Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Somehow the internets failed me, and at least one of my entries was deleted. Here is a gem from March of 2005:

Monday, March 28, 2005

In an attempt to revitalize my social life, I've taken up weekend trips to New York City up as a hobby. I've always gone to the city pretty frequently (mostly for shopping or observing homeless people with binoculars), but I've increased my visits lately, as I've needed a change of scenery. It's just as cold and bleak there as it is here, but with more beautiful women and Jewish camera and electronics superstores. I've also got some friends from school that have recently moved to Brooklyn and have hip designer jobs in Manhattan. I've had a lot of fun visiting them, in what used to be gross and downtrodden, but is now gentrified, safe, renovated, and ridiculously expensive. I like that. Sometimes I like to just go to the city and not tell any of my friends that I'm there, and roam around while listening to my ipod (misanthropic B's hobo-watching mix, volumes 1-6), observing everything, laughing, wanting to buy things in windows, trying to get lost, sometimes hoping some crazy motherfucking mugger will pop out of an alley and just stab me in the throat.

Anyway, there's this place in Brooklyn where the kids like to go (it's in Williamsburg; the hippest place in America from what I understand) that's called "Barcade." It's an expensive bar with lots of fancy beers, and the walls are lined with old arcade games. It sounds like heaven, I know. But somehow the novelty wears off more quickly than one would hope. You can only take so many games of "Rampage" or "Tempest," but you can always drink more. And try to hit on women. I attempted to do both of these things on friday night. My friends got bored of the bar and wanted to go somewhere else. Somewhere hipper and more exclusive, or something. But I had not yet fulfilled my mission of the night: get wasted, hit on a cute Brooklyn girl, and play Arkanoid until I ran out of quarters. I achieved the first part, and wished my friends a good night. I told them I'd catch up with them in the morning if I didn't somehow make my way back to Grand Central in time to leave the city. Then they left to go get six dollar beers at some other place. The girl-finding mission was actually much lower on my priorities list than the Arkanoid mission. But there was one problem; this one girl was hogging the machine all night. She had big plastic hoop earrings, and a beret, and a denim jacket and...and I stood behind for a while, tapping my foot, drinking imported beer after imported beer, growing ever more drunk and impatient. She had a never-ending pocket of quarters. She was kind of cute. And real good at Arkanoid. That's respectable. But I didn't really care about that. I just wanted to play, real bad. And she WASN'T going anywhere. I made three trips to the bathroom and she was still there every time I came back, completely ignoring me. Finally...and my memory is spotty on account of me being completely shitfaced, I decided I had to do something, anything, to make her get off that machine. "Hey.." I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around, causing her to miss her ball, and lose the game. "WHAT?" she barks at me, while fishing around for another quarter in her 160-dollar ripped jeans. "Hey..." I'm shouting over the indie-rock blaring from the speakers, barely able to stand up straight, "Hey hipster-bitch....I've..I've got some cosmic-balls you can paddle around if you want," I paused, not believing the words that were coming out of my mouth. She stared at me incredulously. I continued, "...and if you're lucky, you'll get the laser-upgrade! Ooh!" All I remember happening next was a sharp pain on my cheek, my glasses getting knocked to the ground, and spilling beer all over my pants "Yeah...get out of here...don't you have a thrift store to go to or something, you urbanite hussie?!" I screamed at her, my words getting drowned out by the whiney music all around me. I kneeled over, picked up my glasses, tried to brush some of the beer out of my soggy jeans, and then spent seven dollars playing Arkanoid for as long as I could keep my eyes open.

I awoke in my apartment the next afternoon, miles and miles away from New York City, with no recollection of how I left that cursed yuppie-infested concrete monument to humanity and made it back to my place. I almost remember climbing into some kind of space-tube to bounce around a magnetized cosmic ball (or maybe it was a subway train and I had found a chewed-up tennis ball on the ground somewhere), but it's hazy. I'll probably go back there next weekend. Brooklyn hasn't seen the last of me.