I mean really: who didn’t do this in college? This photo was taken in my townhouse Halloween 2002, or 200 Days to graduation from St. Bonaventure. I’m seeing the guy in the middle tomorrow.  Today is a particularly sad day, License to Ill was the very first album I ever bought. This was after my mother looked at me in horror, at her six year-old first born asking her to not change the radio station that was playing “Fight For Your Right to Party”. Good night and good luck, MCA, thank you so much for everything.

I mean really: who didn’t do this in college? This photo was taken in my townhouse Halloween 2002, or 200 Days to graduation from St. Bonaventure. I’m seeing the guy in the middle tomorrow. 

Today is a particularly sad day, License to Ill was the very first album I ever bought. This was after my mother looked at me in horror, at her six year-old first born asking her to not change the radio station that was playing “Fight For Your Right to Party”.

Good night and good luck, MCA, thank you so much for everything.

Let’s try this thing. My tennis coach, when I was ten, used to call me “Diamond Dave,” so this song reminds me of days gone by of slipping on clay, white sneakers, and seeing how far I can hit the ball over the fence.

Source: Spotify

251 West 13 Street—Dream home. Amy and I walked by this place tonight on our way to the subway from ‘sNice after a writing session. Basically, this place would be a dream home in my mind. Researching it, I found that Tom Fontana owns it, the creator of Oz. Take a second and read that story, it is a pretty amazing place. Leaving the corner, I said there is no way I could ever have such a place writing comics or doing anything that I aspire to do. But reading that story, I now think it is not out of the realm of reality of having a place like that and calling it my home in the future.  

251 West 13 Street—Dream home.

Amy and I walked by this place tonight on our way to the subway from ‘sNice after a writing session. Basically, this place would be a dream home in my mind. Researching it, I found that Tom Fontana owns it, the creator of Oz. Take a second and read that story, it is a pretty amazing place. Leaving the corner, I said there is no way I could ever have such a place writing comics or doing anything that I aspire to do. But reading that story, I now think it is not out of the realm of reality of having a place like that and calling it my home in the future.  

[Here is part 1, of my obnoxious experiment into the concept of my Internet Identity].  December 25, 2011: Dad, Andrew, and I went out this afternoon to walk the golf course and hunt wabbits, as Elmur Fudd would say. Texting Rebecca, I said I went hunting today and she replied—sitting poolside in St. John—“I thought you were against that!” I replied with “Not anymore.” I was the precocious kid who talked his dad out of hunting when I was six years old, but here I am—thirty-one—gleeful at the idea of shooting a rabbit and shooting the hell out of an old computer tower. What creates this sudden course alteration to want to destroy a living thing or blow-up a lifeless thing like something out of Office Space? I suppose a deeply repressed person who doesn’t get the opportunity to SMASH something on a regular basis who feels amped up with a sudden need to unleash it in a way that is totally against his principles. Nature rules over everything. I got a Nook for Christmas. I downloaded the John Carter of Mars series which has the first five books for ninety-nine cents, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which is just amazing because it reads like a Hitchcock seamless shot, without any breaks and no deliberate editing in it. One sentence into the next with an unbreakable historical perspective from the main character’s childhood into his current day perspective without taking a break in the narrative. Just amazing. 

[Here is part 1, of my obnoxious experiment into the concept of my Internet Identity]. 

December 25, 2011: Dad, Andrew, and I went out this afternoon to walk the golf course and hunt wabbits, as Elmur Fudd would say. Texting Rebecca, I said I went hunting today and she replied—sitting poolside in St. John—“I thought you were against that!” I replied with “Not anymore.”

I was the precocious kid who talked his dad out of hunting when I was six years old, but here I am—thirty-one—gleeful at the idea of shooting a rabbit and shooting the hell out of an old computer tower. What creates this sudden course alteration to want to destroy a living thing or blow-up a lifeless thing like something out of Office Space? I suppose a deeply repressed person who doesn’t get the opportunity to SMASH something on a regular basis who feels amped up with a sudden need to unleash it in a way that is totally against his principles. Nature rules over everything.

I got a Nook for Christmas. I downloaded the John Carter of Mars series which has the first five books for ninety-nine cents, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which is just amazing because it reads like a Hitchcock seamless shot, without any breaks and no deliberate editing in it. One sentence into the next with an unbreakable historical perspective from the main character’s childhood into his current day perspective without taking a break in the narrative. Just amazing. 

Internet Identity.

Felt like I needed to take a bit of a hiatus from the Internet. On Christmas Day, in the wee hours, I tweeted: “Live your life somewhere that isn’t online. Try it. Merry Christmas, everyone.” And decided that I was going to abstain from interacting with the Internet for a week, until New Year’s Day and instead just think about my identity, the things that I put forth. A week of reflection about what it means to have an Internet Identity, an interior reflection of the self that has to do with the exterior personality, whether having this exterior-interior personality actually means anything or it is just shouting into a wind tunnel.

The question I had was: why do people share this way? Some come off facetious and starved for attention; people who need some kind of satisfaction to their exterior identity so they share their lives online in order to show that they are, in fact, cool or interesting. It gives me comfort knowing that most people, like me, struggle with self-confidence so they share their life in hopes of a reader or a new follower that validates their interests and personality. It shows that someone actually likes you. And they like you because of the kinds of things you say in a forum like this one. On the surface it comes off as a narcissistic endeavor, but it really isn’t, there are a lot of good things to it too. It’s celebrating your life, your thoughts for anyone to read if they look for it. It’s management of individual identity in the twenty-first century and that is a thing worth doing so you can regulate what appears online and what does not. This is a lesson I think most people should pay attention to.

The identity, it is whatever you say it is I suppose. That sounds like a cliché and completely untrue, but your identity is how you shape it. Until recently it meant how you behave in public, what you see and how you behave regarding it. Now the Internet is yet another thing that portrays your identity. So I went with the question what does it mean to have this identity in public—what does it mean for writers and what does it mean for people who use it regularly? For me there are people who use it well and other people who use it in such a way to promote a product, and it is hard to make the distinction that the product is not oneself; it could also be a company, a brand, as well. Really the thing for me with this hiatus was to not post anything—nothing on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook. Interact the way I used to, through email and the phone, but still read everything and even like certain articles, but not interact in any written conversational manner.  

I suppose the point of this exercise is to react to stuff involving the Internet on a deeper level rather than just the surface, and to think about how I would react to things in my personal life that I would say on the Internet. The point is, I guess, to just think deeper. So, for a week, I wrote down stuff that I would normally talk about on my blog and try to do something more with my thinking. So, over the next week I’ll post some of the things I wrote about in my week off. 

christmas cards.

I’m in the Duane Reade on the corner of Broadway and Steinway earlier tonight, having just finished my Shakespeare final and officially being a done student of the Masters of English program at Brooklyn College. That is if the Dean of the Humanities approves my thesis, which is looking kinda sketchy since she’s sent six of them back this semester. The saga never ends.

So, I’m looking for some cards to go along with my gifts and I notice something underneath the “Funny for Mom” and “Religious for Brother” tabs, a subtitle that says, “Our family is grateful to have you.”

What the fuck? I don’t even look at the cards I’m just confused by this subtitle in little minute typeface just below the headings. And the top headings are for Mom, Dad, or brother, they’re not for Wife to Be or something like that. So my question is: What the hell is this subhead suggesting? Are you trying to apologize for being a cold person to your Mom most of the year and since this is Christmas you want to say you’re grateful? Like I’m grateful you send me money every month so I can make rent. I’m grateful that you’re still with us though you’ve been very sick and on the verge of death.

This label is a fucked up thing to have, right?

The Disadvantages of Summer Babies.

Thanks, Captain Obvious. This is something I’ve known and dealt with my entire life as an August birthday. This is also probably why I feel like I belong in Lake Placid rather than anywhere else because we celebrated my birthday there. Where I went to school—in another location entirely—I was ignored, bullied, and pretty much always considered an underachiever. I had to work twice as hard to be considered average and who the hell knows what this did to my psychosis. I suppose it created an appreciation for work and being thorough (and thus probably slower) with my work which feeds into this system.

Regardless, this story is obvious, stupid, and most of all—true, because I can say all of this stuff is basically the story of my fucking life. 

Source: The Awl