I WANT A REMINGTON SL3

...aka, the greatest prologue ever, written by Tom Robbins for "Still Life with Woodpecker":

"If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

This is the all-new Remington SL3, the machine that answers the question, "Which is harder, trying to read The Brothers Karamazov while listening to Stevie Wonder records or hunting easter eggs on a typewriter keyboard?" This is the cherry on top of the cowgirl. The burger served by the genius waitress. The Empress card.

I sense that the novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3--although it writes much faster than I can spell. And no matter that my typing finger was pinched last week by a giant land crab. This baby speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard."

Seriously. Early Christmas present? Marriage proposal? Just wanna get me on your good side in case you ever need me down the line?

Remington SL3. Circa 1980.

12-9 on the tracks

talk about beat explorin'.

so i was on my way back from a day hitting up the fulton area business alliance office and the social service agencies in bed stuy, thinkin i got some pretty good leads..

and i'm on the C train going toward manhattan and we were coming into the nostrand ave. stop when we screech to a halt and the train operators start yelling at each other over the intercom. "12-9!" one of 'em says, and the other one goes "what's going on?!?"

everyone in the train just looks at each other like what the fuck? and the lady across from me says 12-9 means someone fell on the tracks. then an MTA employee runs in our car and over to the front left side. the dude was trapped there. right there.. under the car i was sitting in.

i said "holy fuck" and start freaking out a little because i think about that stuff happening but never think it's actually going to happen. i read a story when i worked at the brooklyn paper about a girl with a prosthetic leg that fell trying to move between cars on the N and got run over by 10 cars before the driver realized what was going on. they fired that guy. that story haunts me.

and now this? then they cut the lights. a bunch of people were moving into our car, and they weren't opening our doors and we had been in there for a few minutes, and everyone was crowding in to try to see the body. we were right in the heart of bed-stuy.

so finally they let us out and there are cops everywhere and i kind of walk away for a second and then i think... yo. i'm a JOURNALIST. aren't i supposed to be covering shit like this? so i emailed my professor and started snapping photos and my queasiness turned into... a goal.

one cop wouldn't let me back down into the station so i crossed the street and sweet-talked the other cop... then when i came back up both of 'em were standing together. they called me lois lane.

word around the street was the guy jumped. but we didn't print that. i couldn't get to any witnesses who were standing on the platform. and i don't know if the guy was okay or not, but they took him to king's county.

wild day. now i got more homework.

bring it on home to me.

I'm jammin Sam Cooke's 30 Greatest Hits and doin homework, sheets of paper spread out on the bed, and it feels juss like caalllege!

the west indian parade was so fuckin cool, and i blew off this awesome lady who wanted me to dress in costume and dance in the parade, all because i was so fuckin tired that i had to turn off life for the weekend and snooze it out.

but thank god for labor day! the parade was full of food, coconut-vodka pineapple slushies, and reggaeton. and real-tobacco spliffs with real rastas. then the bar, and then fuckin front row at big boi. sweet ass.

tomorrow my assignment is 'beat exploring'... just walk around the hood and talk to people. get to know what the fuck is going on. this is day two of my two-day week. i fucking love it.

but even without class i got a shit load to do, on the streets--which i much prefer.

i'm not gonna lie this sam cooke has got me wanting to fall in love.

first things first things first

represent houston like what, that damn whitney

texas officially has my heart.

the weekend was amazing. i walked around houston alone for the first time ever, and read some hemingway and flannery o'connor short stories in the public library, and got tatted up with ferrick, and ate hella mexican food. margs and migas.

i really like htown, but let me tell you, it's huge and we got lost everywhere we went. that was okay, though, because i haven't driven around for ages and we jammed texas country and george strait and smoked cigarettes with the windows down. got some good girl time.

i saw some of the best faces i know, and us girls line danced to a self-inflicted shania marathon on the jukebox, and the rest of the people at gene's better times didn't seem to mind too much.

danette was so beautiful at the wedding; her dress was perfect. i screwed up my face when i was standing up there; i regret it, can't help it. when i try not to be emotional it just comes out looking like my passport photo. :/

but we got our two step on afterwards, and i tried to peer pressure danette's gammy into taking a shot of patron, and we drank mezcal with a scorpion in it on the sly in the ladies locker room before stanky leggin it on the dance floor.

afterwards the party took it to the hampton inn, where shit hit the fan at Pool Party 2010. jim stepped on a broken bottle and left a trail of blood up to his room. josh fell asleep in the tub and flooded out the gym. i lost my shoes and went to denny's in my mardi gras kitties crop top and bare feet looking like the ultimate po' white. and then we popped a bottle of champagne inside the elevator on our way out, on accident.

in other words, i was in my element.

now i'm back on the grind, slipped right in and giddily stoked on the fact that i got the beat i wanted, in fort greene and clinton hill, plus BED STUY, which is like giving me a piece of chocolate cake and then smushing it in my face and smooching it off. unexpected badassness.

so much good stuff. and i haven't even started yet! YALL READY FOR THIS??

keep doin what you're doin

...you sexy thing.

I wrote down my edit of the Hell House, while it was still aflame in my mind, and then I took my computer into school to put new software on it and it was the only document I didn’t back up and they wiped everything off the computer.

I felt like Bukowski in that Hemingway poem; there were some crazy wild lines.

I got the second volume of Anais Nin’s diary and I was reading the preface in a Starbuck’s today when a girl started talking to me, trying to get me to let her take a nap in my apartment. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I look, to some people, like someone who would let you randomly take a nap in her apartment.

I said if I were her, I’d sleep in the park by the water, and then I felt like an asshole because that’s borderline implying she’s homeless, but if I were her, I really would sleep in the park by the water. I like going there sometimes myself and lying down in the little nooks of the park that is really just a long leafy trail.

On another note, I want an old school typewriter, the kind Dolly used in “9 to 5.” Not ancient. Like, from the 80s.

I got a ticket last night for laying down on the R train, a new habit I acquired this week to deal with these 12 hour plus days and hour-long commutes home. The cop was kind of a creep, the way he kept looking at me and acting like we were doing something personal and kind of cool, here you go, you just pay 50 bucks by this date here.

After they walked away I crumpled the ticket and threw it on the tracks. I have a feeling the day I end up in jail it will be for drinking that Mexican Coke on the drag in Austin or taking up two seats on the subway.

I’ll be back in Texas Wednesday by midnight, and right now my homegirls are on the beach in Galveston, and my heart is down there too. I’m thinking about the night me and Ash and Danette and Mike Golden danced around the bonfire to Bob Marley on the beach with the gallon jug of Jack.

My school life is starting, opportunities are forming, and while this past year I’ve been dancing in the conga line, it feels like it’s finally my turn to shimmy under the limbo stick. And I’ve been stretching.

back 2 school

it has been so crazy that there's been no time to do what it's all about: write.

i finished my internship at the brooklyn paper with a front pager on 'bay news'... the HELL HOUSE. these old school muh fuckers don't have their internet piece worked out so i have to wait to physically SEE it.

i need to go in there and get my notebook i left and pick up a copy. the hell house on voorhies avenue was quite an experience; that place was like a real-life haunted house. spooky. got the cops called on me, which makes me feel like a legit journalist. ;)

the editing process was so brutal i don't know what ended up in the damn thing. my editor, gersh, sent me a text this evening:

good luck. don't let them unteach you.

i bought a big boi ticket for september, fuck yeah. found out all our tweets are displayed real-time on a TV in the newsroom.

school is NUTS... it's almost too good to be true. expensive equipment, extensive training, and all the networking resources of all these bad asses, combined. this is going to be the craziest year.

first day of school was yesterday and i ended up home at midnight, drunk and full off the whopper bar. which apparently is a burger king strictly for whoppers and beer. insanity.

and we found a spot with 7 dollar pitchers. so we're pretty much set to go on this whole grad school thing.

werkin,twerkin

well vegas was dope. i did everything i needed to do (thread the brows, wax the ridiculous bush, cancel my wells fargo account, get me some button-downs) and everything i wanted to do (swim, mad QT with the girls, watch movies with my bro, fam time and godbaby's shower).

and on the last day, after breakfast with my fam and before the girls picked me up to do baby shoppin at target, i sat alone for a minute and got real sad. i won't be back there til december, and so many things are happening to so many people i care about, and shit's just speeding up. got a little nostalgic.

but there's nothing like sunsets on a hill in the desert, and my brother's green room has an awesome vibe, and i got 86'd from yet another bar in vegas. pretty soon there won't be any left for me to go to. wait. there are endless bars in vegas. fuck it.

now i'm back in bk and doin my internship thang and really loving it and it's the start of all things exciting and new. and i finally feel comfortable enough here to really enjoy this big ol' city.

and in a little less than a month i'll be having one last romp in texas with the homies, seeing love at its finest, and then my oh my, the wheels'll be turning..

busy means happy. and these dead things hanging to me are shedding.