serve a purpose, they won’t annoy anybody, but they won’t ever thrill you, like lobster bisque would, or…whatever the thrilling analogy to Dockers would be.

And yet, I’ve decided I’m good with ‘comfortable.’ Sure, as a writer, I wanted the diversity of New York, and in Minneapolis, a diverse neighborhood means a mix of Norwegians AND Swedes, (it’s not so much a melting pot as it is a nice layer cake). But trying to find a place to live in New York was like trying to find Middle Earth on a map.

The Girlfriend and I might be looking for another place here soon, and I am so glad I don’t have to look alone, because that process can kick your ass. When I last tried to move to New York, I realized I probably wasn’t gonna find a place I could afford in Manhattan, so I started looking at Craigslist for roommate listings near New York that might be affordable.  Now I hadn’tt spent much time in the Outer Boroughs (which always sounds like where you’d get exiled to in Soviet-era Russia), but I had seen a couple of Spike Lee films, so I figured I’ve got a handle on the area, and as far as knowing my way around Jersey, I have “Clerks” on DVD.

There are some phrases you see in more than a few roommate ads, and I guess it’s been a while since I’ve looked into shared housing, but some of them seem a little strange. I think my favorite is when the person posting asks for “no drama,” which puts me in a bit of a quandary as an actor. Does that mean I can’t rehearse at home, or just that I can’t actually mount a full production of “Death Of A Salesman” in the common area? And I’m a little put off if all the roommates in the place are described as mellow, or as the kids say, ‘chill’–I’d be worried I’d be walking onto the set of a Judd Apatow movie. Do I watch too many movies? Anyway, if a couple of the guys living there were a little less ‘chill,’ they probably wouldn’t have to look for a roommate. I also saw a variation of this (which I hope was a typo) that described two ‘chilled’ girls…

I was actually offended by one ad. Guy in his twenties, great place, great location, and right as a I was visualizing moving my suitcases in and learning the schedule of the J train, he writes “please be around my age, older people tend to be set in their ways, and that’s a drag to live around”…I was actually gonna send him a nasty email, but I remembered my tv shows were on, and I never miss my “CSI.”

There was also a listing which might be the best example of ‘TMI’ I’ve ever read. Spent a little time looking at the Philadelphia listings (hey, it’s only an hour and a half by train), and was really tempted by an apartment that was listed right in the heart of the city. Free internet. free laundry, five minute walk to the commuter train, and this:

A cat lives there already that will fight other cats. A former roommate once took heroin and passed out in the middle of the night with the oven on. For obvious reasons, she’s been replaced.

First, note that the cat WILL fight other cats. Not ‘might.’ It will–as if, that’s what they have it for. Secondly…the roommate. Couldn’t just say she’s moved out, no, we needed the pulp novel, Billie Holliday visual. Yeah, she was replaced, but it doesn’t say whether they replaced her with another junkie who just doesn’t attempt any baking. While you’re at it, you might want to replace the cat. Oddly enough, this ad didn’t say ‘no drama.’

On a lighter note, I’ll share my favorite typos. One place seemed charming, and I think they meant ‘large’ furnished apartment, but the headline clearly said the apartment was ‘MARGE FURNISHED.” I imagine moving in, and there’s Marge–because, well, nobody had the heart to ask her to leave.

And my favorite–an apartment that conveniently has a ‘laundrymoat.” I’m thinking this may not even be a typo, but some medieval-inspired building feature, designed to prevent tenants from other building from taking your stuff out of the dryer. And that really couldn’t be a typo–I mean the ‘o’ isn’t near the ‘m’ or the ‘a’ on the keyboard!  They must actually have a ‘laundrymoat‘! I never pursued it, though–they might have a laundrymoat, but unless they have a security drawbridge, I wouldn’t have felt safe. It was New York after all.

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too much information

I know too much. Not in the counter-espionage, “I’m afraid you know too much, Mr. Dane, so we will have to eliminate you” sense, but in the sense that I know too much random, pointless information. For example, I know that the plastic thingy at the end of a shoelace is called an aglet. How is this useful? Unless I were to land a job in the fast-paced shoelace manufacturing industry (“I need that shipment of aglets by tomorrow morning or heads are gonna roll!”), there is absolutely no reason for me to remember this. Yet there it is, sitting on a shelf inside my head, there for me to access whenever I need it. Which would be never. But when I need to remember, say, the phone number of someone I promised to call—no, those seven digits are lost in the murky, pot-addled crevices of my brain—hidden, no doubt by ‘aglet’ and six other tiny, meaningless facts.

I’ve been reading trivia books since I was eight years old, which means I’ve been annoying friends and strangers for about forty years. In that time, I’ve told people that the Utah state bird is the California seagull, pointed out that Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and explained that Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee of treason. I know that Edison got a patent for a method of making concrete furniture, I know that Jethro Tull was a horticulturalist who invented the seed drill, and I know that White-Out was invented by the mother of one of the Monkees. I even know that Steven Stills auditioned to be IN the Monkees! It’s a sickness! Did you know a cricket’s ears are on its legs? Of course you didn’t—why would you need to?!

It would be different if I could turn this vast pile of scrap knowledge into something profitable. But it’s not like ‘smart guy’ is a job description. I don’t think you can be a professional Scrabble player. You might suggest I try out for Jeopardy, but the problem there is my personality. The first time Alex Trebek did one of his patronizing “no, sorry—we were looking for a Turkish naval battle—remember the category” comments, I would knock over my podium and kick his haughty Canuck ass.

So here’s my crackpot theory. Suppose, instead of using only ten percent of our brain’s capacity, there’s actually only a finite amount of storage on our cranial hard drives. I believe that the fact that I still remember my address from when I was in junior high and the name of the crazy waitress I had sex with in Omaha in 1987 means that I have two less places to store important things. How else to explain that, despite two years of college French, I can barely order a croissant, and yet I can tell you that the raised reflective markers on California freeways are called Bott’s Dots. Sure, I know that Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer, but there’s apparently no room in my head for how to do basic plumbing, or even sew a button.

I understand that scientists are close to developing a drug that will allow you to erase certain memories. Well, I’ll be the first in line at Walgreen’s to fill my prescription. See, I think we’ve got artificial intelligence all wrong. Instead of trying to make machines think like people, we should be doing a little reverse engineering to make our brains more like computers. Specifically, we need a ‘delete’ key.

I’m not talking about some ‘Eternal Sunshine’/’Dollhouse’ total brain wipe, just the ability to selectively erase bits of information we don’t need anymore. At one time, it was important for me to know all the lyrics to “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero,” but now, not so much. With the brain delete key, you would be able to unclutter the space up there and make room for what you need now. It would be like defragging your head. That uncle tells you in way too much detail about his penile implant? Nod, smile, and then hit ‘delete’. Your best friend gets drunk and shares with you that he always thought your mom was hot? Delete! Delete! Delete!

I suppose knowing a bunch of random trivia isn’t the worst quirk a writer could have. Goethe could only write if he had a rotten apple in his desk, and Proust kept a pet swordfish. L. Frank Baum came up with the name ‘Oz’ when he was looking at a filing cabinet with —wait, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Sorry.

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bad words

I’ll be the first to admit that my language, when unfettered by social propriety, is pretty salty. I never agreed with pedants who claim that swearing just indicates a limited vocabulary (see–I even used the word ‘pedants’). But sometimes, when confronted with certain situations and certain people, swearing is the only appropriate response. These situations include the following:

  • automated phone menus that instruct you to simply say your choice but then pretend to not understand what you’ve said, taunting you like HAL from 2001
  • convenience store clerks who count out your change so slowly that it seems as if they’re seeing the various denominations of currency for the very first time
  • former members of the Bush cabal who won’t shut up because they can’t seem to understand that not only did their ilk create most of what we’re trying to fix but in addition to that they lost and so consequently IT’S NOT THEIR TURN ANYMORE

It just feels good, on a visceral, primal level, to believe that you’re actually saying “fuck you” to the annoying robotic phone lady, or the kid at the 7-11,  or Donald Trump.

Ironically, when I perform standup comedy, I swear less than I do in my offstage life. In performance, language rarely shocks anymore, and the word “fuck” , for most comics on the road, has become a bright shiny object held up to draw the focus away from some hackneyed, hollow joke. Don’t get me wrong–the word is still in my quiver, but I don’t reach for it as often as I used to.

I’m reminded of a comedian who, by way of explaining that he didn’t swear, would point out that it was because he couldn’t think of any words strong enough to express his anger. Which leads me to ‘gadzooks’.

I want to start a movement to bring back some classic, if archaic, words for those “hit your thumb with a hammer moments. A cathartic way of expleting, without deleting. I propose the following ‘starter set,’ with annotations.

  1. Zounds! This one has a little extra spriritual component (it’s short for “God’s wounds“), and as such is useful when you need to swear in a religious setting–“Zounds! How long is this funeral gonna last, anyway?” Strangely, Zounds is also the name of a manufacturer of hearing aids, so context is important.
  2. Holy Mackeral! I like that this one starts out religious, and then veers toward the surreal, allowing you to express the kind of anger that is so disorienting you actually start to imagine fish with supernatural properties.
  3. Yikes! My favorite. Short, punchy, hard ‘k’ sound…channel your inner B-movie star the next time you’re stuck waiting for the cable guy–“Yikes! I thought you’d never get here, my good man!” (note: the “my good man” part is optional)

Speaking of B-movies,  I’d also like to bring back some phrases from the era of black and white cinema, when you knew who the good guys were by the words they shouted, and you didn’t have all that pesky moral ambiguity you see in indie films. Have fun and make the travails of your workaday life into a melodrama!

  • For instance, when the waitress at Denny’s brings you a Grand Slam instead of the Moons Over My Hammy you ordered, bang your fist on the table, stand up and yell”This is an outrage!” It’s best to have one of your friends warm up the car if you feel this about to happen, as you’ll most likely need to move to a different restaurant.
  • Another standby from the movies works like this–someone has told you something you KNOW is wrong…all you need is one word–“LIAR!” The bank teller says you’re overdrawn? Look at her and loudly proclaim “LIAR!” The pompous twink at the Gap says something isn’t made in your size? “LIAR!” (note: this is most effective if said while pointing at the offending party)

Lastly, on the topic of name-calling…ever felt hamstrung by the fact that you reallyreallyreally wanted to call someone a name, but ‘dick’ seemed a little too eighth-grade, and, if a woman was the object of your scorn, well you just didn’t have the time in that moment to navigate shifting waters of feminist theory to determine whether you could use that particular word? Here are some possibilities:

  • Rapscallion–good to bring out in a bar fight, perhaps…if that doesn’t make them back down, try ‘wastrel‘.
  • Chowderhead–this has the advantage of being gender-neutral, with a certain upper-class sensibility…you can up the ante byprefacing it with “Now listen here, you”.
  • Ninnyhammer–now this is a multi-tasking insult–not only does it say to people  ‘I need four syllables to describe your incompetence,’ but it also sounds like the name of the tool with which you would hit them.

I’m sure I’ll think of some others…oh yeah…here–I wrote it down on this…no wait–now I just had it…oh, bother!

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