Tag Archives: Writing

Computer World

Jeez, I have a blank page in front of me, and nothing to write about. I never really have anything to write about, just my day which is tedious. Can’t say if it’s entertaining though on occasion I have gone back and read thing’s that I’ve written and found what I had written enjoyable.

That’s something that I never used to be able to do. I would write and immediately put it away. Editing was something I was totally unfamiliar with. And I would write in various states of mind. Sometimes drunk, sitting at the bar at McSwells and checking ID’s. Instead of me standing by the door, I was situated at the end, next to the brick wall.

I would get more than drunk sometimes and would wind up at someone’s apartment trying to be the DJ. I have several notebooks filled with drunken observations about the people drinking around me. Those are too strange to go back and read.

Still I have them in the closet. Perhaps one of these days I’ll use one of the entries after I tidy it up for public consumption. All for $50.00 and a burger. Oh and Guinness. Actually I think I was drinking mimosas. A pint of cheap champagne and just a dash of orange juice to give it color.

I don’t think I started drinking Guinness until I moved to Weehawken.

I was thinking today, yes I know, how’d that happen? But there I was thinking about the fact that I have been online for about 10 years. Roger Johansen lent me his Mac book and I just plugged in and immediately started surfing.

The first time I went anywhere really, was to Gay.com. I just went to the browser and typed in Gay.com. It was a different site than it is now and I did wind up spending a few years there. I made some friends and met a couple, the only one that I connected with was Juan, but not 10 years ago. I didn’t meet Juan online until about 4 years ago.

I think I took to the Internet naturally and couldn’t understand why people would take courses to lean how to surf the net. There was a point in the 1990’s when my then downstairs neighbor knew of some office computers that were being sold for $30.00.

Those weren’t as user friendly as the computers around today. Only a black screen with green fonts and the only communication was through a BBS, on which I offended some queen down the Jersey shore when the night before the Fourth of July I wished the group a happy co-dependence day.

Soon Harpy gave me my first computer actually, his used Packard Bell which was fun and did the job. Rand and I drove up to LaGrangeville in Rand’s hatchback one morning and of course Rand fixed it all up for someone like me.

I’m still grateful and plan on taking Rand and Lisa as well as Bill to dinner. I got a nice gift card for a few restaurants in Manhattan and would like to use it. An adult dinner, something that one gets dressed up for. That’s the plan.

Writing on the Wall

I just saw Eddie Love on the street. That’s not his real name and I don’t know what his real name is. His DJ name is Eddie Love though. We’ve been in the same universe of Hoboken and actually 20 years ago we were cordial to each other. We never competed with each other as DJ’s. He spun at the Beat n’ Path and I was spinning at McSwells.

Nowadays we pass each other on the street and neither one of us has anything to say to the other. It’s just something interesting. I could have seen his real name since I last saw him the night I was helping to register voters. But I just couldn’t be arsed.

He was friends with Maurice Menares back in the day. Everyone was friends with Maurice. He was such a charmer and still is probably. Last I heard he was managing the Beastie Boys store in Los Angeles. I last saw Maurice when Julio and I went to see Beck at Radio City.

He was doing something for Beck and was great to see him. He’s such a sweetheart. So if he Googles himself, Maurice Menares is a sweetheart.

Right now I’m in a Facebook chat with my niece Hillary. She’s Brian and Karen’s eldest daughter, smart and pretty and she just made the honor roll. Right now I’m trying to convince her that if she ever runs out of things to read, she can always write.

She hates writing though. I can’t ever imagine hating writing. I’ve been doing it all my life. I have journals from past years scattered throughout the apartment. Some embarrassing stuff. Some written while sober, some written while high or drunk.

A lot of friends knew I wrote and felt I was a good writer despite never having read anything that I had written. And so when gifts were given to me they were generally blank books and I have a few of those. I always found blank books intimidating. A keyboard on a typewriter or a computer, I always found them more welcoming.

I once got a good grade in grammar school for an interview that I completely made up. It was with a barber friend of my father’s and it was a last minute, Sunday night homework assignment. I wound up writing about how his customers would talk to him, almost like he was a psychiatrist. Totally bogus yet I aced it.

Another writing task was quite inadvertent. It was Junior year of high school, the dreaded Algebra final. I struggled all year long and I was poised to fail the final. Letters I can handle, numbers I can manage mostly, but putting letters and numbers together just scrambled my brain. If y equals 99 and x equals 1/8 what is the answer?

Things like that would cause a meltdown. And I faced the Algebra final exam and it was all like that. All I felt I could do was to write an essay.

I just wrote about how I never understood this and I probably never will and I swore that I would never apply the lessons Sister Reginald taught in real life. And I also mentioned that summer school would achieve nothing, that my parents would more than likely kill me and that she was a good teacher, that it was just that I was a poor student.

I passed, or rather Sister Reginald let me pass. Social promotion- I benefited!