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Thursday
Went to my bar, drank enough to get me tipsy for the ride to the Czec beer garden. Forgot to bring a photo id so the bouncer wouldn’t let me in. I even tried a bribe. Needless to say, with cheap beer, litre glasses, over two hundred people (including many of my friends, some of whom were improvising on their instruments), and a warm, Bavarian atmosphere, I was a little annoyed. I walked around the side, scaled the wire mesh fence surrounding the playground next to it (there’s a fantastic juxtaposition of adult/child playgrounds), got onto the corrugated iron roof, jumped down into the garden to the surprise of many of it’s patrons, and walked over to my friends who were glad that I was fit to consume golden beverages at will. Of course, I’d not gotten away with it. One of my friends said “shit, Nick, I think you’re in trouble,” so I downed my drink, stubbed out my fag, and got up, hands held high, saying “alright, alright, you got me.”
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Posted 2 years, 5 months ago. Add a comment
- From my diary, 9th July, 2006
I got punched in the head by a guy because I insinuated that his girlfriend was a prostitute. Ok. Perhaps that was deserved. However, my hands were on my handlebars, I was sitting on my bike seat, and I was totally defenceless. Then, when I got the police involved (I wanted an apology) they accused me of being racist, and I was lost for words. Finally, the cop said that he couldn’t press charges unless I was bruised. Now I’m bruised, but I wasn’t then.
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- The reason why New York and billiards make for a good day.
Today I didn’t do much.
I knew from the moment I woke up, around midday, that I wasn’t going to do anything. I was incredibly sweaty. I had left the fan off.
My phone rang. I knew it was Nuno, but I wasn’t sure why. He probably wanted to have lunch. “Hey, dude, what’s up?” was the question, but by the tone in his voice I knew there would be more. He didn’t just want something, he expected something. Turns out I’d forgotten his gig at the Blue Note today, which was on at 2:30. I was in motion.
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- A little edited to cut down, I also talked about my commercial for Centrum (saying I was now a success).
On Christmas Eve, started going out with a beautiful, nice, and caring girl, who I heartlessly dumped a couple of days ago. This was linked with the fact that I’m so busy at the moment, and that I’m a “douche-bag.”
My life is now homework and working at Eastside Billiards. I’ve been teaching a few lessons, doing even fewer parties (trick shots and organizing tournaments), running the league (and playing in it), and bartending. I’m a terrible bartender, forgetful not only about what the customer just ordered, but also how to make the drinks. I keep a “cheat-sheet” in the back room, and tell the customers I’m going back there to fetch ice, then sneak a peek at how to make Manhattans, Long Island Iced Teas, and Dirty Martinis.
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- I know I’m not supposed to be repeating a lot of content on a blog (hits, etc), but I thought this was too good to let go:
Customers at Work
Three customers, there before my shift started, around 9:30. They’re playing on one of the middle tables, although most people choose the ones around the edges. One was an unremarkable grey-haired man, in shape for his sixties, sounds southern, drinking Jack on the rocks. David. The two women were drinking chardonnay. One was a brunette, tall, packed tight into a skirt and tights, her hair bunched around her head like a mango split down the middle to expose a tyrannosaur. She was powerful, held her body very aggressively, and you could see the guys she spoke to (including the thirty-something “player” players who are part of my late-night crowd) scratching behind their ears.
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- I just found this on an old website of mine. Actually, I’d completely forgotten I even had another website, so this came as quite a surprise. Anyway, here you go:
Tonight I lost a friend and I feel ill
Tonight, while doing research for my final poetry submission, I noticed a little mouse creep up beside me. It died, slowly, and inspired the following poetry. I first wrote sixteen separate poems, but have combined them here to form one with sixteen parts.
1
A mouse creeped up to me this evening,
And sat on the carpet until I looked at it.
I do not know if it is a boy or a girl
But what I do know is that it is small and cute,
And that it sat there for a while, cleaning itself.
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“This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing… Political language is designed to make our lies sound truthful, and murder respectable”
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946.
“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in… to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
— George Bush, May 24th, 2005.
George Washington was a famously distant figure, intent on retaining aristocratic rules of etiquette in the White House. Lincoln demonstrated the virtues of a sober, almost impersonal state of mind. Roosevelt, creator of the Fireside Chats, spoke more as a guiding parent than as a sympathetic friend. Johnson never smiled and favoured a monotonous tone. And Nixon wore dress shoes and black socks on the beach.
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- A few thoughts on using dreams in a novel
The average amount of time we spend asleep is between six and eight hours a night, depending on how rich you are. Taking seven hours as the median, the average hundred year old will have spent twenty-nine years of his life with his eyes closed and, for a significant part of that, dreaming his best and worst. First thought to be messages from the gods, the meaning of dreams has been interpreted by every culture we know of, from Ancient Egypt, through the Greeks, Romans, and Christians, to Freud, Jung, and now MRI and EEG scanners. A necessary part of our health, indicative of our weakness, dependent on our relaxation, full of anxiety and always cryptic, dreams have rightly become a useful space to allow for subjective analysis on the part of the reader. Putting the reader to sleep is so useful, in fact, that it is cheap.
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To help with an essay I was writing, I decided to do a character study of one of my characters. Any relation to non-fictional characters is probably not a coincidence.
Name: Jerry W.S. The W is his grandfather’s name, a man he feels a distinct connection to. The story is that Jerry felt W.’s spirit push his car a little back from a cliff edge, thus saving his life, and proving that he was his grandfather’s favorite. S., of course, can be traced all the way back to the Mayflower…
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- Republished without the permission of Our Town
A Meal for the Proles, Carnegie Hill Style
Melt-in-your-mouth liver and a generous BYO policy at Square Meal
By Nick Broad
June 17, 2009
My armchair-socialist father, an Englishman, taught me that real food is blue-collar, like steak and kidney pie or mashed potatoes and liver. But after living for four years with my grandmother (his mother-in-law), a German nonagenarian brought up as the daughter of prosperous steel industrialists, I’ve developed a blooming taste for gourmet.
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