I’m torn. Which quote makes you want to read the review/book more?

“A provocative female rapper in Germany, Lady Bitch Ray, who runs her own independent label, Vagina Style Records, grabbed headlines when she accused Ms. Roche of stealing her explicit form of empowering raunch.”

Or?

Though Wetlands offers, in its 229 pages, an encyclopedia of bodily secretions and a catalog of nonstandard ends for them, it threatens to trigger emesis on only four occasions.

[Update: Just noticed that Infinite Thought (a very nice philosophy blog) has an interview with the author up at Salon.]

UPDATE: Thank the lord and all that is holy, it was in fact an April Fool’s joke, which for some reason they waited for almost a week to announce. Good one guys, but it still doesn’t change the fact that this is more than likely going to come out somewhere else in the near future.

The fucking DOW is down 230 points today to an almost 3-year low, while Oil is approaching $140 a barrel. Unemployment is rocketing to the future, everything is going fucking crazy. OK ECONOMY, WE GET IT, IT’S TIME TO STOP SHITTING THE BED NOW. I looked through my photo collection and found pictoral evidence of the lunacy:

2001

2004

2008

2008 1/2

(see part 1)

WOOPS forgot about Part 2. What can I say, what doth life life life life life

So. We’re briskly vacating the scene of horrors and beating feet back to our respective vehicles, through the rain, quite frankly feeling really uncomfortable to the point of nausea. We arrive at the car and agree to meet up at the first place we toured the day before, so everyone else could see it (we’re moving there this weekend, actually). We’re driving off toward President St. when my phone rings:

(paraphrased conversation)
“Hey Evan? Yeah my car just got towed.”
“Are you [fucking] kidding me? Alright, we’ll turn around and come get you…”

Apparently, because (we’ll call her) D parked at the Royal Farms and took more than 35 seconds to come back and get her car, they had it towed. Regardless of the fact that practically no one else was parked in the lot, it’s beside the point. Let it be known that Royal Farms definitely engages in predatory towing activities in the city of Baltimore and they will have your ass towed without reconsidering it. It happened to another friend of mine up in Hampden, and he even went into the RF for a soda, so he was a paying customer, and still had to pay the fee at the lot despite the fact that he was ‘rightfully’ parked there.

We turn the car around, pick up D and essentially realize that this tow lot is in fact the very same lot to which our other friend had his car towed to from Hampden. Where is this tow lot you ask? It’s in fucking Sandtown. Sandtown Winchester, home of many, many murders, crack dealers, and 400,000 rows of boarded up homes and shuttered businesses. Essentially, one of the worst parts of our cracked vase of a city. And why wouldn’t the lot be in the furthest possible location within city limits from where we were currently? It made perfect sense.

And after driving around for about 20 minutes, we entered Sandtown and the same feeling of creeping death starts to hit. That irrational, probably racist feeling of ‘holy shit we don’t belong here’ upon viewing row after row of dilapidated buildings with their roofs rotting out, prostitutes hanging around in broad daylight on the corner while kids on their Huffys ride past, the very obvious result of a few generations of total neglect on the part of the citizens and the city. Yeah, the same crap you’d see on The Wire that all the white people not from Baltimore ‘really want to see.’

But this isn’t a social commentary, it’s a story.

Anyway we get somewhat lost – in Sandtown – and finally make it to the lot. The minimum fee for retrieving a towed vehicle is something like $260, huge shocker, and they only take cash. This is mostly common knowledge. And of course they have an ATM on site, but this particular time – and more than likely as a result of several other ‘customers’ coming through – the ATM only had $40 left. Great! We get to drive back through Sandtown and find a gas station with an ATM! In Sandtown!

The BP we ended up traveling to, one of those glaringly ghetto stereotypes where absolutely everything is behind bullet proof glass, provided very little in the way of entertainment and mostly just white paranoia as we sat around waiting for D to get $300 – in cash – in Sandtown – so we could take her back to get her car. In a brief exchange about how we were all getting increasingly nervous about having a chunk of cash in the car in an area of the city known for its lawlessness, our one friend made the remark “The stars keep racking up.” We all had a good laugh at that one.

Regardless of all the hype and skittishness, D got her car back without incident. We made our way back to the original house and looked around and IMMEDIATELY settled. It’s a brilliant marketing scheme really, the houses we looked at got progressively worse to the point of horrifying after the very first one. On Saturday I viewed the first place and though to myself “Yeah, this is pretty nice. Welp, on to the next place.” By Sunday afternoon at or around 5pm, having viewed two other unimpressive properties, one dungeon of horrors, driven across town to Fallujah and come full circle to the first place I felt as though we literally had found Shangri-La itself. You’re GOD DAMN right we took that place, and WOO HA time to party.

THE END

(Originally posted May 19th, 2008)

I don’t really think anyone enjoys the process of house hunting. The somewhat creeping urgency of having a lease that’s going to expire in three weeks and having to find another roof over one’s head is stressful to say the least, but in this particular instance, it turned out to be one hell of a trip.

(continue reading…)