Boosing shed*

Some ill-advised going away shots of cheap tequila in a random dive bar in Barcelona.

He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage.*

The Irish are quite deft in the art of dark humor. The grim jokes run freely through Ulysses, and you always have the feeling that it is not only possible to laugh at almost anything, but that you should laugh at everything. In hard times, it does seem to be a great sanity saver.

In my years working in New York, there were many moments when times got tough, and I mean life/death, insanity, love/loss, fear of starvation kind of tough. Pretty much immediately, I learned to embrace my love of dark humor and wield it as a weapon against self-pity and sorrow.

I was pretty miserable slugging away at Ruby Foo’s in Times Square as a waitress after graduation. It was definitely the worst job I have ever had and, let’s pray, will ever have. However, my coworkers were a hilarious bunch and we always came up with some pretty evil jokes to pass the time. Some were on customers, like when my friend served a child a pint of pure grenadine syrup after his mother complained in a rude manner that there wasn’t enough in the previous Shirley Temple. We then watched the child burst into frantic hyperactive shenanigans, and then crash into a kiddie puddle on his insufferable mother’s lap. Entertaining. Another time, we convinced a few unsuspecting waiters that our cocaine addicted manager (who later was fired for doing coke in the office, stealing money and liquor, and left amid a sobbing tantrum) had overdosed. When he showed up to lead our meeting, he was very confused at the reactions from a few of his staff members.

When I worked in the publishing industry, life was better only in that I was a little closer to literature, and because it was a job I actually needed to have graduated from college to obtain. Our office could be a bit crazy at times, and we all kept ourselves from jumping out the window by concocting ridiculous situations and making sure everything was fair game for jokes, including suicide, heart attacks, and serious illnesses like tuberculosis and pneumonia.

New York is a fantastic place for dark humor, and in my next two jobs, I easily discovered macabre minded individuals to share a cackle with me.

Barcelona and Santa Fe, on the other hand, are not really friendly shores for this kind of comedy. Certainly, I have found kindred spirits in both places, but there is something about the plentitude of sunshine, the relaxed pace of life, the focus on things like living rather than working, the mañana attitude, that keeps people from finding it amusing that you would tell an annoying man hitting on you at a bar that you would like to take him home, chop him into pieces and store his body parts in your freezer, and that this would actually entice him further rather than scare him off.

a horrible example of free thought.*

In my quest to transcribe thousands of pages from old journals, I came across this entry that struck me as rather Joycean, though more in its insane jumble than its brilliance. It is interesting to travel in time back to my days in New York. My life there was very different, very difficult. I have included a photo of downtown Manhattan taken from the Manhattan bridge in the wee hours walking home from a party in Chinatown.


"9-24-03 8:42pm
To what land do I go, trot with a head of gibberish, to and fro through the trio of muses I call men but they are but boys and I lost among them only a smattering of woman. Black and white paisley skirt devours Lolita, ah Nabokov you sick bastard to make me think such love is kind to all of our tattered morals. I leave the city downtown in the East river rippling in a fallen autumn air. Who are these beautiful people sitting in orange plastic boats on voyages to lives I can barely guess, even the effort makes my guts crawl. Two liters of seltzer water and I still haven’t burped away this illness, the ravishing vomit bug that creates new back and stomach muscles to scream when I laugh or cough. Excellent weight loss regimen, this. Great for my intellect as well, creating new words stuporific and swelling with more than normal nonsense like a sticky piece of leather, sodden and bloated on a nail. Ah my sense, where hast thou gone? Dreamt of travel last night, France – Paris, boats, villages, dank mysteries. Cast iron belly coils a stew fit for two, myself and a porcelain friend. Skin crawling misery. Why? Not cursed, just free. Must rhyme for some reason (‘tis the season!) (but no reason at all from rhyme) wow where am I, have I journeyed?"