#7 - having it my way.

holy storms, batman! this weekend, there were a series of storms here in the city that brought me back to the summer storms of fort lauderdale, where one second it'd be all sunny & happy & a'birds tweetin' and the next, the sky would turn black & sheets of rain would come crashing down on your face.

as an example, on saturday, i left my house & jumped on the subway up to union square. when i left my apartment, the skies were grey, but there was complete skyness dryness in action when i descended into the subway station to catch the train. when i came out of the union square station 45 minutes later, the GAME HAD TOTALLY FLIPPED & there were masses of tourists & nyu students & citizens & trader joes/whole foods bags & baby strollers & a viola taking cover at the top of the stairs exiting the subway...taking cover from the torrential downpour that could have had irreversible effects on us all...if we were mogwai...which i'm pretty sure we aren't. five minutes later, the rain had stopped & the evil scientist with a weather machine hidden deep in the bowels of columbia's pupin hall cackled with glee.

i didn't want to take the chance that i might be even part mogwai, so with the sporadic violent half-hour storms this weekend, i stayed indoors a bunch overall, assembling quite a lazy dog-dangling agenda.

on saturday night in particular, i decided to have some indoor netflix time with two films...3:10 to yuma & the bridge...a western & a documentary about suicide at the golden gate bridge. to prep for a four hour plus span of couch-sitting, i stopped by the rite aid & picked up the awesomest bag of snack i could find & went down to bierkraft to get a few beers that made me feel snooty...

#7 - having it my way.
snack: burger king ketchup & fries flavored potato snacks
drinks: abita purple haze, victory hop wallop, porkslap pale ale

at around 10:10, i started off with 3:10 to yuma, probably the first western i have watched since i watched dead man for the 7,000th time earlier in the year. anyhow...very entertaining film. i didn't want to kill russell crowe half as much as i expected that i'd want to.

a little bit into the film, i broke open the bag of bk potato snacks. the verdict: they don't really have the bk french fry taste to them, but they definitely taste like ketchup. basically, if you've ever paired a can of potato sticks with a bottle of heinz, you're feeling bk with these snacks. by this time, i had finished the abita purple haze & with the fruity beer out of the way, i moved on to the victory hop wallop. it was hoppy.

just after midnight, i started watching the bridge & cracked open the porkslap pale ale (click on the barn doors if you visit the site!). the porkslap comes from butternuts beer, a brewery located in a town midway between syracuse & albany, both places that are cold in different senses of the word. i'm a sucker for beers like theirs--the kind that come in cans but don't taste like piss. under fear of ketchup overdose, i could not eat another bk potato snack at this point & hid the bag safely in the kitchen cupboard.

the bridge...in 2004, filmmaker eric steel, inspired by a new yorker article about suicides on the golden gate bridge, moved to san francisco & got permits to film the bridge. in that year, a pretty typical one, 24 people died by jumping off the bridge, again making it the top location in the world for suicides. he captured 23 of them amongst his footage & then combined this with interviews with friends & family of ome of the victims.

jumping off the bridge is pretty easy to do, in fact. there's no fence stopping you from doing it. the golden gate bridge district has made sure of that by taking forever to put up some sort of barrier. sure, if there were a barrier up, people would probably just rule that method out & find another (one person in the film likens choosing the method of suicide to picking out a college), but a deterrent is a deterrent in my book.

anyhow, if you are ok with watching a movie about suicide & how people get to that point & what effect it has on friends & family, check this movie out. burger king ketchup & fries flavored potato snacks are optional.