I don’t really have anything in mind to tell anyone today, but I do like typing. I guess I’ll tell you how I spend my days lately as I wait for all of my paperwork to clear at my job, and I can’t start being a citizen of the working world.
I wake up and require a coffee immediately; the one after that is just a bonus. The first cup is for the caffeine withdrawal headache, the second one is for the Newport 100. That’s how I get my head together to function.
I wait 45 minutes to an hour to look at my screens, other than Spotify. I listen to music at all times on my favorite $12 headphones that I got courtesy of the good human Nate. My last pair broke, and he came in the clutch with two replacements.
Once my brain is working, I tend to fire up Street Fighter, either the classic Super Street Fighter 2 X Grand Master Challenge or Street Fighter Alpha 3. The cool thing about Street Fighter, other than being my ideal nostalgia trip, is the depth in techniques possible. I play the game differently than I did when I was 10 in the Jersey Shore arcades. Shit, I play differently than I did last week. I am a nerd. I watch in-depth hour-long videos on high-level Street Fighter play and try to incorporate some of it into my repertoire.
The game is like skateboarding or playing piano to me; everyone has a unique style of movement and attack. You can express yourself in the way you play.
Lately, I’ve been listening to Wu-Tang side project records like “Wu Massacre” and Raekwon’s “Only Built for Cuban Linx 2” while I get my ass beaten by Street Fighter nerds online who are much better than I am.
After 10–15 Street Fighter bouts, I take my medication and think about whether or not I have anything to say on this blog. Today, I don’t. Obviously, this is just a typing exercise. Sometimes I start out with nothing, and some deeply personal things come out in a way that presents itself nicely.
I am always singing, all day. I tend to rock the 83-song playlist of songs I might attempt to belt out with my mentor on piano and sing along to all poor innocent bystanders. Today, I was singing the big 1994 Offspring record “Smash,” which happens to be one of my favorite albums of all time.
While all this is happening, I’m working on my patented “way too long” Instagram stories of random songs, antisocial and communist memes, and weird little videos from my life in the city.
Today, I’m taking my friend and original Newark gangsta Troy to Madison Avenue to pick up a laptop. Troy is a unique individual, and I am trying to urge him to tell his tales of crack pushing and gun running in the 80s and 90s. Positively fascinating and delivered with serious street gravitas.
Once I get him to do this on YouTube, trust me, the links will be everywhere.
That’s one of the funny things about my life; I’m this little white kid from Plymouth, MA, maybe the whitest town in that state, but here I am, tight with all kinds of folks from different cultural backgrounds. We bond over music like Curtis Mayfield and Ghostface Killah. People never expect this little white kid in a Grateful Dead shirt to have memorized “Wu-Tang Forever” because I grew up on that, and so did they.
The other interesting thing about this city is occasionally something I heard on a Jay-Z album in 6th grade makes sense as I watch the city move and breathe. There could be a line that I didn’t know how to relate to in 8th grade, but now, 20 years later, the context is clear as day.
Anyway, that’s a lot of random content for a day when I’ve got nothing to say. Now I’ve gotta go to Madison Avenue. Maybe I’ll see Don Draper. If you don’t know who that is, do yourself a favor and binge-watch the AMC series “Mad Men.” It’s up there with “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” as far as the quality of a television drama goes.
Anyway, I’ll leave you with the Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, and Method Man track that Troy and I will be bumping on the 6 train from Union Square to 23rd Street.
Hey, you can keep me in Cafe Bustello and smokes, i sure would appreciate it: https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
yerrd!?!?
