tonight i heard a guy sitting and talking on his cell phone, seeming very bored. he said, a few times over and over, the bus hit a train. no, no, the bus hit a train. yeah, the bus hit a train.

i was a slam dancing motherfucker last night. fun stuff, babay. living my secret life--mild-mannered scientist by day ... hold on, my spidey sense is tingling.

from the waverly newspaper

my visit to tennessee last month made the paper, thank god. the liberal media even spelled my name right. the line for makeouts forms to the right.

last night i saw lambchop at bowery ballroom. since i got there early to be in front, i had the pleasure of standing there with only four people in the room. i thought: well here we are, the four of us--there's me, there's those two people over there, and there's ira kaplan. we are the lambchop superfans, right on.

a month ago i went to waverly, tennessee, which is "home." over the years, what it feels like to be there has changed. i moved away at 18, and it was the only place i had ever known.


waverly intersection

it still makes me happy to see it, but some ownership has been transferred. i grew up in this place. if you moved there as an adult, and live there now, there will always be a part of it that i own and you don't. i came from there.

but obviously this implies a corollary--people there now have something i don't. when i show up and things have changed, i can't care. it's not mine to say what should stay the same. that's an ownership i don't have, so passing judgment is out of the question. any change is neutral to me. i can only watch.

such passivity toward something that figures so largely in your personality, it is strange. this place made me what i am. and hell with it.

i think i am color blind, but i can't really tell. i mean, i seem fine. i don't wake up with color blindness night sweats. i don't have a nurse to wheel me around the neighborhood. in social situations, after i say something particularly stupid, people don't cup their hands over their mouths and barely aspirate: "we're sorry, he's color blind."

how do you tell if you're color blind? take this thing:


wtf

if you're normal, you're supposed to see a 15. if you suck, you're supposed to see a 13 or a 17.

my initial answer was 13. but, i mean, it's kind of dotty, you know? then, after the answer key says 15 ... well, ok i can see that. maybe. it's there. not plain as day, but it's there. 17? i could see that, too. sure.

usually i know how to answer. who was the first presdient? george washington. clearly. how many fingers am i holding up, can you walk the white line for us please? sure, i can do that, i'm an expert at that, watch this.

do other people see a huge mess in that picture? no one will ever tell me. i ask the eye doctor, and they get all coy. "maaayyyyyybe." is it a secret? i'm not asking you out--i'm just asking: does anyone else ever say it looks like a big mess and they can see every possible answer in it?

okay, in search of clarification, we go back and look at the instructions for the color blindness test, to see how clear it should be. here's what we get. can you see a number in this?:


are they joking?

i mean, is this supposed to test if i'm retarded? or blind, like for real blind? is that what the other answer should look like to me? i'm so confused.

i knew a guy once who said he was severely color blind. okay, i said, what does that mean? he said: grass is orange. huh? really? i don't get that. my grass is green. like, that sounds totally like he's trying to get out of military service or something. grass is orange? okay, corporal klinger, your dress is orange, too. here, run the motor pool for us, please.

is anyone else color blind? god help us, do you see orange grass? do you need help? let us help you.

the other night i went to see roger waters play dark side of the moon at madison square garden. when i listened to pink floyd play at live 8 last summer, it was the strangest, most wistful feeling i have ever gotten from hearing a couple songs. being in london for that would have been great. pink floyd was really my musical first love.

so, i had to go see roger waters's show. and you know what: nick mason played with him, as kind of a surprise, so that was exactly half of pink floyd. pretty good.

about halfway through he played a new song called leaving beirut--essentially an anti-gulf war statement disguised as a spoken word story. it's about a kindly arab family who took him in when he was seventeen. i felt really unhappy about it all, because half of madison square garden booed him for it at the end. thousands of people, half booing, the other half clapping. waters ignored it all and just played the next song.

the guy behind us shared his views on the subject: fuck that motherfucker. how dare he come over here at say all that shit, the day after nine-eleven. that motherfucker should stay in england if he doesn't like it. but can't we all just be polite and keep our feelings to ourselves for a while? it's all so confused, because the song wasn't about 9-11, and he talked about 9-11 before some other song anyway--about how touched he was by the memorials the day before. i don't know. last i checked, we all paid a hell of a lot of money for tickets, with the man's name, roger waters, printed on them, and he's the guy who wrote all the pink floyd songs you like so much, and here we all are in madison square garden, drinking ten dollar beers and listening to him sing. i would say the man has the floor. even if his message is ham-handed. you don't have to clap and cheer. but you don't have to boo, either.

you can boo. but maybe it's just not classy.

but anyway. if asked, i wouldn't have been able to guess the songs that blew me away. one of the best was sheep, which was presented simply as a badass rock song, closing the first half of the show. also, a big surprise, on the run, the frantic electronic noise song from dark side, was completely awesome.

my favorite, though, was us and them--as good a song as any, which made itself more poignant simply by being the perfect response to the people who booed earlier. in fact, it was also the perfect response to waters himself and his simpleminded message in leaving beirut. there he was, from thirty years earlier, answering himself and everyone in the room, and finding the perfect words for it. there is no lesson from us and them, other than perhaps war is hell. and also that there is nothing easy to understand, and wars will happen and people will die for no good reason, and that if your opinion is clear enough to articulate, clear enough to explain to someone ... well, then your opinion is probably too simple. sometimes if things don't just leave you at a loss for words, then you're not giving them the consideration they demand. us and them, it was a beautiful song.

the democratic and republican primary elections were today. this morning i thought about going by to vote, but in the end i didn't. this is highly unjoshlike. normally i vote in every election, even if it seems unimportant. if there is a clear winner before it even starts, i go and vote for some other person, in hopes that the clear winner will co-opt one of that person's positions once they clearly win. what is a good strategy for the democratic process? i don't know that anyone knows.

but today i didn't care. eliot spitzer is going to win, and people are talking about him running for president someday--but they say that about everyone, all the time. i don't know--i just didn't care today. no opinion at all.

politically, i have always been going through the standard stages at odd times. since i started college as a young republican, my revolutionary stage had to wait till late college/early whatever. so now i am apathetic. i guess.

the new robert pollard single has come out, called supernatural car lover. it's saturday, and i'm in to work, but we must remember: one of the great pleasures of working off hours is playing the new robert pollard single through the crappy computer speakers on your desk.

yet, i just unplugged them and put in my headphones, because i'm embarrassed about the way i listen to songs. nick is in the other room, and he might hear me playing it ten times in a row, learning the words and picking out cool little things hidden in it. i don't like owning up to that. so, now it's playing straight into my head. i've gone underground. very nice song here underground, very very very nice. i'm happy.

me reading at cringe, in brooklyn

i went into dunkin donuts. man, i hate dunkin donuts--but: it's open all night, and it's bright inside, and you don't want to bother with making coffee or finding something to eat.

two indian guys were working. the guy who waits on me is apparently being trained. his speech is a little too thick to understand, and before each task he looks at the other guy submissively. like this: his finger poises above the cash register ready to push a button; yet, he looks. the authority guy says plainly, "yes." and the button is pushed. so it's all like that.

i asked for coffee and a boston cream. there is only one bin of doughnuts, it being late, and every kind is thrown in together. "boston cream, sir!" he says, and gets the bag, and the piece of wax paper to hold the doughnut with. he goes to a boston cream, right in front, and picks it up. the authority guy and i are both watching.

"no," says the authority guy.

he pauses and sets the boston cream back down. "you want a boston cream, yes sir?"

"yes," i say. "please."

he stands rigid, perhaps a bit puzzled. his hand goes down and gets the boston cream again.

"no, no, no," the other guy says. "no. chocolate glazed."

i thought this was kind of funny. did the guy in charge not know what i'd asked for, since it had been repeated three times?

the guy getting the doughnut sets down the boston cream and picks up the chocolate glazed doughnut. "this one, sir?"

i say, "is it a boston cream?"

"yes," he says.

"ok then," i say.

and i ate it and i was happy, walking down the street in the dark. maybe i didn't want a boston cream. boston creams make you fat. but what have we learned? is this simply a case of dunkin donuts as the soviet union in 1950? what kind of doughnut do you want? are you sure you didn't mean chocolate glazed? why yes, of course i did, comrade. chocolate glazed are my favorite. or, less political, more sociological, have we just seen that the man in charge is often quite confused? with great power comes great brain rot. bhupesh, the man clearly asked for a chocolate glazed, how can you be so stupid?? forgive him, forgive him, he is so stupid, he does not know any better, the dog. "oh, uh, yes, it's all right. i, uh, forgive him."

maybe i just roll with it too much. "no, i wanted a boston cream. i think he was right." then, who knows? maybe bhupesh gets fired as soon as the door closes. bhupesh, slain by authority man, and in the prime of life. all over a mistaken doughnut and a loss of face.