Eat, Pray, Shlub #10

WHAT’S GOOD MRR. Welcome to my tenth column. So much has been going on since the last time I wrote. Namely, I moved out of New York City for the first time in my whole entire life and now I live in Austin, TX. Weird, right? Everyone I know is excited for me, but also everyone is shocked that I would leave because I’ve always seemed like one of those people that would stay in New York forever—in part because of my personality, but also because I’ve always adamantly sworn that I would never leave.

Three other things I’ve adamantly sworn in my life: I would never like the Smiths, I would never be a vegetarian, the Dead Kennedys would be my favorite band forever.

Re: The Smiths. This is something I said when I only listened to Blanks 77 and the Casualties, the same era where I pejoratively referred to the Stooges as “too psychedelic.” Like one year later I was dating this Darkwave College Babe who I met at the Starbucks I worked at in High School and we were driving to the beach and the song “Ask” came on a mixtape in her car. Her cybergoth dreads were blowing in the breeze and I was deeply Puppy Doggin’ and all of a sudden I liked the Smiths. I rode that wave so hard and so far that I’m back to not liking the Smith’s again, but maybe that’s not the point, is it?

Re: Vegetarianism. This is also something I swore up and down in high school. Then when I was 19 I went on this zine reading tour with my right hand man Salvatore where the destination was a motherfucking debutante ball in Dallas that I had gotten us invited to because one of the debutantes briefly lived in NYC and we would do drugs together. ANYWAY, Salvatore is the son of a butcher and so he was a vegetarian. I didn’t get it and was like, “that shit is for hippies I’m gonna eat all of your dad’s prosciutto,” or whatever. Then we were in Dallas at the debutante ball on a ton of speed wearing these shitty thrift store tuxedos and carrying around a tub of DRUM tobacco like an amulet. I thought everyone would be freaked out by us because I had a mohawk and Sal had that Kevin Seconds thing where half his head was shaved, but mostly they had an easy time compartmentalizing us as the “friends from New York,” and that seemed to explain everything weird about us. The only thing that successfully freaked out the squares was when dinner came and Sal traded me his steak for my vegetables. People truly lost their shit and I became a vegetarian next day. I also am not a vegetarian anymore, though I was for years, but again, that’s not the point.

The point is that oftentimes the things I proclaim the loudest are the things that I end up ultimately doing and I think maybe part of why I feel the need to adamantly and publicly distance myself from them is because I’m actually getting myself used to the idea of maybe trying them out. Or something. Is that actually the point? I’m unsure. But this column isn’t called Making Points With Colin Atrophy, it’s called something different than that so fuck you anyway. As for the Dead Kennedys, I was like 13 when I decided they were my favorite band forever and I mean, come on.

Look, what I’m saying is I moved out of New York like four days ago as of this writing and an indeterminate amount of time as of your reading, because like, I don’t even know who you are or when you’re gonna read this. It could be any time after now or even before now because linear time is an oppressive concept that was made up by capitalism (more like CRAPitalism, am I right?) to bring you down and make you go to work on time. I drove to Austin in two days. I ate three bags of peanut M&Ms and one dozen oatmeal cookies that my mom made for me and put in a ziplock bag. I listened to approximately twenty hours worth of this horror story podcast that Imogen told me about and I consumed exactly Thirty Hours of Energy. In the end I arrived in Austin a day and a half after I left New York, almost to the minute. My girlfriend Becca had made me a homemade VEGAN chocolate babka to welcome me so if I had been harboring any doubts about whether packing up my apartment into the back of a station wagon and moving across the country to be her Professor’s Wife (which I wasn’t because she rules), they would’ve been set aside.

I’m eating a piece of that babka right now and listening to the Popper Burns tape I wrote about last month. Last night my old friend Ben Trogdon (of the ever exciting NUTS Fanzine, the new issue of which has an interview with fellow columnist Bryony’s band GOOD THROB) had an art show here and tomorrow night G.L.O.S.S. is playing and I’m very excited about establishing my new identity as a New Yorker, Elsewhere. Just now Becca made a joke about some NASCAR driver and I had no idea who he was and I got to act all befuddled like, “why would I even know about a NASCAR driver?”

So yeah, 2015 is closing out soon and I’m stoked and in love and I live in a new town for the first time in my life which is very exciting. You can still send mail to my old P.O. Box for now, it just might take me a little longer to get back to you. 442-D Lorimer St #230 / Brooklyn, NY 11206. And you can still email me sliceharvester@gmail.com and blah blah blah blah blah. I’m excited for my future columns to all be about me being confused by shit here and I hope you are too. No cops, no creeps. Peace in the taqueria. I’m out.