humping around

I was on the fence tonight whether to blog up some stuff or go to bed, but then I spilled a beer and it got all over my new hoodie and some placemats, so I had to throw in a load of laundry. Now I have like an hour and a half whether I like it or not. Whether you like it or not.

Why don't I tell you about my weekend? It was pretty weekendy.

On Saturday, I went and played me some basketball, poorly. I didn't really fuck up or anything, I just barely registered. There was no point to me. If our game ever got turned into a movie, you would be like, "Why did they introduce that supporting character in that one scene and then never get back to him?" I didn't advance the plot at all. Maybe they're saving me for the sequel.

After one game I was sitting on the sideline, dripping sweat and trying to make small talk with a guy I know. I was like, "Man, I'm a step slow today...maybe two steps." Trying to be modest but also telling it like it is. He said, "Dude, you've been two steps slow for two years now." Ouch. I'll show him! Ah....fuck it, no I won't.

Then I was talking to another guy about the Knicks. Remember them? Tall, incompetent, irrelevant, unpleasant? Office is over on 33rd? Anyway, this guy was genuinely optimistic about the 2008-09 season, with D'antoni stepping in as coach and all.

"But the personnel..." I said. "They have two big fat center types who can barely move, one with a heart problem, and now they're gonna run? Yikes. It's all the same shitty dudes, I don't see them being competitive."

He said, "I think Nate Robinson's gonna play well. And I like David Lee. And the new Italian guy might be good. And Crawford..."

I was all, "OK man, if you think that's gonna be a good team..."

He said, "This is the time of year to have high hopes."

He's right. Of course, once they start playing games those hopes will fade fast. But why not at least be excited for a month? As he pointed out, this will be a good chance to see how much of a difference a coach can make. My guess: 5-6 games over the course of the season.

Thinking about Zach Randolph got me reminiscing about Knicks I've hated through the years. Greg Anthony will always be my least favorite Knick PG, but I think Charlie Ward deserves some special mention in any discussion of History's Most Loathsome Knicks. Not only did his low-bridge boxout on PJ Brown ignite the fight that cost us the '97 season, but then he took over the locker room with his anti-semitic and anti-woman-reporter bullshit. He was a hateful, small-minded little fuck, and...AND... he had virtually no game to speak of. That combination is unforgivable. Plus he had the charisma of a file cabinet. A file cabinet full of papers displaying the box scores of every game Charlie Ward ever played for the Knicks, with his stat line highlighted.

So a belated F you to C Ward.

Then Saturday night I knocked back a few bierce with some college pals at Tom & Jerry's. It was fun, but around 2:30 everybody (except me) started getting tired. I was about to enter the "rah rah let's tear the night open and throw burning garbage into its bleeding torso" section of the evening, but I sensed that there was no more life to be squeezed from this particular crew on this particular night. They had stuff to do on Sunday and frankly I was becoming more aggressively uninteresting every second. So we parted ways, mostly their choice.

I put on my headphones and started to walk home. The bottom may be falling out of the economy but you'd never guess it from walking through NYC at night. Packed bars, people spilling out onto the street smoking. Traffic all jammed up at 3 am. Horns and loudmouths filling in any silent moment that might try to slip in. Packs of douchebags in pressed shirts, looking to pick up girls so they can brag about it to their bros the next day. Arty kids passing judgment on them. And married dudes walking home from the bar bopping their heads to their favorite songs from 1973.

I walked up Bowery and made a right onto maybe 3rd street. Up ahead something caught my eye. It was a young couple, grinding like crazy against a building. What fun! At first I thought they were actually...you know...doing it. They were totally mashing their parts together in a crazy exaggerated thrusty-dance. I think the words "They're fucking!" actually rolled across my mind.

As I got closer I noticed that they were clothed, which both relieved and disappointed me. I would call it a building-aided vertical dry hump al fresco, if I was keeping score. As I got closer still I noticed that the guy was sort of burying his face in the woman's neck/cleavage area, and the woman was leaning back and apparently enjoying whatever he was doing. Then I looked again...the woman was actually talking on her cell phone!

Wow.

I got concerned for a minute. What if she was in trouble? I didn't want to be part of a 2008 Kitty Genovese moment, so I turned off my music to listen for sounds of distress and/or ecstasy. No sounds I could make out at all. Definitely none to get worried about.

But I couldn't help wondering: who was she calling? Was she listening to work voicemails? Calling an ex to taunt him with the live play by play of her latest hookup? Looking to recruit a third? Naively trying to pre-order Mets playoff tickets? Calling Ghostbusters? Making a spa appointment for Sunday?

And did her paramour care that all his best moves were only enough to consume a fraction of her attention? He didn't seem to.

I like to think I would.

For The Weekend

It's late late Sunday evening. It's snowing in New York City, there's a thin coat already on the ground, the night is beautifully quiet in Stuyvesant Town and blogging conditions are excellent.

It was another fine weekend.

So you didn't do anything cool like you used to do, like pull your plonker out on the streetcorner or shoot off 99 Flaming Balls and other assorted fireworks or pretend to be a sexually confused 14 year-old boy or steal a homecoming float or offer to sock a crazy street person in the face to protect your crew or sell Loverboy tapes on the L train or ride around Chicago drunk in the trunk of a Honda Civic or tell a bearded college kid in a diner that you and your lady were starting a new society on the side of a mountain someplace and did he want to come along? or get beat up by a dozen skinhead townies or wake up with mysterious blood on the (open) door to your shitbox apartment or convince a cute girl to get off the other dude's lap and come sit on your lap to win a juvenile bet or try to steal a crane or try to steal a boat or set yourself on fire trying to consume a flaming shot or climb a building and sit in a covered wagon or streak for a good 2 miles or throw fruit onto rooftops or pee on a hot grill or invent a new dance called The Unknown Soldier or drive drunk to Chicago or listen to "Unsatisfied" like 68 times in a row at 4am while eating Cheetos in your friend's car in a Howard Johnson's parking lot in Madison, Wisconsin or bury a note and a beer in a box of crackers on a hill or politely walk a girl out of a bar so she could theoretically get on her bicycle and ride home but instead you both pause by the bike and stare at each other and make nonsense talk for like five minutes until it becomes comically awkward and she asks you if you are gonna kiss her or what and you say, no I don't think I can but maybe another time even though you want to more than anything and she shrugs and rides away on her broken down old bike and then like four years later she dies in a car accident and you hear they think it was a suicide. But you end up kissing her in between those two nights -- the night when you didn't kiss her and the night when she died -- on the night when the guy with the ponytail gives you a drunken ride home on his motorcycle the wrong way down a one-way at like 60 mph and she rides her bike and meets you there so you can all watch The Maltese Falcon. And then ponytail guy falls asleep watching the movie and you end up kissing her. He wanted to kiss her, wanted to kiss her even more than you did but he fell asleep and you snooze you lose and truthfully he never had a chance anyway. He's probably dead now too. Dead or like 42, either way it's bad news. But that's his problem.

That's not how you spent this weekend, I bet. But who cares about any of that, weekends are still pretty fucking sweet you ungrateful bitches. Just breathing weekend air and eating weekend food and doing weekend things, whatever they may be.

I played basketball for the third Saturday in a row. That's the plan now. We used a Brand Squeaking New NBA Game Ball, Classic Edition. I guess it needs to get broken in 'cause it felt terrible, like a plastic toy, slick and hard and difficult to control. I am wondering if maybe the New Non-Classic Game Ball might not have been an improvement after all if this is the alternative. What happened to the buttery leather Game Ball of my youth, the one Kissel bought at a Flea Market in Cape Cod and kept pristine for years before some joker dribbled it on concrete and ruined it?

Whatever the case my game is wack like Roberta Flack and I need to keep working at it or it's time for the glue factory. Maybe we need to get the whole crew back together for an over-the-hill VCS classic.

I drank some of the Guinness Draught cans this weekend, including tonight. Them are really not bad. Not the same as a real draft beer but smooth and satisfying nonetheless.

What did you do this weekend? Did anybody watch Steve Nash play? He's good. My dad refers to him as "my hero." We could go through a long discussion about why white basketball fans love white basketball players so much, but there's just no time right now. Instead, just marvel at Nash and remember, his career was on the scrap heap before he suddenly became an unlikely all-star in Dallas, and then he went back to the lab and figured out a way to get even better again. He's the two-time reigning MVP of the greatest basketball league on the planet. He is, in his own peculiar way, the best basketball player in the world. Hard to believe.

For 24 GP's, whodat?