Sure I'm sober, sure I'm sane

It's funny, when I set out to try and post something here-to bring context to what's going on with me, in New York, right now (because my life is so damn riveting-no, really, it is, it's more than a collection of unread book galleys and empty wine bottles, but if one was to snapshot any unspecified moment you'd think otherwise-or maybe that's just my creeping self-doubt that cripples me and keeps me from writing. It's way easier to think the former, though, because it negates any sense of personal responsibility to this blog), it hasn't worked as of late.

And then I woke up this morning with a melancholy in the back of my throat, like the natural progression of sinus congestion or too much crying (or, yeah, too much red wine). The flurry of Facebook status updates reminded me of what day it is-Mother's Day (or is it Mothers' Day? Are we celebrating the royal, ultimate, Platonic concept of Mother, or is that too pagan/hippie/Ani Difranco concert and granola-shoes for mass consumption?). That explained it. And, like a pensive teenage girl just informed that I can't go to the Tokio Hotel concert with my BFF Jill, I've run to my blog to sort it out.

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Under a sheet of rain in my heart

I can't stop listening to this song, and, despite David Letterman's utterly inane not-story, I think this may be the definitive version.

Seriously, Bat For Lashes (and you all have to forgive me, I didn't pay attention to Natasha "B4L"'s first record, so I've spent much of this year calling her collective BatS, plural, For Lashes...not "Bats Plural", just "Bats". Sort of like how it's not "Mister Manager", it's just "manager") has one of the greatest futuretro albums I've heard in 2009-Two Suns is beautiful and heart-wrenching and witchy, like a freakfolk-doused Stevie Nicks/Kate Bush amalgam. I can replay the entire thing endlessly for hours and get lost.

(I know, I know, a real update is coming here soon).

Blog-hopping

Ok, in my ongoing quest to have a venue to bitch about what irks me in every corner of webspace, I just turned in my first post for Creative Loafing's Culture Surfing blog.

And it's about Dan Brown.

Also, I penned my bimonthly entry for A Good Blog Is Hard To Find. Like all the best things, that piece is entirely about me.

One of my favorite albums this year so far is Telepathe's Dance Mother, a jerky, jilted electronic storm, and I wrote a little on it for Resonator Mag.

Last but not least, I most recently talked about sex, bodily functions and a new literary hottie over at BabyGotBooks.

It is my goal to translate net-ubiquitousness to money. Stay tuned for how that happens (it won't).

And when it was good, it was really really good. And when it was bad...

...So, I had this experience, making a Babycakes run before the REStart show last Saturday, which apparently is commonly shared schema for New York amongst most people who've lived here for any extended period of time:

In the cold, blustery, where-the-fuck-is-the-wicked-fucking-witch torrential downpour of rain that is, apparently, the ONLY setting New York has for liquid precipitation (like, what, there's no gentle summer rain here, is there? Oh, right, that's called a "southern rain" for a reason...), as I (kinda grossly, considering the weather) happily jaunted along my way in the nasty, nasty weather, anxious for my Babycakes fix and to be the vessel which provided it for others, my umbrella, apparently deciding that it did not, in fact, want to do the one fucking function it was created for, flipped inside out.

At that moment, I knew not only how Joan of Arc felt but also what it must have been like to find out and actually care that Milli Vanilli were fake-everything true and dear about the way the world operates, good and bad, right and wrong, soycheese and all, had been, literally, turned inside out.

Oh god, bad pun. Ready for another?

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Y So Wifiless

I realize that, in terms of recent entries on here, I'm jumping in chronology a bit by talking about something that just happened, like a topic that I'm still in the process of relieving the resulting back tension from. But I feel it is vital, and urgent, and vitally urgent, that I allow the universal governing force, GodBuddhaStalinBono,to use me as its mouthpiece and speak out on the single biggest plague facing New York right now...

NO FUCKING INDEPENDENT COFFEESHOPS HAVE WIFI!

Not to turn into Jerry Seinfeld (but, I mean, really, fuck is the deal with airline food, for real?) here, but this is the third consecutive time I've had to claw, kick, bite and spit in Manhattan to sit down in a cafe, open my laptop and get any sort of work done. I genuinely don't understand what the hell New York freelancers do with their days, but I guarantee you one thing: my ventures into the coffee wilderness here have yielded nothing but shoulders rubbed raw from my laptop back, fractured emotional nerves and weird debit card charges from my assuming a cafe has wi-fi, buying a latte and then tossing it only to find out that I have to trudge on to another coffeeshop because the one I'm at has no public internet. I then, at the next stop on my "tour of indie coffee places", buy ANOTHER latte (since I wouldn't DARE enter one indie with another's beverage), sit at a table and find the exact same problem-no wifi.

Eventually, I just end up at Starbucks. I've actually upped my T-Mobile/Blackberry plan to include a monthly T-Mobile HotSpot plan since this eventual Evil Coffee Empire endpoint seems unavoidable, and, frankly, I've lost too many potentially productive days to inept New York coffee shops.

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