Good morning. It’s 5:23 AM, and I’m sitting on my friend Jed’s couch in Brooklyn. All sorts of important school shit started to go down today in Providence, but I was privvy to none of it. We had one last frolic out at the beach, this weekend, you see. Just a handful of us, and it was a fantastic last hurrah for the summer. The temperatures were within range, the people were concordant and the relationships could be accurately described by an adjective that means the opposite of “awkward”. I’m sure you just got back to work and so the last thing you need is someone yapping about their complacently happy beach time while you have to fix the TPS reports and whatnot.

But so: I had told fidelity to put a lot of money into my checking account at bank of fucking america. I had issued this order last Thursday, and I’d only done it so late because the FIRST one I did, when I called on Tuesday, didn’t go through at all. But the second proved to be a far more nettlesome thing, really…. the transaction didn’t go through until Monday, so I had to bum cash off my friends and generally be annoying about money, a state of being I detest with the passion of 10,000 supernovae. So but so: on monday, licking my chops to hit the ATM, I check my balance on the intertron, and what is it I see? Why, the fools have executed a WITHDRAWAL and not a deposit. So there is a gigantic number in my bank account as I expected, but it is most unexpectedly red, like straight-up #FF0000, and there is a minus sign next to it.

After much phone-calling and yelling and screaming of “ESCALATE ME NOW!!” and the like, I got one dude to admit that the broker had literally CLICK THE WRONG FUCKING BUTTON. this was a real show-stopper factoid, I have to say… at RPI, I was in charge of the security and proper treatment of lots of peoples’ personal info. I didn’t even touch money stuff with my systems, but believe me, if I had done something like that to even one of my charges’ data, I’d have been super ultra fucking fired. AND BUT SOOOO, these dildos haven’t fixed my fucking shit yet!! I won’t go into all the details, really, but WTF, you can click a mouse and ruin all of my savings at once, but you can’t click it the OTHER way and FIX IT?!?!?! Color me boggled by this shit.

Anyway, I guess the upshot is that I learned a lot of stuff about American financial infrastructure. Did you know that the Federal Reserve closes at 2:30? Maybe. But did you know that most contemporary ACH transfers, while slower than federal wire funds, actually ENCOMPASS a federal wire fund transfer within their transactional boundary? That is fascinating. I learned shit like that, in between breaths while I yelled at bankers. Yes.

Anyway I will be back in PVD soon, and back with the REAL WRITING too (someting more for Ms. Ganssle, yeah!)… in closing, I would like to apologize also for being a shitty communicator this summer. I have a few legit excuses: I couldn’t get GTalk to turn off on my fone for a few weeks, so it only looked like I was giving you the cold, silent finger. Not long after, the fone was lost in entirety while I was riding the infamous cyclone down at coney island. I swear, it was totally in my pocket in what I thought was a secure fashion… I couldn’t have been wronger; the fone was tossed to the breeze, and so I had to upgrade ad-hoc and scramble my contacts together from pieces of paper, and even answer calls with queries like “who is this?” … blech.

So these are my excuses, but fuck them. Soon, we will chat all through the night. It will be wonderful. But before that, I’m going to crash here, and hopefully scrape up enough cash to achieve the requisite fiduciary momentum to leave New York. Fuck yes. Salud!

good:

• rebuilding merce cunningham’s internal database
• frying hot dogs in butter (the only worthwile thing I got from the book “dry” by augusten burroughs, you axed me)
• the similarity of mcgorlick park with washington square park, not just in design (that sort of radial french-garden plan thing) but also in the way that each lane in the park seems to self-segregate into a micro-region based on foot traffic (e.g. in washington square, southwest corner = chess players, west middle corridor = nyu students going to class, center area = tourists watching breakdancers, etc… in mcgorlick park the distinctions are a mite more subtle, like polish dog walkers vs. new moms with bugaboos, but they’re still there).
• maybe maybe maybe selling a book, knock on wood, yes yes
• interviewing people and having them blab about design and language on tape for hours
• cupcakes from billy’s
• dancing with girls, all night long
• riding a bike from greenpoint to redhook with your friend on a summer day … normally I enjoy deriding “bike people” as hillarious fanatics, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from with that. weaving in and out of the little niches between cars at high speed gives you this total man-over-machine type buzz, and plus if you’re doing this in new york, your perspectival POV of the city is very similar to how the video game Grand Theft Auto looks, which is entertaining. the whole thing is further enhanced by stopping at grimaldi’s and/or swimming in a redhook swimming pool, indeed.
• doing laundry … just now in my laundry, I unexpectedly found an almost-new deerhoof shirt that I know is not mine, but is in my laundry and is my size. this never happens, but karmatically it makes sense considering the staggering quantities of my own clothing that has disappeared without warning or explaination into washing machines and dryers throughout my 27+ years of garbed existence
• cutting video again
• shakespeare in the park

bad:

• the G train
• hangovers
• when someone you love very much is in a bad way, such that it makes them seem mean and nasty when really they’re just tired and scared, so you have to repress your emotion when interfacing with them, which is not easy because you love them and seeing someone you love in pain makes you kind of emotional
• the total wasteland of despair that is typographic control in CSS
• dumping liquid into your new laptop, destroying the keyboard
• talking before thinking
• drinking too much
• forgetting recipes
• transcribing interview tapes where both parties are hyped on coffee and talking 400wpm or thereabouts
• money
• not being able to sleep because of hideous anxiety attacks concerning life decisions and whatnot

ugly:

• old polish men peering in your window at night and catching you dancing to really stupid shit
• thinking proudly to yourself, “wow, I haven’t seen a single cockroach in my apartment all summer”, because as soon as you have thought that, you have of course irrevocably jinxed yourself and you basically see a huge one crawling up the wall as soon as you’ve finished the thought
• rats that have been smooshed by cars
• the hipsters who have formed a kickball league (replete with un-funny ironic team t-shirts) and play relentlessly in mackerren park
• the blackouts currently plaguing brooklyn and the subway in general
• leaving a cabinet open, forgetting you have done so, and then smashing your temple on it when abruptly standing up

… basically, yeah.