Will Hines Dot Net

They cats will not stop splashing water. They refuse to drink it right out of the bowl. Maggie dips her paw in the bowl and then licks her paw. Hopey splashes the water out of the bowl onto the floor, chases the stream and bats at it as it spreads across the floor, and then begrudgingly sips at it. There is an entire bowl’s worth of water spread out across my kitchen floor right now like a lake, with two cats staring at it from afar, proud of their work. Good job, cats! You’ve killed and flattened a bowl of water!

They’re going to die of dehydration and, I think it’s fair to say, stupidity.

Recent milestones:

• I turned 35.
• My improv group started making preparations for its last show.
• A smattering of exes got married, had extra babies and bought houses.

Also, I defeated Werdna.

persnickety
willfully
elegant
economical
somnambulism
ostensibly
quotidian
resonate
mollified
natural

Grab onto them and feel safe.

Saw the play The Pillowman yesterday. I don’t see many plays. But the night before, I was at McManus with Eliza, Tanouye, Thunder, Birch, and Gavin. Gavin and Eliza were raving about The Pillowman, and how it was closing this Sunday. So Tanouye and I, the unemployed, drunkenly swore to wake up the next morning, go to the half-price ticket booth and see the matinee showing. Which we did.

As far as drunken promises go, that’s a pretty highbrow one — to go see a critically-praised play. Usually drunken promises involve Atlantic City, or always being friends forever, or moving to Austin, Texas. But at 12:30 I stepped out of the train station, and Tanouye and I waited in the line for the Tkts booth.

Standing there, you can look around at Times Square and see the huge billboards promoting the big shows — mostly musicals. It’s disheartening to me to see how many shows are either revivals of older shows (Fiddler On The Roof, Chicago) , or shows that are based on an already-famous person/thing/movie (Lennon, Mama Mia!, Monty Python’s Spamalot, Hairspray). It makes the billboards look desperate to me: “Come see Lennon! You know, JOHN Lennon? You know him! You already like him! Right? Right? You feel comfortable, teeming masses? We don’t want to upset you with a new idea! PLEASE PLEASE come see this!”

I would hate to be pitching an original muscial (or movie or play for that matter) — when it seems like 90% of them are just cannibalizing an already-existing thing. I would bet that if you took a well-written completely original story, and made all the characters just arbitrarily have celebrities’ names, that you could get someone to put it up — just because the existence of familiar names would sooth advertisers and potential audiences. “Come see The Pillowman! Watch the travails of an author named TOM CRUISE as he’s interrogated by a policeman named DONALD SUTHERLAND and also trying to relate to his brother who is named DEBBIE HARRY.”

Anyway, the play was great! And I felt for one afternoon that I am a Person Who Does Things. A Person With Interests. And there were celebrities in the cast (who were really good), but the story was brand-new. A good day.

I’m heading out now to buy an egg and cheese on a whole wheat bagel.

The most difficult part, by far, of my purge of apartment clutter is done. I have thrown out my jewel cases and most liner notes.

“Good God!” I can hear my fellow music-lovers gasp. “The jewel cases, maybe — and that’s only MAYBE — but the LINER NOTES?”

You got it. I THREW THEM OUT. With rare exception (I kept the recent Elvis Costello releases with his cool behind-the-music ramblings, and the booklet to Smile) , I plucked out the cover art that has kept me company for sometimes 15 years (in the case of the photo of the “old” Beatles on the Blue Greatest Hits album) or maybe just a matter of months (the freaky picture of the waving radish-slice-head woman from Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea) — and dropped it into a black Hefty trash bag. And now my CDs are neatly packed into two encyclopedia volume-sized bookets. 1.5 big bookshelves now sit empty in my apartment and five big trash bags sit in my hallway.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t easy. When I got to They Might Be Giants, and had to throw away the CD packaging from their first album — which was the first CD I ever purchased, back in 1988 — I got misty. But you know what? The last time I opened up that CD and looked at the liner notes was probably 1996. And that’s a conservative estimate. It’s possible I haven’t looked at the liner notes to that CD since the day I bought it in Willimantic, CT back when there was still a Berlin Wall somewhere.

And two weeks ago I threw out a cardboard box of cassette tapes, which included some I had lugged around since I was 14 (Footloose, “Weird” Al Yankovic In 3-D). Do I have to wait another 15 years before I allow myself to let go of a 5 5/8″ by 4 9/16″ photo of the Beatles crossing a road in front of their studio?

Even with this logic — in which I firmly believe — I weakened at times, and frantically started to re-assemble my jewel cases. What brought me back to my senses was the memory that in 2000, exactly 1/2 of my CDs were stolen from my apartment. Jewel cases, liner notes, AND CDs — gone. I left the door ajar for a bit, and a thief (I assume someone insert menus in the doors?) got in and shoved A-J of my CD collection (along with my cable box and Mr. Met cup full of change) into my sidebag and hustled off. I survived that. And this should be easier, since I still have the actual CDs.

For some reason, I had two copies each of Synchronicity and Outlandos d’Amour by The Police and Some Girls by The Rollings Stones. I’ll keep them in my bag and hand them out at near-random times over the next few days.

I missed a lot of great albums recommended to me. I’m now keeping a list of them here, so I can proceed down the list systematically:

http://www.willhines.net/albums.html

Good God, check out that list! That’s huge! Yet my obsessive nature commands me to listen to everything.

The only way I’m getting through it is if someone hands me a bunch of these on discs. Purnell listed like 700 albums, but then again he DID give me copies of them, and I listened to them. If anyone can help me out — especially if you recommended something to me and really want me to hear it:

The red rows I don’t have copies of.
The white rows I already had or already knew.
The green rows I did not have, but have gotten or have heard since the album was recommended to me.

And if you’re going to suggest more, 3 maximum, and no more than one by any single artist.

Ok, now who get me a copy of “Back in Black”?

All right, I’m feeling restless, and getting a bit lower on savings than I’d like. There’s only one reasonable solution: I have to get a job.

Computer programming job. If you guys know of any, let me know. My general skills are web programming: PHP, Perl, ASP, Cold Fusion. I’m also good with MySQL, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server databases. I’m strong with Microsoft Access. And most of all, I’m good at tying together lots of different applications and making things work. And figuring things out. I’m a workaholic obsessive, too. So that’s nice.

I have a few leads, so maybe this search won’t take that long. But consider the word put out that Will Hines is trying to be a responsible citizen again.

I was watching an improv show last week. 10 minutes into the set, a couple sat down next to me. Soon, the guy leaned over, pointed at the stage and asked: “What’s going on?”
I summed up the scene that was in progress: “That man has a real bird. The other guy has a mechanical bird, and they’re competing.”

The guy nodded and started watching.

About four scenes later, the guy asked “What’s happening now? Does THAT guy have the mechanical bird now?”

And I said. “It’s a different scene. They’re doing a series of scenes. When someone runs along the front it means a new scene is starting.” The scene that was occuring at this time involved a man with a fission reactor competing with a man who had a cold fusion reactor, but I did not explain this to my neighbor.

The man nodded, whispered something to his date, and returned to watching the show.

Most of the members of Monkeydick decided to grab some dinner before what would be our third-to-last show. We watched Andy Rocco’s hilarious “How To Go Down On Women The Andy Rocco Way” and then trudged two blocks to Dallas BBQ on 8th Avenue and 23rd. Now I’m going to allow here that it was my suggestion to go there, and I’m also going to allow that the food was very good and service quick and polite — but I feel compelled to point out that you’d have a hard time finding a larger and more appalling example of debaucherousness unbound than a Dallas BBQ.

On an island of tiny cramped restaurants, Dallas BBQ in Manhattan is a cavern — a warehouse of meat-eaters. A Home Depot of fat-asses. The din of noise gives to my iPod-damaged ears a constant blanket of urgency, as if there’s a horde of Vikings stomping up a nearby hallway as you eat. The helpings are willfully huge there, so everyone looks like Emporer Nero as they shove another pulled pork sandwich into their gobs. I had ordered a pulled pork sandwich.

Actually, if I’m going to put down Dallas BBQ I need to make a full disclosure: I alos kind of like being there. I mean, I’d go so far as to say that I kind of NEED to go there every few months. I guess I’m at least part fatass. Once I even went by myself. And if devouring enormous portions of sauce-slabbed pork with a group of friends makes you feel a spoiled, unbounded Arabian prince — then eating there by yourself makes you feel like a sociopath who survives only on the most unhealthy of meals.

They also rush you in and out of there. Not rudely, but efficiently. You get your food and check right away. I’m so used to the unspoken NYC policy of “We’ll bring you your check when we shut the place down” that it’s jarring. They’re in such a rush that upon arriving, when Lathan asked the matre’d “How long for a table” he replied “There is no wait” in what I’m hoping was an ominious and meaningful tone.

Dinner conversation was great. A large portion of it dwelled on dissecting “Weird” Al Yankovic’s catalog. I knew Curtis and John were familiar with those songs, but I was pleased to discover that Rocco and I were also way way too able to quote long passages from many non-singles of the Yankovic catalog. I regaled them with my story of seeing “Weird” Al at Tuxedo Junction in Danbury, CT in 1994 — thus witnessing a roomful of enthusiastic fans getting into songs which are merely making fun of actual songs. It’s like crying at a parody of a Robert Frost poem or something, right? God bless him, that “Weird” Al, but still.

You know what? We had a great time. That I’m casting a negative light makes me an irredeemable sourpuss.