How does Starsailor get away with sounding so much like the Verve? They're in the same time period and everything. At least the Strokes ripping off the Velvet Underground is removed by a few decades.
I think I have reached critical mass with my hard-boiled egg problem. For some time now, I have been addicted to hard-boiled eggs. In fact, my household has been known to go through several dozen per week. My addiction was fanned by online research proclaiming egg whites to be a perfect protein; you could live on them and nothing else if you were so inclined. You could add spirulina, which is also a perfect foodstuff boasting all of the essential amino acids one needs, and head off for some deserted island.
I don't eat the yolks. They're bad for you. But I've been lifting a lot of weights recently due to Project Buff, and I rarely eat the meat, so the egg whites are a good idea. But in typical Kristin style, I've gone and overdone it again.
I have no idea why I'm writing about this vapid topic except that I am so happy to be back on Diaryland, and all eggs aside, I'm dying to share something with you people. Anything. Even if it's my current dietary habits.
So a few things about me: I am impulsive, I am insatiable, and I have absolutely no self control. I have been trying to rein in my writing here and in email so I can direct it toward the greater good -- my book -- but as soon as you take something away from me, I want it more. It's like having to pee and trying not to think about waterfalls. I thought taking a week off from Diaryland would serve me well but it's just made me hungry for it. And I seem to be indulging in one of my crazy upswings where there is no end to the copy pouring out of my mouth and fingertips, so I may as well run with it.
I don't claim any quality assurance with all this vomiting on the page. I'm just sayin -- I got mad words today.
I stopped drinking coffee, my last remaining Drug of Choice, and that didn't work out so well. I went two weeks without, and got really depressed. My doctor, who has been trying to get me off caffeine for three years, said, "Maybe you should start drinking coffee again." Holy synchronicity: "Coffee Girl" by MK Ultra just came on the radio. I'm not even kidding.
I'm back on the beans and feeling 100%. Fully embracing caffeination, I've been going to the Someday Café nightly. The Someday loves me, and I love it. It saves my favorite table for me every night and plays my favorite records when I come in. Last night they were playing Keep it Like a Secret, which is the Built to Spill album Jenn lent me to feed my freshly re-ignited love of this band. I distinctly remember the show of theirs I went to at the Middle East winter of '98 with Shannon. It's one of the few things I actually do remember from that winter. I remember this Built to Spill show because I was so excited to get tickets, having loved them intensely through tapes from my friend Jema. But the show was so so miserable, and I was like, "What the fuck? I thought I liked this band!" I should have known better than to expect anything decent to come out of the basement of the MidE but there you have it.
Now I hear them everywhere. The radio, the café, minidisc, CD player. I wonder if it's because I'm listening for them now, like that blue test (if you look for blue, you see it everywhere, if you look for red, you see it everywhere) or if it's because they're pushing Doug Martsch's new solo album and his Paradise show, bringing them back into the larger consciousness.
Back to the topic of the Someday.
Tuesday was the Best Night Ever. I settled my butt at my table. My table.
Here's the thing with the table -- and pardon my delusions of grandeur. A chunk of the book I'm writing takes place at the Someday, and I've become convinced that when it becomes a best-seller, they'll gild the table where the book was written, and put a little plaque with my name on the chair. Maybe they'll even fill my ass-print with gold -- Hollywood Blvd. style.
Tuesday I was curled up at my table with the Navi -- my diminutive laptop that was recently brought back to life. Last year, I traded a coworker my Dell for this Sony Vaio laptop. It's smaller than a sheet of paper and weighs one pound. It's purple. It was so disgustingly cute I had to have it. The Navi and I became fast friends. I took it everywhere, wrote on it constantly, and suped it up with wireless networking and tons of MP3s.
Then it abandoned me without warning. No flashing lights, no blue screen of death -- not even a note. Just flatline. I gave the Navi to a friend with a screwdriver and an inhuman urge to take things apart. He gave it back to me last week in working condition -- after a year.
Behold the Navi! I couldn't even believe it. I had literally forgotten all about this little computer. When I boot it up, there's all this writing on it that I had lost when it died. I've been reunited with so much material. It's like Christmas. But. I have to warn you -- the Navi is a renegade. It's not pretty. Where my newer, respectable Vaio is sleek and sexy, the Navi is like a seasoned Jeep -- badass but left out in the weather for too long with no cover. It was stolen and hijacked. It's running illegal software. It's covered with indelicate stickers and silver nail polish. There's even duct tape involved, which definitely gives it street-cred.
So the Navi and me were curled up in the window of the Someday reacquainting ourselves. As I said, it was like Christmas and I was digging through old documents, all excited. Then began the parade of friends. It was the best. I love sitting in the window of the café for that reason -- I can see all of Davis Square, Store 24, the movie theatre and the subway entrance. No one can escape my view. Every half hour one of my friends would pass and I'd thump on the glass and they'd come in and hang out for a little bit. Some came bearing gifts -- Shea fed me Killer Chocolate ice cream from Denise's and Bobby brought me a mix tape.
One funny thing about the Someday lately is that I started running into my crush from three years ago that I actually think might be of age now.
Last night I was recalling my desire to seduce our little convenience store worker. I asked Shea if he remembered who I was talking about, and he says, "Of course I remember. He's was like 13 and you were obsessed with him." Busted. Though he couldn't possibly have been 13; there are child labor laws. I guess he's about 22 now.
Anyway, he's been hanging around the Someday again, though no longer working at the convenience store. He's one of those awkward, weird-looking kids that I have a soft spot for. As I've said before, I have strange taste. He's very tall and gangly and has little wire rimmed glasses -- I think he might be a tiny bit cross-eyed -- and this silly shock of blond hair that looks like a cockatiel's crest, and the rest of his head is shaved. Drinks oolong tea and always looks a little surprised. He's totally goofy and his jeans are way too big.
So I've been thoroughly entertained by us throwing weighted stares and raised eyebrows at each other. As Angela Chase says of Jordan Catalano: "Whenever he's around, I'm like, one of those dogs... that point..."
I'm really just bored.
The window served me well that night, and strangely enough I found that I got a lot of work done on my book, even with sporadic visitations by nomadic buds. I've been working a lot on my characters, getting to know them before I take on the plot. The Anne Lamott book Bird by Bird has given me a lot of inspiration in that department. Even though she's completely insane, she's knows character development.
She points out how when you write a plot and then create characters to go in it, they often do not fit. They may disappoint you and turn their backs on you, or give you the finger, chanting, "We won't go!" That may have been my problem in past projects. Or I would launch too quickly into the plot without getting to know the characters well enough to realize how they'd act in certain situations. I've been sitting with them for a few nights, asking them very personal questions. Or just hanging out. I'm learning what they're all about so I can manipulate them.
One of the wonderful things I've observed at the Someday lately is how I've grown up and haven't noticed until now. I spent some of my most formative years in cafés. In New Haven, my life began at the Daily Caffe. I swear I didn't know jack shit about anything until I tripped over that little dank hole in the wall one night. Wandered in off the street and didn't leave for two years. I have no idea what we did there.
That's what amazes me now at the Someday -- that I don't remember. I have a million notebooks filled with scribblings, drawings, communal stories, coffee stains... all conceived at the peeling black booths of the Daily. We would meet there immediately after school and stay until eleven at night. Or we'd go there after our shifts at Friendly's and stay until 1:00 AM. Ninety-five cents would buy a seat for the whole night. And that's why they were always kicking us out.
Steve Shapiro was the owner of the Daily, and he hated us. That's okay -- we hated him back. Of course, we forgot that it was his establishment, and a money making one at that. He was out to get us, and we dared him to. We sat on the sidewalk for hours, chain smoking and chasing each other around in the streets, hooking up, trading tapes, drinking coffee and eating Taco Bell.
Eventually Yale got so pissed that masses of punk children were blocking the sidewalks that they threatened to close the Daily. Yale owned the building. Steve Shapiro hired bouncers to keep us off the sidewalk. Alright, they weren't bouncers. They were just extra-tough Caffe workers. But the manager at the Daily, with whom I shared affection (and who incidentally ended up teaching me guitar when I turned eighteen), came to my high school graduation party at my house and said, "I have kicked all of your guests out of the Caffe at least once. I think I should leave."
We were always loud, always making a mess. Yelling, throwing things, taking up the entire back half of the Caffe and filling it with clove smoke and obscenities. The only time I ever saw that place quiet was the day that Kurt Cobain died.
I walked into the Daily and the place was silent. Bleach was playing, and the kids sat at the black booths gripping white paper coffee cups with the words, "He's dead" scrawled on them in black sharpie.
I have some cool pictures of the Daily and that whole time frame in New Haven that are pretty entertaining. I'll have to dig them out. I saved all the articles too, when they were trying to close the Caffe and the kids were up in arms -- my mom mailed them to me at college. There were petitions. Rallies. Strikes. Protests.
The kids lost; the Daily closed two years after I left New Haven. I grieved. Life is unfair. Please pause for a moment of silence.
It's funny to watch the café situation from the other side now, sitting at my chair with Important Literature, wondering what the fuck these little punks do all night in there.
How soon we forget. They've got no other place to go -- they're not old enough for bars and they can't afford the movies. There's something disturbing to me about a bunch of 16-year-old boys who aren't afraid to push safety pins through their eyebrows hopped up on three grams of caffeine and huddled in a room together all night.
Long live the Someday.
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