Best First Summer's First Saturday

Back in June, so many weekends ago, I went out to Coney Island to learn about the island life and the Island's Mermaid Parade.

At first it was me...


...and Amanda and Mackenzie. (I chopped their feet off myself. And it may seem obvious that some of these pictures were taken with a different camera--those pictures, the good-looking ones, those I took off Amanda's Facebook)


(later on there'd be more of us...that part comes later on)

Ok, let's go exploring! (This was my first time at Coney Island except for concerts)


Things Seen:


This taco stand looked magnificent.  Make your guess now as to whether I came back to it later for lunch...

I love it when they're called "shrimps."

The Colossal and Soaring Wonder Wheel.

All the Wonder Wheel facts you could need...

We wound up at the Mermaid Parade staging area where paraders were registering for the parade.


Excuse me, I meant "pre-registering."

The Mermaid Parade has got stuff that's for grown-ups.

And stuff that's for kids.

And, on occasion, stuff for grown-ups & kids

Exploring, continued...





We explored all our way into finding Josh, Casey, and Regan.


Avengers Assembled!


We headed down to ride the Island-famous Wonder Wheel.


Si Non Oscillas, Noli Tintinnare The Wonder Wheel's features two "layers" of cars, the inner cars roll and swing on tracks. It's a frightful and fun experience as there is a strong sense of something-could-be-going-wrong here about it when the car starts rolling forward along its track.


In line, I promise you this is what Casey was saying: "Dude, feel my shirt."


All aboard for Danger!



Most of the ride is peaceful and fun, just like your typical Ferris wheel, but with views of Coney Island weirdness.






But then, twice a lap (we got two) there is the panic and horror of the sliding and swinging, which I will illustrate here with a screencap from a sliding-and-swinging videos instead of with an actual video:


Casey and Josh didn't make it into our car. The boarding of the cars was conducted in a constant evacuate-the-embassy sort of crushing panic with people being forced into cars that they were trying to get out of and pulled away from cars they were trying to get into.


Apparently the rule is that if you find a blue wall a picture gets taken.


Before getting lunch (remember, you still have the opportunity to guess whether I got tacos or not) we made the not-too-bright (at least for me) decision to ride a ride called the Saturn 6 (or perhaps that was Saturn 9?) which was like a really dizzy version of Dumbo's Flight.


This one ride it had winter sports murals intermixed with hip hop legend murals and they played real good rap music real loud. I really ought to tell you what I think of Tha Carter III sometime.


Time's up. If you guessed that I Did get tacos, Gongratulations, you win! And the thing is, even though these tacos have lettuce on them, they were really good. Like, "I will definitely get them again next time I'm at Coney Island"-good. I think being by the water and the fact that somebody nearby was playing Sublime real loud it all just came together right and it didn't matter if the tacos had lettuce on them or not. Everything was just a little perfect.




Bellies filled, it was finally time for what you've been scrolling down for this whole time: The Mermaid Parade!




Sea-Span weather-maids!





Some of our old pals from earlier in the day started popping up




This is us again.



Does this remind you of Arrested Development too?






Reverse mermaid. Kind of gross.




Parrot girl on stilts was the showstopper of the day.


And this was one of my favorite costumes of the parade




Hmmm...nope, sorry. Liked the little girl on stilts better.




Island Friends: Remember how weird this was?



After an hour and half or so we had seen enough and headed to the beach for a while. Went in the ocean, got wet, dried off, sat, went back to the ocean, worried about camera, you know, the usual. Also, before getting to the beach I got separated from the group and super-lost. Like, as lost as you get as a kid when you wander away from your mom at the department store.


After a bit I was done and headed back to Manhattan because I had somewhere VERY important to get to...





...a pig roast in Yonkers!! YES!


(You'd expect I'd have more to say about that, wouldn't you? Sort of feel the carcass says it all, though.)

Best Excerpt of the Week

Odd to you, perhaps, but I find this one exciting and, uhm, stimulating? Emphasis added to the part that's really cool, the part that gets the post-structuralist in me really going.

...from the invisible inside, where I could neither see nor want the very thing that I have always been scared to have revealed on the scanner, by analysis - radiology, echography, endocrinology, hematology - a crural vein expelled my blood outside that I thought beautiful once stored in that bottle under a label that I doubted could avoid confusion or misappropriation of the vintage, leaving me nothing more to do, the inside of my life exhibiting itself outside, expressing itself before my eyes, absolved without a gesture, dare I say of writing if I compare the pen to a syringe, and I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe, a suction point rather than that very hard weapon with which one must inscribe, incise, choose, calculate, take ink before filtering the inscribable, playing the keyboard on the screen, whereas here, once the vein has been found, no more toil, no responsibility, no risk of bad taste or violence, the blood delivers itself all alone, the inside gives itself up and you can do as you like with it, it's me but I'm no longer there, for nothing, for nobody, diagnose the worst...

-Jacques Derrida

The part I bolded is my excuse for why I haven't written a book. And if I write a book, it will probably be a book on how hard it is to write a book, and the part I bolded will probably epigraph.

Actually, I've got a few epigraphs in mind. Just have to whip up the rest, I guess.

Best Fourth of July Celebration

This morning I declared independence from a cluttered room!

Best Little Thought on the Old Passion

The swim races at the 2008 Olympics are going to be unreal. At the trials we've got people breaking records left and right, swimming as fast as it seems human beings could go. We're nosing up against the barrier of swimming sound, about to burst through into the impossible. I mean, people are going 47:5's in the 100 M Free. That should be an impossibility. And to have multiple men able to swim a sub-minute 100 M Breast, this is like the fall of communism, something many couldn't admit to ever expecting to see in their lifetimes.

13 year olds, 23 year olds, 33 year olds, 43 year olds. Unreal.

Best Recommended Reading V

Ok, this is what I was working on.



There is blood on these walls, and some of it is mine. Last night I sliced off the tips of two fingers and bled so profusely in the elevator that they had to take it out of service.

"Doomed Love at the Taco Stand" by Hunter S. Thompson

Originally published in a Time magazine that I picked up in my orthopedist's office in 1996, this piece coincided with the swirl of interest generated by the approaching release of the feature film adaptation of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." My knowledge of the Good Doctor lives somewhere between "having read too much" and "not having read enough" and I especially liked this piece of reporting (perhaps...as there always seems to be a "perhaps" when he reports) for 1) it's near-perfect title and 2) Thompson's near-perfect and generous use of words like "savage," "beast," and "brute." During the 12 years that have transpired since the last time I read it this is what I remembered: the pine needles, the dog attack. His natural girlish charm. Wondering if a word of it was true or supposed to make any sense.

I had a hard time for a long time reconciling Thompson's writing with his infamous living until I saw him on TV for the first time. Reading him I could only think that his work was buoyed by a healthy amount of unhealthy posturing, when I witnessed him living and breathing through the television screen I realized I hadn't granted him the insanity that really possessed him, I'd imagined him too much like me and not enough a preposterous legend.

Also, his voice reminds me of my Uncle Earl Bob's. Physically they aren't so far apart, either.

Best There are Many Things That I Would Like to Say to You

File this one under "sweeping the internets"...

When it was announced that Jay-Z would be headlining the world-famous, rock-intensive Glastonbury Festival this year, Oasis' Noel Gallagher said this selection was "wrong"and:

If it ain't broke don't fix it. If you start to break it then people aren't going to go. I'm sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance.

Glastonbury has a tradition of guitar music and even when they throw the odd curve ball in on a Sunday night you go 'Kylie Minogue?' I don't know about it. But I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It's wrong.

At Glastonbury, Jay responded thusly:



I believe that, in the British vernacular, this is counts as what they call "taking the piss."

Best Turns Out I Walked a Lot Further Than I Thought I Did This Evening

But here's the game: Do you know New York and me well enough to discern tale of this decent sized urban hike?