The Department of Useless and Ill-Informed Opinions

Callum Robbins Needs Your Help

It's not often that I get serious around here. Usually this is for flittering flights of fancy, random ramblings, or just plain ignoring and not bothering to post for months. But every now and then, something strikes me that's of a more sobering nature, and I like to speak about it. As such, here's a story for you...  It's about a 1 year old child, a now-defunct band, and a rock club in NYC that's long gone.

My story starts... Well, I don't remember exactly when. I'll place it in 1995, but that's an estimate, a stand-in, considering it may have been a year or 2 before. My phone rings, it's my friend Nick. Nick's older brother worked at Tower Records, which for us was the epitomy of cool-as-shit. I was never able to pull off a job there. I'd applied once, and though I thought I'd aced the music test they included on the application, I guess I just wasn't cool enough.

Nick's brother was our musical barometer. Back then we didn't have the ways to find new bands that we do today. Nick calls me, and says we're going into the city with his brother to see a band which he swore would change our lives; a band with intertwining guitars, deep bass, and tightly-wound drums, so tight you'd swear they'd split open when they were hit. How could I possibly say no?

Well, I did. I protested that I was tired, and I had to work or something the next morning, and I just didn't want to go into the city that might. Thankfully, Nick and his brother won, and I got into the car and off we went to Coney Island High.

What we saw did indeed change my life. We saw Jawbox.

At the time, apart from going to school, I was an intern for a small college radio promotions company. This isn't so important to the story, but it leads to something more, because after around 2 years there I decided to move on and intern at a label. Talking with my bosses, they agreed to help me where they could by reaching out to friends. All I had to do was pick the place I wanted to be at.

I went through labels in my head, and in the end knew that there were a few where I'd be put to good use, but only one where I knew I'd be happy. Atlantic Records. Why Atlantic, with an entire city full of record labels? Jawbox. I wanted to play whatever small part I could in drumming up support for them, knowing that had just recently put a record out.

I saw them play a few more times... Brownie's, Maxwell's, other places I can no longer remember.

And then Atlantic dropped them, along with the other few bands I personally gave a shit about, in a purge designed to only keep acts who were selling Hootie numbers, this being the day when Hootie & The Blowfish sold 16 million records. (Seriously. 16 times platinum. I shit you not.)

And then, Jawbox went away.

But I didn't. At least, not entirely.

Jawbox is still a regular part of the constant swirl of music on my iPod, and everytime I'm scrolling through and opt to stop on them for a while, I'm always happy I did.

Jawbox, and as a result J. Robbins, did much for me when I was younger. They helped shape and refine my musical tastes in ways they never otherwise would have had I never been turned onto them. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.

And now, it's our turn to help J.

J.'s wife, Janet Morgan, gave birth to their first child, Callum Zachary Robbins, on January 27, 2006.  In September, after a visit to their pediatrician and subsequent trips to specialists, Cal was diagnosed with Type 1 Spinal Muscular Atrophy. J., on his sites, and Bill Barbot and Kim Coletta, on theirs, put it so heartbreakingly simple that I won't even try. Cal Robbins has a very difficult life ahead of him, and we can help.

J. and Janet are accepting donations to the Callum Robbins Family Fund. I've given a small something, not much, but what I could, and I'm asking you to do the same.

Visit Cal's blog for more details on his condition, and for more information on how to donate.

Things To Do

I turned 31 last week (and threw myself a party at a bar that I learned only 2 days prior was an apparent blogger hangout, which tempted me to change venues), and as such I decided to spend my post-birthday semi-hangover putting down a list I'd been mentally working on for a while (which I liberally lifted from another site, on which I can't find the specific piece I'd wanted to reference). And so...

Things That Every Man Should Own/Do/Know/Comprehend By 31 (I'd have said 30, but I think it's fair to give us all a year to adjust to that big new roundish number to figure shit out; I'm cutting you some slack here, so don't take advantage):

1. Not just own a suit, because you should've had that taken care of way earlier, but own 2 or more suits.
2. Have a quality writing implement.
3. Even it's not your everyday one, possess a fine timekeeping device, i.e. a nice watch.  One that doesn't have a band made of rubber being a good start.
4. The number of books sitting on your shelves should be greater than the number of Xbox/Playstation/Wii/whatever video games.
5. Sure it varies from day to day and is dependent on all sorts of external conditions, but know how much beer, wine or booze you can drink before you get sick. I'm not telling you to stop before the sickness hits, I'm just offering the suggestion that maybe you shouldn't be caught offguard by it anymore.
6. On that line, know a good "business drink" that you can order so as to not look like a moron in front of serious people. The sort of drink that if you're at a thing, and a real, live adult hears you order it will prompt them to be impressed. Sure, maybe they're more impressed that you're not ordering a Fuzzy Navel, but maybe, just maybe, they're impressed that a young-ish person such as yourself can handle a real cocktail.
7. Be able to sit through a foreign subtitled film.
8. Own a corkscrew that isn't of the $5 "I grabbed it at some store in a rush" variety. I'm quite partial to the one I have.
9. Vacation in Europe. It's "where the history comes from."
10. To that end, have yourself some decent luggage. Maybe even a luggage set, if you're feeling particularly bold.
11. Have knowledge of current events that goes beyond what the score of Monday Night Football was.
12. Vote. Seriously, you have no idea the number of excuses I get from people, and none of them is valid. Short of "I was hit by a bus the day before Election Day, and am in a full body cast" I can't think of many others. And no, being out of town isn't legit. It's called an absentee ballot.
13. Learn to dust, scrub, vacuum, polish or whatever else you need to do to keep your place clean. If you can't manage that, drop $50 on a cleaning lady. (I'm wholly ignorant on that one, is that what it costs? For all I know it's $150 in NYC.)
14. Be able to hold a conversation at a party that doesn't consist entirely around sports, your fantasy teams or the real ones.
15. Call your mother.
16. Read A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present. It'll blow your mind.
17. Have at least two bottles of quality booze, of different varities, in your apartment.
18. Have the ability to go see a great band on a weeknight, stay out until 1 or 2am, and go into work the next morning. Trust me, this one will shock and amaze friends, family, and co-workers alike.
19. Go out for way-too-expensive cocktails every now and then.
20. Don't need to buy the cheapest tickets to a sporting event, be able to buy something mid-level. I'm not saying to necessarily buy the more expensive tickets, because there are few things I like better than a ticket that's cheaper than a beer, but it's good to know you don't need to scrimp on the seats.
21. FInally, and this one is my favorite, find a couple of things that you used to do, that once made you happy, and do them again.

So... Comprehensive, informative, blah blah blah. I won't say how many off of this list of 21 I do myself, but I will say I sure as fuck don't comply with all of them. This much I will fess up to: I fully adhere to #'s 1-4, sometimes follow #14, and blatantly ignore #13.

Is it considered acceptable behavior...

...to post once, directly after a vacation, saying that I'll be back on track shortly, followed by a second post 2 or so weeks later saying that I was perhaps wrong earlier and wasn't back just yet, but would be soon, and then to disappear for 3+ months only to claim to be back once more?

Right, didn't think so.

I make no promises as to just how "back" or not I may be. Let's see how this goes, and we can move forward from there.

So, what's been new since October? Sadly, little. But there are a few things I can say:

1. I've been promoted, or am at least deep into the process of being promoted. Offer letter has been signed, business cards with the snazzy new title have been ordered, and I've started doing some of the new work. All while technically retaining my old title and still doing my old job on top of the new one. It's a special form of bureaucracy, really. Wonderful stuff.

2. New cell phone that I'm quite pleased with. She's a looker, if I do say so myself.

3. I watched my favorite sports team go out with a fizzle. But it was a damned good year for them, the best in 18, so I shouldn't complain. Though I probably have, and will continue to.

4. I nurtured a good friend through a horrible ordeal: bedbugs.

Fuck. Is that really it?

I won a pub quiz one night, but it didn't nearly as much to do with me as it did to my friend Jen and her boyfriend Sam. They were the whiz kids.

Here's the thing, about the absence from here... This, here, right now, is the first thing I'm writing since... well since oh-so-eloquent "Be Back Soon" post in mid-October. I've mentally drafted a bunch of things, probably one every week or 2, but I've never put finger to keypad, as it were. And as for anything non-website-related, it's been much, much longer. I haven't gone so far as to look back at Last Saved dates on any files, because I'm scared that I might be underestimating myself, but it's been a good, solid year.

So, plans are afoot (though not quite in place just yet) to change the neglect I've shown to myself and my writing. If all goes as planned, I'll be back here, and I've got some interesting ideas I've been thinking about (a collection of short stories, an unrelated one-off short story, and maybe a 3rd draft of my most recent novel). It's time to shit or get off the pot.

I just don't know what the pot symbolizes.

Be back soon...

I know, I said I'd have some stuff to say within a couple of days of being back from Germany.

And now it's been two weeks and I haven't said anything.

I do have lots to say. I've been amassing a list of shit I want to talk about.

But, things are a little nuts at the moment. October is typically a very busy month for me, socially speaking. And with my team in the running, well, it's that much more.

I'm trying my damnedest to remain rational, as I watch this fantastic season I've just seen fly by begin to crack at its foundations right in front of my eyes. I've never been (and I don't want to become) one of those Fever Pitch-esque types who live and die by their teams' every moment; those people who obsess over each nuance of each game. And I think that while I've been watching intently, either by TV or in person at Shea Stadium, I've been good and have decidedly not been That Guy.

However, it is affecting somewhat my ability to concentrate on extracurricular activities, such as writing. If I had to guess (or at least hope), my money says it's more from the consecutive late nights out than it is from my mind spinning with permutations of postseason outcomes. But whatever the root cause it's fucking my shit up, to put it succinctly.

Tuesday night, the first off-day for the Mets in almost a full week (though they're talking about the possibility of another rainout on Monday night), is a good target for me to say a little something more. I'm exhausted by the NLCS. I can't even imagine how the players must be feeling.

Power Outage

I was in Newport, RI last week, from Sunday through Wednesday, for a company conference.

As anyone who's ever been to a conference can attest to, it's a booze-fest. The only saving grace was that the bars in Newport close at 1am, and the hotel bar an hour prior to that. So when 12:45am came around and whatever bars we were in turned the house lights up and yelled out for last call, we were done with the drinking.

On Tuesday night, the last hurrah if you will, we found a bar which let us stick around a little while longer. By 1:30, a few of us wandered outside (a mistake during a lock-in) looking for a splinter group who had gone next door to the more chic place a bit earlier. They were in the process of being sent home, seeing as how it was past 1.

I run into a friend, and we're walking at a spot in between the two bars and right near out hotel, when we hear a bang. Every light around us goes out. The streetlamps, both bars, every light in the hotel. It's cloudy, as its been raining like a bastard since we got there, and from beyond the hotel, to the north, we can see flashes within the low-hanging clouds. So, we're wondering what's happening. I mean, clearly a blackout, but we're drunk and confused. Maybe a minute later, we hear gas-powered generators kick in, and some of the hotel's lights come back.

Now, we all work for a network provider. And we're always somehow sort of thinking about work, which is hard to avoid when you're off with 60 people from your company. So, we look at each other and say, "Redundancy."

I know, we're fucking tools. Sue me.

We head back to the hotel, to find only hallway and emergency lighting on. We also find a load of our co-workers wandering around the first floor confused, thinking there's something big going on. Also, thinking that if the power's still out in the morning we can all feign lacks of alarm clocks and skip the 8am meetings.

As we're plotting and wondering and all that good drunken stuff, a hotel employee comes to us, with two purposes. First, to tell us to shut the hell up. Second, he's cracking glow sticks and dropping loads of them into the elevators (which are running off of the generators).

We ask him what's up, and he tells us it's normal.

"Normal? THere's like whole blocks out."

"Yeah, we're on an island. Power outages happen all the time."

And he walks away.

Everything and anything...

This is what happens when I don't write to here for 3 months... I'm going to ramble like a motherfucker now about all sorts of shit while I watch the Met game and think about breakfast at 2pm on a hot-ass Saturday.

A lot of why I poofed away, once again, has to do with this article by Sarah Hepola. She talked about how she finally realized that her best work was being poured into a blog, when it should have been put to better use in a planned novel. And while I'm not going to go so far as to say that my best work has been on these pages (because if that's the case, I'm a pretty awful writer after all), I thought the concept was interesting. But, I've missed the outlet, and I like being here. So, I'm back. At least for now.

Sometimes, you find a band that you know damn well you should have been listening to for years but just never have. That's how I was with Leonard Cohen for a while, and now it's the same for the Pixies. I've known for years that I should have been listening, and now I'm finally catching up. I can't turn off Surfer Rosa.

At the same time, I'm rediscovering my old ska collection, and I'm remembering just how much I used to love this music when I was, say, 18-22.

If I ever decide to resurrect Inactual Size, the very first thing I'm going to post back (thereby making this line redundant) is Zach Galifianakis vs. Johnny Fairplay vs. Alcohol. Incidentally, it's so named because of the CD Patton vs. Alcohol vs. Zach vs. Patton, a small piece of genius I picked up on the Comedians of Comedy tour when it hit Irving Plaza last year.

And speaking of Zach, watch Dog Bites Man on Comedy Central before it goes away, which I suspect is soon already.

Enough about how I've been entertaining myself (or at least some of how I've been entertaining myself)... Work has been work, play (i.e. alcohol) has been play.

Dating in NYC blows, as if anyone needed to be told that. I've got a good solid rant or two on that topic stored up in my head, but I think that it deserves its own piece. Plus, I'm still not sold on dragging my entire dating escapades out into the public domain. For one thing, I read people's shit where they talk about every single detail, and it seems self-serving. And while that both appeals (since I'm a self-serving kind of guy) and repulses/frightens (because I value my privacy) me, I also think it potentilly can sabotage a date, and here's why: Don't you, at least sometimes, Google people before you date them? If someone knew my name and Googled for me, they could possibly find this, and I'm just not sure that I want them reading my innermost thoughts about them.

Meh, whatever.

I'm doing something I've never done before for a writing project: research. Seriously. It sounds like it should be something basic, but I've managed to never have to do it before. Everything else I've ever written has a mix of both "write what you know" and just a general non-need for it. I've been sitting on The Big Idea (heretoafter referred to as TBI) for a while, and I acquired a number of books late last year to help me on that research and started reading them, but it proved a little too daunting to me for the time. Plus, I think much the way Kevin Smith has talked about how he had the concept for Dogma long before he had the idea for Clerks. I think I'm just not the writer (or the man) I need to be to write TBI just yet. One day, though. In the meantime, I'm working on a project that requires some research, but nowhere near the same depth, so it's proving to be a nice warmup for me. Plus, I hate to sound like such a douche, but walking into the library and telling the clerks there that I'm doing research for a book, even though I know they hear that line 50 times a day, just feels good.

As I've been writing, the Met game has gone from 2-1 Mets in the 1st into 3-3 in the 3rd. Fucking El Duque.

I think I've prattled on enough for now. I'd like to say I'll be back soon, but I've said that shit before, and I'm just a big liar at this point.

UPDATE @ 4pm:  Ok, El Duque has retired 17 straight Braves now without giving up a hit and it's 10-3.  I take back my "Fucking El Duque" comment from before.

New Digs

Well I've imported my entire Blogger site over to here, but this is my first post to the new TypePad place.

Why did I convert from a good, old free site to one I had to pay for? Capitalism, my dear lad.

Not really... I wanted to do something with my http://www.inactualsize.com site, and to get the features I needed, I had to convert.

I liked Blogger, but I felt no real brand loyalty to them or anything like that. Which strangely has a lot to do with the theory under which I'm re-launching Inactual Size. But more on that at another point (especially considering that right at this moment, as I'm writing this, it still points to the old, aborted baseball site).

Anyway, I've been stacking up shit to write about lately. Most of it's general, non-time-specific type stuff, but then I'll get a time-sensitive idea (thanks Dick Cheney) and start to work on that. But inevitably by the time I work it up to the point where I'm pleased enough to publish, it's not all that relevant anymore.

So let's call this not just a re-launch of The Department, but also a renewed commitment to excellence. Or some such load of complete fucking bullshit.

So, anyone want to see

So, anyone want to see why I've been lax about updates? Let's see a show of hands...

I thought so.

Here's what the FDNY did to my bedroom (and keep in mind that it's a good thing they did this):

That's some shit, huh? Pictures 1 through 3 show the hole in my ceiling. Picture 4 shows the crap that fell onto my bed when they took it all down. It also demonstrates just how tiny my bedroom is, what with it being wall, bed (queen size), nightstand, wall.
Edit: I should also note that the roll of paper towels seen on my bed in Picture 4 is not there to attempt to clean up the piles of shit. The roll was there *before* the fire department took the ceiling down, as water was splashing out of the pots that were strategically placed around the room, and I was trying to prevent it from landing on actual possessions. I just didn't bother to move the roll when they took the ceiling down.

So this is most of the reason why the word count has remained frozen since Saturday morning. As of this moment, everything is fixed though. The hole was patched up on Monday, and it was repainted yesterday. Today I'll have the final discussion of damage repayment with my landlord, and hopefully by tonight I'll be back in my bed instead of on a floor.

And then back into the book, to finish up my story.

-Jordan

So yesterday I decided to

So yesterday I decided to blow off some steam and try to spruce up the website some. I was working on one of those '50 things about me' kind of pages with my headphones on. As I finished up, I heard a noise coming from my bedroom. I went in to find rusty water dripping from my ceiling. The sound was it hitting plastic dry cleaning bags. The leak quickly escalated and started flowing from 7 or so different places, all over my bed and clothes and everything. With no super or landlord to be found on this holiday weekend, I called the fire department, who promptly took one of those big hooks on a stick & ripped my ceiling down to let the water out.

So now I have a soaked bed, some ruined clothes, no bedroom ceiling, and most importanly: no bedroom.

I'm glad I hit 50k yesterday morning, otherwise it never would have gotten done. Or I would have been writting with the fire department working around me.

This should be fun...

-Jordan

Here's a quick one... I

Here's a quick one...

I got a little bit done today, about 750 words. I'm falling way behind. But today was the waste I suspected it would be, and I'm hoping tomorrow doesn't find me too hung over to be productive.

I have to run now to get all dressed up in my tux. The past 2 hours have been a blue of insanity, and I've torn my apartment apart looking for my good silver cufflinks from Tiffany. No luck. I have no clue where the hell they've gone. I don't wear this pair very often, usually only for evening events like tonight. So it looks like I'll be stuck wearing my tux with a pair of Kenneth Cole light bulb cufflinks instead.

-Jordan