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The other day my friend Tadeusz bought an electric shaver for $60 on Woot.com.

He realized that he was fed up with constantly having to buy razor blades and shaving cream, and deal with messy residue on his collar or in his ear embarrassing him at work. He was fed up with having to melt shaving cream off of gunked-up razors with hot water and, OUCH, getting burned.

When the electric shaver came in the mail I went to his apartment to take a look at it. He was going to shave in the living room while we drank beers and watched the news. That was the moment he was thinking about when he bought it.

When I got there he was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. The box looked like it had been ripped open and stomped. The quick guide was on the ground in the living room.

Step 1: Carefully remove item from box.

Step 2: Plug in charger/cleaning base and charge for 6-8 hours before initial use.

When I started laughing he closed the door with his foot.

The next day I went over and found him sitting in the living room watching the news and drinking a Stella. His face was clean shaven. There was a cold Stella for me in the fridge, but I was pissed off about having to wait and wait and wait just to see the damn thing so I left; with the Stella of course.

Two days later he called me up. I rode my 1979 Bianchi Bianchimatic and a couple of people stopped their cars and told me it was cool. When I got there he was shaving. When I got home I went on Woot.com and bought an alarm clock radio so I could wake up to the news like my friend Donald, who is a computer engineer and a member of a certain secret society.

I gave him that alarm clock radio because I wasn't using it, so when he told me about waking up to the news I was fed up and bought another one.

Liz Cho

On July 6, 2003, Liz Cho replaced Diana Williams alongside Bill Ritter as the weekday anchor for Eyewitness News. Later that year she was named one of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People. She is married.

Remington

One day Tadeusz called me up to drink beers and watch Liz Cho on the Eyewitness News. For a while I had made it a priority to watch her every weekday at 6 because I was interested in her presence. When I got there he was shaving. He thought he was all slick because he could shave in the living room or on the go.

Then the Remington started beeping and making crunching sounds as it cut, but he kept going, to prove a point. By the time he was finished, his face and neck were bright red and he had to melt ice cubes on his throat to cool the skin. He hadn't been refilling the charger/cleaning base with the Remington cleaning fluid, which severely damages the device and nullifies the warranty.

We found out that you could only purchase the fluid from the Remington Store in New Jersey and it cost $15 for an 8 oz bottle with S & H. New Jersey's sales tax is 2.62 % less than New York City's, which is part of the reason why he wants to buy a condo in West New York, and if he does he could by the cleaning fluid no problem.

Real Estate

In 1996 my parents bought a charming 4 br/ 2.5 bth ranch house in the prestigious Village of Lake Success. We had been living in a commercial building in Flushing; the only property that father was allowed to keep, by my mother and the fucking banks.

My father had been working for Citibank as the Head of the Asian Department and was fired because he was making too much money. Looking back, this must have been a difficult time for our family. I remember one night my father threw my mother on the ground. I had never seen him hit her before, they barely even touched. We were spanked, but that was different. I thought, my father is a wife beater. He never did it again, or at least I never saw him do it, but there are times now when I wish he would.

My brother and I were still in elementary school, so terms like commercial real estate or median hh inc. had little bearing on our perspective. We missed our big house in Douglaston Manor. We missed the big back yard and the little fish pond with the electric fence to keep the raccoons away. We missed a lot, but we took the rest with us.

Fences

Though he did capitulate, finally laying down the electric fence, my father still lives exclusively in that moment when he was killing the raccoons that were killing his fish.

He is still at the fish market making the right decision and taking it home to stuff with poison. We are still helping him lay the bait around the pond and in the raccoon bushes that lined our neighbors' yard. He thinks we are standing with him on the porch, so proud.

He raises his hands to both our shoulders and as he does the lights come on. His hands hold us down. They pinch the nook above the collar bone when we turn to go back inside. He holds us there and yells into the night, for my mother, to get the camera.

Wedding Photos

Before the wedding photographers reported us, we used to fish for carp in a park pond in Roslyn across from the big Macy's. The pond had a small bridge over a concrete waterfall just like the one in Amélie where elle fait le ricochet and the camera swoops over her like the Loch Ness Monster.

My brother and I would find the worms in the park's shadiest areas, overturning rocks or stirring up the dirt mixed with garbage, beer bottles, and the occasional giant rubber worm skin. My father baited the hooks. He skewered the worm back and forth, leaving a writhing piece at the end. Then he would spit on it and move away as we threw it into the water.

Using this ritual we caught whole genealogies of carp. We put them in the pond at night and fished out their bones in the morning. Though the pond never shortened its supply, our enjoyment quickly wavered and turned to work and eventually vengeance. We bought an aquarium tank for our basement and kept only the biggest fish inside. We dug out the pond in preparation, making it wider and deeper. At our father's suggestion, we came to believe in the existence of a monstrous fighting carp, like the ones depicted on the walls of our favorite Japanese restaurants. This noble fish could kill a predator made slow and careless by his days of excess, but on most days preferred a juicy worm served inside the lining of a human mouth.

Each week we enlisted a bigger fish and fished out his bigger bones. In the end we never found the fighting carp and my father put up the electric fence. One time I hooked something heavy that snapped my line. I tried to hold on but it was too strong and the line snapped as my father was climbing down the wall to net it. My brother said it was probably just a branch or maybe some dead guy. My father stayed under the bridge stabbing the net into the water.

As we walked back to the car I asked if he saw it down there, was it the fish. He said, You knew what it was.

Sometimes today, when we are eating and not talking he will bring it up. He says we should make a movie and use it as a dream sequence, only in the dream the carp would kill the raccoon. We wouldn't show it of course, because we want to maintain our PG rating. We would show the racoon by the pond, then the carp, then a little spash, then the reflection of the sky and the moon in the water as it calmed. People would get the picture.

Then we could use CGI to evaporate the water into millions of tiny bubbles that collect all the black and white hairs and preserve them, in heaven.

Yearbook Photos

For some time I thought that the saddest thing was seeing yearbook photos of the recently deceased on the news or in the paper. I thought it was horrible that the families wanted them to be known in this moment; one shared with so many people.

I wondered where the other photos were. Where were the afternoons out on the front lawn with the car, or on the beach, or in the doorway dressed for the prom, even a birthday party, or some random snapshot closely cropped, wouldn't that be a better. But when something like that happens it probably severely fucks with your sense of time.

All of a sudden there are all these deadlines; you have to share with your community, your police, your reporters, and all your witnesses on the 6 o'clock news.

The reporters must make a lot of phone calls; the victim's family is usually the last. By that time they've probably heard the story a bunch of times; unless no one else knows.

So they usually just ask about the deceased: who they were, what they did, what they loved. When it airs they'll use this stuff as an introduction, because without a story a corpse is just gruesome and not heartbreaking, which is much worse.

At the end, the reporters explain that they will need a picture, but that giving one was not necessary; they could always get it from the yearbook. So really, it's not the generic pictures but the specific ones chosen amidst all the chaos that make you wonder, who are these people, what are they doing, what do they love.