On the referreal of ESPN's Sports Guy, I've been reading the chronicles of one Willie Williams, a high school football player in Miami who's trying to decide which school will "win his services" next year. The Sports Guy calls it "the greatest newspaper series of all-time." Twice. So I checked it out. On his Unintentional Comedy scale, this thing is up there. It's mostly filled with Willie's own personal accounts of his recruiting trips. How he gets there, who he meets, what he eats, etc. And it's totally hilarious. It actually seemed oddly familiar. I couldn't place it at first, but his youthful, naive, and jockish descriptions of everything remind me a lot of a collection of stories by Ring Lardner called "You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters," about a "A pugnacious, uncontrolled young pitcher writes to a friend back home about his misadventures as a member of the Chicago White Sox." It's description: "A humor serial that turned into a substantial novel, moving from grotesquerie and stereotype into something resembling the great American novel of disillusion and experiment. Except that narrator Jack Keefe is always too irrepressible and stupid to be really tragic." Willie isn't nearly as dim-witted as Jack Keefe, but the parallels are inescapable, as in both cases one gets the full story not from the narrator directly, but from how he describes everything, with very few other source of information other than the narrator.One typical passage, from his trip to Auburn:
During the wait, several of the female hosts, nicknamed the ''Tigerettes'', offered him some of their spinach dip.''You know how it is, those girls are supposed to be there to cheer you up,'' Williams said. ``But I told them, `I ain't no animal, and I ain't going to eat no plant.'
``But they kept pushing it toward me. It was disgusting. I told them, `I'm from Miami. I don't eat that. You farm people are used to it, but not me.''
Really, quite fascinating.
The Deep Freeze continues. The serene, snowy streets outside our apartment would normally be rather picturesque when viewed through the large windows of our living room. However, the view is spoiled somewhat by the the sight of my own breath as I stand in the living room and look out the window. Seriously, it be colder than a motherfucker in that place. I love this apartment, but it's tendency to be hot in the summer and freezing in the winter is somewhat disquieting. Keeping the oven open helps more than I thought it would. But during my stay in this apartment I'm averaging almost two showers a day. During the summer, it was two or three, minimum, to keep cool. Now, it's one in the morning and one in the evening, just to get warm. Even started taking baths for the first time in years. Still, I love the place, just like a love all my "two-week" jackets. These are the jackets I own that I really like but can only wear during the two or three weeks between the ending of summer and beginning of fall, and the ending of winter into spring, when the temperature is around 50 degrees. My apartment is starting to seem like one of these. The climate was perfect for a few months.
Still, the cold has definitely made selected pockets of the place much cozier. Miss Charming Melodee and I huddled in the rumpus room last night, me working my night job and playing guitar, while she painted in the corner and talked on the phone, all around the roaring new space heater. Then we worked out a rendition of Santo and Johnny's "Sleep Walk," which ended up sounding ok. I was playing the drumset the other day and, really, all I was thinking about was how much fun our apartment was. I decided that the only thing that could make it more fun would be a trampoline. There's no way I could ever live in Manhattan now, I'm afraid. Unless I was living with someone who had some sweet Soho loft or something. That'd probably be the only neighborhood in Manhattan I'd really like to live in. It's terribly expensive, but it's a very pretty yet urban neighborhood. Great stores, nice looking streets. And the Apple store is right there too. Not sure why that's important or notable. But as it stands now, I think this is the largest apartment I'll ever live in in New York, as far as space per person. Plus, with Matt and Jed moving into the neighborhood in a week, I'll enjoy the locationi even more.
The apartment and neighborhood has got me thinking lately about all the decisions made long ago by various people that directly or indirectly caused my current life. Here's a boring and detailed account of the events leading to my living with Miss CM in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn.
If my brother Geoff hadn't decided to go to Amherst 8 years ago, none of this would be happening. He was the one who lived with his college friends for a summer in Park Slope, and I stayed with them when I came to NY to look for a place in 1999. And if I didn't live in the Slope, Jed wouldn'ta been there, and it's doubtful Matt or Jen would be there now. And my apartment in on 8th ave. in Park Slope was had only because one of his friends from Amherst's brother lived there. And this is where I met Miss CM in autumn 2001, when she moved upstairs.
On Miss CM's side, she and three friends almost signed a lease at a different apartment building, before finding a random ad for the Park Slope apt. in the New York Times of all places. Furthering the luck, Matt and I had signed a lease to move to an apartment down the street, only to have the deal fall through over a squabble about bars on the windows. So miss CM and I both ended up at the apartment on 8th ave, despite both finding apartments elsewhere.
In summer 2002, Miss CM moved out and moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I also needed a change, especially after almost moving out the year before, and had discussed finding a place with James in the Williamsburg area. Long-ish story short, a week before I had to move out and not having found anything, a realtor shows me a great apt in Greenpoint, whose only drawback was that it happened to be on the exact same street Miss CM had just moved to. Aware and embarrassed of the stalker-esque appearances of such a move, I take it. James rents the small, glorified closet of a room.
Finally, in early 2003, while talking to my former neighbor and MCM's former roommate Rachel back in Park Slope, she mentions that her ex-boyfriend, who she recently began talking to again, is vacating his apartment, and that it's a great place. Rachel's roommate is also interested in it, but MCM and I stop by to look at it anyway. Then we get it.
So to sum up, if not for decisions made by Geoff (including his choice of friends), MCM and her roommates, Matt, a landlord who refused to put bars on windows, and NY Times ad, Miss CM and I wouldn't even be dating, much less living together. I'm amazed by the luck of it all, particularly the timing. It really couldn't have happened at any other time. Wouldn't have worked any sooner, and wouldn't have happened later. I usually think my situation now is just the outcome of random events, and that it's just as likely that I could be living with some other girl in some other place, depending on some random decision. Most of the time I think that. But as much as I like to believe in (and fear) the randomness of the universe, as that great scientific mind Oliver Wendell Jones once exclaimed, "The universe is just a little too darn orderly to be a big accident!"Of course my big problem now, philosophically, is, once you accept that something might be attributed to fate or destiny or whatever, what do you do now? If a series of events conspired to bring you to a certain point, are they still working toward some unforeseen end? Or is this just it? Am I being dropped off here? Hello?
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