When you take a left off of the bridge Gary Evans jumped off of 10 years ago, you wind down a hill, pass the South End Tavern (which still boasts a neon “Ladies Entrance” sign) and drop into Troy, New York.
There are a lot of ways to describe Troy. The local chamber of commerce presumably paid for the mural on the north end of the town that proclaims “Troy: Toast of the Hudson.” Locals prefer “Troilet.” A more objective outsider might use terms like “downtrodden,” “hard-scrabble” or “down-on-its luck.” The phrase that kept coming to my mind this week was “busted out.”
Third Street is a one-way avenue that parallels the river and cuts north through rows of houses primed for foreclosure. There are lots of cars parked on either side of the street but very few people (and I traveled up this street at several different times a day during my two-night visit). I’m probably being overly-harsh when I say the homes — which have a median value of $114,000 — look like crack house. But the few people I do see milling about have that look of being up to no good.
A friend from high school who has lived in the area for more than a decade describes Troy and the surrounding capital region in careful terms. He admits that, even after 12 years of living here, he’s hard pressed to find a label, so he draws an analogy. (more…)
I am now freelancing for the Boston Globe’s business desk on what looks like it will be a somewhat regular basis. My first article is here. Freelancing for a newspaper in Boston, I’m finding, is much more pleasant than being a staff writer for a paper in Pittsburgh.
As for the rest of my writing life, I’ve been busy with end of semester stuff (I finished classes Monday and submitted grades on Tuesday), planning a research trip to Albany and taking a second look at Gary Zerola. Hence, limited blogging, but that should change once I get into my summer routine.
This is embarrassing, but in the interest of full disclosure, I’m posting the Runner’s World video on me. I look like Barney the Dinosaur and he really fixated on me watching the 2006 Boston Marathon after leaving a bar, so I come off as a bit of a drunk.
For those of you in my world, look for RCF’s cameo at the very end of the finish line interview.
It looks like I’ll be teaching two sections of the Journalistic Essay at Bridgewater State next fall (which is very exciting for me). I’m totally revamping my syllabus and putting together a new reading list.
If you’re interested in seeing what I’ll be teaching (it’s a work in progress) you can take a look here. And please use the comments to let me know if you have any recommendations; I’m typically looking for feature-length nonfiction articles of 3,000-10,000 words written in a narrative style.
(And yes, I realize I wrote one of the articles on the list — I typically teach something I wrote so I can tell the students how each bit of information was reported, and let them know what I would have done differently).
As a reminder, you can see some of the work my students did last Fall at this site. I plan to make more use of that site next year, so add it to your RSS feed if you’re interested.
Becomes he comes up with sensible solutions to real life problems. Take, for example, his urinal code:
1. If there are three or more urinals, and all of them are empty, thou shalt take a urinal on the end. That way, the next guy can take the other end — leaving an unoccupied urinal between the men.
2. Thou shalt never take a urinal adjacent to a urinal that is in use unless there are no other urinals available.
3. If there are other men in the rest room, thou shalt look forward, down, or up whilst urinating — never to the side.
There was a time when I questioned whether or not running a second marathon could be more fun, more uplifting, more meaningful and more a bunch of other stuff.
I was able to answer that with a “yes” yesterday.
I’ll spare you the full report but there was something overwhelming about running on a course and seeing people you know, both in the race and on the sidelines, which just didn’t happen as much overseas. I’m happy that I was able to knock close to 40 minutes off of my time in Dublin in 2006. And the crowds — who line the course almost all the way from Hopkinton to Boston — providing me with memories I hope I never lose.
Like this sign, seen somewhere between mile 22 and 24: “Run like a pre-teen on a polygamist ranch in Texas.”
I’m still a little speechless about the whole experience and my thoughts are still a little disjointed. RCF will be sending photos and a video of me finishing later on today. Maybe I’ll have something more coherent to say then, but right now I’m just going to go bask in the delirum (and ake some Advil).
Number of miles run between November 19 and today: 386 (AKA not nearly enough)
Minutes spent on elliptical machine: 875
Number of shoes used in training: 8
Size of shoes used in training: 15-4E
Weight lost during training: 20 pounds
Total weight lost since starting to run two years ago: 40 pounds
Time I’ll wake up tomorrow: 4 a.m.
Number of bottles of water consumed today: 12
Score of Red Sox game I went to in an effort to make today go faster: 6-5 Sox
My race number: 21782 (follow me at www.baa.org)
Time I’m shooting for: 5:30
Time I’ll make if everything goes righ tomorrow: 5:19
Time in Dublin, 2006: 6:00:24 Money raised for the Leukemia-Lymphoma Society: $3,845 (and counting — please help!)
They say something as simple as a book can change your life, but they didn’t warn you that sometimes that change is for the worse. And the book that changed my life isn’t even a good book — it’s poorly written, excessively narcissistic and riddled with typos. It amounts to nothing more than cutting-and-pasting entries from your self-obsessed blog into MS Word, then handing it into you publisher.
And then watching it shoot up the New York Times Bestseller’s list.
It’s hard to even put I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max into words. Max himself comes off as a wannabe Hunter S. Thompson — drunk, callous and socially inappropriate — except that for what he lacks in lucid political and social commentary he makes up with what seems to be a biochemistry that naturally produces Viagra. And for what he lacks in terms of biting prose, he makes up for cliche-riddled drivel.
The book itself is pretty much a diary of Max’s drunken sexual exploits. The Cliff Notes might look something like this:
1. Guy walks into a bar.
2. Guy gets excessively drunk.
3. Guy says all sorts of insulting things to all sorts of people, including women he wants to sleep with.
4. Women, in turn, say he’s funny and sleep with him.
5. Guy wakes up in a puddle of his own bodily functions.
6. Guy goes home to write about it in telling detail.
A sample: “I was solidly Tucker Max Drunk after a long Friday night bar-hopping, and came home alone at around 2am. I hadn’t fucked for like four days — a serious dry spell for me — so I started scrolling through my phone, calling every female name I come across…I don’t really recall the amount of time I spent on the phone or even how many girls I called, but I do remember having the distinct impression that I was shit out of luck. I relegated myself to the couch to pass out while watching re-runs of The Shield, when all of the sudden there was a knock on the door. It was an irregular fuck buddy of mine, Sandra. Sweet!”
At the risk of giving away the anecdote, another girl also shows up. Hilarity ensues. And that was one of the less self-aggrandizing passages of the book.
You can call this book disturbing because Max insists all of the stories are true. You can call it disturbing because people like Max — and the people who have sex with him — do indeed exist. You can call this book disturbing because for many of the kids in my freshman writing class, it’s the only book they’ve ever read outside of school. And the loved it. You can call this book disturbing because what amounts to 277 pages of monosyllabic tit jokes now classifies as literature
But here’s what’s really disturbing about the book: I couldn’t put that fucker down. The woman who recommended it to me (she had bought it based on the title and because the woman posing with max on the cover looked like her roommate) had the same reaction. She gave me fair warning, telling me it was disturbing and would probably throw me into a long fit of sleepless nights.
And she was right.
If I am going to give Tucker Max a compliment it is A) going to be backhanded and B) note that, if nothing else, he is excessively honest — as all good writers should be. You get the sense he is too dumb and too preoccupied with himself to make this stuff up, and even he notes that if there had been exaggerations, he probably would have been sued for libel by now. He’s also quick to note his shortcomings, no matter how embarrassing they may be. He constantly refers to his average-sized penis (guys who make constant references to being average tend to be using the metric system to measure). He writes about defecating himself in the lobby of an Embassy Suites Hotel and of being duped into getting a rather awful chlamydia test by a jilted lover (in, I might at, far too excruciating detail).
In any case, I hope they revoke my library card in hell.
“I iz guna b votN repUblikaN dis elektion cUz obaMa b uh fraUd. dat dur neRd b uH wanNba OG GanGsTa, he nahT no waT eet B lyke awn da streeTz lYke mi n mI BOiz duz. He b Uh ImposTa n b Uh disGraCe 2 uz blaK peePz evreewhur”
Yeah dude. See more MySpace morons flashing $20s and $10s and the occassional firearm, all claiming to make $250,000 per year with barely a high school education.
Every day from 4:30 a.m. until 9 I write financial news. Since I started this job almost a year ago it has gotten increasingly dire: the subprime mortgage market meltdown snowballed into the credit crunch which exploded into what most now agree is a recession. Job losses, reduced consumer spending and widespread home foreclosures are all underway.
Then I take the dog for a walk and listen to my iPod. Music generally lifts my spirits but if you listen to the lyrics too hard, you realize they’re overwhelmingly fixated on broken hearts and lost love. And when they’re not, they’re fixated on political ills. With the shame of borrowing a concept from a film/book as bad as “High Fidelity,” it’s amazing any of us made it through adolescence without going to therapy, given everything we listened to.
I teach in the middle of most days, and my students are generally upbeat and fun (today we’re taking a field trip to the Boston Globe). But some of them have significant problems and it’s hard not to care.
Then I come home and continue researching which evil criminal I will spend the next year or two researching for my next book. The two leading candidates are awful people who did some incredibly awful things. I mean really awful things involving chain saws and bombs.
All I’m saying is sometimes I feel guilty for being happy.
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