The night of the eggplant parm

In the past few days, I have moved. Vacated one life and am now in a holding pattern until the next begins. Scary times strange steps and a lot of the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs record holding my hand in a way the first one didn't but the last one more than did.

This is where I'd post a picture of the page from my old black spiral Mead notebook on which I scrawled, in landscape orientation (that's a little page layout humor, yo!), "I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE NOT TO GO BACK TO YOU. NO MYSTERIES.", but I got freaked out living in a moment between past and the future like that Kate Bush song says and deleted my entire old Flickr account the other night, so that picture's long fucking gone.

I don't think I have the emotional or mental reserves at the present moment to get to anything major. Too tired. Too hung over. Too much of one thing and not enough of another, with all of that being some sort of obnoxiously vague metaphor for something. I'm reaching here, people.

Rather than have this sound like a bad LiveJournal...

Click to read more ...

In the past 24 hours...

In the past 24 hours, my life has been a blur of

this

and this

And, no doubt as a result of angst from the former being relieved by the latter, I wrote this as a part of my bi-monthly tour of duty over at A Good Blog Is Hard To Find

Axes fall. So do chips. So does the sky. The bottom? It drops like my stomach does when I use the word "unemployed" to refer to my status in the current socioeconomic climate. A friend on twitter (or a "twal" as they're referred to in the arcane infantile rebranding of babytalk portmanteaus that passes for a network-specific "language" on there)has informed me that I need to be more sensitive (let's say sensitiver) to the branding needs of all of us super-literate now-jobless folks awash on the dirty, jellyfish-laden shore of the book world. As such, at my friend's request, I am not "unemployed", I am "self-employed". Actually, in terms of putting a big, bright, ravey-yellow smiley face sticker over the stigma of being jobless, I by far prefer the term "under-employed".

At the moment, I am MOST DEFINITELY under-employed...

You should read the rest. It introduces a Springsteen comparison that it fails to fully utilize or flesh out. But that's how I roll (failing to ever fully utilize or flesh out...anything).

Fragments and reminents of a book launch event, or "did anyone get the number of the Sav. Blanc truck "

Anointed was birthed, kicking, screaming and telling bad jokes, into the world this past Saturday night, and as the publicist for the book (and the author, but mostly just the book really), it was pretty much damn required of me to finish an entire bottle of Charles Shaw Sauvignon Blanc by myself in an hour.

Ok, in under an hour.

Ok, in like fifteen minutes.

What's important to note, though, is that the following brief and mostly pictorial recap of the night focuses less on author/client of mine Zachary Steele and more on...

...the insanity that was this opening "discussion"/"debate" held between myself and a former colleague/current friend who won't be named because, um, he hates it when he uses the "internet" to "read things about himself". That said, I probably could name names, because his idea of "the internet" involves "logging on" via a graphing calculator, so he'd never know. But for the sake of (avoiding any) argument, I'll respect his wishes.

There were several topics of discussion in this debate, the sole purpose of which was to amuse Zach on the night of his first novel's debut. See, this aforementioned "colleague" and I have a history of barbed, sarcastic banter that very rarely takes place in private and has been known to be supremely publicly offensive...and also greatly entertaining. Our points of contention tend to revolve around historical fiction (I hate it, he loves it), food (I've been a vegetarian for about 13 years now), author pin-up Marisha Pessl (that link takes you to my interview with her for my old work blog, I'm eventually going to port it over here), and, well, one of us being right and the other being stupid.

Now, I thought my preparation- opening remarks involving my reading the Websters definition of "right" from the dictionary, my beginning every answer to each question with a "before I answer your question" reframing, my bringing an annotated copy of Pessl's Special Topics In Calamity Physics to read from when the topic of her either being brilliant or flash-in-the-pan inevitably arose-would at the very least put me ahead in terms of sheer "prop" factor in the debate.

But oh, no.

Granted, I managed to work in my reading from Special Topics

but there was absolutely no way I could win when my formidable opponent arrived with the following pieces of propaganda:

Yes, folks, that is a hybrid MARISHA (I excuse my opponent misspelling her name here ONLY because I was too drunk to call him on it at the time) and Sarah Palin...

and

Suffice to say, I didn't win the debate. "Crushed by a damn landslide" was the term I think I recall Brett, Zach's editor on Anointed, using. I drowned my sorrows in brownies and cheap wine that night, indeed I did.

Oh, and oh yeah-the rest of the evening? A cheap wine-induced blur of hilarity, good times, and me seriously wondering about the phallic nature of those sausages on the "Russ Needs Meat" poster.

The reconnaissance mission

So, I'm sitting alone in Wordsmiths, drinking my first cup of coffee of the day in total solitude and listening to the new (read as: oh god so awful in some parts) U2 album, for the last time. I mean, it's not my last cup of coffee-of the day or ever, god no-and I'm far too much of a masochist and a Bonoist to not listen to No Line On The Horizon again (despite its title being the universal statement for "this party's over, folks"). No, this is my last day at Wordsmiths as Marketing/PR director, and in a month I'm gone from Atlanta, too. And I still haven't found a job. Like, I can hear my mom's voice in my head worrying over me-or at least what I imagine would be her voice if she'd ever actually inquired about my well-being. 

My trip to New York, my new and future home, last weekend, went well. It was really more of a reconnaissance mission (and her "mission" has to be drawn out in a Bjork-ish voice so that it sounds like "mess-see-awn"), a "must get x, y and z done in a very limited amount of time, on limited funds and with minimal airline fuckups" set of days. And, despite that last bit-the minimal airline fuckups-almost taking a turn for the worst (hey, hey Airtran,  I mean Val-U-Jet, I'm talking to you: FOUR gate changes?  At six in the morning? That's beyond annoying, that's obscene on par with, like, you having graphic sex with my grandmother while I'm in the next room. And then a delay? I was prepped to have to miss my job interview on Friday and blame it ENTIRELY on Airtran, force them to rebook me for a later flight back to Atlanta from NYC on Tuesday to allot for a rescheduling of said interview that would be missed, and I'd expect a god damned cookie with it, too, but fortunately it didn't come to that. I would have treated that customer service rep as though he or she was a student loans collection agent-and that's *not* a good thing. Are you still out there Miss Blair, my favorite student loans collection agent of all time ever?), I must say that the trip was a success...

I spent my Sunday afternoon with my wonderful internet friend who is now obviously my real-life-friend Kelly, aka the person nice/crazy enough to allow me to crash on her couch for a month while I, um, acclimate to New York. And by "acclimate" what I actually mean is "find a job".  And by "find a job" what I actually mean is "holy hell, I am moving like 900 miles and at the moment I am unemployed, so unemployed in fact that I didn't even dare to abbreviate the previously-written 'at the moment' with my usual 'ATM' because 'ATM' conjures images of money and oh my god I have no job". 

My first day in New York, though, I was greeted with this:

"What the hell?", you're probably asking aloud. No? Well, dammit, do it. Ok, there-I'm glad you asked! It just so happens the above is self-explaining:

That's right: now you don't have to separate your beloved popcorn chicken and your awesome large cola!

(Side-note: chicken in a cup reminds me of the now-infamous "chicken in a box in a wok" scene from R Kelly's "Trapped In The Closet". Ok, look, my definition of "infamous" is "constantly cited by my friends and myself". Also, I mean really, "Trapped In The Closet" is a work of genius, a masterstroke only capable of being executed by the master thespian that is Robert Sylvester Kelly.)

Any city that can capitalize on my southern-bred love for laziness AND gross food combinations is a city after my own heart. And my wallet. Whether it's empty or not. Which, at the moment (again, no ATM abbreviations here), is painfully, frighteningly empty. 

It's funny, though, because despite having gone on interviews, being jobless and looking out at the bleak market through the lens of someone getting ready to slog to the Unemployment office and say "yeah, I'll have one with everything", I seem to have more projects to work on than ever.   However, saying "oh, I'm super-busy" only makes me feel that much lamer when there's no actual money coming in at the moment. AGAIN WITH THE NO ATM. Because "no ATM" is how I'm going to be living my life for the foreseeable future.  Maybe I should have listened to my family and gone into, um, "computer repair". There's certainly more money in that than in publishing, marketing and publicity. I think...

Oh, a quick anecdote that makes me feel better: while in NY, I got to listen to a superstar A-list renowned author that I've never read and will never read complain, at a benefit event/museum reading, IN A MUSEUM MIND YOU, AND FOR A BENEFIT, that he didn't get any free alcoholic beverages.

IN A MUSEUM. FOR A BENEFIT.

He then asked for "baby foie gras". You know what that is. Think about it.

I may be poor, but at least I have tact.

Best compliment I've ever received

Courtesy of Lauterhaus