Today’s soundtrack: stomp your feet
Today at 6:02pm: thirty blocks down, thirty blocks to go


There are some things in life you feel certain you won’t do, but years later you find yourself doing it.

Today I joined a gym. (You can’t see it, but friends of mine who know me well are reading this and making a “What the fuck?” kinda face.) The concept of spending money to lift heavy things in a room full of strangers, then washing off in a prison-style shower always seemed stupid to me. I know some people use gyms as pick-up joints, and I sure am single but something tells me I’m not going to meet Mrs. Right on the stairmaster. You only have to take one look at the average NYC gay man in a gym to realize how far below the standard you are.

I got this flyer in the mail that said THE TIME IS NOW! and GOLD’s GYM and $39.99/MONTH written inside a little yellow explosion. Words that come in explosions are not meant to be taken lightly, so I saved the flyer for Lam, who is a gym nut.

“No thanks,” he said, citing the remote John Street location. (John Street is down in the financial district, the southern tip of Manhattan; you only go there if you work on Wall Street.) “Why don’t you use it?”

I was in the middle of throwing it out when he said it, but something about the way he said it made me hang on to it.

When I was a freshman in college I was in a dorm with a lot of jocks. I weighed less than 120 pounds and the first time I had to take my shirt off in front of them they all laughed.

A year later I’d dropped out of school (long story) and had a lot of time on my hands. I waited tables, drove an ambulance and started going to this nearby gym. I didn’t really know what to do so I just went in and rode the bikes while watching MTV. (It was the early ‘90s, we used to watch that shit.)

There was this huge German-esque guy who worked there named Stefan who had legs like tree trunks and a neck the same diameter as his head. He always wore a bright red track suit and exuded this positive attitude. In retrospect he must have been ‘roided out of his mind, but every time you saw the guy he was psyched.

One day Stefan pulled me off the bikes (literally) and dragged me over to the free weight area. “Okay man, let’s DO IT!” he said, clapping his hands once. The shockwave reverberated through my hollow chest.

“Uh...do what?” I said.

“Bench press, baby!” He prodded me over to the bench and started loading weights onto the bar. I should point out here, at this point in life I don’t even think I could have done a push-up. It’s a miracle I got laid in my teens at all.

I did as he said, laid down and tried to lift the bar off the rack. Couldn’t do it, couldn’t move it. He took some weights off. I tried again, same result. He took more weights off.

When I finally managed to hoist the bar off of the supports...it was just the bar, which weighed only thirty-five pounds. And I could barely get the thing back off my chest. But Stefan stood over me, barking jock talk and letting out a thunderclap every once in a while, and I squeezed out a few pathetic reps. After I couldn’t do it anymore, he waited two minutes, then made me do it again. And again, and again. The last set I could barely put it up even once. It was pretty humiliating, just struggling under this empty bar with all these other people in the gym.

Next he ran me through some free weight exercises, with similar results. After thirty minutes I was drenched in sweat. Stefan gave me an enthusiastic clap on the back (almost caving my ribcage in) and I think if I wasn’t already leaning on a wall I would’ve fallen over. “Come back on Thursday,” he said, all psyched. Afterwards I went out to the parking lot and sat in my car for a couple minutes before starting it up and driving home.

I did come back on Thursday, and Stefan continued torturing me. Then I came back every Monday and Thursday. When I could put the bar up for twelve reps, Stefan started loading weights on it, more and more, until we hit a weight that I could only put up once or twice. “We gotta shock your muscles into growing,” he said, explaining that those one or two barely-possible reps would do more for me than lifting a low weight dozens of times.

I remember the day we hit 85 pounds because Stefan was standing over me and yelling “Eighty-five! When you started you couldn’t even lift the bar, and this is almost three times as much!” Mathematically speaking that’s not quite true, and 85 pounds was still only the strikingly little 25-pounds weights on either end of the bar, but I appreciated his enthusiasm.

One day he loaded the large 45-pound weights on either side of the bar. I thought for sure I wouldn’t be able to get it off but I squeezed out two, then another barely-possible two. “That’s 125!” said Stefan, slapping his hands together with enough force to crush a walnut. “That’s more than you weigh!” he chortled, and this time the math was right.

By the end of my time there I could do dips and pull-ups ‘til the cows came home. The various rowing exercises Stefan had run me through put little triangular lats under my arms. I put some meat on my chest, my back broadened somewhat and my shoulders rounded out. My arms got thicker, my forearms got hard. I was still never going to be bulky, but I was a fuck of a lot better off than I was six months earlier.

Then I went back to college, art school to be specific, where there wasn’t many opportunities to engage in feats of physical strength. We’re all sitting in a room smoking and playing with clay, for fuck’s sake. Three weeks into the semester when I moved into my first apartment in Brooklyn I noticed my crates of records had gotten lighter, that was about it.

In the fifteen years since, I haven’t touched weights more than twice. I took up a martial art called Hapkido but it gives different results than a weight room. The art I’m studying now, Ba Gua, uses even less strength, and any muscle mass Stefan grafted onto my skinny 19-year-old ass has long since atrophied.

So today I signed up at the gym. There were no Stefan-type instructors I could see, all of the trainers look too cool for school, the kind of guys who will probably only help you if you are a hot blonde. The attractive and completely unfriendly female receptionist who signed me up said you have to pay extra if you want someone to spot you or help you.

Still, starting in May they’re offering a lot of classes like yoga, stretching, cardio and all that stuff, free for members. I figure yoga classes alone could easily cost forty bucks a month, and here I’m getting more than that.

I took a quick look around the facilities. Everything is in a temporary room because the gym is still being built out and won’t be finished until May. In the free weights area, amidst the contraptions I saw a single bench press in the middle of the room, with an empty bar perched up on the rack.

So I’m going to buy a red track suit and come in here for the first time, clap my hands once and say “Let’s DO IT!”

Really I’m not.

I just hope I can lift that fucking bar.

Today’s soundtrack: fellas, things done got too far gone
Today at 12:32pm: having a keyboard snack while the mouse cools off


My camera is fucking falling apart. I cleaned the lens pretty thoroughly with some solution I bought at the camera store, but those spots keep showing up on my photos; even worse, the auto-focus now appears to be crapping out, the LCD occasionally clicks off and goes totally black, and my pictures come out blurry unless the light is sharp and dramatic.

The spots appearing on my photos would be fine if I was shooting leopards, people with measles or Kwame, but now I find myself seeking out shots with enough shadow to hide the lens blemishes. Sucks, man, this used to be a great camera. Maybe taking pictures of the sun for forty-five minutes wasn’t such a good idea.

Got my money’s worth out of it, though. I carried it in my right front pocket through most of Europe, as well as a train trip across the ‘States and a week of urban hiking through Tokyo. Storing the camera near your hot, sweaty crotch with all its attendant humidity and friction is probably not what Canon’s engineers had in mind, but I didn’t expect it to ass-out in under three years. I spent good money on this thing, you know?

Since it’s been a few years, I figured the price would have come down on this model dramatically. But during my lunch break at The Corporation today, I looked it up online and found they don’t even make the shit anymore! It’s an SD-10, and now they make something called the SD-30. I guess at some point there was an SD-20 I missed.

The SD-30 is expensive, fancy-looking with frivolous colors and has five megapixels. But I don’t want or need five megapixels, or the stupid colors; I want a small, simple rectangle that focuses when I tell it to. Who the hell wants a bright red camera? What am I, showing the thing off at my bridge club?

Nevertheless I will have to get a new camera, and I’ve got an idea to try to pay for it using what I shot with the old camera. I don’t know if it will work but it can’t hurt to try. The plan is this: To sell desktop photos for people’s computers. I’ll put an assload of thumbnails up, and if anybody wants the high-res version to use as their desktop, it’ll be 99 cents through PayPal. What do you think?

Today’s soundtrack:
well you know the blues got pregnant
and they named the baby Rock & Roll

Today at 10:02pm: headphones, beer



Tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning I have to go see the Tax Man. Not the IRS guy, but the accountant I’ve been going to for the past five years. I imagine I’m not one of his more desirable clients; I’m a professional drifter and pay the rent however I can, end result being I’ve got this fucking stack of 1099s. If I had them in my breast pocket and someone shot me, they would stop the bullet.

The government doesn’t take the taxes out of 1099s, so soon I’ll have to cut a fat check I can’t afford. Sometimes I’m really happy with my life, but April 15th is never one of those times.

Today’s soundtrack: you treat me too much wrong
Today at 11:02am: in the freezing cold, having a twelve-block cup of coffee



With thirty gigs of music under this keyboard, one week I’m into this, next week I’m into that. Lately I’m spending a lot of time in the blues section. Not the sad, low kind of blues, though that kind is good too, but more of the rollicking kind, you know, the shit that Elvis ripped off. I love how blues lyrics are imprecise in syntax but dead-to-rights in meaning.

Here’s a list of the sixteen best blues songs I own, in case your taste is like mine. Each of them is worth tracking down but are not for the casual listener; if you don’t already like the blues I doubt any of these will sweep you up after a single listening. And as always, if you go to the trouble of acquiring these tracks and decide you don’t like ‘em, well...keep it to your damn sugar self.

I wonder what’s so ill about it.

If you’re ever in a parking lot in Detroit at midnight on a Sunday, and a hippie drives up to meet you in a VW Rabbit pickup truck, you know you’re about to have a very different kind of experience.

Let me back up a minute.

Nighttime on a Michigan highway, Marcia’s driving.

“Shit, I took [route] 96,” she says. “We were supposed to take 94.”

I break out the directions Steve had written out for us, refer to a map in the door pocket and work out an alternate route. But once we get inside Detroit we spend fifteen minutes going in circles, as the map doesn’t indicate one-way streets, and the road we’re trying to stay on has more dead-ends than a Karl Rove probe.

The only time I ever saw Detroit was in 1993, and it was scary-looking. Now, thirteen years later...it’s scary-looking. An urban wasteland, bombed-out buildings.

Manhattan, or Chicago, or any other city-city has a grid of streets outlining blocks filled with buildings. Detroit’s got the grid of streets, but the blocks are mostly flat and empty--just chewed-up earth with just a few lonely, dilapidated structures on them. It looks like the aftermath of something, like a mathematically-selective bomb went off that flattened 75% of each block instead of destroying the whole thing. There are very few signs of human life.

Every so often you see a massive, huge, freestanding brick building, and the whole thing is boarded up, all twenty, thirty storeys of it. To me this speaks volumes; when huge buildings are abandoned it reinforces the impression of mass flight.

So we’re driving down this one very dark, desolate street. If Marcia and I had a dead body in the trunk and were looking to drop it somewhere, this is the street I’d pick. But she turns into a parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence.

Across the street is a house, a single house by itself, with a bunch of hard-looking dudes standing in front of it. The type of guys where like, if Marcia suddenly had a heart attack and told me I had to run and “go get help” I would run in the opposite direction from them.

A car drives past and slows down. “Is this your boy?” I ask, eyeing the car nervously as it turns into the parking lot next to us. It’s a rusty VW Rabbit pickup truck.

“Yep,” she says.

Her friend gets out. He’s a lanky, crunchy hippie guy with a peaceful air about him. He seems like the kind of guy who would know what to do if you came across a sparrow with a broken wing or a bear cub that had lost its mother.

His name is Kevin (I’m 90% on that) and he walks us over to a gate in the chain-link fence. It’s freezing and pitch-black out, by the way, no lights. Marcia unlocks the fence and the three of us walk through it. I close it behind us.

“Should I lock this?” I say, trying not to sound like a nervous pussy.

“Nah,” says Kevin. I want to lock it, but from what I understand this is a farm; some animal might attack me and I might have to run back out through this bitch in a minute, so I leave it.



We walk out into this open dirt area. I really can’t see too well but there’s a small red barn to our right. Kevin unlocks it and we go inside. He turns the lights on. I’m expecting to see animals, but there aren’t any; just a collection of well-used implements hanging on the walls, a wheelbarrow and a bunch of, you know, farm stuff. Smells farmy.

We walk through the barn and back outside through a door at the end. I follow the two of them across this expanse of dirt, and we reach another chain-link fence. Marcia starts unlocking a gate in it. I can’t see shit, but as my eyes adjust I make out all these shapes moving behind the fence and I almost let out the most shrill, ladylike scream you ever heard.

There are all these animals on the other side of the fence: A half-dozen goats, a big, puffy sheep, a Shetland Pony, and then this tall-ass horse comes over like “Yo, whatup?” They look so funny together, because they are all different sizes. The horse is so tall. I know these guys are probably all friends, but I’m sure the horse can’t really relate to the goats and the goats have no idea what the horse goes through.

Marcia goes through the gate, selects a specific goat (how she distinguishes them, I have no idea) and shoos it back out through the gate. The goat seems psyched to be outside and trots towards the barn happily, clearly knowing where it’s going.

The three of us follow the goat into the barn and shut the door. (There are some bad movies that start like this.)

There’s this metal bench-type thing in the barn, and the goat jumps up on it automatically. One end of the bench has a little stockade, and the goat, without any guidance from us, sticks its head through it. Kevin mounts a feed-bucket near its face and the goat starts eating. Marcia starts talking to the goat, “Hi Tabitha, hi Tabitha.”

Marcia and I sit on these chairs on either side of the bench, and I get my first really good look at the goat. It’s roughly dog-sized, but with skinny legs and it’s really round around the middle, with rough fur. If someone submitted this to me as a design for a new animal I’d send them back to the drawing board; it doesn’t look very well-thought-out.

Marcia has two mason jars. She hands me one.

Then she starts milking the goat.

I look over at Kevin. “Um, what do I do?” I ask.

“Just gotta get in there,” he says, looking at the goat with that peaceful expression on his face. This reminds me of studying martial arts, where you ask the master what to do, but he wants you to figure it out yourself.

I scrunch down and lean forward to check out the hardware. Just forward of the goat’s rear legs, it’s got these two round sacs hanging down, one on Marcia’s side, one on mine. Hanging from the bottom of each sac is what looks like a little black chili pepper. I don’t see any genitals, I guess they’re aft of the sacs.

Marcia’s already milking the thing like it’s nobody’s business; I can hear the periodic stream of milk hitting the inside of her jar, tssss, tsssss, tsssss.

I grab the chili pepper and gently squeeze it. Nothing happens. I squeeze it harder, worried I’m going to hurt the goat. Nothing happens. The goat keeps eating.

“Use your mouth,” Marcia jokes, laughing. But there is no way I am blowing a female goat. I mean, I just met it.

“You’ve got to seal the nipple off at the top, like this,” says Marcia, squeezing her index finger and thumb together. “Then you squeeze the milk out with the bottom fingers.”

I grab the chili pepper up near the top of it, touching the sac, and am surprised at what I feel: the sac is very warm and feels much like a human breast. My first year in college I dated a girl who was a 36-D and it kind of feels like that. I mean, except for the three-inch nipple and the goat hair.

After a couple minutes of monkeying with it, I manage to get a couple drops of milk. Marcia says some words of encouragement but clearly I am not a natural. Milking a goat is not intuitive at all, if you just squeeze the chili pepper all the milk goes back up into the sac and nothing comes out.

A few minutes later I’m kind of getting the hang of it, but I can’t get the direct, ample squirts Marcia’s getting. I’m pretty clumsy with it and several times I pull the nipple too far towards me, squirting goat milk directly up my sleeve.

I also can’t seem to get a consistent squeeze, like sometimes milk comes out, sometimes it doesn’t. The goat stops eating and turns its head to look back at me like “Yo, what the fuck are you doing?”

A few minutes later the goat stops eating again and just stares straight ahead, pissed off, I imagine. Then it starts trying to kick my hand away with its rear leg.

I stop for a moment, then try again. But every time I go to touch the goat it kicks at me. I feel a weird sense of rejection. Does “no means no” apply to goats?

Marcia and I switch sides, and that’s a little better. Soon the side of the goat I’m on is empty, as Marcia’s cleared most of the sac out.

She milks the other sac through, then it’s time to switch goats. Marcia opens the barn door and walks outside while the goat and I follow.

The goat stops by a pile of branches and starts chewing them. I take the goat’s collar and gently pull her towards the animal enclosure, hoping she won’t bite me. She’s a little stubborn at first but gives up and trots toward the gate.

Marcia swaps the goat out for another one. The sheep is hanging out by the gate, maybe trying to make a break for it, and Kevin tells us its name is “Sweater.” I think that’s kind of like naming a cow “Steak” but Marcia insists it’s different.

The new goat ambles over to the barn excitedly. Inside, it hops up on the bench and sticks its head through the stockade. I’m not used to seeing goats so I don’t even notice something’s wrong with her, until Kevin points it out to me. “She doesn’t have ears,” he says, ruefully.

I look at the goat’s head, and sure enough, there are no ears. “What happened?” I ask, thinking it was a birth defect.

Kevin tells me, quietly: some local thugs sicced their pit bull on the goat.

“Why’d they do that?” I ask.

“’Cause they’re mean,” he says, shaking his head. Jesus. I try not to imagine what must have been a very ugly assault, the poor goat. On top of that the goat’s name is Princess, and for some reason I find this heartbreaking, like meeting a clumsy girl named Grace.

Kevin hooks up the feed basket, but this goat doesn’t eat right away; she keeps turning her head to check me out. Her eyes are pretty big, about the size of the dollar coins that come out of the Metrocard machines back home.

“This oughta be interesting,” says Kevin. “It’s tricky getting milk out of this one.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Her nipples are funky,” he says.

Marcia and I take up our positions and start milking. At first I can’t get anything, then I get the hang of it and start housing that shit. I’m getting big-ass squirts and making the tssss, tsssss noise in the jar. I guess I’m only good at milking goats with funky nipples.

This isn’t bad at all. It’s freezing in the barn but the goat’s sacs are really warm, and it’s strangely satisfying when you’re able to correctly grasp the chili pepper and evacuate all the milk. Soon I’ve got three-quarters of the jar filled.

“Try drinking it,” says Marcia. “Drink the milk.” I stop milking and look into the jar. The milk is perfectly white, kinda creamy-looking, but it’s not the only thing in there; there was some dirt on the bottom of the goat that fell in and is floating on the top, along with some goat hair.

“Get the fuck outta here,” I say.

“Drinnnnk ittt,” she says.

Well, what the hell. I lift the jar to my lips and start drinking.

It’s actually not terrible. It’s kind of like drinking a harsh liquor--the first sip is pure misery, like you’re tossing a goat salad, then after that it’s smooth sailing. And I guess it doesn’t get any fresher than this, I mean it was inside the animal not twenty seconds ago.

We continue milking, but there’s a problem; we’ve filled the only four jars we have, and the goat still isn’t empty. So we have to start drinking down what’s in the jars, to make space. I take a couple sips but Kevin, man, he starts chugging that shit down like it’s going out of style.

After we finish milking Princess we take her back to the pen. The goats are pretty excited and start jumping up and down when she comes in, like she’s bringing them tales of the outside world.

“Now it’s time to get the eggs,” says Marcia. I’m thinking Goats lay eggs? but then she locks the gate. I follow her back across the dirt expanse to another gate, which she unlocks. After we go through it I can see a little frozen pond and all these sleeping ducks, maybe a dozen. Marcia goes over and starts talking to them and they hop up and start running around, all wahhhhhhh, wahhhhhk. “Sorry, go back to sleep,” she says, walking past them.

She opens yet another gate, then we’re inside this chicken coop. Kevin turns a wan light on. There’s two rows of makeshift shelves with chicken-sized compartments in them, and a shitload of squawking chickens. I expected them to all be sitting in their compartments like in Chicken Run, but they’ve all moved to the side and out of our way. What a bunch of sellouts! Like Go ahead, take all our children.

“Reach in and get some eggs,” says Marcia. The compartments are dark but I stick my hand in one, cautiously; I think I read somewhere that chickens will crap on top of their eggs, and just because I’m chicken shit doesn’t mean I like touching it.

“I got nothin’,” I say, my fingers brushing against nothing but thatch. I stick my hand into the compartment next to it, tapping around with my fingers until I brush something hard. I pull an egg out, and while it feels like a little victory I avoid making eye contact with the chickens.

In the coop next door are turkeys (they’re much bigger than the chickens and more malevolent-looking, if they came towards me I’d probably panic and kick one) and Marcia checks them for eggs. Next we check the duck coop next to the frozen pond. I can’t believe they sleep on the ice like that.

Back in the barn, Marcia and Kevin make some notes in a big white binder labeled MILK AND EGG DATA. We’ve got a total of two chicken eggs and a duck egg. They offered them to me but I declined, and Kevin said he didn’t have much food so he would make an omelette out of them, which I wish I’d thought of.

Then we lock everything up, say our goodbyes and get in our cars. There are two jars of goat milk between my feet, which Marcia plans on pasteurizing later tonight.

As we drive off I survey the surrounding area, the urban desolation; then I spot, get this, a fucking pack of wild dogs, five deep and calmly trotting down the street like they own it. It’s some Mad Max type of shit out here.

The next morning I step outside Marcia’s house--which is enormous, by the way, it’s like that house in The Shining--and it’s blizzarding. I figure for sure I’m gonna get stuck in Michigan for a fourth night, or God really is going to send a guy named Vito to permanently alter my gait with an axe handle.

But we make it to the airport fine and my flight is on time, proving my predictions incorrect.

I’m not great at forecasting what’s going to happen. Case in point, I went to talk to high school kids in Ann Arbor, and as a result of record snowfall in New York, ended up on an urban farm milking goats in Detroit. Didn’t really see that one coming.

For the second morning in a row I woke up in a hotel room in Ann Arbor, having been snowed in a day longer than I’d planned for. I got dressed, put some bathroom coffee on, awakened all the hookers and shooed them out of the room. “Begone, you sleepy hookers,” I cried, pulling garter belts off the ceiling fan and drinking my coffee. “You too, Sergio.”

I packed, checked out and walked across the street to a Wendy’s. I normally wouldn’t go to Wendy’s in the morning but this one had a Tim Horton’s inside and I loves that shit. Two donuts later Original Steve came to pick me up. Steve is this Korean cat from Peoria, making him the only Peorian Korean Steven I know.

I had lunch with the two Steves and Chris at a restaurant in town, then headed by myself to Espresso Royale, a cafe with wireless internet. I spent a few hours making fortresses out of all the couches, then got around to doing some editing work for Theme Magazine. Original Steve had agreed to come back around 3:30pm to take me to the airport.

Unbeknownst to me it’s still snowing in New York, and around 2pm my phone beeps. The text message is from Northwest Airlines, and it says

FLIGHT 648 FROM DETROIT FORT WAYNE TO NEWARK HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Then the battery symbol starts blinking; I didn’t bring the charger because I was only supposed to be in Michigan for 18 hours. I call the airline, speaking quickly. “When’s the next flight?”

“Tomorrow, 6:44am,” they say.

So, looks like I’m spending yet another night in Michigan. If I was a churchgoing man I’d think God doesn’t want me to go back to New York. Then again, if God really wanted to keep me here, there are simpler ways to go about it than dumping 29 inches of snow on New York; if I was God I’d probably just send a guy named Vito to break my legs.

I call Steve (Second Steve, the department director) and leave him a message apprising him of the situation, wondering if U-of-Mich is gonna spring for a third night in a hotel. Those hookers ain’t cheap, you know? Then I call Original Steve and tell him I won’t be needing that ride to the airport today.

Original Steve’s with his girlfriend Marcia, and they call back in minutes. “Marcia lives in Detroit,” he says. “She says you can crash at her place tonight, then she can just drop you off at the airport in the morning.”

“Is that cool?” I say.

“It’s cool,” he says, “but she says you have to help her milk some goats.”

“Get the fuck outta here,” I say.

“I’m serious,” says Steve. We agree to hash out the details later, and click off.

So basically, Marcia is an activist living in Detroit. Last night when we all went out to the bars, she told me about these “urban farms” they have up there, to provide the underserved inner city with fresh produce and teach job skills to the underprivileged. She’s involved with the farms, has farm duties. Me, I’m not sure I’ve even ever seen a goat.

By late afternoon I’ve been at the cafe for hours, editing until my eyes bleed. I fought valiantly to retain my couch fortresses but they’ve all been sieged.

My dying phone rings, it’s Marcia. “I’ve got an extra ticket to tonight’s performance,” she says. (“Tonight’s performance” is a U-of-Mich cultural show; Marcia does spoken word.)

“I’m down,” I say. “What time?”

“I gotta go running, so I’ll pass by the cafe on the way back and pick you up,” she says.

“Running?”

“I’m training for a marathon,” she explains.

Man. I try remember what it was like, having energy.

A couple hours later it’s dark out and the two of us are walking across Ann Arbor. Steve is in some kind of meeting and won’t be free until after the show.

“Hold these,” says Marcia, handing me a pair of running shoes. I hang onto them while Marcia slaps all her pockets.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“The thing I wrote for tonight,” she says. “Haven’t memorized it yet.”

“How big will the crowd be?” I ask.

“About a thousand,” she says.

So I’m walking behind this girl carrying her shoes and thinking Holy shit. Here she is cool as a cucumber right about to perform in front of a thousand people. Me, two days ago I’m getting bent out of shape to give a lecture to seventy high school kids. Some people can just get up there no problem; I can only get up there with a problem.

We get to the student center where the event is, and it’s like a little mini-Lincoln-Center. Marcia disappears into the stage entrance and I head into the main lobby. “You’ll be sitting up in the balcony,” Marcia had told me, handing me a pink ticket-thingy.

The portly woman blocking the staircase to the balcony stops me. “Performers only,” she says. I show her the pink ticket and she steps aside.

I climb the steps, take a bridge to the balcony and pull the door open. Stepping through it, I experience the sudden disorientation that comes when you step into a very high place with seats and ceiling both angled sharply down towards the stage. (Photo up top.)

I take a seat, and the balcony starts filling up with large groups of people dressed in costumes and all belonging to one ethnicity or another. I flipped through the program to see what was on. U-of-Mich is pretty damn multicultural; some of the student groups performing tonight were Armenian, Korean, Irish, Filipino, Greek, Arabic and Indian.

People keep filing in, the space is getting full. Sitting there by myself in this massive auditorium and looking at all these groups, I suddenly have one of those awful moments where everything zooms out and you realize how truly alone in the world you are. I felt uncomfortable and fidgety for several moments, then the feeling passed.

Marcia and her spoken word partner went on first. She’s kind of a low-talker so I was worried I wouldn’t be able to hear her, but she projected and spat her lines out with the ease of a natural performer, despite not having memorized her piece. I gotta fuckin’ learn to do that.

I checked out a few of the performances after Marcia’s piece, then she came up to the balcony and we left to get some chow. Steve got out of his meeting and joined us.

Afterwards, the three of us went for coffee at a typical collegiate cafe. I was amused to hear the waitress and a patron earnestly discussing Russian literature. “When Chekhov writes that she’s ‘unforgivably happy,’ does he mean he can’t forgive her for her happiness, or she can’t forgive herself?” asks the wide-eyed waitress.

“Well, that’s a good question....” says the customer, furrowing his brow.

Ah, college kids.

I don’t mean to make fun, I mean these kids know more about Russian literature than I ever will. For someone who aspires to be a writer, I am not very well-read; I associate Chekhov with Mr. Scotty, not Tolstoy.

Marcia and I hit the road around 10pm. I love roadtrips, but Detroit is only 30 minutes outside of Ann Arbor so this won’t be a long one.

It’s freezing out, there isn’t much traffic and the roads are dark. Our little green Ford hurtles down the highway.

I’ve done these college gigs how many goddamn times, and I still get crazy nervous before each one. At the hotel, I get up an hour earlier than I need to, sheer nerves, and make some coffee in the bathroom. I’m not sure why the coffeemaker’s in the bathroom but that’s how Marriot rocks it.

I suck the coffee down and turn the TV on. “We are in for some snow, folks!” says the Michiganian weatherman. He goes on to reveal that New York is due for a shitload, more than a foot. I hope my flight back home won’t be delayed. I turn the TV back off and finish tinkering with the speech. Sometimes it’s better not to fuck with things but you just can’t help yourself.

After about an hour, it’s time. I put my black College Speech sweater on, grab all my shit and head down the hall. In the lobby, I check out and enjoy a bowl of complimentary Fruit Loops, which does nothing to settle my stomach.

The department director comes to pick me up at the hotel. Though it’s a different guy from the night before, he has the same name, making this the second time in two days I’m getting driven somewhere by a guy named Steve. A guy could get used to this. (Unless that guy’s name was also Steve, which might get weird.)

Me and seventy high school kids in an amphitheater for thirty minutes.

The speech didn’t go great, I definitely should not have kept messing around with it. Instead of delivering a coherent, well-constructed oration, it sounded more like I was standing up there and spitting out a bunch of random factoids I thought these kids should know. Afterwards the college kids who set the gig up said it was okay, but I know the truth.

When it comes to college gigs, I can always see the wrong in what I’ve done, but rarely the right, and yet gigs still come in. I guess it’s better than if everything was the other way around.

After the gig I’ve got four hours until my flight back to New York, so Steve, the director, and his girlfriend Chris, an activist from Chicago, take me out to lunch in Ann Arbor. The snow keeps coming down, so I call the nice people at Northwest to see what the deal is.

“Delayed, with a chance of cancellation,” says the airline rep. I don’t like the thought of being stuck at Detroit Fort Wayne, so I treat this as a cancellation.

“Don’t worry,” says Steve, the director. “We can put you up for another night.”

Sure enough, my flight is later cancelled. Looks like I’ll get to know Michigan a little better.

I spend most of the afternoon in a coffee shop with Chris, working on editing for Theme Magazine. Deadline time is this weekend, so it’s a good thing I brought the laptop.

The evening finds me back at the Marriot Courtyard. Shirtless, lying flat on my back and admiring my new potbelly. Some people get pets, but I decided on a potbelly; easier to take care of. A potbelly is like a cat, if you feed it a couple times a day it will never leave you. My friend Handsome Dan says there’s nothing worse than a fat skinny guy, but I can feel myself going down a road I probably won’t return from. When people next to me on airplanes start complaining, maybe then I’ll worry about reducing.

I’m in a different room from last night, and this one has two double beds in it. To help the University of Michigan get their money’s worth, I am reclining on one bed now and will switch to the other one when it’s time to go to sleep. Which won’t be for some time yet; those crazy college kids are taking me out for drinks tonight.

To kill time, I flip through cable stations. Unlike my television at home, this one is huge, has a remote control and actually gets a clear signal. I end up watching a fascinating program called “Captured,” where they show footage from that crazy L.A. bank robbery in the ‘90s, the one with the 40-minute shootout.

Ten minutes into it, the phone rings. “Hello?”

“Hey Rain, we’re outside.” It’s the college kids, coming to pick me up.

I get out of bed, carefully; the potbelly is sleeping on my stomach and I have to be careful not to wake it.

Thirty minutes later we’re in an Ann Arbor jazz bar. I put my cigarette out on the way in, but once I got in, realized people were smoking. Holy shit! Booze and smokes is so much better than booze alone.

With me in the bar are Steve (Original Steve, the guy who picked me up at the airport), his girlfriend Marcia, an activist from Detroit, and a student named Theresa, which I pronounce “Therese” because that’s how people said it where I grew up.

Tonight it’s blues night, and a three-man band is up on stage, banging it out. Kind of a strange scene--the guitarist and bassist are two white guys not younger than sixty. The drummer is a redheaded kid of maybe sixteen, and his simultaneously frightened and glazed expression suggests he has been kidnapped by these men and forced to play drums in a blues band for several weeks.

For several hours we hop from bar to bar. I can’t remember the last time I went bar-hopping, and it’s actually kind of fun. I also find out that Therese, whose idea this was, first worried that they should take me to an “old person’s” place. “What do people his age do?” she wondered. I told her I normally have a glass of warm milk at 9:30 and am in bed by ten.

By the end of the night we wind up at the Fleetwood Diner, a beautifully grimy shitbox greasy spoon, which has to be one of my favorite types of places in the world. An honest-to-god diner. It’s packed, smoky, filthy, and the kind of place you can only get by being around for forty years and not changing a thing. You occasionally see places like this in Jersey, but there’s nothing like it left in Manhattan. I order something called “Hippie Hash” (food, not weed) and the group of us chow down.

They drop me back off at the hotel around 4am, and by 4:10 I’m lying in the second bed. I flip the TV on and am thrilled to see the bank robber show I was watching is on a loop, and is playing almost exactly where I left off. God I love cable.

Overall it was a good day, even if my speech could have been better, and tomorrow I’d be going back to New York--or so I thought.

Causality and the power of random experiences never cease to fascinate me. Record snowfall in New York means I wind up at an urban farm in Detroit, where I had experiences with animals. If you snickered when you read that, well shame on you.

Few months ago I got booked for a college gig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Only it’s not a college gig, it’s a high school gig. Some kind of conference set up by students at the University of Michigan for February 11th. Want me to talk to some local teens about going into alternative careers, and hey, it’s right up my alley.

Maybe in another ten years I’ll be able to lecture on what it’s like to fail at alternative careers. That will be short lecture; it will just be slides of me getting progressively skinnier while the pile of paper in the wastebasket behind me gets bigger and bigger.

The gig is for February, Saturday 11th. I decide I’ll fly in the Friday night before, so I can get a good night’s rest. The school can only afford to put me up for one night, so I have to fly back home on Saturday, sometime after the gig. Fine with me. So last Friday night, I put a backpack on and trek down to WTC, to take the PATH train over to Newark Airport.

I don’t know why, on airplanes, I still find myself hoping some hot girl is going to sit next to me. It never happens but you still find yourself wishing in the jetway.

Then I get into my seat, and minutes later see some big, sweaty, massive bastard coming down the aisle and I just know. I just know that this sonofabitch is 17-D. I’m 17-C.

Sure enough, he grunts and points, and I get up to let him slide in. The two of us sit down and it feels like he’s more in my seat than his. We’re on one of those tiny-ass commuter jets with two rows of two and this is absurd. It’s absurd that me and a guy who can probably lift this plane if it has a flat tire are allotted two seats of identical size right next to each other. Whenever you send a package, they weigh and measure it to make sure they can fit it on the plane. They need to start doing the same with humans because we are basically freight.

But they’ll never do it, because we’re freight that can talk and complain and vote for congressmen and make educated purchasing decisions. Drives me nuts. When I am King, all airplanes will be empty and passengers will bring their own appropriately-sized seats, and you will space them out in a configuration that’s comfortable for everybody. Or better yet, I’ll fill the plane with those multicolored balls from Chuck E. Cheese and everybody will just sit wherever they fit. When it comes time to deplane it will look like you broke open a Contac.

Two hours later me and 17-D have become bonded on a molecular level, like when you press two bars of soap together really hard. I find myself praying that he will pick me up, rip me in half and eat me just to end the misery. I feel like the guy at the bottom of the Abu Ghraib pyramid.

From Newark to Detroit is not a terribly long trip, but at some point in the air we fly through a time warp. We left Newark only ten minutes late but got to Detroit forty-five minutes behind schedule.

After landing, we had one of those things where the plane has to wait on the tarmac. Sometimes the pilot rocks the mic and tells you what the problem is: “Sorry folks, but all the gates are full so we’ll have to wait until one of these planes pushes off.” The problem is always a logistical one, but it would be more exciting if it was something fantastical, like “Sorry folks, but an evil, gelatinous cube is rampaging through the concourse, absorbing and digesting people. We’ll have to wait until S.W.A.T. can trap him in a hydraulic press and crush him into harmless goo before we can approach the gate.”

The distance from the gate to the airport exit is far--it felt like I walked the length of friggin’ Eight Mile--and by the time I made it outside, 10:35pm, I was officially an hour late. After some wandering I finally found the college kids who came to pick me up, a girl and a guy. “I’m so, so sorry,” I say. I don’t know why, but whenever someone is picking me up at an airport and the flight is late, I always feel like it’s my fault, like I didn’t do a good job cleaning the runway beforehand and I caused the delay.

The girl is named C.C. and the guy is named Steve, so it’s good I don’t have a lisp. C.C. and Steve drive me the thirty minutes to Ann Arbor, then take me out to eat at a huge, bi-level pizza parlor with mission-style furniture. The midwest is weird, dude. I put a bacon cheeseburger into my gullet and we shoot the shit.

Next they drop me off at my hotel, a Marriot Courtyard. Suh-weet! In more ways than one--they put me in a suite. Two rooms! Once again I regret that I am not famous or successful enough to have an entourage. I need a posse and, like, sycophants. Sycophants with tricky rants in wicked pants and cliques of fans. Or maybe I just need a rhyme writer.

Or a speechwriter. I sit down at the desk, look at my speech for the next day and decide it sucks. I start to rewrite it, which I’ll later realize was, like the end of the previous paragraph, a mistake.