In My Time of Slacking 7.6.05

I have been working towards camp. And reading a lot. A trio of highlights:

She’s Just Not That Into You is interesting, but I really hope my female friends can figure out when a fella is jerking them around. I also realized that I have been “not that into” a number of women I’ve dated. Hm.

Read Fall River Dreams, in part because I am ingesting more basketball books and also in part because I wanted to see if the book made reference to a fella named Justin McDonald. I thought most of my friends had met him but that was not true; Eben met him a while back when he worked for my sales unit at the failed dot-com. Justin was a star for his high school team, playing in all-star games and winning a state championship in Massachussetts; he played at a Div II school and a little bit in Europe and when we met him, he was figuring out what to do with himself. When he got drunk, he would show us his “shake-and-bake” headfake. And in the book there he is, Juddy McDonald, a specter over the next year’s team, the upholder of basketball skill and virtue, the outsider who becomes a Fall River hero.

Also reading Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, which is amazing. It’s a history of hip hop that goes back to the sound system DJ’s of Kingston, Jamaica, to the gang warfare and bankruptcy of NYC’s 70’s, to the graffiti art scene. It’s a reminder that while New York was a tad scary even when I was growing up, it had some fire and some tension. I think in 10 years, all the fire and the tension will be in the Poconos and White Plains and whichever Connecticut city is the most bankrupt. And we’ll have an Eckerd/ CVS/ Starbucks/ Applebee’s on every corner, indie movie theaters to remind us what it looked like living in a place where bad things could happen to you (and you adapted by being tough and careful), and our music will sell us more Western-like fantasies of gunplay and deals that barely exist.