ian glazer's tuesdaynight

L’shana tova. May we all be inscribed in the book of life. First off, birthday wishes to Fitz who is headed to SF. He will be spending his birthday with Tuesday Night West. The nice part about Tuesday West is that they are simul-cast with a three hour delay. So Tuesday West does a happy hour while we go out late. Supposedly, they are going to call Toledo… something to look forward to. Second, I have put new photos up on tuesdaynight.org. Go to the Overseen section and see what’s there. I haven’t scanned the deep fried turkey pictures yet, so stay tuned. Other than that, I’ll see you Tuesday at Toledo. i PS I just wrote the following piece. Lemmie know what you think. So, Tuesday morning I woke among evil. It’s happened before and I’m sure it will happen again. But like I said, I woke among evil. I could tell. It wasn’t the dull throbbing behind my eyes. It wasn’t really the ache in my gut that tipped me off. It was the smell. There is no smell quite like a Grey-side doctor’s office. “Awake,” asked the doctor as I wheezed into consciousness. “No.” “Good,” he responded putting down the newspaper, “I hate to lose a fare.” “Just meat and money to you?” I asked. “Yup. Just a fare.” I had paid off my place. Covered my debts. And had found myself will nothing particularly to do. Idle hands. Idle hands. “You’re lucky.” It certainly did not feel lucky. I’ve been shot before. You never feel lucky waking up from being shot. You feel like shit. Simply, like shit. And I, apparently, had been shot and was now waking up. Like shit. I coughed. “Yup, very lucky,” the doctor continued, “I don’t get it. Ever time you end up here it’s a frickin’ miracle. Like your vital organs just hop out of the way when a bullet hits you. Maybe you’re made of jello or a nasty fart that won’t go away. Someone somewhere must love you.” I coughed. Oddly, I didn’t feel to talkative. “Yup, no hydrostatic shock. No bone or organ damage. A slight tear in the upper intestine, but nothing major. Damn lucky.” I coughed again. It’s odd feeling like your insides are on fire. I’ve felt that way before. It really hurts, but after a time… after a time you get used to it. “Am I covered?” I asked. I wondered if my employers had extended my medical coverage. In the company I keep, health benefits were at a minimum. There was slight laugh from the door to the room. A gaunt figure leaned like the dirty part of a shadow there. “Covered?” I asked again. Slim at the door nodded his head. I could barely make it out as I tried to hold my head up. Seeing his nod, I put my head back on the pillow I assumed to be both stained and threadbare. I chucked as best I could with fireguts and passed out. It was Tuesday afternoon when I awoke. Threw up a bit of blood. Sat up, found my shoes, and checked out. It must have taken me a half an hour to put on my shoes. Checking out was a bit easier once I found how to stand. It always amazes me how fast people forget how to stand, how to walk. I’ve been doing it for a while and I still have trouble remembering some days. I limped past the river, staying on the south side. I smelt like the doctor’s pillow. Found a rickshaw near 50th and South River. Slumped in and off we went. Amazing the doctor hadn’t gone through my coat; I still had some cred on me, enough to go home, stop at a liquor store on the way, get a bottle of something that would probably eat its way out of the hole that recently developed in my gut, and tip the kid running his heart out in front of me. As I lay on my silk sheets, I wondered. About nothing in particular. The usual before-bed and shot thoughts that one has. I hadn’t brushed my teeth in a while. Need to pay paperboy. Who won the game last night? The usual. So Tuesday I awoke among evil. Maybe Wednesday I’ll wake up on the beach.

We are numb. We are hollow with grief and panic and a fear that has not been seen in this country in a long long time. We get goosebumps when we hear a survivor’s tale, or learn that a friend of a friend was late to work and thus not in the World Trade Center when this all happened. The Internet is full of emails asking people to check in, websites (www.helping.org) collecting money for victims, and words of peace. I am so worried that this is going to get worse. That the gloves are off, the brass-knuckles are on, and that the US won’t stop until it is too late. Is there a “Them” in this war? In World War II, it was simple: Hitler was Them. Mussolini was Them. Hirohito was Them. And now? Osam bin Laden is Them?… but there is no real army to fight against; there is no real installation to fight for and win; there are no beaches to land on. Them is Hydra: cut off a head and a new one grows back stronger than ever. Them is an army of ready-made martyrs willing to trade each of their lives for the lives of American citizens. I have spent the last few days attempting to lead a normal life. Calls to friends. Drinks with guests. Laughing at jokes. But it all still feels so wrong. We tried deep fried turkey therapy last night. The turkey was good… Fitz was right: deep frying a turkey is a great idea. Skippy, Kwame, Joe and I made a flag… that’s the real way to do it. But then we saw planes flying overhead, and at least to me, felt wrong, felt dangerous. I am still unsettled. So far as I have heard everyone has checked in okay. There are two and three degrees of separation people that are unaccounted for, but all in all, I feel lucky. There is no difference, in my mind, between what Robertson and Falwell said about the liberal media, homosexuals, and pro-choicers causing “God” to punish us than bin Laden saying that America caused the wrath of Allah to befall it. Roberston and Falwell are treasons snakes, and the poisonous vemon that they spew belongs nowhere in this world. This kind of institutional hatred makes Falwell and Roberston compatriots of bin Laden. It just fuels my deep distrust of organized religion even further. The following is an exerpt from Bruce Schneier’s monthly computer security email called the Crypto-Gram. I believe it neatly sums up a lot of the fears I have.

All - So far as I can tell, everyone is safe and sound. Obviously, there’s no Toledo tonight. Be safe.

You never what you’ll hear at Toledo Lounge. Simple as that. So I was sitting at the bar, with my new camera, playing around, taking pictures, carrying on. At any rate, a guy comes up to me and starts talking about the camera and if I am a photographer. Simple, idle banter. And then he asks me if I take people’s pictures… okay this getting a little odd, but nothing too bad. He asks me for a card, which I don’t have on me. He says he’ll be by tomorrow and I can give him a card then. He says that he has women who will pay me to take their picture… this gets stranger. I’m not really sure if I want give him my card… call me crazy. At any rate, I am in the midst of training. The CEO, the two founders, and a host of other corporate types are here brainwashing us. So much fun. The long and the short of it is that I am unsure whether I will be at Toledo tomorrow.

So a good number of Tuesdaynighters are in Rome right now. That’s right… it’s time once again for Oracle Club Excellence. Kinda strange. Oracle employees (or at least, me) use Clubs as a measure of time. It has been almost a year since I worked for the Big O… time flies. At any rate, there is at least four List members running about Rome right now. I think the best song I can think of about Rome is “When I paint my Masterprice” by Bob Dylan and performed by The Band. Here are the relevant verses: Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble, Ancient footprints are everywhere. You can almost think that you’re seein’ double On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs. Got to hurry on back to my hotel room, Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece. She promised that she’d be right there with me When I paint my masterpiece. Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum, Dodging lions and wastin’ time. Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ’em, Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb. Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory, When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese. Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody When I paint my masterpiece. I think it is a damned fine song. I am still trudging through Bowling Alone. The book is amazing. I want to share a quote from it which is actually attributed to T.S. Elliot: “It [television] is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.” Yes, apparently TV is one of the top causes of the atrophying social capital in this country. In fact, with the increasing number of channels with increasingly targeted content, TV serves the individual and not society as a whole. TV can keep us isolated, and not bring us together. I’m back from Montgomery. I am a little scared of that place. For instance, the locals refer to the town either as Monkeytown or The Gump. Yikes! Needless to say, Ken and I found a decent place to eat and drink: The Olive Room. We almost spent more there for dinner for two than one of us did on a hotel room for three days. Lodging is cheap… finding somewhere to eat is impossible. Well, that’s no really true. If you want to eat big ole cheesebuggas or waffles, you can find hundreds of places. If you want to eat something that might, just might, be fresh… you have a long search ahead of you.

That was a quote from one of the waitresses in The Smokehouse in Pine Apple, AL where I just finished dinner. I’d like to take this opportunity to quote Bugs Bunny when he gets stranded on the moon after defeating Marvin the Martian, “GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!!!” Because of “mistake” made by my travel agent, Ken and I, are staying 40 some miles south of Montgomery. To compound matters, because of an Air Force floorshow, there are no hotel rooms in the entire area, which means that we have to stay in the sticks. And even more fun, Ken and I have a white covertable Mustang. Nothing like a damned ferinner (say it out loud and you’ll figure out what it is) and a Jewboy with a goatee driving through the Deep frickin’ South! By the way, the Montgomery Airport and Swimmin’ Hole does not exactly inspire confidence. It is a glorified high school gym with a small tower. ARG! I, presently, am here (http://www.mapquest.com/cgi-bin/ia_find?link=btwn%2Ftwn-map_results&random=565&event=find_search&SNVData=&address=&city=Greenville&State=AL&Zip=&Find+Map.x=18&Find+Map.y=9) I think that the aerial photo is a lot better (http://www.mapquest.com/cgi-bin/ia_find?link=btwn/twn-map_results&aerial_photo_tab.x=1&aphoto=1&uid=uexehbq8m105w6od:zwh01g5ar&SNVData=3mad3-g.fy%28a2g1fr_%29rz09zy%3bah7-%3d%3a%16%18JDLBK%12%13M%3d%17%13_%3dGG_luylhw%28.5yzn0r%28l%241w-u.wf7%3bxcx5sf7.grfe%7cs&pcat=) Thankfully… wait, there is nothing to be thankful about on this trip.

(Okay, time to write a Tuesday night. Hmm, how to begin.) All - (Good, stock beginning, low commital.) (Need some standard idle banter to get things rolling. Um… let’s try this.) So I went tubing this weekend. There is something satisfying about buying beer at 9:30am and drinking one of them by 10am. I thought that car insurance was a racket, but this has got it beat. Basically, to run a tubing company you need: 1) Nearby water 2) Tubes 3) A beat-up bus 4) A few stoners to run the operation 5) A really good liability waiver With these things you can make a killing. One note about tubing, make sure there is sufficient water in the river. Or barring that, make sure you have double the amount of beer you thought you’d need. (Not too shabby. Little humor. Universal appeal. Now for the report from last week… oh, this’ll be good.) So I wasn’t in town last week. I was in Kentucky. Outside of Louisville to be exact, at Fort Knox. Things that I saw near Fort Knox: * The Armored Acres Mobile Home Park * Big Pink Jerry’s Liquour Beer * Thorobred (sic) 3 and 4 - I make it a practice never to go to a strip club where the women are compared to livestock * A sign that read “Your car won’t start, your wife is ugly, your dog has fleas, come here and buy beer” - you can’t make this stuff up * One simple white concrete building that had a sign that said “beer” * A similar building that had a sign that read “girls” * Oddly, there was no third building that with a sign that read “beer and girls” * The only traffic jam I saw was due to the first night of the Kentucky state fair (On to the main rant… oh, shit, I don’t have a rant. Damn. I mean, ranting about KY is as fair as kicking a blind cripple. Until Chandra is found there isn’t much to write about there. I’m a little tired of the whole social capital thing right now. I must be tired, I can’t think of a damned thing to rant about… well, here’s a desperation shot.) I hate the trend in websites to add javascript that causes their windows to popup in front of everyone elses. It just bad design and quite annoying. (Quickly, end the email and hope that no one has gotten this far.)

Greetings from Kentucky. It is not too bad here. It very much reminds me of Vermont or even the drive along 70 from Baltimore to Harper’s Ferry. I have not seen identifiable Kentucky Blue Grass… it all seems pretty green to me. I have seen the gold depository at Fort Knox… from a distance. It is near the highway with some big fuck-you fences around it, but it doesn’t look that heavily patrolled… hmm, that could be worth investigating. News from last week: The big news was that Lisa was in town. Good job Lisa! The other big news was that Lisa blew up Toledo Lounge. Good job Lisa! She was sitting just a few feet away from the manhole cover that blew on 18th St. This disturbing trend of exploding infrastructure is a bit concerning. It was all fine, well, and good when this was limited to Georgetown, because, really, who goes there anyway. But now it is striking 17th and 18th streets… not good. Joe’s theory is that it is some anarchist plot to undermine the government from the bottom, from below. What I really did want to write about: Bowling Alone. Go get this book: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam. This book is (so far, as I haven’t finished it yet) a summation of a lot of the themes that I have been trying to address through Tuesday Night, that Joe has been trying to address through 365 and the wine bar. Putnam is a professor of public policy at Harvard. He has researched the loss of social capital. He has studied how all major organizations: religious, professional, political have all suffered a massive loss of participants and that these losses effect society as a whole. This is a fascinating book. He makes the interesting point, for instance, that traditional religions, like Catholicism, are more likely to do community outreach work, while newer, evangelical religions, are more centered around the self and self-help and salvation. The overall trend has been for the last fifty years that American’s focus has shifted from the betterment of community to the betterment of self. Putnam’s major point is that a well connected society, a society in which people of all kinds mix and mingle via organizations, is a stronger society. Sharing time with people different from you makes you better. Now, I am only 90 pages into the 500+ page work, but I am blown away on several fronts. 1) The book is amazingly approachable. Yes, Putnam cites source after source and weeds through some heady sociology, but he does it in a simple and straightforward manner. 2) The overall decline in the American society community is staggering. Groups have shifted from things you serve on and work for to things you write checks to. AARP is not about making connections within the senior community but getting their lobbying voice heard on the Hill. We have turned inward and have used our checkbooks to act outward. 3) How simple a case this can make for Sunday night dinners with friends… or beers on Tuesdays.

For those of you who missed last week’s Tuesday… which was most of you… it was, by far, one of the more bizarre evenings. Lemmie set the scene with Joe, myself, and a drunk and stone Rasta, who knew Joe via the taiji school. Joe and I were just settling into a nice birthday beer, when Rasta man, let’s call him, Bob (which is not his name), says, “Hey, you’re Joe.” And from then on, Bob did not shut up. First, it was stories and plans. He is planning on going to Prague, taking with him his sewing machine, his drill (he is a locksmith), and figuring it out there. Second, it is the discussion of intent versus intend. He intended to knock Joe’s lighter into his beer… this is where I started looking for an exist think that claret might ensue. Then, we moved on to religion. Faith is not belief according to Bob. He had faith that if he had one for Stella he would just up on the wall and rip off some of the knick-knacks thereon. It was in the religion discussion that the phrase, “You cannot escape the compassion of life,” was uttered. Finally, we closed out the evening with a discussion about butterflies, which Bob called flutterbyes, because in his word, “There’s no butter in those flies.” See? See what you miss if you don’t come to Toledo?

Well, for once, the travel gods have smiled my way. My trip to Jacksonville was cancelled. So I get to spend more time in Baltimore. My first meal as a 27 year old was cold meatloaf. I was on a con call and missed lunch. My coworkers had it wrapped and an hour later, I munched on cold meatloaf in a small huddle room at HCFA… there wasn’t even a candle in my mash potatoes. A note about vindication… I saw, I swear, an Urban Park Ranger van. Yes, Dianne is not insane (about this at the very least.) The Urban Park Rangers really exist. Fear them. Now on to the rant: Chain restaurants suck! I hate the general concept of them. The whole Morton’s, Ruth’s Chris, Legals Sea Food, Capital Grille, Cheesecake Factory thing, I am over. Why do I hate these places? Because people treat these places are fine dinning. They think that a good night out (not to mention a shit load of money spent) for a mediocre meal with passable service is a good time. Worse yet, people treat these places are cultural Meccas. My family went (against my vote) to Capital Grille in Boston. I was aghast at the prices for boring food. I have had far better for far less. I have had far better in my own kitchen… far better. And then. And then I saw the wine list and I saw the prices and I was just plain offended. Here’s an odd thing… I don’t usually get wine when I go out to dinner. Why? ‘Cuz I know what this stuff costs and see the prices jacked up two and three and four times is just galling. Its highway robbery. Now as a bidniss traveler, I am the first to admit than when you pull into a new town, it is nice to know what you are getting in terms of a meal. This is the only thing in favor of these chain jobs. There is another and far worse problem with chain restaurants. They screw the little guy. The local place, the mom and pop place, gets priced out of the market. If you are small shop, like Anne Cashion’s Cashions, you can buy at what the market dictates. But large chains, like Morton’s, can dictate the market because they buy in such huge volumes. The little guy has a harder time getting a better deal. And what happens next? The little guy has to pass on the higher cost of buy supplies to the customer and then you, the customer, get grumpy at the higher cost. (Very much like the Walmart effect.) What can you do? Number one, eat locally. Hunt out the local places run by local people to eat. Try Cashions. Try La Fourchette. Scour sidewalk.com to find something to eat that isn’t a chain. Number two, check out Slow Foods (http://www.slowfood.com/cgi-bin/SlowFood.dll/SlowFood_Com/scripts/Chisiamo/chisiamo.jsp?SlowFood=SF). These are people with the right mindset. So to the chain of foods, I say, “Fork you!”