Now they’ve got TV screens at the gas pumps. While filling up the Hyundai Sonata I saw loud advertisements for an energy drink, heartburn medicine, and a sitcom — because god forbid I spend more than three minutes in public without a screen selling me something.

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The Normal – TV OD
from TV OD/Warm Leatherette. Mute, 1978
“I don’t need a TV screen. I just stick the aerial into my skin and let the signal run through my veins…”

Helping my father move. Combing through the clutter of a lifetime. Yearbooks and musty Christmas cards and sentimental vases. Shoeboxes of receipts from 1986. A mashed clay figurine of my mom that I made when I was six. Trinkets from the days when I felt safe. We don’t know what to do with these things.

The house is almost empty. My father has a bag of guns. “You want them? Otherwise I’ll take ‘em to a pawn shop.” A green army duffle leans against the wall with a few shotguns and rifles poking out the top. My great great grandfather’s rifle. My grandfather’s shotgun. A pistol from World War II. They’re beautiful. I pick up a shotgun. Pump action. I know this because I go to the movies.

Handling a gun feels surprisingly natural. Powerful. Like suddenly I’m six again, playing cops and robbers and death is still an abstraction. I peer through the scope.

“What kind of gun is this?”
“A .22 — I grew up with that gun.”
“It feels like a toy.”

At night I often dream of guns. Vivid high pressure fever dreams. I have a recurring dream where I buy a shotgun at a swap meet and immediately lose it under the seat of a rental car. I’m frantically groping for it while attackers crash through the windshield. Sometimes I find the gun in time but the barrel is pointed the wrong way, Wile E. Coyote style. Or somebody else is pointing a gun at somebody I love. Think fast. And sometimes I dream of gigantic helicopters dropping boxes of guns into the most frightening parts of the world. Blades beat in the middle of the night and searchlights sweep across jungle and desert while thousands of people clamor for boxes of pistols. I probably saw this on TV.

Although they’re always in my dreams, I don’t know how I feel about guns. The argument that we’re safer if we’re armed makes no sense to me. But I remember one night when swerving high beams flashed in my rearview somewhere in the Sonoron desert. Somebody threw a bottle. I remember wishing I had a gun.

My father pulls out boxes of X-tra Range Shotgun Shells and Rim Fire Cartridges for the .22. “This ammo is probably still good,” he says. He tells me I don’t need a permit for rifles and antique pistols. Even if this is true, I don’t think driving through the Midtown Tunnel with a trunkful of old guns is a bright idea.

He tells me hunting stories and army stories. My great great grandfather feeding his family. My great grandfather’s stint as a night watchman. My grandfather returning from the war. “You can’t sell these,” I say. I dig the wood. I read the engravings and examine the bullets. I cock the hammers. “Rabbit ears,” my father says.

I tell him to keep them. Let’s put them in storage. We might need them someday.

Lunch at a diner off of Route 93 in Conyngham, Pennsylvania. They serve Freedom Fries. They also serve a Recession Buster Special: grilled cheese, a cup of soup, a pickle and some coffee for $3.29. My country’s ability to simultaneously embarrass and satisfy me knows no bounds.

Back on the road in a rental car. Detroit bound in a Hyundai. Some guy at a rest stop is trying to remember the names of all fifty states. He’s writing them down. He’s stuck at 48. I think he’s forgetting Rhode Island and something else.

Setting the trip odometer to zero always gives me a thrill. So do toll booths. I love the feel of rumble strips and tossing some quarters in a basket and gunning the engine.

I like going. I don’t like arriving. Maybe someday I’ll hire a shrink and work on this.

Bought some birthday records today. Found the Velvet Underground in the used bin and picked up Boogaloo Pow Wow: Dancefloor Rendez-Vous in Nuyorica, a first-rate compilation of 1950s and 1960s Latin rock from the Honest Jon’s imprint (they’re also responsible for Son Cubano NYC, one of my all-time favorite records).

The star of the day is Psych Funk 101, which is a terrible name for a record, but it’s packed with a fantastic assortment of 1960s and 1970s tracks from places like Tehran, Seoul, Athens, Lagos, and Istanbul. Check this track from Beirut, a caffeinated fusion of traditional Lebanese folk with some 1974 fuzz rock and a slinky synthesizer lead:

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Wadih Essafi - Aandak Baharia Ya Rayess
from Psych Funk 101. Stones Throw, 2009 | buy

Or this insane track from Moscow, originally released in 1973 and phazed, flanged, and filtered to Jupiter and back:

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George Garanian with The Melodiya Jazz Ensemble – The Big Search
from Psych Funk 101. Stones Throw, 2009 | buy

It’s been a good day, despite leaving the last shreds of my early thirties in the dust. Went to my fighting class tonight. Some guy nearly broke my elbow with a wild kick. Now I’m recovering next to the turntable. Exciting to get some new gatefolds. More than ever, I take solace in the analogue time spent with my records and books.

I can always tell that I’m making bad life choices when I have to send somebody a money order. Today it was the state of Florida for speeding through a swamp.

Love the clamor and clang and the thick old ladies with their carts loaded with metal dishes of pork, bean curd, custard, pork belly, chicken feet, more pork, sticky rice, shrimp, and more pork. Dim sum is the best way to eat. I want to make this place my office. The food at Jing Fong is a shade better, but when it comes to prompt service and a slightly Bladerunner aesthetic, 88 Palace wins in my book.

A sad scene across the street from my building. Dig the empty bottle of gin at his feet. Pee Wee’s sidekick has got the blues.

Sometimes you wander into a movie theatre and get your mind blown. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 camp horror flick House is that kind of movie. Floating death cats, dancing skeletons, and murderous vegetables. A girl named Sweet says an atomic mushroom cloud looks like cotton candy. A girl named Fantasy floats on a river of blood in the living room. Every cinematic cliché is thrown into a grinder and turned into a bad acid fever dream. Like nothing I’ve ever seen. People say that all the time, but it’s true. Now playing at the IFC Center.