Random Endorsements

I don't have anything remotely interesting to say at the moment. This is different from all those other moments when I'm fascinating. I gave up smoking two weeks ago, and even though I'm on the patch I've got the attention span of a two-year old crammed full of Snickers bars and cotton candy. Being fascinating, as is my usual custom, requires a modicum of focus. Still I want to put something up here to keep the two or three people who stop by regularly interested. (Hello whoever you are at the Carlyle Group! It's nice to know I have readers that make more money in a day than I will in the next several years. Welcome!) This is the bloggiest post I've put up so far. Forgive me.

So, these are things I've been enjoying lately.

The Mess Around. This is my band. We are awesome, so long as we take the stage before midnight. At that moment, when the fabric of darkness is thickest and when we've all consumed one or two drinks too many--those of us in the band who drink anyway--we become merely incredibly entertaining, rather than staggeringly good. People ask me to describe our music and this is what I tell them: It is like old fifties R&B, shot through the venturi of punk rock, post punk, seventies pop and played by four white boys, really really loud. Check us out on Sept 21 at Lit Lounge.

Pash. This band played with us a little while ago. They are even better than we are. Also, all the band members are attractive.

Red meat. I have been eating a lot of red meat lately. A few years back I read Michael Pollan's account of the disgusting things that cows are fed and injected with over the course of their short lives. I ate no meat at all for several months after that. Mostly it was the preponderance of estrogen and anti-biotics that skeeved me. I don't care about the killing and all that. But that was a few years ago. Now I find that my mood is a little off if I don't taste cow blood on the end of my fork at least once a week. Thank god for cardiac bypass surgery, angioplasty and stents.

The Habitrol Nicotine Patch. The State of New York has been good enough to provide me with a bundle of these generic nicotine patches. Elliot Spitzer hates that I smoked for so long. And to thank him for his help, I'll point out here that the patch actually works. I don't nic fit all the time. If I'm busy the patch is in many ways better than smokes as a nicotine delivery system, since I don't have to stop what I'm doing in order to get my fix. Also, if you wear it when you go to sleep at night you will have dreams that would send Coleridge running for his pen and pad.

The Amateur Magician's Handbook. I checked this book out of the library when I was nine years old and paid its replacement cost rather than return it. I still have it on my bookshelf. I'd put it among the top-twenty most important books I've read in my life, not because I went on to become an illusionist--I can't even palm a quarter anymore--but because it taught me the concept of misdirection. Now I have grown into a cynic who's forever trying to look at anything other than what he's told to look at in the hope of ruining the trick. Try it with politics.