Clublife

The Site Has Moved

2013-06-03T22:35:00.003-04:00

From now on, everything is here.

Moving Day

2013-06-03T04:00:00.000-04:00

So, we’ve now come to the point where I’m finally doing something I should have done years ago: I’m moving this blog to a new website with a dedicated domain name and a WordPress blog platform.

The template you see on this site is the first one I ever used, from the first night I started doing this nearly ten years ago. I went on Blogger, chose a basic setup, dicked around with the HTML, and started writing. I eventually figured out how to create a background, so I chose a JPEG of a hardwood floor that I found on Google images, and left the entire thing alone for nearly a decade. That flooring background’s been gone for a while, right? I don’t know what happened to it. I think I thought it looked like the dance floor at a club.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about getting out and doing some stuff that’s not related to what I do for work, meaning I want to get back into “writing for pleasure”—although, since I’ve done it before, this probably means something more along the lines of “writing to get attention and make money.” That would be cool, and I think I have a lot of that in me—and I’ve always believed I could do this on more than just the cheesy 2006 “job blogger” level.

Sure, if I could have, I would’ve done it by now, but there’s more to it than that. Life’s just been fucking weird over the past several years, and my career branched off in a direction I didn’t think it would, away from the kind of work I really want to be doing. You’ll get no complaints from me, but the direction I’ve gone isn’t exactly what I envisioned when I first went out to lunch with a big time literary agent who told me I had a “great writing career” ahead of me.

I didn’t put in the work I needed to do to get that. I’m aware of that. Things are far from over, however.

I owe this blog a lot. Believe me when I tell you that it’s responsible for creating an entirely new life for me. The opportunities it’s created have made me a decent amount of money, I’ve met people I never otherwise would have met, and it’s given me a whole new career doing something I never thought would be possible: using my brain to make a living instead of my back.

In focusing solely on my job for the past four or five years, however, I’ve veered away from this part of my life. I’ve been trying to get back into it lately, though, and I’ve started enjoying it again. With that said, if I’m going to get things moving again, I’m also thinking it’s time to upgrade the facilities, too.

To do that, I called my friend Josh (he’s Canadian, so if the new site sucks, he’s used to being blamed for shit) and asked him to create a very basic website for me, using WordPress as the blogging platform. Blogger’s been awesome to me, but I prefer WordPress because there’s more I can do with it. I didn’t want anything crazy in terms of site design—just a really bare-bones black-and-white template that features whatever text I’m putting up that day. It’s pretty empty right now, but the sides—and everything else—will fill in if and when shit starts happening again.

Will anyone care? Who knows? As always, I’m doing this for myself, so even if everyone completely drops off and I’m the only one reading, I’ll still just keep going, because I like doing it.

The new site address is Standingonthebox.com.

I’m moving away from the whole “Clublife” deal because it’s probably been about five years since I’ve even set foot in a nightclub—much less bounced at one. Metaphorically, however—and yeah, I know this might be stupid, but fuck it—I’ve never really moved “off the box,” either in my head or in life. I’m still watching, waiting for trouble.

So, from now on, everything’s switching over there. We’ll see how this goes.

This is Why Business Sucks

2013-05-31T04:00:00.000-04:00

If you have talent, you work hard, and you expect the people you work with to have talent and work hard, too, you’re bound to be disappointed. Too often, that’s not how professional life works. When you’re good at what you do, your work ethic matches your competence, and you expect your coworkers to hit those same standards, you’re an outlier—and things will suck for you because people will catch on and begin defending themselves against any change in the status quo.

People who suck want to continue to suck. That’s just how it is.

Going into business for yourself—or forming a startup venture with others—doesn’t immunize you against the same suck you’ll find in corporate jobs like the one I’m always bitching about, either. Far from it, in fact. When you come up with a solid concept, and you implement it and start making money, you can expect the following six things to happen:

1. People who want something for nothing are going to sue you. This is what useless people do, and there’s nothing you can do about it aside from retaining a good lawyer and putting him or her on speed dial. No matter how original your idea is, or how hard you’ve worked to get your business started, there will always be people who want to take it away from you.

2. No matter what steps you take to protect yourself, people will blatantly copy (steal) your intellectual capital, your business plan, and your methods of doing things. This is because original ideas are impossible to come by for people who don’t have any talent and refuse to put in the work necessary to dig said ideas out of the earth. As soon as you develop something worthwhile, they’ll circle like vultures—and unfortunately, shotguns are strictly forbidden in this genre.

3. A large percentage of the people you hire, work with, or consult with will eventually develop egos and think they deserve to have their name on the door. The idea of making money for someone else, with no recognition other than your weekly paycheck, has a short shelf life. When people see you succeed, they’ll want that same success for themselves—not as a member of a successful team, but as the actual boss. If they’re looking to go off and hang out their own shingle, wish them luck and buy them a drink—but when they start claiming your original idea as their own, telling others that they were the brains behind the business, that’s where you’ll run into problems.

4. If you don’t watch them like a hawk, people will attempt to bleed you dry. Most people don’t work nearly as hard as they claim they do. You have to judge the quality of someone’s work by the results they’re getting—and not by the hours they’re putting in. As I’ve said here before, if the first thing someone I’m working with crows about is the number of hours they’re putting in every day, I’m automatically skeptical because I’ll start wondering why it’s taking them so fucking long to produce less work than I’m doing in a quarter of the time.

5. You will eventually spend 90 percent of your time dealing with other people’s bullshit instead of doing the work required to build and maintain your core business. Sad but true. Once you’ve implemented your idea and built the framework of a solid business, stupid shit takes over, and rather than continuing to do what you’ve been doing, you’ll be busy mediating meaningless disputes between people you likely shouldn’t have involved yourself with in the first place.

6. You learn that the unemployment rate is so high because a massive percentage of the population simply isn’t worth hiring. True story. We’ve been looking to fill the same two or three positions for months now. These jobs pay fairly well, and they offer a shitload of incentives—along with a lot of freedom. You’d think finding qualified people would be easy, but it’s not, because everyone we’ve interviewed for these jobs has royally sucked. This has applied to everyone from new grads to people who claim to have decades of experience. To a man—and woman—they’ve all been woefully mediocre, which explains a great deal about recent economic statistics.

Access

2013-05-30T04:00:00.000-04:00

Like all the other suckers looking for shortcuts, I enthusiastically read Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Workweek a few years ago. I was really into it at the time because I was stuck in a shitty corporate job back then, and the book’s whole selling point is the idea that it’s possible to get out of that situation permanently by implementing “lifestyle design” concepts that create income streams that you don’t have to put continuous work into—i.e., you don’t fuck with them, and they don’t fuck with you.

I’m not here to critique this book. I have no problem with it. What Ferriss claims is possible absolutely is possible—even though his book isn’t exactly the blueprint I’ve used for my career, which has taken some interesting turns over the past year or so. Much of what he advocates isn’t really my scene, but it was a fun read—and at the time, it was interesting to see someone game the system (read: the publishing industry) the way he did.

My problem now is with people who use Ferriss’s book as the absolute bible for everything they do. Chief amongst these offenses, at least when I’m dealing with people in business, is the idea of being completely out of touch with everyone in the world until you’re damned good and ready to answer your email or return phone calls.

Because The Four Hour Workweek was so popular, we’re now confronted with thousands upon thousands of thirty-something self-styled “entrepreneurs” who intentionally delay responding to communications for weeks on end—and who tell you they need to schedule fifteen minute phone conversations two weeks in advance.

My advice, for what it’s worth?

If you’re a guy who’s doing this shit, you have to stop. I’m very busy, too. I’ve got a shit-ton going on professionally, I have a shit-ton happening personally, and I’m also trying to get back into writing for something other than work. Although I’ve been addressing cutting all the fat out of my life for productivity purposes lately, my days are still extremely full.

That’s why it’s fucking infuriating when people—I’m talking about guys who want and need to do business shit with me, not people I’m soliciting for stuff—take several days to respond to communications. I especially despise it when they say shit like, “Yeah, I can do a phone meeting. How about a week from Thursday at 8:30 AM?”

Horseshit. You’re not that fucking busy. The President isn’t that fucking busy.

I’m writing about this because I deal with these types every single day, and I’ve actually stopped working with several of them because they’ve pulled this shit. It’s great to be in total control of your own time—and to be able to prevent people from disrupting you when you need to focus—but the flipside of this is that taking excessively long to respond to people is disrespectful, and it’ll piss them off. When you’re dealing with responsible adults who keep regimented schedules and appreciate considerate behavior from their colleagues and business associates, this isn’t the approach you should be taking.

In fact, I just “fired” someone who was running this little game with me. Before I broke it off, I asked him if he’d read The Four Hour Workweek, and he said it was his favorite book. I told him I couldn’t work with someone who took a week to get back to me every time I asked him a question, and I severed the relationship. Now he’s frantic to get my business back.

Tough shit, dick. Show some respect, and we’ll talk.

I’ve often said that I miss the rotary phone era—and the idea that you didn’t know who’d called you during the day until you got home at night and saw a note on the kitchen table or a blinking answering machine. Tablets and smartphones can certainly be invasive if we let them abuse us, and it sucks to be constantly reachable by everyone on the fucking planet. This level of accessibility is wonderful for professional reasons, but personally, I prefer to stay far off the grid until I want to be in touch.

Our reality, however, is that we are reachable. The technology we all own means we’re only a text or email away from whoever needs to communicate with us. Putting yourself as out of touch as some of these guys do is both absurd and offensive, and it makes people not want to work or do business with you.

Do this selectively, or don’t do it at all.

Situations

2013-05-29T04:00:00.000-04:00

The first thing I mentioned last week was my plan to black out all social media and to severely curtail my abusive email checking. For a week now, I’ve taken a serious crack at both of these things. My efforts have been partially successful.

The Facebook Situation

This part worked. I signed off for the last time in the middle of last week, and I’ve only been back on once since then—to temporarily deactivate my account. From now on, I’ll only be using Facebook for email purposes. It’s an very effective way to find people if you have no contact information for them—but for me, that’s going to be the extent of my usage.

I don’t miss it, I haven’t needed it, and I’ve recaptured a shitload of lost time by not using it. Deactivation is kind of a symbolic measure, because logging back on is all it takes to reactivate a dormant account, but I’m making a statement—to myself—that I’m no longer going to waste my time getting annoyed by stupid memes, shitty grammar, and dumb announcements from people I used to know in the nightclub business.

Very rewarding, and very productive.

The Gmail Situation

I really suck at this. I’ve definitely cut down a bit on checking my email, but I’m still prone to using my Gmail tab as a default click whenever I take a break from anything. What’s worse, that “inner clock” I wrote about last week is still going off—the one that compels me to move away from whatever I’m doing to check my email because I think something must have come in since the last time I looked.

It keeps happening, and it’s annoying. I can’t use site blockers because I need to use email fairly often for work purposes, but I also need to get things on some kind of hourly schedule. The plan is to keep working on this until I get it right.

The Calendar Situation

This was a very simple fix. Every night before I go to sleep, I fill out my calendar for the entire next day. When I wake up in the morning, I just stick to the schedule I’ve laid out.

This plays to one of my strengths. I can be a lazy, obnoxious piece of shit, and I’ve been known to procrastinate like a motherfucker, but I’ve never been late for anything in my entire life. I’ve operated on a fifteen-minutes-early timeframe since I was a kid. This isn’t something I was taught by anyone, either. I’ve just reasoned out over the years that lateness is the ultimate sign of disrespect for other people, and I refuse to engage in it.

Using a calendar instead of a conventional to-do list has helped me see tasks in terms of time, as opposed to a nebulous list of shit that “eventually” needs to get done. This is about starting things more than it is about finishing them. If you tell me something’s due tomorrow morning, I’ll get it done, but I might wait until four in the morning to start working on it. Tell me I have to start the job today at 7 AM, however, and I’ll be there at 6:45, drinking a cup of coffee and getting ready to go. That’s just how I’ve always been, and the calendar method works well for me.

The Idea Situation

Last week, I came up with an idea that I want to try. It’s a writing project about something I’ve been experiencing lately, and I think it would interest a lot of people. I’d also like to start writing again—about an actual topic, and not just about myself and my attempts to get my shit together.

I know I said I was going to implement this idea this week, but here’s the thing: It’s an idea that’s grown on me, and I don’t want to waste it by just vomiting the thing out on the page. I want to make sure I put some thought into doing it right and making it good—and I also need to talk to a few involved people to make sure it’s cool with them for me to write about this. When everything’s settled in that regard, I’ll get moving on it.

Fonts

2013-05-28T16:31:00.004-04:00

I have no idea why this entire fucking blog is now in an italicized courier font.

What a shit show. Sorry.

Dusted

2013-05-28T04:00:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend (we’ll call her “M”) needed to start cleaning out her office last weekend. She’s taking a new job after ten years with the same company—using the same office the entire time—and clearing out a decade’s worth of shit isn’t the easiest thing to do. Unless, of course, you’re accompanied by an irritable, impatient, profusely sweating prick who has no emotional attachment to anything in your office—and who yells at you whenever you take more than three seconds to decide whether to throw something away.

When M finished cleaning off her desk, she went to a utility closet and brought back a product called Dust-Off, which she sprayed on her laptop and desktop keyboards. Dust-Off is a can of air that you shoot at your keyboard through a small straw. It blows all the dried chewing tobacco flakes—sorry, dust—out of all the little crevasses in your keyboard. It’s very effective.

I switched to a MacBook Pro a few months ago, and I’ve been trying to keep this thing in virgin condition. Finding Dust-Off that day was a very exciting thing for me. I watched M spray down her keyboards, and I fantasized about all the nasty shit that would fly out of my MacBook Pro when I applied my own can of Dust-Off, which I vowed to find and purchase as soon as possible.

I could have swiped one from M’s building, but M is paranoid about shit like that. She gave me a hard time when I asked her for a pack of legal pads, so I assumed there must be some angry logistics and supply clerk somewhere in the building who would track the missing can to her and, perhaps, take legal action. I didn’t want to risk M’s illustrious career like that, so I left without my prize.

A few days later, I went to Office Max to look for Dust-Off. It wasn’t in the cleaning supplies aisle, which I found strange because Dust-Off can be found in that category on the Office Max website. I asked a guy in a red polo shirt what the deal was, and he told me they have to keep Dust-Off locked up because too many people were spraying it up their noses in the store. This happened so frequently that it became store policy to keep Dust-Off off the shelves—despite the fact that it now contains a “bitterent” designed to deter people from huffing it.

This reminds me of something that happened back when this blog was getting shitloads of attention and people were inviting me to parties in Manhattan. I was in a bar with a bunch of people I didn’t know—but who all seemed to know me—when a girl asked me if I’d go outside with her while she smoked a cigarette. She was very pretty, so I went. She smoked, took her last puff, threw the butt on the sidewalk, then said something unusual.

“That cigar store across the street has whippets. You wanna do some?”

No. Thank you, though.

This was kind of like the girl who wrote me and said, without irony, “Hey, I love your blog! You’re an awesome writer! Can you come over and fix the lock on my apartment door?” Maybe this was a ruse and she wanted something else. Probably. I never wrote her back.

There was a time in my life where I knew about all the shit in the supermarket that you could sniff, swallow, and smoke to get yourself high. I never actually did any of it—really, I didn’t—but I grew up with, hung out with, and am related to, people who did shit like that. I preferred to just sit and consistently drink, i.e., while everyone else was wasting time rolling joints and snorting Reddi-Whip at 7-11, I continued to observe my one-drink-every-ten-minutes rule, which meant that no matter how much they all smoked or huffed, I’d still be more polluted than the entire room combined by the end of the night.

That’s kind of still my deal, even though I haven’t had a drink in a while.

But Dust-Off? I had no idea, and I don’t like that I had no idea. I suppose I’ve graduated, life-wise, from knowing what 16-year-olds are shoving up their noses, but it still makes me sad that this was news to me, as though I’ve lost touch with a whole body of knowledge I’d developed and maintained for the first thirty or so years of my life.

That, plus I think it’s fucking pathetic that I have to ask somebody to go in the back and get me my Dust-Off because the general public can’t be trusted with it, but that’s far too easy of a target. Fuck people anyway.

Experiment

2013-05-24T04:00:00.000-04:00

How do you know whether an idea is stupid or not if you don’t act on it and see what happens?

Ideas have always caused me problems. I have lots of them. Some may even be good. Until a few years ago, I wasn’t writing any of them down. Something would come to me, I’d spend a minute or two congratulating myself for potentially shining my brilliance on humanity, and then the thought would pass on through, never to be heard from again.

Then, through a combination of technology—Siri plus Evernote on my iPhone—and the obvious practice of carrying a notebook everywhere I go, I enabled myself to capture all these ideas as soon as they materialized.

You’d think this would’ve solved the idea problem by now, but it hasn’t. This is because I don’t act on any of these things—thinking, in retrospect, that they’re too stupid to go anywhere. That’s the common theme here—that idea of just letting things rot. I’m nothing more than a list maker. I make lists. But what good is a giant to-do list if you’re not planning on doing any of it?

I’m writing this post because I had an idea last week that I’d really like to try. I should probably just go ahead and do it, but I’m also trying to figure out why I have such a hard time pulling the trigger on so many things—so I’m both analyzing this little character flaw and issuing a disclaimer, of sorts, regarding what I’m planning on doing here next week.

Saying all this in public is also a way to leverage myself into doing something about it—although we all know I’m full of shit when I claim I’m going to do anything on this site. I mean, how many “comebacks” can one guy claim he’s about to make? This time, however, I want to see what happens when I step up and take action on one of these random ideas. In keeping with this week’s theme, this might be a good habit to adopt.

Anyway, discipline week continues. Stay tuned, I guess.

Moderate Success

2013-05-23T04:00:00.000-04:00

Day one of my new discipline enforcement program has been a serious success. I’ve had my most productive workday in months, I plotted out a schedule and stuck to it—including the writing of this blog post, which is happening precisely when I scheduled it last night—and I’ve accomplished everything I’ve set out to do today.

The most important thing here has been an absolute blackout of Facebook. It’s out of my phone, it’s no longer a tab on my browser, and for today, at least, I haven’t even thought about it. I haven’t checked it at all since before I wrote yesterday’s blog post, and I think this policy has saved me at least an hour today, if not more.

The Gmail situation needs improvement, but it’s still better than it was. I checked my email more than the once per hour I’d originally planned, but these were more “situational checks,” meaning I didn’t go anywhere near it until I’d finished whatever task needed my extended attention.

I’ve also gone back to my old habit of keeping a very detailed calendar. I planned today out on Google Calendar, allowing a decent amount of leeway in case something ran long—or in case things went completely sideways, which often happens. Thus far—and this period of writing is the last thing I have scheduled for today—everything’s been perfect. I’ve stayed within the time parameters I’d set up, I’ve stuck to my plan, and I’ve gotten a shitload of work done.

So far, so good. Hopefully this level of discipline, once it becomes habit, will enable me to dig out some entertaining shit on this site—but for now, you’ll have to bear with me as I exorcise all this shit in public.

On to DAY TWO.

Friend of Bill W

2013-05-22T04:00:00.000-04:00

My name is Robert, and I’m addicted to stupid shit. This addiction has turned me into a very unproductive person, a lackluster friend, and a generally maladjusted dimwit with dwindling reserves of both creativity and common sense. I need to break this addiction to stupid shit and relearn the ability to focus, concentrate, and pay attention to one task for long, unbroken periods of time.

One stupid thing I’m addicted to is Facebook. I don’t start my day intending to let Facebook sidetrack me, but it always does. I’ll scroll down and read every post that’s been put up since the last time I looked—which is typically right before I go to sleep. I’ll comment on a few, I’ll “like” a few others, and then I’ll invariably start clicking on any links I see. This is ironic, because although I don’t give a flying fuck about any of this shit, I don’t think I’ve missed anything any of my “friends” has posted in several years.

I’m also addicted to Gmail. I’ve read scores of articles on productivity over the years, and one common theme that’s always addressed is the idea of checking email on a set schedule—at the top of the hour, or a set number of times each day. At a minimum, I check mine every two minutes. All day, every day, whenever I’m home. I’m not kidding.

In fact, I’m tempted to check it right now. My plan here is to finish this post without any interruptions, and I’ve blocked off a period of time during which I intend to do just that. In all probability, I have at least two new emails sitting in my inbox—along with a handful of text messages and missed calls on my phone (don’t get me started on my instant messaging problem)—and it’s killing me that I haven’t checked any of this in at least ten minutes. My internal alarm is fucking screaming at the moment.

This happens when I read, too. I’m a fast reader, and I can usually plow through a 300 page book in two or three nights. Over the past few years, I’ve become completely incapable of reading more than ten pages or so before I’m compelled to pick up my phone and start fucking around with it.

It needs to stop. I need discipline of the sort that’s only going to be formed by forcing myself to cut the shit. This isn’t a luxury. It’s not a skill I’m looking to cultivate just for the hell of it. My inability to focus is hurting me professionally, it’s not doing me any favors personally, and it’s the primary reason why I’ve been so unproductive on this site and everywhere else, writing-wise.

BREAK: I was just interrupted by my fucking landline. See?

To combat this shit, I’m putting myself on a program. Starting today, I’m going dark with Facebook, and I’ll only be checking my email at the top of every hour. I’ll force myself to avoid abusing both of these things, and I’m going to devote more of my time both to actual work—and to getting my writing skills back (provided I ever had any in the first place).

I’ll let you know how this goes.

Something Else

2013-04-25T04:00:00.000-04:00

Fuck it. Here’s another product review. When I don’t have anything of interest to say, I’ll tell you about some of the useful things I’ve found recently that I like. This is stuff that’s made my life easier, helped me to be more productive, or made me look like I have more money than I actually do.

Here, then, is the Moshi Concerti iPad case:

This fucker is substantial, it stands your iPad at whatever angle you want, it closes like a book, and it has a strap that keeps it shut. It’s also black, and I like black and silver shit when it comes to my technology. This makes me feel like I’m in a William Gibson novel, especially when I’m in the airport, whatever the fuck that means.

I think I’ve deluded myself into thinking it makes me look less trashy.

I’ve tried three different iPad cases. This is the only one I’ve liked. I use my iPad for damned near everything—including, in combination with the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, as a light-travel laptop—so I needed a solid case. I also didn’t want one that looked asinine or made me look like a pussy. Mission accomplished, maybe.

Get one of these. I found mine in some liberal store in San Francisco. When people root through your briefcase, your Moshi Concerti iPad case will make it look like you have important shit going on, and that’s what matters.

Recommendation

2013-04-24T04:00:00.000-04:00

I’m a big fucking dude. Just big, now. No longer fat. I used to be kind of fat. Even though I lifted weights and ran like a maniac, I ate like shit and drank far too much beer. This is no longer the case. I don’t drink anymore, I’ve cleaned up my diet, and I’m doing everything the right way. I still lift weights like a madman, though, so I’m still significantly larger—in both height and muscle mass—than the average American male.

Not that height has anything to do with lifting weights, mind you. I just wanted to emphasize that I’m not a little New York dickhead with a Napoleon complex. I’m too tall to have one.

This all leads to severe complications with my laundry. My size and my activity level make managing laundry a royal pain in the schlong. I have an in-house washer and dryer now, but when I’ve used laundromats—or the laundry rooms of the buildings I’ve lived in—I’d always walk in with triple the amount of shit everyone else seemed to have.

People always want to know why I check a bag for a two-day business trip. It’s because I can’t wear clothes for more than a few hours without completely fucking them up.

Dress clothes? Fuck that, man. My shit gets ruined before I even leave for work. Especially during the summer, the simple act of putting on a shirt cancels out the money I spent to get the shit dry cleaned in the first place.

That’s why I’m convinced that Under Armour is the greatest clothing company in the history of mankind:

Every piece of workout clothing I own is made by Under Armour. So is every pair of underwear, every pair of socks (even my “dress” socks), every undershirt, and every pair of cargo shorts I wear in the summer.

The underwear, especially, is a must-have. It’s the single best shit I own. After using this stuff for the past year or so, I’ll never, ever wear anything else. If I knew about Under Armour’s socks and underwear while I was bouncing—a piece of shit job where you’re supposed to stand in one place for hours on end, then engage in periodic bursts of fighting with drug-addled Guido fuckbags who want to stab you—I probably wouldn’t have been pissed off enough to start this blog.

If you’re as abusive of your clothing as I am, get yourself two pair for every day of the week. You’ll thank me for it.

Oblivity

2013-04-23T04:00:00.000-04:00

When massive, earth-shattering news events happen, life still carries on in some corners of the world—and sometimes those corners happen to be smack-dab in the middle of where these earth-shattering events are taking place. To see what I mean, take a look at your Facebook news feed the next time something huge occurs.

I heard about the Boston bombings about thirty seconds after they happened, because one of my Facebook friends was standing on Boylston Street at the finish line of the marathon when the first bomb exploded. Evidently, the first action he took was to whip out his phone and post about the bombings. I was looking at the very top of my news feed when his post appeared, so I likely was among the first people outside of the immediate area to hear the news.

Once I’d seen this, I immediately turned on CNN, which hadn’t yet broken into special report mode. Their Boston coverage didn’t start until a minute or two after I started watching. For the rest of the day, I kept CNN on in the background, occasionally watching while I used a combination of Twitter and Facebook to figure out what was actually going on. This is because I don’t trust Wolf Blitzer, et al, to do this for me any longer—a feeling that would be validated repeatedly over the next week.

By 4 PM EDT, it seemed as though the entire world had heard about the Boston situation. Twitter was going ballistic, and every network was deep into coverage, showing the same video footage on a repeating loop and presenting various scenarios with regard to what they assumed was happening. My day, at this point, was shot to hell, and I wasn’t going to be doing anything other than following this story.

As evidenced by the way the media has covered the bombings for the past week—and by the way we’ve been riveted by everything to do with them—this was a massive story. And when massive stories happen of the sort where you remember precisely where you were and what you were doing when you first hear about them, we tend to assume that the world stops for everyone else, too.

And it does, except on Facebook.

My Facebook account is private, in the sense that I don’t use it for business purposes. It doesn’t have anything to do with my job, and there’s no connection to anything I’ve ever done with writing. I have over 500 friends—a relatively small number for someone who’s been using Facebook for over seven years—and I’m pretty sure I’ve met every single one of them in person. With that many friends, however, my news feed tends to get a bit jammed up at times, especially when my more post-happy connections get on a roll. I don’t care enough to hide anyone’s updates, so separating the wheat from the chaff occasionally becomes a bit frustrating.

About two hours after the bombings happened, I scrolled through my news feed to see if anyone had posted anything of note. Strangely, at least 25 percent of the posts I saw had absolutely nothing to do with the Boston story.

For every three “Thoughts and prayers for Boston” posts, you’d see one or two CrossFit memes. For every three news links, you’d see a post about the Knicks. For every three direct updates from Boston—I have several friends who live there—you’d see a guy complaining about his job, or posting a “LinkedIn’s Top Ten Networking Tips” link, or putting up a picture of his new rims, his dog, his kids, or his latest home improvement project.

I wondered if these people knew. I assumed they didn’t, but if you’re posting this sort of material on Facebook in the midst of what essentially amounts to a national emergency—at the very least, it was the biggest news story of the year—can you not see what everyone else is posting? If you didn’t see, and didn’t know, I can understand blissfully going about your business, but what does it say about you if you did know?

I’m giving people the benefit of the doubt here. Things can happen that you don’t hear about, and I’m sure the thousands of people who posted Willy Wonka memes at 3:30 PM last Monday feel ridiculous about it now. I know I would.

In fact, I’ve done something similar. Last New Year’s Eve, one of my best friends, whose life was pretty much decimated by Sandy, posted on Facebook about how he wished 2013 would be a far better year than 2012. In his comments section, I made a point of saying that 2012 was awesome for me, and that I was going to continue that momentum in 2013—conveniently forgetting that half the people reading, including my friend, were likely still homeless from the storm.

Fucking bonehead.

So, I won’t judge. I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned here—something akin to looking both ways before you cross the street. The next time you’re about to post a SomeEcards meme, an appeal to save pit bulls, or a “letter from Bill Cosby,” make sure we’re clear of natural disasters, political assassinations, and declarations of war before you publish.

Watertown

2013-04-19T16:51:00.001-04:00

I'm amused by all the people on Twitter right now talking about "civil liberties" with regard to the search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Watertown, MA (an area I'm very familiar with, incidentally).

Instead of blaming this on law enforcement for attempting to find the guy and protesting this supposed "suspension of the Constitution," I suggest we focus our negative energies on the assholes causing the problems in the first place.

Boston

2013-04-16T08:56:00.000-04:00

I don’t understand why it matters whether President Obama is referring to the Boston bombings as an “act of terrorism” or not.

When explosions happen, and it’s determined that they were the result of multiple bombs detonating in concert, it’s “terrorism” by default. There’s no other description for it.

Everything else seems like a straightforward, albeit difficult, process: You find out who did it, you find out why they did it, and then you make your judgment and mete out the appropriate punishment.

Until then, what’s the point of arguing over semantics?

Boston

2013-04-15T21:59:00.000-04:00

Folks who talk for a living are easily confused.

The only people surprised when professionals run toward danger are narcissistic Little Lord Fauntleroy types who’ve never done anything courageous in their lives. Sure, running into the scene of an explosion without knowing whether another bomb’s about to go off is heroic beyond measure, but it’s myopic as fuck—and more than a touch offensive—for so many media professionals and celebrities to judge the rest of the world by their standards and act as though it’s a miracle such people “still” exist.

They’re everywhere. You just don’t give a shit about them until you need them. The rest of the time, you’re hoping they just stay out of your way. Thank them, pray for them, and be amazed by them—but don’t act as though their existence is a mystery and their behavior is something you thought was bred out of our society. They’re why you’re still permitted to breathe.

Otherwise, there’s no real lesson to be gleaned from this, unless we’re talking about heightened security measures every time human beings gather in crowds in places where people have rights—or maybe when we learn about some new group who considers the killing of civilians a fair exchange for an “offensive” cartoon or national requirements to pay one’s taxes and register one’s motor vehicle.

Beyond that, stop throwing around shitty words and phrases like tolerance, understanding, and “stopping the hate,” because these other assholes—no matter who did this, foreign or domestic—have no problem offending everyone else.

And yes, some people find explosions and killing more offensive than the spoken word. Shocking.

Friday

2013-04-12T18:05:00.001-04:00

When I take a shower at someone else’s house, and they have one of those flimsy-ass, attacking shower curtains that insists upon touching me the entire time I’m showering, I become highly skeptical of the people who live there.

This is because I have nothing in common with individuals who would not purchase a new shower curtain in this situation.

Tattled

2013-04-11T04:00:00.000-04:00

Want some more work advice? I know you do.

If you’re ever in a work situation where your coworkers tattle on each other, it’s time to go. Every workplace is a carrier of this disease, but once it’s full blown, there’s no stopping it. That’s when it’s time to start looking elsewhere.

Workplace tattling goes something like this:

A major corporation hits the financial skids, so they hire upper and middle management “puppets” at bargain rates. These people are massively unqualified for their jobs, but somebody needs to fill these seats and perform at least some rudimentary work. This results in multiple people ending up with jobs they otherwise wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of landing.

They’re there because they’re the most qualified people to be found for the money—which, because the company is an industrywide joke, is about a fifth of what the same position would pay elsewhere. The puppets know they’re expendable. They’re fully aware that they’re not there on merit, so they’re insecure, they trust nobody, and they intentionally create a culture within their departments where people are encouraged to tattle.

Look at it this way: If you’re totally unqualified for your job, and people on your staff can see through you to the extent that they actually find your incompetence funny, you wouldn’t like it. You’d be angry and fearful—and the people laughing at you would bring out every insecurity you’ve ever had regarding your own lack of talent and ability.

And you’d want to keep an eye on those motherfuckers, because you know they’re better than you, they know they’re better than you, and they know you know they’re better than you.

So you reward your underlings for informing—people naïve enough to think you can do something for them despite the toothless nature of your position—and you call the tattled-on into your office and disingenuously commiserate with them about how “real men don’t tattle.” That’s how you play both sides. Meanwhile, however, you’re keeping a file, because you’re a miserable little no-talent who’s barely managing to hang on by your fingernails to a job you didn’t deserve in the first place.

And we saw how that turned out, didn’t we?

If this ever happens at your job, bail out fast—if you can. I did, and unlike some people I know, I can still afford the internet service to complain about it publicly.

In the Sand

2013-04-08T04:00:00.000-04:00

Growing up, we had a little white Quasar color TV set in the kitchen. My father put it on the table so he could watch while he ate after work. I did the same. I’d come home from school after practice, in time to watch the end of the local news and the beginning of ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. We didn’t have cable, and the CBS and NBC signals sucked in the outer boroughs. I ate my spaghetti while a Canadian high school dropout gave me the news.

I don’t know when I stopped paying attention, exactly. I think it happened a decade or so ago, after “real” adulthood took over, and my job and life made me so tired by the end of each day that all I wanted to do was watch sports—and people playing make-believe—instead of anything that required me to think.

Last night, on my iPad—yes, I have one—I watched the HBO documentary In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution, and I was mortified—and pissed off—by everything I didn’t know about what happened there in 2011. 846 people died in less that three weeks, and then over 300 more were killed in the aftermath. In the first days of the protests, the Mubarak regime hired a makeshift army of “thugs,” at $75 per head—a fortune—to clear out Tahrir Square, a major, modern-looking swath of open space in downtown Cairo where you don’t expect to see sword-wielding lunatics sweeping through on the backs of camels. Bloody fucking hell broke loose after that.

My concern here isn’t about who was at fault. It’s not about whether Mubarak was a Reza Pahlavi-like figure who spent thirty years collecting palaces and fine art while he bled his country dry and tortured his own people. And it’s not about whether the Muslim Brotherhood, if left unchecked, have designs on helping Al Qaeda bring Sharia law to my doorstep. These are things I’ve heard. Now I’ll do my research and learn my ass from my elbow in this department.

The problem here for me is that I didn’t follow along while any of this was going on. I had no idea. In January and February 2011, I was busy with my job, and the concerns within my meaningless little sphere—and although I’d heard snippets of news about what was happening in Tunisia and Egypt, I never took the time to really learn about the situation because of that whole “news embargo” thing I’ve had going on for the past decade.

I knew Egypt was an ally, of sorts—or thought so, anyway, because they’d made peace with Israel in the 1970s. I knew about the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and King Tut—because of Steve Martin, of course—and I knew Cairo was supposed to be a fairly cosmopolitan city that was friendly to western tourists. I’ve heard of the Aswan Dam, and I know that Nasser, the Egyptian president that preceded Sadat, was a pretty controversial guy. When I was in high school, an Egyptian guy named Alaa Abdelnaby played center for Duke.

That, right there, is the extent of my knowledge of Egypt. It’s embarrassing, but what’s even worse is my failure to pay any attention to this while it was in progress. It’s not like I’m addicted to bullshit TV, either. I don’t watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians, or Duck Dynasty, or anything else that’s popular—except, of course, The Walking Dead.

I don’t even know what those shows are, because I’ve never seen them. The idea, however, that I didn’t know a revolution happened in a place where 75 percent of the population makes less than $2 a day while the president is worth between $30 and $70 billion is disgusting to me. I’m horrified that, while I rode the subway down to the Financial District and back every day, worried solely about which salad I’d be ordering for lunch, 846 people died in a three block radius over a period of eighteen days.

It’s astonishing to me, after spending half my life bitching about how fucking stupid everyone is, but this level of ignorance leads me to believe I’m just as hypocritical as every other arrogant know-nothing walking the earth.

Sad but true.

The Juicer

2013-04-05T04:00:00.000-04:00

Here’s another story about my old job.

My company inexplicably hired a guy I knew to run my department. People knew I was familiar with him—hence the adverb in the previous sentence—so they asked me what he was like.

“He’s okay,” I said. “I don’t mind him.”

True enough, but they didn’t ask me whether I thought he was any good. Different story, that.

One of my coworkers, whom I’ll call El Nepotisto Incompetente—which I know is a shitty translation, but it gets my point across nicely—told me he’d heard the new “boss” used to be a bodybuilder.

I was unaware of this odd and rather irrelevant bit of history, because the new “boss” weighed about 150 pounds soaking wet. El Nepotisto Incompetente, with whom I was actually friends at the time, had come into my office by himself—remember, nobody else was listening to this conversation—so I decided to say something funny.

“Yeah,” I said. “That guy is a major fucking juicebag. He’s more roided out than Lyle Alzado and A-Rod put together.”

It’s important to note, once again, that the guy I was referring to looks like he runs marathons twice a week and spends the rest of his time residing in Ethiopia.

For his first two weeks on the job, the new “boss,” despite the fact that we’d been friendly in the past, gave me the cold shoulder. I wondered why, so I called a mutual friend—another former coworker—to find out what had crawled up the new “boss’s” ass.

“He said you were spreading rumors accusing him of being on steroids.”

The Ballad of Mike Rice

2013-04-04T04:00:00.000-04:00

I know very little about Mike Rice, other than the fact that he was a very successful basketball coach before he arrived at Rutgers, and that he hasn’t been very successful there. That lack of success is more a commentary on the mediocrity of Rutgers’ athletic programs than on Rice’s coaching ability, but that’s another story entirely.

I do know a few things about sports, though—both playing them and coaching them—and there are some things we should be thinking about when we consider the facts of this case.

I’ve never seen anything like Rice’s video before. In all the time I’ve spent around college sports, although I’ve seen coaches put their hands on players in a not-so-loving manner, I’ve never seen anyone shoved, kicked, or otherwise abused the way Rice’s players were. That approach is completely foreign to me as both an athlete and a coach, and I think it’s reprehensible.

Old-school coaching, at least to a point, is good. It works. College athletics are a royal bitch, and coaches aren’t ever as touchy-feely in practice, in meetings, or in games as they are during the recruiting process when they’re sitting in your living room with your parents telling them how much they care about you as a person. This is total bullshit. Once you’re signed, it’s a major surprise if the head coach even remembers your name—at least until you fuck something up and he humiliates your sorry ass in front of a large group of people.

Even this is perfectly fine. Athletics at this level is a pressurized environment that bears no resemblance to the whole “everybody participates” culture of today’s youth sports, and coaches stay up your ass in this regard in order to build your will and get you to understand that every competitive minute of the next four years is going to be a massive struggle. As an athlete, that’s how you learn about life—and the type of shit that’s waiting for you in the real world, whether you graduate or not. From the coach’s standpoint, he needs to know which players he can depend on, and which he can’t.

Athletes are accustomed to being screamed at. It’s accepted, and you need to develop the ability to deal with it without taking it personally—and this includes a shitload of name-calling. Again, sports are a bitch. What’s happening on the field has little resemblance to what you’re seeing from the stands—i.e., it’s not as easy as they’re making it look. When you’re playing in the NCAA Tournament or a major bowl game, with millions of dollars in revenue at stake, you need to be psychologically prepared for how hard things are going to be—and coaches don’t accomplish that level of preparation by holding your hand and discussing Sarah McLachlan lyrics.

The hitting, kicking, and ball throwing, though? Not so good. I don’t know what Rice was trying to accomplish there, but I can tell you this: As a freshman and sophomore, I would have taken it, keeping my head down and my mouth shut. As a junior, I may—mind you, this is a very tentative may—have mouthed off to a coach who threw a ball at my head. As a senior? Fuck that. Scholarship be damned, they would have had to peel me off the guy just to load him in the ambulance.

As for his word choices, I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent here—and issue a bit of a hackneyed disclaimer: I’m okay with the gays. I have gay relatives, I have gay friends, I support gay marriage, and I’ve never had any issue with any of it in my entire life.

I take semantic issue, however, with the use of the term “homophobic” in this case. For the semantic part, the term phobia is defined as an “irrational fear or avoidance” of something. With most people, I think the important part here is irrational avoidance. Although I know such people exist in large numbers, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s literally afraid of homosexuals, so I’m going on the basis of avoidance here rather than fear when we introduce homophobia to the equation.

Growing up, we threw around the word “faggot” liberally before we even knew what homosexuals were, or what was supposedly “deviant” about their lifestyle. To most kids, calling someone a faggot was the same as calling them a pussy. A faggot was someone who lacked skill in sports, chickened out of a fight, or ran home crying when teased.

This mentality, with athletes, continues into adulthood. When you call a lazy basketball player a “faggot,” you’re not saying, “You didn’t set a good enough pick because you prefer same-sex relations as your sexual preference.” What you’re really saying is that the guy has no balls and isn’t working hard enough.

The world is changing—for the better, for a lot of people I care about—and the faster words like faggot become obsolete, the better off we’ll all be, especially since we’re now aware of what a large percentage of the population it offends. Rice should not have used the word. It has no place in a learning environment—whether you think so or not, that’s what a college basketball practice is—at a major state university. No matter how attached he is to his loudmouth youth, a 44-year-old man in a position of authority can’t be calling kids half his age “faggots.”

Still, however, I shrink from the notion of calling this homophobic. Yes, the use of the word is dead-ass wrong, but it’s a stretch to say that Rice is engaging in an “irrational avoidance” of homosexuals. I’m probably taking the etymology of the word a bit too literally here, but I think he’s guilty solely of standard insensitivity and stupidity. This isn’t exactly a hate crime, and dragging his asinine behavior into that realm smacks of phony outrage—at least in terms of my sense of his motivations (which, admittedly, could be incredibly off base).

Those motivations don’t mean shit, though. Wrong is wrong, no matter what the guy was thinking when he said what he did, and I’m not defending him even one iota. The sad part is that he’s probably coached multiple gay players who’ve had to put up with his bullshit. The not-so-sad part is that he’d likely coach several more over the span of his not-going-to-happen career, and those guys won’t have to listen to it.

Regardless, it’s always a good thing when shit like this happens, because this is the only way we’ll learn what not to do, and what we won’t tolerate—especially when it comes to sports, which in the grand scheme isn’t important enough to merit looking past behavior like this. I’ve done my share of coaching, and I think Rice’s behavior was fucking repugnant on every level—including his language. The fact that he wasn’t immediately dismissed is an embarrassment to Rutgers, as is the fact that he’d likely still be employed if none of this had been made public.

Wolf Tickets

2013-04-03T04:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve told this story several times today. Most people think I’m making it up, but I’m not. I’m not creative enough to think up shit like this on my own. I’ll just write it, and you can decide for yourselves.

I went to the bank this afternoon. The branch I use is in a schizophrenic area that can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be bohemian or abject ghetto. It’s neither gentrified nor shithole. I’m not part of either scene, so I just do my business and get out before something irritates the living shit out of me.

There was an older black guy standing ten feet away from the front door of the bank. He wore a leather trench coat and a red Kangol hat, and he was smoking a cigarette with his thumb and forefinger. Picture Robin Harris and you’re pretty much on it.

A very pretty blonde girl walked past him on the sidewalk as I crossed the street toward the bank. She was wearing a sweatshirt and black tights with knee-high boots, and she had a very full, very round ass. You get it. I know.

The black guy watched her walk past, then said, “Hey, baby girl. Back those milky haunches up over here.”

It helps if you say this aloud in old-school black guy voice.

Milky haunches.

Why

2013-04-02T04:00:00.000-04:00

A child is born in New England. He’s given toys to play with. Stuffed animals to love. He learns to walk, to talk, and to feed himself. He goes to school, where he’s taught to read, write, and do math. He graduates high school. Maybe he goes on to college. Maybe he serves in the military. Maybe he learns a trade. Maybe someone loves him along the way. Hopefully lots of people do, and he returns their love a hundredfold.

At some point in his journey, he becomes conscious, if not completely aware, of something called taste. Of preference. Through trial, error, and observation, he embraces some form of culture that’s comfortable and meaningful to him. He demonstrates this with the way he speaks and acts, with the clothes he wears and the music he favors.

In what seems like the blink of an eye, he’s a man, with a career and people who depend on him. Maybe he marries. Maybe he procreates. He comes to his late forties, and what makes him him has been constructed, brick by brick. Maybe he likes what he’s become. Maybe he doesn’t. Either way, this funnel leads him here, to you, in the parking lot of the Lee Premium Outlets in western Massachusetts. What he shows you there, amongst all the Easter bargain-seekers, is the sum total of everything he’s become.

And when you see him climb out of an aqua blue Corvette, sporting a mullet, a goatee, and a pirate earring, wearing a multicolored pleather NASCAR jacket, you wonder what the fuck was going on that whole time.

You really do.

The State of Massachusetts

2013-03-29T04:00:00.000-04:00

My uncle, who was born in Ireland and knew plenty about our family’s history of emigration, once told me a voyage on the ship from Southampton to New York cost nearly twice as much as going from Southampton to Boston. This explains everything.

More stupid shit has happened to me in Massachusetts than anywhere else on earth. If the x-axis of a graph represents places, and the y-axis represents the number of bizarre fucking things that have happened to me in each particular locale, the state of Massachusetts would show a massive spike running three times the height as any other place, including New York.

This is because people in Massachusetts are fucking insane. Most people, when they’re irritated by a Masshole for the first time, believe this place is so strange and inefficient because the people here are stupid. This is not the case. Instead, I think people are clinically fucking disturbed up here, and I always have. I have a long history with this state—including residency for long stretches—and I know what I’m talking about. Trust me on this one.

Case in point:

We’re driving down Main Street in Great Barrington, going to the diner to eat lunch. Parking on Main Street is tough—as it is, unnecessarily so, everywhere in this state. I see a spot along the curb, so instead of pulling past and parallel parking, I nose the car in directly from the right lane—because I had space, and because I’m a really fucking good driver with over twenty years of heavy experience, including several years spent driving 54’ trucks for my uncle. Long story short, I know what I’m doing. This is relevant.

I shut the car down, and we’re about to get out when a woman gets out of the minivan in front of me and starts yelling at me, gesticulating like someone lifted her fifth of Dewar’s before she could take the last swig and backhand one of her kids. She was claiming I’d hit her car. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even come close. I was at least two feet behind her the entire time, and I told her so. There’s no stopping a Masshole onslaught once it’s in motion, though, so this whole thing had to play itself out.

“My caaaaaaaah raaaaaawwwwwwked!”

“No, it didn’t!” I yelled back. “I didn’t even come close to you, you goddamned crackpot! Get away from me!”

I really said this. Leave me alone, you fucking mutant crackpots.

This was not an honest mistake, nor was it someone trying a “clip job” to get some insurance money out of me. This was a prototype raving Masshole, hailing from the great state of Mass O’ Mutants, inflicting her mental illness on me as only a true New Englander can.

When I was younger, and this shit was new to me, I thought people from Massachusetts were interesting and colorful. Unfortunately, Massholes no longer have the power to hold my attention—unless they’re enraging me—and I don’t have time for the way they attempt to complicate our lives with their psychological issues. One day I’ll write about the lady who inexplicably made it her mission to prevent me from getting a $2 discount on a pair of headphones at a Lechmere store, or the parking ticket clerk at Government Center who cursed at me for offering to pay $20 more than I actually owed—an option he offered me—because I didn’t want to wait on another line. Same concept.

I love Boston to death, but this is probably why I’ve never moved back.

New England

2013-03-28T04:00:00.000-04:00

This morning was very bad. I ate at Taco Bell last night, because I wanted to shovel a load of shit down my throat as quickly as I could. I did this right before I went to sleep. I had Volcano nachos, two Doritos steak tacos, and a steak quesadilla. This happened very late at night. At four in the morning, I woke up with acid reflux. I had to chug a gallon of water to get rid of the burn. I didn’t go back to sleep for another two hours, but then I had to wake up a half hour after that. I wasn’t happy. I don’t know why I do this.

Then we drove to Massachusetts. Whenever I leave from New York to go on a long drive, I’m always amazed at how two cars on an empty road can create a total clusterfuck. I think this only happens in New York, because people in New York are fucking stupid when they drive.

I’m in the Berkshires now, on vacation. I just ate at a pizzeria in Great Barrington called Baba Louie’s. If you’re ever there, try the barbeque chicken pizza. I’d never had good pizza in New England before, except at a place in East Boston called Santarpio’s—although I don’t know if you can call a pile of barbeque chicken on top of flatbread “pizza,” exactly.

The table next to us was filled with irritating nineteen-year-olds who thought they were funnier and more sophisticated than they actually were. You know the type. They were trying to top each other for loudness. Their stories weren’t funny. I tried not to listen, but the volume was too high. Ten years ago, I would have told them to shut the fuck up.

I tried to take a nap this afternoon, but I couldn’t sleep, so we went to eat. After we ate, we went to the Price Chopper on MA-7 to get coffee for tomorrow morning. I bagged my own groceries. The Price Chopper is fucking huge.

Today was a mixed bag.