I was bored and when I get bored I look for something to do. My idle mind tends to gravitate towards mischief, so instead of conducting unhealthy Google searches I decided to tweak my blog. It’s not dramatically different, really. I’ve always loved the banner so I kept that. I changed the name to this somewhat Bukowski-esque title. Compared to the previous title this is a bit shorter, a better play on words and it rolls off the tongue more easily. Do I need to explain that this is a witty sarcasm? That I’m not really exiled or in pain? (Well…not much.) In the past, I was told that The Unbearable Banishment was an insult to my bride. Further, I was asked that if life is so unbearable, why didn’t I just leave? It’s just a joke, brothers and sisters. Not a cry for help.

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I took the girlies to the horse track and showed them how to bet the ponies. Not the complicated data dump that constitutes real wagering. Just the basics. This is a dangerous game to play. The only attention I ever got from my father—and I mean ever—was on Thursdays during football season when he’d let me fill out a betting chit. It doesn’t take a Freudian scholar to figure out where my love of gambling and casinos was born. That’s something I DON’T want the daughters to inherit so I’m careful.

Horse racing is a dying sport, but it’s still a pretty big deal in New Jersey. You wouldn’t think so, but NJ is horse country. The area where I live is dotted with pretty horse farms. This was by no means our first visit to the track. The track is excellent! It’s not a total dive, but it’s still a bit seedy around the edges. It’s mangy enough to be interesting, but not so much that it’s dangerous or scary. If you look around, you can still find some sharps right out of a Damon Runyon novel.

I taught The Daughters how to read the Racing Form. Just look at that logo. A classic design.

Kids will place a wager based on the jockey’s silk color or the name of the horse. You’d be surprised how far that’ll get you. My father-in-law and I pour over stats—track condition, jockey weight, previous running times, opponents, etc.,—and more often than not throwing a dart at the page is just as effective.

The worst thing that could happen happened. 11-Year Old Daughter won $33 on a $6 across-the-board bet. She bet the number three horse because she’s third in her class. Now she thinks she’s got it all figured out. Very dangerous.

We’ve spent the last few weekends on the boardwalks pumping badly-needed capital into the local storm-damaged communities. Restore the Shore! Hurricane Sandy fucked this place up pretty good but it’s amazing how much progress they’ve made. Some of the amusement park rides are still out of commission but pretty much everything else is up and running.

Daughter and friend stroll through the Jersey scene. I’m glad they’re going to spend their youth near a beach community. What great memories! I grew up near Lake Erie. Why do you think they call it eerie?

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Scary quotes du jour

“You can have privacy or you can have the Internet, but you can’t have both.”

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the recently revealed government surveillance programs.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.”

George Orwell
1984

I walked out of the Laura Pels Theater onto 47th St. It was dark out.

[I had just seen the clunkily titled The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin. Primo character actor David Morse is a white collar criminal home from prison to terrorize his family. A compelling story with some forced dialog and a few strained scenes. Morse, terrifying as always. Do you remember him from The Green Mile and The Hurt Locker?]

I crossed 6th Avenue to Rockefeller Center to see what Ugo Rondinone’s Human Nature looks like at night. It was a satisfying enough work during the day. I thought the inky sky and floodlights might cast some interesting shadows. As I suspected, the work is much more nuanced and spooky in the dark. Isn’t everything?

The compulsion is to walk up and touch them. I’ve seen people stroke and even hug them.

The lights spill onto the plaza and give the sculptures more texture and depth.

A friend sneaks a shot of your humble author hard at work. Waiting for the pedestrians to clear my viewfinder

Have any of you had Lasik surgery performed on your eyes? Any regrets? Long-term negative side effects? How horrific an experience was it? The procedure looks like medieval torture but I’m so fed up with wearing glasses that I’m considering it. The operation can’t be any worse than having my forehead cut open for basal cell carcinoma surgery and I survived that. Barely.

Envy.

What a useless emotion. You can’t use it as motivating force. You can’t build or repair anything with it. It’s the leech of all emotions. And yet it’s an ingrained part of our human nature. Why hasn’t it been phased out via genetic selection? I just read an article that said the DNA of cockroaches has been altered so that sweetness is no longer an appealing flavor to them. They figured out that poisons are baited with sweetness, so over a few generations their molecular structure changed and they now avoid anything sweet. Brilliant! Why hasn’t envy been genetically torn out by its roots?

I walk up 6th Avenue and it seems that everyone swirling around me, darting in and out of expensive hotels and restaurants, riding by in hansom cabs, well manicured, well dressed, youthful, are all more successful, smarter, happier, together than I can ever hope to be.

I went to the drug store next to Carnegie Hall to buy eye drops. The druggist was chatting with a very pretty lady in front of me. They knew each other. She lives upstairs in Carnegie Towers. She’s back in New York from her home in St. Moritz. It wasn’t a boastful conversation. It was all perfectly civilized. They exchanged pleasantries. Seemed genuinely happy to see one another after a long separation. I felt a hole open in the floor and swallow me.

As I get older I realize that certain things are never going to happen for me. I envy the young and their wonderful naïve sense of limitlessness. I know this is all a terrible illusion but I have to acknowledge it. It’s a whispering voice. Human nature.

I feel the sense of possibility
I fee the wrench of hard reality
The focus is sharp in the city.

Peart

My human nature feels a lot like Ugo Rondinone’s Human Nature exhibit looks. (Now through July 7th at Rockefeller Center.)

Nine giant stone figures stand sentinel in the plaza.

There’s something beautiful, sad and majestic about them.

Each stone weighs around 30,000 pounds. They had to do an engineering study to insure that the exhibit didn’t crash through the sidewalk.

30 Rock, indeed.

I’ve been bored with everything recently, especially myself, but instead of spending the evening wallowing, I taught myself how to code a rollover of a photo. You young punks who are laughing because a rollover is coding 101 and you knew how to do it when you were 12-years old can all kiss my ass. It’s a minor miracle that I figured it out and I am in short supply of minor miracles, so I’ll take it.

One of Agatha Christie’s most popular titles is And Then There Were None. It’s been reprinted hundreds of times, made into plays, movies and even a point-and-click online game in 2005—more than 60 years after its publication!

And Then There Were None is NOT the original title of this book. It was once titled Ten Little Indians. But we live in a more enlightened time, so they gave it an innocuous title.

Actually…Ten Little Indians wasn’t the original title, either. Hover your pointer over the image (or, if you’ve got an iPhone, tap it) to reveal the true original, utterly shocking title.

Good God in heaven! What was she thinking?! That’s a first edition that I saw at the recent Park Avenue Armory bookfair. Yours for only $12,000. The rollover functionality doesn’t work on some mobile devices. Get thee to a desktop and prepare for an outrage!