Well a person can work up a mean mean thirst, after a hard day of nothin' much at all

One of the problems with trying to come up with new shit for your "website" each day is that you sometimes are drawn into telling old stories again, or telling new stories that you might have told at a later date in front of an adoring crowd at a party. Either of these options result in you being a less interesting person.

The upside is that all your lame stories are recorded somewhere, so when you're 118 years old, you can look back and have a chuckle.

I say this as a preface to one of my old lame stories, one that you probably have heard, and one that I may tell you again if I corner you at a party some night.

I have a problem with sarcasm. While I'm no stranger to using it myself, I have a hard time detecting it when others use it. And I use it so much, sometimes people think I'm using it when I'm really not. For instance...

1987: freshman year of college. I am sitting on the toilet in our dormitory (in retrospect, I am astonished that I was able to use our community toilets -- there were four of them in a row, and often more than one person would be using them at once), and I suddenly realize there is no toilet paper in my stall. Stranded, I sit and wait for someone to enter the bathroom and rescue me. I hear the door swing open, and someone starts using the sink to wash up.

"Help!" I call out. "Who's out there?"

"It's Steve," says Steve Waggner, a 23 year-old sophomore. Steve was a rough guy -- full moustache, rugged complexion, and a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He had worked for a few years after high school, and he must have felt some degree of distance from the rest of us, a bunch of once-a-week-shaving freshmen who had no real understanding of life. He always had dark bags under his eyes, like he stayed up at night regretting things that hadn't even happened yet. He always seemed a little bit sad.

"Steve, could you do me a favor?" I ask. "Could you roll me some TP over the top of the stall?"

Steve is happy to oblige. He was a pretty nice guy in general; he'd buy us beer and rock out to The Doors with us in his dorm room. He takes some of the toilet paper from the stall next to me and sends it over the side of the adjoining stall into mine, where I can use it freely.

"Thanks a lot," I say.

That night, I went to the bathroom to brush my teef, and there was Steve, brushing his own.

"How'd that TP work out for you?" Steve asked, smiling.

Here I must explain that, despite my wholesome good looks and aw-shucks midwestern speaking pattern, I grew up in New York City. We didn't "TP" people's houses, we didn't use the phrase "TP," and thus I was genuinely confused by what he was saying. Yes, I had used the term myself earlier that day, but it was just an instinctive abbreviation on my part. I didn't realize it was not only an accepted phrase in suburban circles, it was a rite of passage.

"What TP?" I asked, forgetting about how he had kindly saved me earlier that day. I honestly had no idea what he was talking about.

"You know, the TP..." he said, quickly growing angry, looking me in the eye and waiting for me to crack a smile.

"What are you talking about?" I asked, sincerely baffled.

At this point, Steve got right up in my face and I was sure he was going to haul off and deck me.

"Don't FUCK with me!" he said, and then he turned and left the bathroom, slamming the door on the way out.

It wasn't until weeks later that I found out what TP was and why Steve was so mad at me.

What I'm getting at is that sometimes people give you more credit than you deserve. They assume you know things that you do not, and that you're cleverer than you really are.

An example is the last line of yesterday's post:

The internet does not grow stale. It just grows.

I was just trying to close my post with a nice ringing last line, but somebody found a connection to something deeper. Reader AAA posted the following in the comments section:

Reference caught! (or lyric stumper)

The desert grows three miles a year/ It just grows/It just grows/The desert grows three miles a year.

Now I wish I was smart enough to have been referencing this song, but I'm not. I don't know the song. Who sings it? I like it. I wish I was cool enough to know this song. And to Steve Waggner, I was being straight with you, dude. Sorry about the misunderstanding and danke for the TP.

I went out for a few beers with queer eye alum Josh D. tonight. Oh, how I miss the village. We ran into a guy Lou and his buddy Joe at the bar. Nice guys, real drinkers, chatting to every lady who walked into the bar. Lou was a card. He was a salesman, in a suit, somewhere between 38 and 45 years old. He told us he had a presentation the next day.

"What are you selling?" I asked.

"Truth," he answered.

I couldn't help but call him on that.

"I bet that's a tough sell. Nobody's really interested in that," I said.

He nodded to me and said, "I'm buying this guy a beer."

He bought us each a drink and told us some great stories, like the one about the time he was pulled over doing 90 in a 50 drunk and somehow avoided a ticket. Then Joe told us the story of how he got suckered out of his house in Salt Lake City by two cops during a party. As soon as he got outside, they cuffed him. Apparently he had six outstanding tickets. He said he was cursing them and trying to drag them back into the house, which would nullify the arrest. He was a pretty big guy, too. I wouldn't want to bust him.

After we talked for awhile, the two of them made a sincere effort to buy the Food Network.

"How much you want?" they asked.

"$5,000 or $50, whatever you got on you," I said. Somehow the deal fell apart.

As much as I agree with the general suspicion that the latest, building-specific terror warnings are a calculated effort to distract us from all the other things that are going on right now, things that would benefit the democrats across the board, I can't help but feel a little uneasy living here in New York. Hopefully, nothing will happen, but I keep thinking about those people in the WTC, and how that day started out so normal for them. You hear all those gut-wrenching stories about guys who left messages for their wives that morning, before anything happened, reminding them to send in the rent check. Or how they stopped and got their morning coffee from their morning coffee guy, and discussed the Yankees' postseason chances. And I imagine more: how a guy spent an extra five minutes in front of the mirror that morning, straightening his tie, getting ready for his big meeting. All the mundane bullshit we do every day assuming there's more life left in us. All meaningless when we get killed. And I wonder about the stuff each of us are doing every day now, all under the belief that we'll live long enough for it to matter. It'll seem so trivial if we die. I was going to expound upon this, so I sent myself a little list, which I'm now just going to leave as is, because it's late and I'm tired and I'm not sure it's worth saying any better.

new yorkers
making phone calls
getting a receipt from the taxi driver
picking up dry cleaning
making appointments they'll never live to keep
going to work
hustling to be on time
jamming their toes in the subway door to hold it open
saving money by using their duane read club card