Author: Gil

The most disturbing thing about this new study on binge-drinking-by-region isn’t that North Dakota has the highest rate in the country. Nor that Oregon residents prefer pot to alcohol. Nor is it the relatively obvious point that Utah has the lowest rate.

No, the most disturbing thing is the study’s definition of binge drinking: “Binge use was defined as consuming five or more drinks on the same occasion at least once in the last 30 days.”

No, seriously: Five drinks in a night is a binge?

This story about stars shopping at the Apple Stores in LA is a hoot. Especially when Levar Burton goes bananas:

“I finally caved in, only because I could see a vein pulsating in his forehead and I didn’t want to be the one responsible for causing the blind dude from Star Trek to have a stroke.”

On Thursday, I went up to Burlington, MA, near Boston, on business. Here’s what I wrote during the train rides there and back.

Taking the train up from NYC to Boston today to cover a pharmaceutical facility’s ribbon-cutting. I was supposed to drive up, stay over, and visit another site tomorrow, but there were all sorts of dire predictions of monstrous snow up here. Thursday’s company offered to put me on the Acela to get me up here, then send me home tonight.

No snow at all, naturally. Still, there’s been lots of rain, which would’ve made the drive pretty miserable.

My most recent train story involved that trip from Brussels to Amsterdam, where I encountered Thai prostitutes and some joint-rolling soccer fans. This ride’s been less eventful (just passed Providence, so there’s still time, I guess).

Watched Crimes and Misdemeanors on the laptop, and I’m listening to one of my favorite Mad Mixes (Big Bad BIO, which I listened to about 50 times during last June’s drive from San Francisco to San Diego) on the iPod.

I boarded the Acela at Penn Station, and we stayed underground for a bit. There was the customary ear-popping as pressure changed, and we came up out of the tunnel. A funny thing happened then; I had no idea where we were.

For a moment, I thought we might be by the West Side rail-yards, but surely we’d been underground too long for us to be that close to Penn Station. The heavy clouds and high walls made it tough to get a perspective. I looked west to see any NJ landmarks. In a few moments, I saw the Citi tower and realized that Manhattan was to our west. The train had gone under the Harlem River and come emerged outside Manhattan.

We went north, across the river from the FDR Drive, the route by which I usually bring Amy back to her apartment on Sundays. A few weeks ago, stuck in southbound traffic (the Triboro Bridge exit usually brings things to a halt), we noticed a facade for Icahn Stadium over on Randall’s Island. We’d been driving this road for a year, and neither of us had ever seen it before.

Today, the train was on the other side of it. The letters were backwards, and it felt for a moment like being backstage, as if this world was oriented for the view from the east side of Manhattan.

I’m not making profound observations about NYC, memory, or anything else. For that, you need to look to some of the work of Ben Katchor, a cartoonist best known for the “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer” strip. About 7 years ago, I attended “Carfare City,” one of Mr. Katchor’s slideshow/performance pieces. In it, he invented a travel agency that booked tours for people in their own neighborhoods. He was trying to convey how we need to make ourselves unaccustomed to our surroundings, how we need to become tourists in our lives, so as to find new depths, new mysteries, by approaching a familiar intersection from an unfamiliar direction.

Through this trip, there have been stretches where the rail line runs closer to Rt. 95. Amy & I drove up that highway on Saturday. Now the landmarks come at different angles, different speeds. I don’t have to pay attention to the cars, or my speed. This train reaches 150 mph at some points, but I don’t know if that happens during the NYC-Boston stretch.

A few years ago, I told my friend John that it’s a real achievement to see what someone else sees when they see you. Try to understand someone else’s impressions of who you are.

I first saw Crimes and Misdemeanors in an art theater in New Orleans, when I was a student at Tulane. Years later, I saw American Beauty in that theater, then got stuck walking the streets of NO,LA till 6am (don’t ask). This Mad Mix I’m listening to includes a song by an old girlfriend. Last night, I think I put the nail in the coffin of a friendship I’ve had since 1988. A week ago, I was in the Strand Bookstore, on the newly opened second floor. On a table, I saw a stack of copies of an art-book that another ex-girlfriend edited.

Once upon a time, the sight of it would’ve filled me with nostalgia, or longing, or something. But I just smiled and thought, “That’s funny,” and headed over to the Cedar Tavern for drinks with my buddy Elayne, before visiting Amy. My brother likes when I write ex-girlfriend stories, but I don’t really have any anymore. That’s a nice part about being happy and in love.

* * *

Coming into South Station in Boston today, I remembered that I took the train up here one other time, for the Drug Discovery Technology show back in 2000. The Big Dig project was still in effect, and there were construction tunnels near the rails as we closed into the station. The entry points were ladders, with official signs reading, “Glory Hole #[xx]” for each. I marveled. No signs this time.

On my way home now. Just passed Bridgeport, CT and just finished Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The plant visit went well. I interviewed the company’s president and got some good material for my parenteral manufacturing article.

A bunch of the attendees at the ribbon-cutting were readers of my magazine. Several knew my name and told me how much they like my editorials. That feels good. I imagine it’s not the same as having a guy come up to me and tell me that my novel changed his life, but I haven’t written a novel, so I don’t know.

I also made the acquaintance of a couple of people who may be able to write for my magazine. Plus, I met a guy who used to run a website about the World’s Strongest Man competitions (I think it was strongestman.com, which seems to be inactive). He told me some funny stories about how he and his buddy decided to “rank” (subjectively) the top U.S., Canadian, and international competitors on the site, and how the list instantly became the authority in that sport.

My cabdriver for the ride from Burlington back to South Station insisted that the U.S. needs to blow up Mecca. He wore a Red Sox cap and asked me my favorite baseball team. I said, “TheYankeesIcan’ttalkaboutit.” He understood.

I need a ton of sleep, since I didn’t get much last night and I’m in the midst of my 6th hour on trains today.

(or, Basquing in Stupidity)

You’ll never guess where I’ve gotta go for a conference this fall.

And I’d still rather go there than the original venue for the show, where I attended an expo last fall.

Neat article in the Times today about how forensic psychiatrists deal with the term “evil” in their diagnoses of some criminals.

I like to think that you don’t need to quantify a type of behavior to decide whether or not it’s evil, but I guess psychiatrists have to deal with that framework. Even then, it seems there are a bunch who won’t use the term. I have a ton of friends who shy away from calling someone evil, because it implies a moral judgement. Of course there’s tons of leeway about what people consider evil. But I believe that there’s also stuff that any honest person would recognize as evil.

Internet Bonus: When I call up the article, I get a vertical banner ad from Victoria’s Secret with a gigantic pair of boobs on display.

Back to those Paris Review interviews. I don’t even remember if any of the collected volumes I pillaged included the interview with Robert Penn Warren. I hadn’t read All the King’s Men at that point, and had no idea of how mindblowingly good that novel is.

Here’s a piece of Warren’s interview:

First thing, without being systematic, what comes to mind without running off a week and praying about it, would be that America was based on a big promise — a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that — the house, that’s quite a problem — particularly when you’ve got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America — you see, that saddle’s going to jump now and then and it pricks.

There’s another thing in the American experience that makes for a curious kind of abstraction. We suddenly had to define ourselves and what we stood for in one night. No other nation ever had to do that. In fact, one man did it — one man in an upstairs room, Thomas Jefferson. Sure, you might say that he was an amanuensis for a million or so people stranded on the edge of the continent and backed by a wilderness, and there’s some sense in that notion. But somebody had to formulate it — and we’ve been stuck with it ever since. With the very words it used.

Do you know the Polish writer Adam De Gurowski? He was of a highly placed Polish family; he came and worked as a civil servant in Washington, a clerk, a kind of self-appointed spy on democracy. His book America — of 1857, I think — begins by saying that America is unique among nations because other nations are accidents of geography or race, but America is based on an idea.

Behind the comedy of proclaiming that idea from Fourth of July platforms there is the solemn notion, Believe and ye shall be saved. That abstraction sometimes does become concrete, is a part of the American experience — and of the American problem — the lage between idea and fact, between word and flesh.

I’m pretty happy I found these interviews. Just reading them again throws me back 10 or 11 years, except without having to listen to Lucas with the Lid Off.

As promised, a couple of pix from Saturday’s trip to Providence. We went to Colt State Park and walked out by Narragansett Bay. The weather was beautiful (for the season).

Here are a couple of the water. I sorta like the “big empty” look of the sky, but you guys know that I’m crazy.

I hope there’s a statue of me someday, and that it shows me wearing a suit. This one’s of John H. Chafee, who helped the state acquire the Colt Park land during his tenure as RI’s governor in the ’60s.

This one’s of Paul, me, and the official VM girlfriend.

When I was a wee Virtual Memoirist in my grad school days in Annapolis, I used to read the Paris Review‘s Writers at Work interviews all the time. Borrowed a bunch of the collected volumes from the public libraries, and abused the photocopier at the MD DOT — where I taught GED skills to highway workers — to make copies of the best ones.

Now, the magazine is posting a whole ton of these great interviews on its site. For some bizarre reason (probably legal), they’re calling it the “DNA of Literature,” rather than “Writers At Work.”

Also, I’m not sure why certain of them haven’t been PDF’d (you really need to read the Faulkner one).

Today marks two years since I started Virtual Memories! (It wasn’t a very auspicious first post, I amdit).

The occasion really warrants a redesign of the blog (and the inclusion of some additional resources/side sites); maybe I can get to that sometime soon.

Meanwhile, you’ll have to content yourselves with my ramblings and occasional guest-posts. I’m always looking for more of those, with the intent of turning this thing into a little more of a magazine than a personal rant-fest. If my general plans for the rest of the year work out, I’ll have a bunch more time to work on that [twirls moustache, cackles hideously].

Off to Providence, RI on a day-trip. The official VM girlfriend gets to meet my buddies Paul & Deb. If I get any good photos from there, you’ll be the first to know.

My first trip up there, they took me out to see HP Lovecraft’s grave. I was hoping that the experience would confer some sorta funky powers on me, but Paul sez that it only gives you the ability to awe attendees at horror-cons. Oh, well.