Item!

Rooster snuffed!

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Thunderbolt

I pass all of these great things in my neighborhood every morning on my walk to the train, like the father and daughter who ride to work/school every day on a tandem bicycle, or the tiny little boy who wears his Spider-man mask with his jacket and school uniform, but this is my very favorite:

I think that in its heyday it said “thunderbolt,” or possibly “thunderbird.” Definitely thunder-something. I think we all can respect that. Check out what’s on its side.

This is all somehow etched into the glass. I pause every time in awe.

This dude is:
1) Drinking Outlaw Heavy Beer.
2) Beckoning you to join him.

This dude lives on a hill in a creepy mansion with a graveyard and has some sort of vulture walking stick. Also, he has skeleton hair.

This one is sort of blurry because I got a little scared.

Obviously, I need to find the guy who owns this van and marry him, hopefully in front of the crowd of bikers from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. I’m cool with this, because the three things I’m into are guys with beards, hot young dads, and guys with vans, but for the first time in my life, I feel this twinge of anxiety that perhaps this guy might be more than I can handle. It’s like the sarcastic teenage boy who works in the Springfield Library who’s always reading Catcher in the Rye and makes Lisa Simpson giggle, “Ooh, if only some woman could tame him!”, only with a lot more broken glass, and, judging from what I could see through the windows, possibly jars of urine.

Stuff and stuff

• The next Cringe is in two weeks: Wednesday, May 4, again at Freddy’s. Email if you’re interested in reading, because it’s filling up quickly.

• I played some laser tag Sunday night with Evie and Aaron, who are really funny, although way more into Tony Danza than you might think. I’m sad to report that Red Team lost twice to Green Team, and that I personally witnessed some Red Team members running in the game zone, even though we had just promised not to run in the game zone. I love all the oaths involved with the laser tag scene. It’s like being straightedge, but with more gear. I played under the code name Kurt Loder, as a cross-country shout-out to my old war buddy Steve Gooch, but the most interesting code name had to be the mysterious “Smackahoe,” who was in reality a very calm and quiet young man named David. We knew his name was David because it kept running across the LCD screen on his belt buckle. (Pay attention here, those who are in the market to buy me birthday presents in less than two months: David bought his on the street at 23rd & Broadway.)

• Also seen at the arcade:
  
  Is it too dark for you to see his yarmulke? I hope not. Evie said, “I think that game he’s playing is called Gazatron.”
• Rooster update: sadly, rooster has still not been cooked or eaten. And apparently does not limit his crowing to the daylight hours, as learned while in the middle of an attempted serious conversation in my bedroom at 2 am Saturday night/Sunday morning. There was some big talk last week on Josh and Ryan’s part of a furious Hunter S. Thompson-esque coke binge that would result in them staying up all night and then finding the offending rooster at sun up, using only their ears, wits, and coke-addled instincts to seek out the bird, and then, by stealth, sneaking into whatever yard or house it was and killing it, either with a BB gun or by wringing its neck, but this plan quickly unraveled into Josh just emailing me the lyrics to “Rooster” by Alice in Chains once everyone was sober and at work again the next day.

• Did I ever show you this shirt, made by Dave G.? Because I meant to. I’ll refrain from sharing the other shot, showcasing my windblown Coney Island Easter Sunday hair. Man, internet. We really haven’t talked in awhile, have we?

Why Did I Move?, Exhibit 6

Someone in my neighborhood, someone very near my house, owns a pet rooster. In Brooklyn. A rooster. What a fucking adorable idea.

Why I Moved, Exhibit 47

The Oklahoma State Tax Commission homepage, written in Comic Sans, with a giant NASCAR banner at the top. Y’all ain’t got any animated gifs of turkeys or nothin we can slap on here too?

Awesome

Last night we somehow ended up walking in to the W Hotel at Union Square soaking wet from the rain, breaking into an upstairs ballroom, and sitting on the floor in the dark, drinking the two bottles of champagne Josh stole from the kitchen and playing Truth or Dare (or, as Colin kept insisting, Truth, Dare, Double Dare, Promise or Repeat) until 3 am. After-work drinks with Josh always have a tendency to turn into one of those nights where Colin shows up already drunk, you start off with a couple rounds of fishbowl-sized margaritas, sing Sweet Child O’ Mine to a roomful of ugly people, and go home eight hours later with a jacked hotel deadbolt in your purse, having to fish your bra out of Colin’s pocket before you get in the cab.

Eight hours. That’s like a work day’s worth of drinking. Why am I not getting paid for this yet?

Cringe

This Wednesday night, April 6, you should come to Freddy’s Bar and Backroom in Brooklyn and hear me and some other people read aloud from our actual real life honest to god old diaries. I would call them “journals,” because I’ve learned from Mike Toole that calling them diaries makes you a fag, but the thing about these diaries is that they’re from our adolescence, so they’re fagged alllllll the fuck out.

A few years ago I came across all of my old diaries, which I kept pretty faithfully for most of my young life, beginning in kindergarten, when I wrote in green Strawberry Shortcake marker, and ended each entry with “I wonder what will happen tomorrow!” One night I took a chunk of them from middle school over to the Byrnes’ house and read some selections to Erin while we both killed a box of wine, and then Brian came home and she made me read them to him too, and they both laughed so hard it was totally worth selling my thirteen year old self out. Then I did a brief run of Sarah’s Journal email lists, where I’d pick an excerpt and send it out in a mass email to my friends once a week. This got a huge response and the list grew to 60 people, 40 of which I didn’t even know, which was terrifying and humiliating and awesome all at the same time. Every week, right before I’d hit “send,” I would think, “Why the fuck am I doing this again? This is embarrassing!” And then all these people would write back and suddenly my new mission was to find a more humiliating entry for the next email. Which, I should be sad to say, was not hard. We shall not speak of the highlighter art on the backs of some of these notebooks.

My roommate Liz brought home some of her old zines from high school after Christmas, and after spending an evening reading some breakup poetry where rain rhymed with pain, our mission was clear: we needed to share this with the world, or at least Brooklyn. So come out to Freddy’s this Wednesday night, and please, laugh with us. Laugh at us. If you’re going to just laugh at us, though, you should at least buy us a shot before we get up there and bare our awkward souls to you.

(Also, it’s not just me and Liz reading. I don’t want to give too much away, but I know at least one person with an entry dealing with the anguish of having their 15th birthday fall on the same day as Kurt Cobain’s suicide, but also? One of their breasts is smaller than the other. WHAT TO DO.)

Cringe Reading Night
8:30 pm, Wednesday, April 6th
Freddy’s Bar and Backroom
485 Dean St.
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
2/3 to Bergen, any train in the world to Atlantic/Flatbush