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....and now there' s some guy with a guitar and an amp down on the sidewalk playing "Cat's in the Cradle," for fuck's sake. Though I can't really see him very well. But I sure can hear him.

And I ask myself:

What has happened to the sidewalks of the city I once knew and loved? What the fuck kind of busker plays "Cat's in the Fucking Cradle"????

I mean, seriously.

Please consider this thread the place to report upon any immediate or quotidian aspects of your environment and experience of a non-RI-nature that either happen to catch your attention or you feel like sharing with the class.

Sorry man that sucks. But at least you don't live in my neighborhood where the Reggaeton party starts at 8pm Friday and ends after midnight monday morning, with a hella lotta trash to be picked up.

on a brighter note, i watched a crow eat rose petals - it was standing in the street

Whenever I go out for a smoke, I hear a gruff, male voice shouting, just a few doors down.

"FUCK YOU! You're going to die! DIE DIE!" Seriously loud.

"You fucking bastards! This is such.. BULLSHIT!!!" Raging.

At first I was a bit alarmed, until realizing there was never any context, or any kind of response.

Finally, I spoke with a neighbor who explained he was shouting at his teammates and adversaries in some online first-person shooter action game.

Now, I stub my cigarette out, shrugging, and return from the windy outside to my own online computer game, which doesn't ever really inspire me to spew invectives at the screen, but does indeed arouse emotions as I'm role-playing out different scenarios with folks around the world.

And I think about the mediation and abstraction of human emotion. I think how odd it is that here is my neighbor in the flesh, interacting in his virtual world, and here I am, in my own. Total atomization. But you know what? I'm happy to leave him to his first-person action shooter game and imaginary combat rage. If I were to hang out with him in monkeyspace, I can't imagine what we'd talk about anyway.

Funny.

Foote Hertz wrote:on a brighter note, i watched a crow eat rose petals - it was standing in the street

Really? That is cool.
I've been enjoying beautiful blue and gold fall days. Making jam from free, grows-in-my-yard fruit. Planting more of the same. Getting ready for Samhain. Exchanging ideas with people near and far. Life is good.

it was a few doors down from my favorite cafe on a quiet street - it hypnotized me ( screen memory - right? )

Samhain my wife wants to go to a spiral dance - i think i'll walk around the neighborhood in a latex pig mask and pork pie hat

jam sounds nice - ever see Carol Channing as the White Queen? "not a shade of marmalade"

i accidentally caught myself on fire a few minutes ago.

OP ED wrote:i accidentally caught myself on fire a few minutes ago.

I wish I could say that would be news worth writing from home about when it happens here. Oh, all right. Fine. I'm just kidding, it's not a crime. The truth is that I rarely accidentally catch myself on fire. In fact, I think the last time I accidentally caught myself on fire was while having my picture taken for a contributor's page on a windy day down in Battery Park City, and it was long enough ago that the World Trade Center was still standing. I'd been handed a small hair and make-up budget for the shoot. But I don't like being professionally made-up, since you can never rely on the make-up artist not to leave you looking like Joan fucking Collins, no matter how clearly you explain that your skin has nothing to hide, or that you are not going to be under bright TV studio lighting. So I skipped that part. However, I did like having my hair done. Especially because though it's long now, it was chin-length then, and that was always a style for which executing an absolutely perfect blow-out was simply beyond my girlie-skills. I therefore happily went and had my hair rendered supernaturally straight and shiny, before proceeding to the location, with a small bag of accessories and the kind of Pantene aerosol hairspray that you can only buy in Europe. I forget what it's called, but presumably it has some ingredient that only destroys the environment in North America and not on other continents. I guess. I don't really know. The only reason I had some was that I don't like having things withheld from me enough to smuggle it into the country, even though I never used hairspray of any kind. Including that one. Which it turns out makes your hair extra-sensitive to accidentally catching on fire if it happens to blow across your face while you're trying to light a cigarette on a windy day. So it was kind of a shorter photo-shoot than scheduled. Which was okay, really, because nevertheless, it produced the only picture of me I've ever looked pretty in, in my own estimation. So I was delighted with it. Until the art department lost the film. Those fuckers. Though I think I may still have one of the Polaroids somewhere.

Anyway. For a while I had to work more of a layered hairstyle than I would have opted for, had I had any choice about it. But it was worth it. I always hated that pimping-the-brand part of the job so much that I only ever did it under extreme duress. It doesn't come naturally to me and I had come to frankly regard it as torture, on the fairly straightforward grounds that it always was. Except for that one shoot, of course. Because it totally comes naturally to me to appreciate the enjoyable part of spending a small amount of the corporate media's money accidentally catching my illegally perfect hair on fire. Though needless to say, in a larger sense, I'd maintain that actually, I didn't start the fire, 'cause it's been always burning since the world's been turning.

Still. Thanks for reminding me of it. I really couldn't say when I've had more fun than that, whenever the hell it was.

I caught my hair on fire blowing out the candles on my ninth birthday cake.

This thread has finally taken a turn I can relate to. I caught my whole face on fire while drinking "Flaming Eddies" at a party many moons ago. The first two went smashingly, but on the third attempt I absurdly put the burning liquid in the shot glass to my lips and when that didn't pan out well, pain-wise, I tilted the whole thing back as I leaned my head, and covered my entire face til I presumably resembled a tiki torch, grimace and all. I had not really adequately thought this through. The damage was minimised as, by some quick thinking or reflex, I smothered my face with a nearby leather jacket, and performed a perfect drop-and-roll into the dance-floored living room as the Foghat roared on the Blaupunct. Interpreted by the general peeps as a stunning and dexterous "move", I received a scattered applause for my trouble. Semi-blinded and stumbling to the bathroom for a forensic examination with my GF, I found that my eyebrows, eyelashes and feathered bangs were now smoked, shriveled and otherwised disappeared, while my lips had aquired the look-and-feel of freshly shucked blue point oysters with tabasco sauce. I got laid anyways.

I have never been able to effectively whistle "Train Kept A-Rollin" since.

Thanks to those who contributed the last three post above. A perfect sequence of narrative (IMO). Happens sometimes...


Got caught in a Bison jam last week at work. Not much to do but wait em out. At least they don't rage...much.

This mistake involved fireworks. (and kerosene, and most of the leaves on my hillside, actually)

[what i was doing was probably slightly illegal, so i won't go into it]

(it was temporarily very exciting)

that is all.

Many years ago, I was reading the Guardian in a cafe when suddenly nearly everyone else in the cafe stood up and started shouting at me. Only then did I realise my newspaper was on fire. (There was a candle on the table.)

That made me feel really cool.

Apologies for flaming.

We could do a poll on how many RI members have set fire to themselves. The results might well be statistically anomalous.