Clublife

Update

2012-01-19T04:00:00.000-05:00

Lots of funny shit has happened to me over the past several months, but I've been afraid to talk about any of it because people I know read this site.

I don't care anymore! I have nothing to lose anymore, because I've already lost it and I'm perfectly fine! As a result, you're going to hear it all.

More to come.

100 Words and Done

2011-12-28T04:00:00.000-05:00

My last few posts can happen to anyone. I used to think it was a sign of weakness. I’d keep it to myself when I had feelings for anyone or anything – especially when something was lost. It never paid to show it. I don’t think that anymore. You wake up, you take your best shot, and then you go to sleep. Then you do it again. Some days you hit. Others you don’t. It doesn’t matter either way, because what you saw was where I was for the past week. It’s all over now. Everything ends, and everyone moves on.

They Put You In A Corner

2011-10-17T04:00:00.001-04:00

The way stupid shit starts on Facebook is a six-step process.

1. I post an innocuous status update about a frequently aired television commercial that I think is stupid.

2. I get a stream of comments from people who think my comment is either on-target or is itself rather stupid and unnecessary.

3. My friend's father responds with an out-of-leftfield political comment that has nothing whatsoever with my original post (although I think he thinks it does).

4. Several more people post comments arguing his point and ridiculing it.

5. My phone predictably rings, bringing Facebook into real life, where it doesn't belong.

6. I get exasperated and give up.

Ironically enough, this was the highlight of my weekend.

Gesture

2011-10-13T04:00:00.002-04:00

Three months of taking on some challenges of my own showed me two things.

1. I can make it on "the other side." It's not ideal, but life goes on.

2. You were right and I was wrong. I took some of your suggestions and have come to the conclusion that there's no sense in continuing to stick to an unloaded set of guns.

You didn't have to thank me. I just wanted to do one thing to not be thought of in perpetuity as an asshole. It's a good thing you're doing, and I'm proud of you.

Back

2011-10-12T04:00:00.000-04:00

I was in a very bad bar last Friday night. I’m not going to tell you which one, but it’s in the Financial District, adjacent to the Occupy Wall Street protest’s base of operations, and it sucks. The service sucked, the music sucked, and beer after beer, no matter which ones we tried, seemed to come, as my British friend said, from a “dodgy line.”

I didn’t get drunk.

I really don’t get drunk very often anymore. That’s a nice change. The last time I was drunk was at a Yankee game two months ago. I was celebrating finding out about the free New York Waterways boat from South Street Seaport to Yankee Stadium. I started drinking at 10:30 in the morning and finished up approximately sixteen hours later at a bar on the Upper West Side.

I didn’t curse at anyone, lose my phone or wallet, or get in a fight. My bladder held up well. I was relatively coherent when I made it home. Life was good. It seems to be staying that way.

Update

2011-10-05T04:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry I haven't been writing much lately. I mean it. I actually am sorry. It's kind of a generic, bullshit excuse, but I have the stereotypical "lot of shit going on." I've been getting home really late a lot for the past few weeks, and it's kind of hard, in that case, to sit down and do any writing-for-pleasure. It sucks, because I enjoy doing this, but that's life right now, I guess.

Tomorrow (today) I'll try writing some shit from work and see how that works out.

We'll see. In any case, all is well. Very well, in fact.

More Free Advice

2011-09-26T04:00:00.001-04:00

I'm always amazed at how different life is from the pictures painted by everyone in the peanut gallery.

"You know what you need to do? You need to walk right in there and tell them you need more money, otherwise you're leaving. They're fucked if you leave, so they'll give you whatever you want because you threatening to leave will scare them to death."

No, actually it won't. That's not the way it works. Don't tell people to do that, because you'll probably just get them fired.

Update

2011-09-16T10:58:00.001-04:00

I probably should have pointed this out, but I'm away from New York this week.

Not that I mind.

Closure

2011-09-14T04:00:00.001-04:00

I realize I said I was going to address 9/11 at some point here, but that turned out to be a crock of shit. That's because I listened to what everyone was saying last week and realized I had nothing of value or substance to add to the discussion.

So, I did what I thought was the correct thing to do. I kept my mouth shut, missed people I knew who died that day, thought about everyone I know -- and so many I don't know -- whose lives have also been changed over the past decade, and watched football.

Holding

2011-09-08T04:00:00.001-04:00

No, I haven’t bailed out yet.

One thing you learn when someone who’s close enough to you for you to be responsible for them has a serious illness is that shit happens – and by “shit,” I’m talking about stuff that’s out of anyone’s control.

I’ve been a little preoccupied with that this week. I’ll write more tomorrow (today).

Trucks

2011-09-02T04:00:00.001-04:00

Old Me came back today. I like that I’m able to keep Old Me under wraps for professional reasons now, but I also like that Old Me is still around. Over the past year or so, I’ve had to take a long, hard look at the way I handle situations, and I’ve realized the futility of getting all bent out of shape when stupid people act the way we all should logically expect them to act. The daily commute in Manhattan helps build calluses that way, and I’m not nearly as half-cocked as I used to be walking around New York.

Old Me, however, knows not to take excessive amounts of shit when they get a little too far into my personal space – and Old Me is still capable enough, or at least capable looking enough, to get their attention when they do. I’m more likely to throw my back out these days than throw a solid punch, but nobody needs to know that.

That was self-deprecation, by the way, and it’s insincere. I can still do some shit, and I’m trying my best to keep it that way. Nothing’s changed in that regard.

Where I work in the Financial District there are lots of truck businesses: hot dog trucks, Mexican trucks, Italian sausage trucks, coffee trucks, bagel trucks, yogurt trucks and newsstand trucks. I’m a gum chewer. I like Orbit gum. Some days I like minty flavors like Spearmint and Peppermint, while other days, I like fruity flavors like Pina Colada and Tropical Remix. This depends on the weather and the mood I’m in. This is important.

Today it was Spearmint, and I bought it at the newsstand across from South Ferry – the one adjacent to the entrance to the 1 train and 1 New York Plaza. That’d be the southeast corner of Water and Whitehall if you’re not from around here and want to scope it out on Google Street View. I do that all the time when I’m reading. When a book I’m reading mentions a street, I whip out my Droid and take a look at what the author’s talking about. Usually it looks nothing like what I’d imagined. Either the authors I like are incapable of describing physical locations, or I just suck at reading. It’s probably the latter, because all published authors know what they’re doing. It’s true.

I only had a ten-dollar bill on me this morning, so I had to wait for the guy behind the counter to make change. This newsstand is busy in the morning, so I had to stand in line to buy my gum. When it was my turn, there were four people standing behind me, in a line that fanned off to my left.

I showed the guy my gum and handed him the ten, but while I did that, a soft-looking foreign-guy-of-indeterminate-origin came alongside me on my right, yammering away on his phone, and started his own line, leaning on his hand where the newsstand guy was counting out my change. This put him approximately six inches away from me, and since we were about the same height, he was now yelling in my ear. I didn’t know why this was necessary, so I turned and looked at him, but he didn’t notice and continued yelling in some rather abrasive language I couldn’t identify.

At this point, I had two choices. I could’ve waited ten seconds, taken my change, walked away and forgotten about it, or I could’ve done what I did.

“You better step the fuck back, motherfucker.” I raised my voice.

He stared at me and kept talking, but he took several steps back and stayed back. I knew exactly what was happening, because I’ve seen this shit thousands of times as a club bouncer.

People will push you. When you push them back, they’ll stop. But if you don’t push them back or say something to get them to quit pushing you, they’ll push you even more. Guys like this aren’t looking for a fight. They’re calling your bluff, figuring you’d rather get the fuck away from them than say something. This happens on the subway – on every car of every train, every single fucking day in New York. You carve out your little space in the world where you’re hanging onto a pole with nothing but air around you, and before you know it, someone’s touching you. You move six inches in one direction in order to not be touched, but then you’re being touched again. And so on.

When you wake up to what’s actually happened, you’ve moved two feet over, and the motherfucker who was rubbing against you has now co-opted a space you thought you had to yourself. That’s how it works. They’re counting on you to move, though, so if and when you do, they’ve got you. This dick figured nobody would say anything if he cut the line. He thought I’d stand there and let him yell in my ear. He thought the woman behind me would just let him take care of his business, because doing that would certainly be preferable to dealing with him. Just let me go, and the unpleasantness will stop.

People make a valid point when they tell you not to dwell on this shit or let it affect your life when you live here, but when does it end? Where do you draw the line with the walking dead around here? How many times a day, when you’re out in public, do you have to stand there and swallow it when someone pulls some bullshit on you that you wouldn’t even think about doing to them?

Thinking about moving to New York? Work out that balance in your head before you come here, because this place will give you a fucking stroke if you don’t.

Relationship Advice For Women

2011-08-31T15:13:00.002-04:00

If you and your significant other have pet names for each other, and the two of you have a disagreement in front of his friends, don't repeatedly refer to him by your pet name for him. If you do, two things will happen:

1. His friends will now refer to him by this name.

2. You will look ridiculous and nobody listening will take you seriously.

Thank you.

Good Night

2011-08-31T04:00:00.000-04:00

I rode the subway to work all hazed over this morning. This is because I turned Irene weekend into a couch-to-couch bender that didn’t get me much quality sleep. I suppose the high note of the weekend was the fact that I only urinated in public once – in a backyard in the rain on Saturday night because I didn’t feel like going back inside – but when you live like that for a few days, you eventually have to pay a price for it, and I did that today. I’m doing it right now.

I’m very tired, is what I’m trying to say. I need some sleep. Some good, solid, high-quality sleep that has me waking up on my own, as opposed to being jarred awake by my fucking alarm clock. That’s one of my goals in life – to earn my living doing something that doesn’t entail being forced awake by the screeching piece of shit that’s been sitting on my nightstand since college. I’d like to simply sleep until I wake up, then go make a lot of money doing something I can do while I’m well-rested. I should also buy a new alarm clock, but this one’s woken me up for some important shit over the years, and I don’t want to hurt its feelings.

Of course, this isn’t how anything works. I’m figuring once I get to the point where I’m financially and professionally able to do something like that, I’ll have some other shit going on – like kids, maybe – that keeps me from sleeping no matter what I do. Or maybe I’ll continue a lifelong theme and have some asshole neighbor somewhere who likes using woodchippers and chainsaws at 6:30 in the morning. Or I’ll live underneath a trio of trust fund club sluts who walk around in heels all night screaming about nonsense – a phenomenon that seems to be a citywide epidemic, and one from which I’m hardly immune.

They’re hot, to be sure, but people who go to clubs have diseases. I worked there, so I know. The next time you see one, think about toilet seats first, then see if you’re still interested. Toilet seats seemed to be a theme among hot girls who hung out at clubs when I was in that business. This made no sense to me because public toilet seats are disgusting. That’s how I knew these people were very different from me. It was a stunning realization.

Tonight, however – it’s the night before you’re reading this, obviously – none of it’s going to matter, because I’ll be out like a damned light as soon as I’m done writing this. I won’t be fucking around online, making any calls, texting anyone, or watching the two Breaking Bad episodes I’ve DVR’d over the past week and a half. I won’t be doing any of that. The idea right now is to brush my teeth, wash my face, get in bed and turn off the fucking light so I can take advantage of every minute I have between now and tomorrow morning. Sleep will solve everything. No longer will I have these bloodshot eyes, this dried out skin or this feeling of looking at life through a pair of toilet paper rolls with screens taped over the holes.

Everything else can wait right now.

Placeholder

2011-08-30T00:23:00.003-04:00

Was too busy tonight to write anything. Back on my grind tomorrow (today), if you will, so I'll write about my commute to work, or something. For a change.

We'll call tonight an uptick. That's a good thing.

Monday

2011-08-29T15:35:00.001-04:00

We don’t get natural disasters here in New York, only manmade ones. Our first “earthquake” in my lifetime was something most of us didn’t even feel. I learned about it on Facebook. We just don’t get hit by stuff here, so we go through life in New York watching this shit happen to other people. We turn on CNN, we watch the coverage for a little while, and then we move on. It never happens to us. It’s been like that for my entire life.

Which, of course, explains why nobody, myself included, took Irene seriously. Instead of packing our survival kits, stocking up on supplies, developing evacuation plans and “hunkering down,” most of the people I know did the exact opposite: we stocked up on booze, got shitfaced and pretended it wasn’t happening.

We started drinking on Saturday afternoon at around 4. I went to the beer distributor, bought a twelve-pack each of Yuengling, Blue Moon and Bud Lite Lime, went to my friend’s brother’s house on Long Island – which is where I chose to spend Irene in case I was needed – and began the anesthetization process very early in the game.

So, Irene happens, and I’m busy sleeping it off on the couch, oblivious to anything going on outside. Then I woke up and watched the Weather Channel for an hour while I drank coffee. There’s a guy on the Weather Channel named Jim Cantore who reported live the entire time from Battery Park, which is 400 yards from my office. Jim Cantore is in good physical shape, so he does his reporting in tight tee shirts with his hands on his hips, wearing a baseball cap. He is also very intense. When he talked about the weather, I listened very closely because a guy who takes the weather so seriously that he trains in the gym to report on it wouldn’t steer us wrong at all. If I’d needed to evacuate, I would have taken Jim Cantore’s advice.

When I was done with my coffee, I went out for a drive. After a while, I got nervous, because branches were still coming down everywhere. It was still windy. I eventually decided that driving was a bad idea, so I went to my mother’s house to see how much damage there was. There wasn’t any, but her power was out. It still is. That sucks for her, so I went back out and bought some food for her to eat, which was a bad idea because she already had plenty. I was unnecessary in that regard, so I went out on the driveway, pulled some fallen branches into the street and chatted up her neighbors about hurricanes and trees and shit like that.

It was all very exciting. Tonight, I will be back at the gym. More tomorrow.

The Strawman Equation

2011-08-26T20:29:00.001-04:00

(Misreading Something I Wrote) + (Misquoting Me) = Broader Point I Wasn't Trying to Make

Is this a reading comprehension issue?

Ripples

2011-08-25T04:00:00.002-04:00

I like to get on subway cars toward the end of the train, either in front or in back. This is because the majority of turnstile entry points in subway stations are situated toward the center of the platform, and since people are generally too lazy to walk a hundred feet to avoid one another, the ends of trains are usually less crowded than the middle cars. I take a different train to work now, but this practice seems to be universally effective if your goal, like mine, is to avoid being crowded by people who smell bad and dress like circus clowns.

Today, however, I was crowded by a woman dressed like a circus clown. She was 4’10" and at least 225 naked, wearing a tube top and what people on Jamaica Avenue used to call “poom-poom shorts” back in the early 1990’s. It’s been a while since I’ve spent any time on Jamaica Avenue, so I don’t know if people still call them “poom-poom shorts,” but since my urban vocabulary was current until roughly about the time that Big Daddy Kane, De La Soul and Public Enemy were relevant, that’s how I’ll refer to them here in order to convince you I’m still “street.”

Her hair, cut short like a boy’s, was dyed orange, and she had Chinese characters and the name “LaTrice” tattooed in script into her rippling back fat. I say her back fat rippled because this particular subway line rides a little on the rough side, generating turbulence that passed from the floor to her feet, through her legs, and into the loose flesh spilling over the edges of the piece of pink neon elastic that barely concealed the rest of her. It rolled across her back in waves and made her arms jiggle from back to front. I thought this would be soothing, but it wasn’t, so I stopped staring at it.

I’m getting used to this new subway line now. The last two stops before you get to mine take precisely 200 pulses of my hand on whatever pole I’m holding. If you see me on the subway, and the muscles in my forearm are tensing every second or so and I’m staring at the ceiling, I’m tired of being on the subway and counting beats until I’m supposed to get off. When things get repetitive, like riding the same train to work every morning, I find ways to kill the time. Then I divide these by four to create the quarters of a football game. This way, when my count is below 50, I’m in the first quarter. If it’s above 150, I’m in the fourth quarter, and it’s time to get serious. Sometimes I even squeeze the pole with four of my five fingers to let myself know I’m in the homestretch and it’s time to make every play count. Or something like that. I do this maybe once a week. It’s fucking stupid, but so is the subway.

Sometimes I also count attractive women. I don’t leer at them or anything creepy like that. I just count them. If I see an attractive one reading, she counts as one-and-a-half, because women who read are better than women who don’t. In the morning, if there are four within visual range on my subway car, that’s a good score. If I see three, it’s somewhat less good, but still okay. Two can still be pleasant, but it’s certainly not as good as three or four, because you can’t swivel your head from girl to girl to girl to girl very easily, and sometimes you get caught. Of course, it’s okay to get caught, but since I wouldn’t want someone staring at me at 7 in the morning in a place as foul and unsanitary as the subway, I try to mind my internal play clock and move on. This system usually works.

It worked today, but I was still stuck two stories underground on a moving metal tube with the circus clown lady grinding her buttocks into my loins and leaning her exposed – and still rippling – back fat on my newly ordered, sale priced, yellow and blue striped Ralph Lauren shirt. I’ve bought some new clothes recently, but this was no consolation today, even though I’ve been very proud of myself for buying new clothes. It made me feel worse because I don’t like when I buy new things and have strangers – especially circus clowns of dubious cleanliness with excess back fat and orange hair – touch them. I can’t lie and say I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone, because there are plenty of people I’d wish this experience on, but I’m not one of them.

Tomorrow – which will be today for you, since I write these posts the night before – I’m going out drinking with someone different. I will order Stella Artois because it’s strong beer, and I will do a lot of talking. Then I’ll go home.

Quake

2011-08-24T04:00:00.000-04:00

In what certainly sounds like a sex metaphor, I was in the middle of it, but I didn’t feel a thing. I was on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge when it hit – that’s where my calculations put me, at least – and had no idea.

Then I get this text message:

My boy at OEM says no elevators til 7 and if the lights flicker get the fuck out of the building.

But I wasn’t in a building, and there’s no radio in my car – only my iPod hookup – so I had nothing to listen to and no idea what this guy was talking about. I assumed there was some kind of terrorist alert, so while I sat on the bridge, not moving, I started Googling shit on my phone and figured it out. Then I put my phone away and turned the music back on. I suppose being trapped in a car on the George Washington Bridge while under the impression that a terrorist attack is an imminent possibility isn’t exactly ideal, but I wasn’t really given much choice in the matter.

Several hours and several trains later, after dropping off my car, I went home, got online, and went where I get all my news these days: Facebook.

On Facebook, all the people from New York were yelling about how they’d just experienced an earthquake, and all the people from California were yelling about how all the people yelling about the earthquake were pussies. I thought this was ridiculous, so I put up my own post on Facebook about it, then started texting people. Then I had something to eat.

I was working in New Jersey today. Most people don’t like New Jersey. I do. I know dozens of people from New Jersey, and they are all very nice. Nothing of note happened to me while I was there. I was neither enraged at anyone nor did I find anything particularly funny, so the only thing I can really do within the scope of this paragraph is point out the fact that I was in New Jersey. Perhaps that will clarify what I was doing on the George Washington Bridge. Or perhaps not, if you know nothing about this area.

The best news I can offer today, at least with regard to my life, is that I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of shit out of my system over the past month or so. As I wrote a few weeks ago, someone very close to me has cancer, and that hit me pretty hard. I was in a fucking awful frame of mind for a while. I wasn’t functioning well at work, I was eating like shit, and I was walking around the city like someone shot my dog.

The one good thing that happens when someone close to you gets sick, however, is that you get centered in a hurry. When someone has cancer, you only have one shot at it, so you put everything else to the side and you just go. Do that for enough days in a row, and you’re back to reality without even consciously trying – and reality, in my case, is a far cry from the career-killing woe-is-me bullshit I’ve been spewing for so long.

And all I can say about being supportive of someone with cancer is that I forgot how fucked up I look with my eyebrows shaved off. Can’t let her have all the fun, right?

Milestone

2011-08-23T04:00:00.001-04:00

With the ten year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks coming up, I'm periodically -- meaning, when the mood strikes -- going to post some relevant "material" regarding that day. In all the time I've been writing on this site, I've kind of skirted the issue, but 9/11 was a day that changed my life in a very, very personal way, and this particular anniversary seems to be getting me to talk with people about it a lot more, as opposed to pretending it didn't happen, which is essentially how I've dealt with it in years past.

I didn't see this until today, but it's a topic that's been timely every day for the past decade for thousands of people in the New York area. It's also something that strikes a nerve with me in a pretty major way.

I realize that readership on this blog is starting to grow again, and that I have a lot of readers from places far away from New York -- which I've always thought was cool given the fact that this site has always been so focused on New York. What I'd really like to get across to people who don't live here -- and people who've moved here since then, or are too young to really remember -- is that there's still a massive segment of the population in this area that's still dealing with 9/11's aftereffects every single day. It's not something people generally talk about, so it's been swept under the rug to an extent as something someone else has to deal with, but for a lot of us, it surely doesn't feel like ten years have gone by. More like ten minutes.

9/11 is somewhat paradoxical with regard to the feelings of people who were involved. It was such a massively unpleasant experience for so many -- an understatement, for sure -- that I know several people who simply don't mention it at all, opting instead to act as though it never happened. When that happens, however, people who weren't involved forget -- and you can tell they've forgotten, or never really understood how bad it really was, by the things they say and they way they act.

This year, I'm choosing to confront it head on and remember it the way it actually happened. With everything that's gone on since, I think the memories we have of that day, at least here in New York, have been distorted, and something's been lost. My focus is squarely on the friends, family and acquaintances I lost that day, and that's where it's going to stay from now on. All the conspiracy theories in the world aren't going to bring them back, so the least I can do is keep their memory alive in my little corner of New York.

When everyone stands at the podium and offers up their little platitudes in three weeks -- and we all know it's coming -- I'd suggest everyone take some time to remember the locals.

Patience

2011-08-22T04:00:00.003-04:00

I went to the Met game on Saturday with my younger brother. The Mets were playing the Milwaukee Brewers. Frankie “K-Rod” Rodriguez is a relief pitcher for the Brewers. He used to be a relief pitcher for the Mets until he was traded for two unknown players and a bag of cash. He also beat up his father-in-law in the clubhouse at Citi Field last year.

“I got a problem with how they treated this guy,” I say as K-Rod trotted out of the bullpen for the Brewers in the eighth. Everyone was booing. I’ve never booed.

“Yeah,” says my brother, who’s one of those guys who has more going on behind the scenes than you see. He says “yeah,” but that doesn’t mean he agrees with you. He knows you’re going to continue, so he lets you.

“I’ve said this a million times, but the only guy who gets in trouble is the guy who wins the fight, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“Think about it,” I say. “How many times has someone antagonized you so bad that you wanted to take care of it like that, but you knew you couldn’t because you didn’t want to get arrested or sued?”

“Every day. Right now.”

“Right. Every day there's someone who chaps your ass to the point where you want to do something fucked up, or it could be just one guy who’s doing the same shit over and over, but either way, you can’t do shit, and you’re the bad guy when you do what this guy did and snap, right?”

“Sure,” he says, sipping his beer, watching K-Rod warm up.

“But what about the guy who keeps doing the fucked up shit? Why doesn’t society come down on him? Why is it that you have to sit and take shit from people, day after day, and nothing happens to them, but you react and throw a punch, and suddenly you’re the asshole?”

“This doesn’t sound like it’s about K-Rod, exactly.”

I put my feet on the back of the seat in front of me and checked the time. He was drinking. I wasn’t. “It is and it isn’t,” I say, “but there’s two sides to everything, and the only one we got here is the one about this guy popping his father-in-law. What I want to know is what the motherfucker really did to get the guy to pop him. That’s what I always want to know. What causes shit.”

“You want the rest of this?” he asks, showing me the bag of peanuts he’d been working on for the better part of an hour.

“Yeah,” I reply, taking the bag. There were four peanuts left, and shells all over the floor. “You got anything to say?”

“I think you should take care of your business and let society sort out whether or not you did it the right way.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning,” he says, “you think about the best way to handle your problems, and if popping someone looks like a solution, you go do it. And if you’re wrong, they’ll lock your ass up. If you’re right, problem solved.”

“It’s a world full of little ratfuck shits, is what you’re saying.”

“Can be if you let it.”

It was a lot easier...

2011-08-19T02:47:00.000-04:00

...than I thought it would be.

More on this next week.

Deturtling

2011-08-18T04:00:00.001-04:00

I had trepidation. I didn’t want to do it. I went through the motions for a few days, said everything I was supposed to say, but I didn’t really want to do anything. It was just kind of an idea I was playing with. Something for somewhere down the road, you know?

Sometimes, though, you talk and talk and talk, and then time passes and you're pigeonholed, and the day comes where you’re obligated to do something, even if you had no real intention of acting on anything. Even if it was just something you’d toyed with doing sometime in the future. Something you figured you’d do eventually, but there were still plenty of days on the calendar to put it off. Plenty of days to stay in your box and not come out.

But you can’t, because if you do, it’s just something else that’s never going to happen. I’ve had enough of those for one lifetime.

So there I was, obligated now, not knowing whether I wanted to come up with some reason I couldn’t, not knowing whether anything I was doing was a good idea, not knowing whether I was doing something totally ridiculous, and you know what happened?

It turned out to be the right thing to do. Fuck, man. Life is weird.

But it’s good, too, you know?

Scent

2011-08-17T04:00:00.001-04:00

The guy in the office next to mine likes to drink protein shakes, because he works out and thinks it’s something you have to do. I drink them too, but I’m not as fixated on them as he is. He drinks one every three hours or so. I don’t know what effect this is going to have on his future, but it can’t be good. He gets laid a lot, though, and he makes it look easy, so maybe there’s something to his routine. I don’t know.

Protein shakes go rotten quickly. This is because protein undergoes a process called denaturing when you leave it at room temperature too long. When protein shakes denature, they smell like a pile of rotting corpses left in the trunk of a car would smell in Mississippi at low tide in July. You don’t even bother washing out the bottle, because the stink seeps into the plastic and it doesn’t come out. This happens to me all the time because I hate protein shakes and don’t drink enough of them to remember to clean out my shaker bottles right away. I’m proud of this.

This guy’s office started to stink yesterday, and he figured out this was because there was a denaturing protein shake sitting behind all the shit piled up on his desk. Instead of taking the bottle outside to a Dumpster, he brought it into my office to show me, and stood there explaining the situation longer than he should have. It took a little while, but my office eventually smelled like a pile of rotting corpses left in the trunk of a car in Mississippi at low tide in July, just like his.

This made me angry, so when he came back from getting rid of the bottle, I marched into his office and demanded satisfaction. “My office fucking stinks now,” I said. “You have anything I can spray?”

“Use this shit,” he said, and handed me a squat green bottle of cologne with a familiar alligator on its front.

“Izod?”

“No, it’s Lacoste.”

Today, his girlfriend, who works for another division of our company, came into my office and sat in one of my “client chairs.” I have these because I’m now an important guy who has meetings in my office, if you can believe that. Since she’s dating him, she always comes in and hangs out with me after she’s spoken to him. I used to hate it when people walked into my office and sat down. Now, not so much. I talk to people all day long about football and my social life. I even have theme songs for certain people. Most of these are performed by Santana. When a Peruvian coworker comes in, I play Oye Como Va or Low Rider. I once played Babalou and expected an HR complaint, but he thought this was funny. When a hot girl comes in, I play Black Magic Woman. They seem to like that.

“I heard he had a little problem with a protein shake yesterday,” his girlfriend says to me.

“Yeah. The fuckin’ thing stunk, and then he sprayed cologne all over the place, and it stunk even worse.”

“What cologne?”

“That Izod shit,” I reply. “I can still fuckin’ smell it in here.”

“It’s Lacoste, and I gave it to him.”

“Oh.”

So, later on, I tell the guy the story of how I insulted the gift his girlfriend had given him.

“I felt kind of bad,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t even wear cologne. You want it?”

“Nah. I’ve got matches.”

Touch of Grey

2011-08-16T04:00:00.001-04:00

I look good today. I’m dressed in a powder blue button-down shirt with white stripes, a pair of light khaki pants, and loafers with no socks. Actually, I’m wearing socks, but they’re those ankle socks that make it look like I’m not wearing any. I look like a guy who just came from the beach. Or maybe like I’m Australian. What I don’t look like, for once, is a bull-in-a-china-shop ex-thug who doesn’t belong doing a job one does with one’s mind.

That’s always the battle for me – fitting in. Or maybe not fitting in, exactly, but not looking like a guy who’s so unfamiliar with my surroundings that I’m going through my days in a state of perpetual discomfort. I know I fit in with regard to my ability to do my work. In fact, I actually may not fit in there, because I’m very, very good at what I do, and I stand out for it. My discomfort is more related to shitty self-esteem, a distorted notion of what I look like relative to everyone else, and just general dissatisfaction with the person I’d turned myself into over a span of about ten years.

But today, I look good. For once in a blue goddamned moon, I’m radiating some confidence. I’m finally noticing that people sometimes look at me on the subway, on the sidewalk and when I’m getting coffee – and they’re not looking at me like I’m some freakish sideshow with sixteen tons of baggage. They’re looking at me because I’m not that guy anymore – and maybe because I’m worth looking at to some people – and for the first time in a long time, I’m looking back at them without pulling my eyes away and pretending I wasn’t.

I know nobody wants to read this kind of introspective bullshit from me. Shit, man, I don’t want to write, read or think about it, either. I’m just making lots of jumps into God-knows-what lately without having any idea of what’s on the other side. It’s the first time I’ve gone after anything with this kind of abandon in a long, long time, and it feels fucking great, if you’ll pardon the irritating cliché, to land on enemy shores and burn the boats for once.

Took me a while to get my fingers moving again after I got back up, but my hands formed fists today. This sums it up quite nicely:

The Working Man

2011-08-15T04:00:00.002-04:00

The worst job I ever had entailed working as an overnight manager at a CVS pharmacy. This was almost immediately after my last semester of college, and right before making a definitive decision about the “next thing.” It wasn’t a pleasant time in my life. I’d just finished playing ball, my father had died the previous year, and I had no motivation to do much of anything to better myself. By choice, that whole summer has disappeared from my memory. I can do aimless pretty well, but that doesn’t mean I like to, and that period was about as aimless as it fucking gets.

When I came home from school, I didn’t do what most of you people did. I didn’t write up a resume and attend job fairs or anything like that. I didn’t network or look into furthering my educational prospects. Instead, I started bouncing in a bar – the local one I referenced in my book. This wasn’t the most productive use of my time, but I knew everyone who worked there and it was fun most nights. Plus, I got to work with our old friend “Clint,” something I still kind of miss doing.

Greg was another bouncer at that bar – a paralegal who’d quit his job to go to law school at St. John’s, where he was in his second year. Not much happened in this place, so we had a ton of time to sit around and talk to each other about life. That’s one of the things you miss when you “graduate” from that kind of life – the sitting around and the talking. You learn a lot. That’s why cops and firemen and soldiers and athletes have reunions. Bouncers probably should, but the job doesn’t mean that much and it's really stupid and pointless, so you won't see that.

I told Greg I didn’t have much of anything going on, and he told me about his summer job at CVS. It sounded easy. You went in at 10 at night, you left at 8:30 in the morning, and you didn’t have to do jack shit. He said he’d go into that little second floor office with the mirrored windows and read legal textbooks all night. I figured I’d try it out for a while until I made some decisions about what the fuck I was actually going to do with my life. It seemed like as good a place to think about this as any.

I interviewed, got the job, and went in for their mediocre little training program, which had me following a rather ambiguous night manager around in a store other than the one I’d be managing. I laughed out loud whenever he referred to the "fem" aisle. After two weeks, they gave me my assignment and I reported for work.

I’ve had some shit jobs in my life – I wrote about one here for several years, obviously – but managing a CVS at night was my least favorite. There was nothing particularly difficult about stocking shelves all night – which, in diametric opposition to what Greg told me, is what it actually entailed – except for the fact that the clock did not fucking move. I mean, it stayed painfully fucking still. You’d open one of those stupid fucking red bins, get everything on the shelves or end-caps and put all your price labels in place, and you’d have killed approximately five minutes, which felt more like an hour. It wasn’t even like you could get into some kind of “flow” state by giving yourself over to the minutiae of the job and drifting off. It wasn’t possible. At least when you're shoveling shit for a living, you can lose yourself in the rhythms of shit-shoveling and make the clock move. At CVS, time simply refused to pass. I’d have been better off just staring at my watch for ten hours.

We were also expected to prevent “shrink” by chasing down shoplifters and holding them until the police arrived. They had to be fucking kidding with this one. I even told them so. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re so cranked up that you’re wandering around a CVS in the middle of West Bumblefuck, Long Island at three in the morning looking for a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, you’ve fucking earned it. Take something to wash it down, too. The fuck did I care?

Payday was the last straw for me – the day I decided, after about three weeks, to bail out. Back then, not knowing any better, I was one of those kids who loved to cash my checks and walk around with $600 in my wallet – money I’d end up spending on clothes or at the bar. That’s how I knew the mindset of all these fucking Guido kids back when I bounced, because I used to do the same shit. I loved nothing more than to hand a hundred dollar bill to a bartender to pay for one drink. In retrospect, I think we both knew it was more than 20% of my bank account, but we all played the game anyway.

At CVS, we were permitted to cash our checks with the cashiers up front, so that’s what I’d do at the end of my shift on paydays. You had to wait for the customers to go first, though. So if you stood in line, waited for five people and were next, you’d have to defer and go to the back of the line if a customer fell in behind you. Company policy.

My last day, I didn’t want to follow this rule. I’d been circumvented by customers three or four times, and I just wanted to go home after working all night. I’d wait it out and be ready to go, and the cashier would tell me someone was behind me. Over. And over. And over again. Finally, I’d had enough. Fuck that Catch-22 shit.

“Just cash my check.”

“I can’t,” she said. “There’s a customer behind you.”

“I don’t care anymore. Just cash my check.”

“You have to wait for the customers.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. I quit. Just let me get my fucking money and you’ll never have to see me in this shithole ever again.”

They called my house a few times after that to ask for my nametag, but I never gave it back.

Bro

2011-08-12T04:00:00.001-04:00

Went to happy hour tonight after work. Met several very interesting people.

It's nice to have a fucking personality again. Others seem to think so, too.

Good to be back. Thank you very much.

The Blade

2011-08-11T04:00:00.001-04:00

This is going to sound more dramatic than it really is. In actuality, it’s pretty matter-of-fact. Surprisingly so.

For the past 30+ years, I’ve pretty much had the same haircut: a number-zero on the clippers. I’ve sported my share of fades and crew-cuts over the years, but every haircut I’ve had since I was a little kid has been a variation on the same theme.

Three months ago, I decided to grow my hair out. I wanted something different, and it’s a move a lot of people have suggested I make over the years. I’ve gotten two professional haircuts over this period, and both were just to trim the back and sides. The rest of it continued to grow.

A lot has changed in my life over the past month. I set up almost the entire infrastructure of my life for the month of August expecting a certain event to happen. Things are very new right now. Different than they were a month ago. I am full of surprises. My life is full of surprises, mostly good ones. One of those surprises was going to be, for people who haven’t seen me in a while, the length of my hair.

And so meanwhile – and if you’ve read the first posts of my little blog comeback here – life was kicking my ass a little bit for a while. Still was, but then it kind of went like this (it won’t let me link to or embed the exact time, so start this around 3:38 and stop it at exactly 4:32, and do me the courtesy of trying to time this right so I can give you the proper effect):

LINK TO VIDEO THAT EXPLAINS HOW I FEEL.

That’s pretty much how it is. Which is good. I’m not getting killed anymore.

And I shaved my fucking head today. And that’s the end of the fucking story.

Rodentia

2011-08-10T04:00:00.003-04:00

This is not a continuation.

My face is dry. This is due to a combination of a low-carbohydrate diet, not drinking enough water during the day, and not applying face lotion at night before I go to sleep. I have several bottles of face lotion in my medicine cabinet that I don’t use. Sometimes I use them in the morning, but I’m not consistent. I tried to fix all of this today by drinking more water. The cafeteria in the basement of my company’s building sells one-liter bottles of Poland Spring water, so I bought one, drank it, and planned to refill it periodically throughout the day.

To refill my water bottle, I use the water cooler in one of the kitchens on my company’s floor of the building. The kitchens are located in the far southeast and southwest corners of the floor. The building occupies nearly an entire city block, so to get there from my office – which sits in the exact middle of the north side of the floor – I need to navigate a maze of cubicles filled with people who spend more time posting inanities on their friends’ Facebook pages than they do working. I know this because in a cubicle, you can’t hide what’s on your computer screen from people walking past. I would resent that.

I think there’s some psychological rationale, by the way, to why I’ve made no move, after all these months, to personalize my office in any way. I have no art on the wall, no framed family photos on my desk, and no photos of young, earnest me in my football days wearing eye black and looking determinedly out at the field. This isn’t a conscious act. It only occurred to me just now that if you walk into my space, it could be anyone’s. There’s no me there. I’m assuming this says something about my intentions.

The cubicles I pass on my way to the kitchen are stylish, with oak veneer on the desktops and drawers, and strategically placed windows that afford a view of your neighbor’s head, while hiding what’s happening at his desk and on his computer screen. If I worked in one of these cubicles, I would find something to block this window. I would crack a joke to my neighbor about how I wanted to beat off in peace, and he would think I was trying to be funny – and I would be just kidding about the beating off, because I only do that in private for fear of being arrested – but I would still be very serious about blocking his view of me. I don’t think I could work very well with someone staring at me through a glass window.

Every time I go to the kitchen – or to the bathroom, which is just beyond the kitchen – I take a different route. Sometimes I walk through the heart of my “department” and glad-hand my coworkers en route, pretending they’re happy to see me after not seeing me for an hour or two. Other times, I avoid them altogether and glide on the outskirts, taking the long way around to give myself the illusion that I’m trying to get back to my work as quickly as I can.

When I made it to the kitchen this morning, I set my Poland Spring bottle an inch below the waterspout – so as not to infect anyone – and pushed down on the lever. This time, as opposed to other times, I’d aligned the top of the bottle perfectly with the water stream, and nothing dripped down the side of the bottle or onto the floor. I can’t leave water on the floor. It’s not something I feel comfortable doing. I’ll always find a paper towel and blot whatever I’ve left. Not everyone does this.

There were two women in the kitchen with me. One wore glasses, and the other wore a one-piece tangerine dress consisting of fabric that looked at least an inch thick, like a hotel curtain with holes cut for her arms and legs. Still, dresses like that catch the eye because they’re sleeveless and cut above the knee, so you look anyway, just in case. All men do this. You don’t want to miss anything.

I looked down at the stream going into my Poland Spring water bottle, then back up at the woman with the glasses. She was trying to get my attention in the way people do when they stare at you with their mouths partly open. They’re waiting to lock eyes so they can say what they want to say. When men do this to each other, you know a one-liner is coming. Sometimes these are funny, especially when you walk away directly afterward without saying anything else or even waiting to see whether you’ve gotten your laugh. Sometimes, you know you’ve nailed one.

We locked eyes. I waited. She looked away, knowing I was on the hook, and then she looked back.

“It smell like a dead mice in here.”

I cocked my head back a fraction of an inch and lowered my eyebrows. That’s my “What the fuck?” expression. I do this when I’m not sure I’ve heard exactly what it is I think I’ve heard. She understood the cue.

“It smell like a dead mice in here.”

Continuation

2011-08-09T04:00:00.000-04:00

Continued from previous post.

Most abrasive of all was late autumn, playoff time, when the ground hardened to granite and touching the football, whether with foot or hand, was something to avoid at all costs for fear of snapping something. Winters were snowbound and schizophrenic, the oscillations in temperature cracking and scarring our pavement playing field with new hazards each week. Come spring, the cracks, for me, were extra defenders when our games began again; a mercenary seventh in a six-man game, adroit at the shoestring tackle and deadly in pass coverage. The scarring of the street was the leveling of the field, the natural evolution of the ground on which we played. When I finally ran on flat, flawless expanses of grass, I could never quite bring myself to trust what was underneath.

To fly-by Long Islanders, Middle-ish Queens appears too crowded and chaotic for anything beyond slapdash games of playground basketball. The streets, flying past in a blur of decay, don’t hint at the existence of sports requiring open fields. From your car, on Jamaica Avenue, Springfield Boulevard or the Van Wipe-it, Queens looks like someone plotted each neighborhood in a grid, abandoned the proposition, numbered the streets anyway, then added named streets and “drives” to further confound the odd outsider blundering in on his way to an airport or a baseball game.

The area’s massive population is its athletic weakness. Because so many people live in Queens and Long Island, football is just another activity in which a young man can participate, hence you’re playing in utter obscurity until word gets out that you’re good. Since the aforementioned association typically only hitches its fortunes to kids and teams they believe to be sure things, you’ll get nothing for playing a sport in this area – no guidance, no encouragement and little coaching – until you’ve already shown some glimmer of ability, at which point, if you haven’t already scrapped the game for some other pursuit, you’re wary of praise received long after the point where it was necessary. So all the best football players from New York City and Long Island who don’t come from the area’s wealthier environs take it with a considerable grain of salt when you tell them they can play. They don’t believe you, and neither did I.

From a football standpoint, I had a fortuitous grouping of innate abilities that helped overcome my rather unusual body type. The first was that, although I wasn’t particularly courageous for a teenager, I was never afraid of anything on a football field. This cuts two ways, as caution can be a virtue in a contact sport and fear can help your mental acuity between the lines, but my utter lack of any kind of trepidation once I had my pads and uniform on meant I could eventually move from shitty-armed, run-at-all-costs quarterback to positions on the field requiring more abandon in terms of bodily sacrifice: running back and middle linebacker. I wasn’t built for hitting, and often looked awkward in my attempts, but the repetition made possible by my deadened-eyed, unthinking mindset allowed me to learn to both do it well and crave it.

Football is a game of triangles, and I was at home within the sharp-cornered confines of an Isosceles. The middle linebacker is the triangle’s tip; the offensive player with the ball stands at either of the two opposite ends. When you conspire to chase down the ball carrier, you do so from the “inside-out,” meaning you want to make sure you’re always attacking from inside your triangle. Broaden your vertex angle, and a shifty ball carrier will cut back inside, causing you to overrun the play and miss your tackle. I was comfortable within this system, and developed a feel for how to keep the man with the ball just on the outside edge of my vector. I still do this in public sometimes, drawing a bead on unsuspecting ball carriers on the sidewalk and envisioning putting my nose across their briefcases and knocking loose a stack of important files upon which the homeless can pounce, then turtle.

I understood this triangularity better than the other kids on most of my teams. This is probably as a result of knowing from my parents, especially my mother, that there was more to the world than our festering little hothouse corner of the city. My mother had introduced me to reading as a toddler; she’d taken me back and forth to rather tense areas of Ireland several times to visit her siblings. So I’d known, from a very young age, that there existed something from which to retreat and seek relief within the confines of our neighborhood. Its streets and back-alleys were protected relief valves from anything happening out on Jamaica Avenue or the world-at-large. To me, each little subdivision off the major avenues of Queens, especially my own, had that wedge-like triangular feel that the other kids, having seen nothing else, neither understood nor treasured the way I did.

To be continued tomorrow.

Fill in the Blanks

2011-08-08T04:00:00.002-04:00

The following is a writing exercise. The sentences and story are mine. The structure, however, is not. I'm trying to learn something.

When I ran, screaming to myself if not exactly aloud, from the insular little strip of warehouse Queens where I lived until I was seventeen to college in New England – where I identified more, it seemed, with the locals than with my peers – the first thing I noticed was that the first seventeen years of my life were very different from the first seventeen years of the people I was watching unload their stereos, projection televisions and “wardrobe boxes” into their new homes. With my black-and-white Motorola, my Army duffel and my throw rug – my one luxury – I was easily pegged, by anyone caring to notice, as someone not quite up-to-snuff in terms of parental success. And I wasn’t, but I wasn’t as acutely aware of it until this exact point.

I learned to play football in the street in front of my house, where chuckholes and raised manhole covers were far greater threats to young ligaments and tendons than headhunting opponents who cruised each game looking for nothing more satisfying than to drill you into the street. This was in East-Central Queens, a ramshackle conglomeration of shitty, ugly homes owned by alcoholic civil servants who couldn’t do any better. Men who spent their days off at the OTB drinking blackberry brandy out of paper bags, placing uneducated bets and accusing Cordero and Pincay of fixing races or “riding lazy,” as though any of them had ever mounted a horse in anger.

At twelve, I was identified by the local football association – a collection of loud, portly older men who hung American flags on telephone poles and advised me to “kick, Bobby, kick” – as being something approaching good. I was an option quarterback on the local Pop Warner team, running an 11-man clusterfuck resembling the Wildcat offense because A) I could run for long distances without being tackled, B) I couldn’t throw, and C) Nobody on my team could catch the ball particularly well. Within two years, I was the target of an ostensible bidding war, with the local Catholic and public high school coaches explaining to my father how much better off I’d be were I to attend their school. This wasn’t a formal recruitment, but it was there, and it was the first time anyone I didn’t know wanted me for something. That year, I played in a summer basketball tournament, where Rob Moore, who was several years older than me and played wide receiver in the NFL for several years, spread his legs, jumped over me and dunked the ball when I tried to take a charge.

My football success was more a product of my ability to recognize patterns where they existed – and with being forced into playing, to an extent, by my father – than it had to do with any sort of specific ability. I couldn’t throw the ball very far or accurately. I wasn’t exceptionally fast, had long legs and a short upper torso conducive neither to hitting nor being hit, and was cursed with the unfortunate combination of huge feet and small hands. The one thing I could do was anticipate what was coming, then move my feet fast enough to get where I needed to be. In a hundred yard dash, you could beat me by ten steps, but in a ten yard radius, within the context of a football game swirling around us, I’d be at the head of a play before you’d even known to take your first step. I could recognize the flow of things and react to it before it made sense to anyone else.

Flow didn’t interest me in Queens, at least from a social perspective. People there were mean. They were stupid, provincial and racist. When three men were chased onto the Belt Parkway in Howard Beach by a gang of bat-wielding white kids back in the 1980s, I’d wondered why the same sort of thing hadn’t yet happened closer to where I lived. The sentiment certainly existed, promulgated by all the curtain-peering old Irish biddies raising the communal alarm whenever a black guy walked down the street.

What’s he doing? Shh...Watch him. Should we call the cops?

People taking the Long Island Railroad to or from points east peer out the window at these warehouse-y parts of Queens and see a dead section of New York City that’s long since been abandoned to the Halal markets, Roti shops, storefront tabernacles and hair-weaving salons that comprise the majority of the city’s outer boroughs – only ours, for some reason, look more decrepit than anything in Brooklyn or the Bronx. Brooklyn has both past and future. People in Williamsburg tell me the hipster influx has “calmed,” and its old-school Italian roots are evident again. To me, it looks like a nice place to live with some cool bars and restaurants. Plus, it’s Brooklyn. To the north, living in the Bronx, at least the world is aware you’re in America’s worst neighborhood. There’s a certain nobility to your suffering if you live there. Alas, there’s no such nobility in evidence in Queens, New York’s closest approximation to a fly-over zone. Nobody gets off at Jamaica to experience the nightlife on Sutphin Boulevard.

To be continued tomorrow.

Clarification

2011-08-06T12:59:00.004-04:00

There seems to have been some confusion with this paragraph:

“This whole writing thing happened almost completely by accident. My life was pretty much a dead-end disaster when the whole job-blog-book movement came around, and I got lucky and caught a wave. The problem was that I thought I was entitled to something I didn’t deserve, and I acted accordingly – like a lazy piece of shit who (pardon the cliché) was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. Just ask my editor. That shit won’t happen again, believe me.”

By referring to the “writing thing,” I was talking about the process of starting a blog about bouncing, having it get discovered and then getting a book deal out of it. This all did, indeed, happen by accident. I took a bouncing job because I was having cash flow problems. I started a blog because a friend of mine enjoyed an email I wrote him about a guy beating off in the club. I got a book deal because Gawker discovered my blog and turned the right people onto it.

I didn’t want a bouncing job.

I didn’t know what a blog was, nor had I ever written anything other than a college term paper. I wrote for several years in obscurity because my friends seemed to enjoy it, and so did I.

I didn’t know what Gawker was.

To me, that’s accidental. And when I said “job-blog-book movement,” I wasn’t talking about my current job. I was talking about the trend, 5-6 years ago, of publishing houses giving book deals to job-bloggers and that fact that I managed to catch that wave, ride it, and have my 15 minutes of quasi-fame. Waiter Rant. New York Hack. Damien what’s-his-name, the investment banker. Melissa Lafsky. They all were part of the same group – people blogging anonymously about their jobs, then getting new jobs or lucrative book deals out of it.

So yeah, you convinced me to keep going and were largely responsible for me having my job today, but that’s not at all what the previous post was referring to. I started writing on my own in 2002, kept it up for several years while I was in my previous career, and lucked ass-backwardly into a book deal a full two years before you came into the picture. What came before it was all on me. I had the idea, I put in the work, and I was responsible. Nobody else, unless you want to count “Clint” for suggesting an idea he probably figured I’d drop after a week anyway.

Call me a “narcissist” all you want, but yeah, that whole thing was an “accident” where persistence – me continuing to maintain this site every day for three years even though nobody other than my friends was reading – met an amazing stroke of luck. I hadn’t even fucking met you yet, and you had nothing whatsoever to do with that.

I'll gladly give you credit where it's due (and have, with regard to my current job), but you're not getting credit for my book deal. I didn't even know you.

And I know exactly how this will go. Instead of reading this and understanding that you texted me a load of bullshit regarding something I wasn't even saying, you'll continue this theme as though this was yet another example of how I'm incapable of drawing even one correct breath in a fucking day.

You want to check in, huh? I'm fine. My sister's fine. We're all fine. Bye.

750 Words, One Letter At a Time

2011-08-05T04:00:00.001-04:00

There has to be more to life than sitting on subway trains fuming. Actually, I know there is. I just haven’t seen it in a while.

I have seen it, though. I’ve seen more of the world than most people, at least in a geographical sense. In a past life, I had a “career” where I did quite a bit of...travelling. I haven’t written about this much, but a rather large swath of my life after college involved being places other than New York, so I know there’s other shit out there. I just haven’t bothered to go out and look for it in a while.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about some new shit, and aside from just hooking up a sick fucking trip for my vacation – I’m finally taking one after not doing so for a long, long time – I’m thinking about some options, work-wise, that’ll have me going away a lot more often. I’m excited to see where I’ll go in life now that I’m finally applying myself again.

I’ll get one thing straight right off the bat: I know how fortunate I am right now to even have a job. I’m also thankful I’m not overseas with people shooting at me. I have friends in both positions, so I shouldn’t complain, and I rarely do anymore. There’s bigger shit going on in the world than the girl who took too long to use the Metrocard machine at 72nd Street this morning. I know all of this, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop thinking about my own life and where the fuck I’m going.

I had an opportunity a few years back, and I blew it. The real story behind the book process is that the most important person in my life died exactly 2039 days ago, right in the middle of the whole fucking thing. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that before. As a result, I didn’t do what I was supposed to be doing, things didn’t turn out the way they could have had I applied myself a hell of a lot better, and now I’m way off the radar. That’s cool. I’ve spent the last few years learning how to do this shit professionally, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’ve learned a few valuable lessons in the process.

I also don’t believe that you can’t do anything more in publishing if your first book isn’t a runaway best-seller. That’s what everyone says, but my first try was a rudderless, half-assed effort on multiple levels. The next time I do it, I’ll know exactly what I’m doing, and it’ll be a completely different story.

This whole writing thing happened almost completely by accident. My life was pretty much a dead-end disaster when the whole job-blog-book movement came around, and I got lucky and caught a wave. The problem was that I thought I was entitled to something I didn’t deserve, and I acted accordingly – like a lazy piece of shit who (pardon the cliché) was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. Just ask my editor. That shit won’t happen again, believe me.

Am I pissed off that there are people who can’t write their way out of a fucking paper bag making way more money doing this than I am? When we’re talking about ability – in a vacuum, I mean – the answer is yes. I read certain books and wonder what the fuck the publisher was thinking. Dwelling on it, however would be delusional. Some people simply know how to sit down and do this shit every single day, even though they have “real” jobs, spouses, kids, and myriad other distractions that make things hard. I didn’t know how to do that. I probably still don’t. But I’m trying. I’m trying to make this a habit, because it’s still something I want to do, and the only way to hit that mark is to just keep churning shit out and getting better.

As for everything else, the 2040th day will be just as hard as the 2039th day, which was just as hard as the first. I’m used to it by now. It’s reality when I wake up in the morning, and it’s reality when I go to sleep. That shit doesn’t go away. You just have to adapt to it and keep fucking moving. I didn’t, but now I am.

And that’s your steaming pile of horseshit for today. Have a nice weekend, everyone.

A Night Out

2011-08-04T04:00:00.000-04:00

I have a close friend who used to be a professional football player. He wasn’t any kind of superstar, but he was a solid player who spent seven or eight seasons in the NFL and played in a couple of Pro Bowls. He’s not a household name, so unless you’re a totally rabid football nerd – or a fan of the team he played for – you’ve probably never heard of him. And since football is played with helmets on and the faces there aren’t as familiar as they are in other sports, he’s rarely recognized in public anymore unless it’s by someone who already knows him personally.

I’m going to call him “Mike,” because that’s football terminology for middle linebacker, his position in college and the NFL. If he’d played strongside linebacker, I’d call him “Sam.” If he’s played weakside, I’d call him “Will.” You just learned something.

We went to the Yankee game together the other night. Mike drives an Escalade and lives in a very nice house, because although he never really broke the bank by NFL standards, he was careful with his money and probably doesn’t have to work again for the rest of his life. I find it very interesting that he went out and started a second career anyway. Some guys have to stay busy. Mike is one of those guys. He’s solid.

Mike just went through a divorce. This is the only negative thing that’s happened to him since I’ve known him, and I’ve known him since our senior year in high school. It’s a sad situation, but it seems amicable compared to some of the other couples I’ve known who’ve gone through it. Nobody cheated, walked out, or did anything wrong. They just didn’t get along anymore. It sucks, but it happens.

Like most guys I know who get divorced, Mike is out there getting after it. Hard. But in his case, since he’s a good looking guy, a former professional athlete who’s stayed in shape, and has a shit-ton of money, he happens to be getting after it with some seriously national-class trim like it’s his fucking job. It’s impressive.

He brought his latest attempt at overcompensation to the game with us. We had great seats, but she did nothing but piss and moan the whole way to Yankee Stadium. The air conditioning was too cold. When we opened the windows, it was too windy. When we closed the windows and tried to make the air conditioning a little more moderate for her, it was “stuffy.” It was too hot at the game. Baseball is boring. There were bugs. She was tired. People were too loud. Her beer had a fly in it. The bathrooms were “skanky.” Derek Jeter is ugly and old.

At one point, Mike went to take a leak and bring back some stuff from the concession stand, leaving me alone with her. We had nothing to say to each other. We sat in silence the entire time. I couldn’t think of a single subject to broach with this person, and although she didn’t even try, I could think of absolutely nothing she could possibly say that would interest me to even the slightest degree. I was so disinterested that it wasn’t even awkward.

Mike came back with beer and started talking to me about Tiki Barber’s comeback. He thinks someone will sign him after the third week of the season, when teams would have to spend less money on him. He says Tiki can probably still play. He said nothing to the girl. For at least an hour, he spoke only to me. I forgot she was even there. She contributed nothing, other than the occasional complaint.

After the game, we dropped her off in Astoria and drove back to Mike’s house, where I’d parked my car in the street. I wanted to go home.

“Well,” said Mike, “that kinda sucked.”

I hit the button on my keychain, opened my door, and wondered why he hadn’t taken her home after all that. “Whatever,” I said. “We went to the fucking Yankee game. Who cares?”

“She’s pretty fucking hot, right?”

Am I missing something here?

Act Locally

2011-08-03T04:00:00.004-04:00

A SIMPLE PROPOSITION

Navigating New York’s sidewalks, crosswalks and subway platforms can be frustrating for even the most patient souls among us. Early in the morning, our wonderful city can be so fraught with unwelcome and unpleasant stimuli that it’s easy to become enraged at the slapdicks responsible. Later in the afternoon, you’re tired, you’re frustrated, you just want to get home after a difficult day of work, and it’s simply unfair to have to summon the patience to circumnavigate the endless flocks of anuses who insist upon clogging Gotham’s vital chokepoints.

Whether we’re talking about the tops or bottoms of staircases or escalators, the spaces between pillars and railings on subway platforms or the entrances to New York’s thousands of buildings, areas requiring free pedestrian passage aren’t places New Yorkers should stand. They inexplicably do, however, and it’s a problem that won’t go away by itself.

Until now.

Welcome to whyfuckingstandthere.org, a dynamic new initiative launched by the people who brought you dontsmokeinfrontofthefuckingdoorway.org and donthittheclosedoorbuttonontheelevatorafteryoustuckyourarminandheldusallup.org.

The mission of whyfuckingstandthere.org is simple and straightforward: to make every fucking moron in New York City understand that when an entire stream of people is walking around you while glaring at you and muttering obscenities, you’re probably in the way, and you should move immediately.

HOW CAN I HELP?

The good people at whyfuckingstandthere.org can’t do this alone. We need your help, and we need it now. New York is completely choked off, and it’s becoming virtually impossible to travel from place to place without encountering some dildo standing somewhere he shouldn’t. We obviously don’t want anyone getting shot or stabbed, but if you’re carrying a weapon yourself, we need you to raise citywide awareness by spreading the word directly to these douches – telling them, in no uncertain terms, to get the fuck out of the way.

Every time you move someone out of a chokepoint, it’s one step closer to victory – but remember this: Move a man out of the way, and you’ve got freedom for a day. Teach a man to move himself out of the way, and you’re free of his fucking stupidity for a lifetime.

That’s what we’re about here at whyfuckingstandthere.org.

WHAT IF I’M STUPID?

Your first step toward liberation is to simply move. Get the fuck out of the way. Lean against the fucking wall. Focus, every single day, on paying attention to social cues, especially during morning and evening rush hour periods, and you’ll eventually start to get the point.

In time, we’ll have volunteers roaming the sidewalks and subway stations of New York, handing out our literature and offering workshops on how not to be a human blockade. You’ll learn marketable skills like:

• Standing where you don’t block hundreds of people.
• Walking downstairs faster.
• Ascertaining whether you’re “hot” enough to wear high heels and walk downstairs at a fucking snail’s pace without pissing everyone off.
• Avoiding standing confusedly in front of Metrocard machines.
• Avoiding standing confusedly in front of subway turnstiles.
• Avoiding inexplicably stopping within the flow of pedestrian traffic.
• Walking in a straight line.

ACT NOW

Let’s be honest, folks. Commuting to work in New York City is just a big, fat fucking joke. It doesn’t have to be that way, but what we need from you to get this initiative off the ground is the sense of urgency that’s obviously missing from the collective consciousness of the hordes of fuckwits who slow our city to a crawl every morning and evening rush.

Don’t let them win. Join us.

City Life: Keeping Right Proves "Challenging" For Imbeciles

2011-08-02T04:00:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK, N.Y. – It seems a simple enough proposition. If you want to stand still on one of Manhattan’s subway station mega-escalators, you keep to the right. If you’re in a hurry and need to treat the escalator like a staircase, you can do so on the left. Observe any subway escalator at rush hour, and this pattern seemingly develops of its own accord.

Until, that is, Miranda Giraud exits her train. Giraud, 38, an unemployed mother of three who now lives in Oniontown, N.Y., is on a rather unusual mission – one she claims will “teach” working New Yorkers to slow down and realize that she can “do whatever the fuck I want.”

“That’s what this is all about,” said Ms. Giraud. “I do what I want to do and none of these motherfuckers can say shit to me.”

If you’ve encountered Ms. Giraud or her growing legion of followers, chances are you’ve been unnecessarily delayed on your way up one of Manhattan’s myriad transit system escalators – and you’re certainly not alone in your annoyance.

“This is something we’re seeing more and more of every month,” says New York City Escalator Division spokesman Frank Sperte, “and it’s definitely more of a problem during summer months. People are hot, they’re sweating, they’re trying to get to work, and you basically have these fucking ne’er do wells violating every common sense law on and off the books. It’s fucking disgraceful.”

Problems arise, say some commuters, when few grown men have the “balls” to do anything about it. “I tell these dumb fucks to move out of the way every fucking morning, at least when I’m close enough for them to hear me,” says Vincent Sapienza, an union elevator mechanic who commutes daily from Long Island to his job in the Financial District. “It’s like a bad joke. How do you not fucking know where you’re supposed to stand?”

A TROUBLED PAST

Once considered a promising student at Jamaica’s Mary Lewis Academy, Ms. Giraud’s first signs of trouble arose shortly before her sophomore year in high school.

“I don’t like categorizing people or offering dimestore psychological evaluations,” says Sister Patricia Teegarten, a veteran school administrator, “but to us, Miranda seemed to have descended into something resembling narcissistic personality disorder rather rapidly. Not that she was ever nice to anyone or anything, but still.”

Her former classmates concur. “She was just a fucking piece of shit to everyone,” says Vivian Gonzalez, who shared several classes with Ms. Giraud. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that she’s getting all this attention for being so stupid. I see her on the news and her tattoos look so bad and shit, you know?”

After high school, Ms. Giraud’s downward cycle continued with two failed marriages, a felony assault conviction and three children born out-of-wedlock. This systematic failure-at-life, she claims, is her motivation for making everyone around her as miserable as possible at all times. “Fuck everyone,” she said. “This is about me, and I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

“People like her fall into similar patterns of behavior when they use our transit system,” said Mr. Sperte. “It’s definitely not a good thing. When you see someone like this blocking the entire left side of an escalator, they’re likely making excessive noise as well, and when they get off the escalator, there’s a good chance they’ll inexplicably stop, inconveniencing New Yorkers behind them.”

THE SOLUTIONLESS PROBLEM

Residents like Ms. Giraud, says Mr. Sapienza, are the rule, rather than the exception. “Short of grabbing these fucking idiots by the back of the collar and hauling them off the fucking escalator,” he said, “there’s nothing we can fucking do about it, and it’s a shame. They’re everywhere.”

The problem, according to Mr. Sperte, is the intimidation factor elicited by these subterranean malcontents. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “You have some stupid, lazy, fat fuck who won’t get out of your way, but the only real means they have to defend themselves against you is to yell at you and hope you get frightened and back down, but let’s be honest here. The average stupid, lazy, fat fuck on the subway does not have the physical wherewithal to engage in an altercation with anyone. They’re simply not in good enough shape. They drink, they smoke, and they eat fucking Taco Bell six times a day. How fucking long do you think they can last in a fight before their hearts explode?”

Mr. Sapienza agrees. “I work with my hands every day, all day long,” he said. “You don’t have a job? You don’t do nothing physical? Get in my way and I’ll slap you in the back of the fucking head. Boom, right in the back of your fucking head. Do something. You can’t.”

None of this, however, seems to register with Ms. Giraud, who pledges to continue doing her part to both delay the flow of progress and irritate every commuter within a hundred yard radius. “This isn’t about those people getting to work,” she said. “It’s about me letting the whole world know that I do whatever the fuck I want to. I already told you that.”

Monday, August 1, 2011

2011-08-01T04:00:00.001-04:00

Here is one of those copout "10 Random Things on a Sunday Night" posts. It's better than nothing, I'd say.

1. Breaking Bad is my favorite TV show at this point. Saul Goodman is my favorite character.

2. The most entertaining book I’ve read recently was The Swinger, by Michael Bamberger and Alan Shipnuck.

3. Since I received my piece of bad news last Sunday, I’ve been listening to the song Ocio, by an artist called Melikka, on a repeating loop. I don’t know why.

4. If I could afford to live anywhere in New York City, I would live in Tribeca. I will, eventually.

5. I don’t own an iPad, nor do I understand their purpose.

6. July has been an absolute shit month. I’m very glad it’s over.

7. The second – or perhaps third – act of my life begins today. I’m happy to be writing it myself.

8. I like things manufactured by a company called Filson.

9. I now carry around a little black notebook and write shit down all day. It’s been helping a lot.

10. I need to stop saying “fuck” and “fucking” so much at work. It’s unprofessional and it’s holding me back.

City Life: Subway Logjams Suck Ass

2011-07-29T04:00:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Stephen Gianakis is sweating. Wearing a double-breasted wool suit will make you do that when you’re forced to stand for several stops on a crowded rush-hour subway train. Mr. Gianakis, a bond trader, is making the trek this morning from his Upper West Side apartment to his job in the Financial District. His immediate concern, however, is neither perspiration nor punctuality.

“This ride sucks in and of itself,” said Mr. Gianakis, 34, “but it’s these dumb motherfuckers who try to get on the train before everyone else gets off that make this shit fucking miserable.”

It would seem logical for passengers waiting to board subway trains to stand aside and allow debarking passengers to exit – there are regular announcements to this effect – but the practice doesn’t seem to have caught on among the majority of New York straphangers.

If you’ve ever tried to leave a subway car and found yourself in the midst of a standoff with a dull-eyed fellow commuter, you’re in good company. According to a comprehensive analysis performed by the New York Mass Transit Logistics Association (NYMTLA), roughly 30% of Manhattan commuters will attempt to board trains with no regard for societal convention, common courtesy or common sense.

“We’ve run the numbers on this over a five year period,” says Jason Moffatt, a NYMTLA research analyst, “and what we’ve found is that people in New York City, especially in Midtown Manhattan, tend to disregard what decent people consider to be rules. I’m speaking subjectively here, but what makes sense to people with at least average intelligence isn’t always the way things work in practice.”

Mr. Gianakis agrees. “I ride this motherfucking train every fucking day, and it just blatantly sucks. From the hot stations that ruin my fucking clothes ten minutes after I get out of the fucking shower to these fucking people I have to ride with, by the time I get where I’m going, I want to take a chainsaw to all these fucking people standing in front of the door. Seriously. One day I totally fucking will.”

Following his organization’s extensive five-year research project, Mr. Moffatt said NYMTLA’s statisticians have noted a number of common threads among commuters who fail to step aside. “We’ve charted just about everything about them,” she said, “and it seems as though the practice is most common among Eastern European and Asian tourists, along with high school students. It’s also quite prevalent among people without work-related paraphernalia like briefcases, which is indicative of a state of unemployment. This piqued our curiosity as to why they’re in such a hurry to get on the train.”

FOOT IN THE DOOR

Unbeknownst to Joseph Merritt, he’s been under NYMTLA observation for two years. Mr. Merritt, 43, is a self-employed “search engine optimization specialist” from Yonkers who commutes daily from Grand Central Terminal to Water Street in the Financial District. He also consistently attempts to run into subway trains as soon as the doors open, infuriating at least those fellow passengers with intelligence levels high enough to notice how irritating he is.

“We’ve run surveillance on him long enough to be able to predict what he’s going to do on the platform,” said Mr. Moffatt. “He was, essentially, the spark that set off the entire study, because he abjectly refused to have any regard for the personal space of his fellow commuters. That, of course, extends to his habit of inexplicably rushing onto the train for no apparent reason.”

Mr. Moffatt said Mr. Merritt’s decorum hasn’t improved one iota over two years. “The guy’s a fucking asshole, honestly. There was one night we followed him, and he shoves his way onto the train even though there was plenty of space, and you know what he does? The fucking guy lit up a cigarette. On a fucking subway train. I looked at my colleague, and I was like, ‘I went to college to fucking follow this guy around?’ I mean, what the fuck?”

At the end of his workday, Mr. Merritt’s subway behavior seemed to have deteriorated further. Sporting a pair of white “earbud” headphones connected to an iPod, his music was audible – and abrasive – from the opposite end of his subway car.

When he first boarded the train, Mr. Merritt seemed content to stand holding the pole in the section of floor between the two middle sets of doors. After a few stops, however, he continually bent down for reasons Mr. Moffatt – observing the situation from approximately ten feet away – could not ascertain. In the process, he repeatedly brushed his hair across the hand of Mr. Gianakis, the other man holding the pole.

“If he did it again, I was going to punch him in the face,” said Mr. Giannakis. “Are you fucking kidding me? Stand still, you stupid fucking drug addicted fuck. What the fuck do they all have to fucking touch me for? People are fucking disgusting. And hand sanitizer? You really think that shit’s going to work? I don’t even like eating lunch anymore. Fuck this.”

BLISSFUL BLINDERS

For commuters like Mr. Merritt, according to Mr. Giannakis, commuting on the subway is a pleasure. “Oh, he doesn’t fucking care,” he said. “He’s too stupid to fucking care. He’s got an easy life, because he can walk around being so fucking stupid that he’s got a fucking bulls-eye on his fucking head, but if I give him what he deserves and punch his fucking face in, I’m the one who goes to jail. Fuck that guy, man. Fuck all these fucking people. Must be a really great life being a fucking moron.”

Dr. Barbara Feldspar, a Brooklyn psychologist and expert on decorum regression, says Mr. Merritt’s behavior is strictly biological in nature.

“We’d like to think this sort of thing has something to do with the quality of one’s parenting, but I’ve rarely found that to be the case,” she said. “The extensive testing that’s been done on these people has simply shown them to be of less than average intelligence. Very far down the scale in some cases. That’s why I’ve begun carrying a Taser on my way to work. I’ve theorized that all I have to do is shock one of these people, and the rest will move out of the way. Clinical studies have shown that the stupid respond rapidly to force.”

The New York City subway system, said Dr. Feldspar, tends to amplify one’s mental deficiencies in ways that may not be quite as apparent aboveground. “On the subway, people are in such close quarters that they’re forced to use common sense. The problem, however, is that very few people have any. When you take a person who’s barely functional in polite society and place him in a situation where he actually has to address the needs of others and show care and caution, he’s not going to be very successful. We see this every day, and it’s generally why people stab one another.”

This, said Mr. Giannakis, is why his health is beginning to decline. “It’s total, total bullshit. The world is a completely fucking unfair place when I have to get up in the morning and I can’t just go to work and be a productive member of society without some fucked up piece of shit touching me with his hair or not letting me off the fucking subway. It sucks. New York sucks. I hate this fucking place. Seriously, fuck all of you.”

“As someone who’s monitored this closely for years,” added Mr. Moffatt, “I really find these studies amazing, because this behavior is so foreign to anyone who knows how to tie his own shoes. As a guy who rides the subway every day, though, I’ve come to consider everyone else on the train my fucking enemy.”

Maze

2011-07-28T04:00:00.000-04:00

Here’s what happened.

Someone very, very, very, very close to me was diagnosed with cancer, and I went off the deep end because two other people who were very, very, very, very close to me have died from cancer over the past 16 years. I erroneously started focusing on something that had nothing to do with this person’s troubles. I did that because this person, who cares about me more than anyone else in the world, chose to focus on that other something instead of her own situation – and that led me to do the same.

I just spent the last several hours hanging out with this person and talking, and there has been a shift.

Some people wait until Monday to begin an exercise program, or the first of the month to start a diet. I’ve never been like that. I’ve never needed milestones to start anything. She does, though. She’s always been like that.

“Let’s just get out of July, man. Let’s just focus on getting to August.”

And we will. Fuck you, July. Eat a dick.

Life, man. Life.

2011-07-26T04:00:00.000-04:00

The 1 train at South Ferry is a very nice place to think, at least for the seven minutes it sits idle before leaving, plus the three minutes it takes to get to Chambers Street, where you transfer to the 2 or the 3. You transfer to the 2 or 3 if you actually want to get where you’re going. You stay on the 1 if you don’t give a flying fuck. I transferred today. I was in the rear car of the train, so when I got to Chambers, I walked around that inexplicable railing on the south end of the uptown platform, sat on it, and waited for the 2.

You don’t really sit on that rail. You lean. It’s a comfortable lean for someone my height, but with the heat on the platform and the never-ending trickle of jerkoffs that stand too close, you can’t settle in the way you want to. You’re always on the move, squirming. Inching left. Inching right. Taking a walk. Checking the sign to see when the next fucking train is coming. Making as much forward progress as you can, just to get the shit over with and get home. Or get to work. There’s really nowhere else to go, is there?

That’s what there is for me right now. Home and work. Work is work, and I can shut it down and not think about what happened on Sunday – at least not constantly. Home is home, and I tend to dwell on it, but at least I’m in the middle of it, which is where I need to be, and where people need me. In between is where I figured I’d find problems, but when I ride the subway, all I’m thinking about is how to ride the fucking subway. None of this shit’s on my mind when I’m worried about staying as far away from them as I comfortably can. When I’m checking to see if the 2 train passed the 1 train so I’ll know whether changing trains is worth the hassle. When I’m worried about keeping my new briefcase off the floor. When I’m enraged at the people who don’t give a shit how loud their fucking music is when it comes through their cheesy-ass stock iPod earbuds.

When some guy slides between trains with a bucket and yells about how “lucky” I am and wants my money.

I remember the first time I took her into Manhattan with me on one of my school-cutting deals. It was a bad idea, and I knew it, but I did it anyway. I’d cut school and take the train down to West 4th Street and play basketball. I had a purple backpack. I would pack my ball, some bananas and a container I’d frozen the night before so it would melt and turn into cold water. When I got to the playground, I’d climb all the way up to the top of the fence and hang my backpack on one of the metal posts. That way, if anyone went up there to steal it, even while I was playing, I’d see him and raise the hue and cry – and people wouldn’t put up with that shit back then. Even the street guys. Nothing ever happened.

I played and played and played and sat on the side, waiting for more run with guys who didn’t have homes. I could shoot.

I took her in there on the train and we roamed around, and she watched me play ball, and then we roamed around some more and went home. We were filthy by the time we got back. The city was a dirty shithole back then, and basketball at West 4th was about the dirtiest thing a 16-year-old kid could do in Manhattan short of driving a backhoe. We didn’t know where the fuck we even were. I wish I knew the city now like I knew it then – which was not so much. It still had something for us. It doesn’t anymore. Especially not now. The only surprises you get now are ones you don’t want.

But when I think of that stuff when I think about New York, everything else goes away the way I want it to. I was all about this place for a long, long time, and I want to be again. I just need her to make it and it’ll be okay again. I know it will. We’ve come too far from there to just fold up.

Something Happened

2011-07-25T04:00:00.000-04:00

Life works like this.

It’s all fucking relative. This is so clichéd it’s a bad joke, really, but it’s true. You go through your stupid little life with blinders on, thinking you’ve got “real” problems when things don’t break your way. Then something smacks you in the mouth and reminds you what a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool problem actually looks and feels like.

Honestly? It’s liberating, especially for someone like me, who has a history of problems that actually are “real” on just about anyone’s scale. I didn’t want the reminder, but I probably needed it. What I didn’t need was for it to be at someone else’s expense, but that’s how it is. And no, it’s not my fault. I’m the solution here, not the cause.

It happened yesterday morning. That would be Sunday, if you’re keeping track. My phone rang at exactly 10:23 AM, Eastern Daylight Time, and the news I received was markedly unpleasant. Ridiculously unpleasant. So unpleasant, in fact, that it knocked me out of this fucking stupor I’ve been in, and brought me back to some semblance of reality. My paradigms? They fucking shifted, that’s for sure. Every other “problem” in my life is now just fucking background noise.

I figure there’s two kinds of bad news: the kind that knocks you on your ass and doesn’t let you move, and the kind that leaves you no option but to get up and fucking do something. Yesterday’s was the second kind.

And what was it?

Make a list of a the five worst pieces of news you could ever possibly hear. It’s not number one, but it’s not number five, either. That’s what it was. Do the math.

Fucked

2011-07-22T04:00:00.000-04:00

I went out for a work-related happy hour and just got home. I had fun.

Off the top of my head, I'd say there are about five people that still read this blog who know me in person and actually worry about me. There used to be a lot more, but I haven't told anyone that I'm writing here again, and anyone who knows me hasn't checked this thing in months.

For the five of you who still do, I'm fine. Really. Have I ever been a problem?

You know where to reach me.

More Crap

2011-07-21T04:00:00.000-04:00

I did good today. Very, very good. Well, too. I was up at 5:15, got my ass to work, and didn’t get home until after 10 – and here I am, sitting down to write something even though I’m tired as fuck. I think what I’m happiest about tonight is that I’m actually starting to give a crap again – about my “career,” about developing the discipline to do some shit I don’t want to do once in a while, and about learning the meaning of the word “professional.”

That’s probably the biggest key for me – being a pro. I think I can still be a little fucked in the head and complain about shit, but I’m pretty much free and clear to do that as long as I’m moving forward and trying to actually get better. Until recently, I was all former and no latter, and that shit doesn’t get you anywhere, because when you don’t do this every day, you start to suck at it. Sure, you can be grammatically correct and spell everything right, but you still suck because your mind isn’t working the way it needs to.

You’ll have to excuse me for writing posts like the ones you’re reading this week. It’s almost like I have to work these basics out in my head in order to start shaking the rust off so I can write about the good shit – stuff that happens at work, shit I see on the sidewalk, etc, etc. I need to get this crap out of my system and figure out my next move, and I need to open up my head and look around so I can figure out what to focus on. The whole bouncing thing was a damned good idea, but that’s out the fucking window now – even though I miss the ready-to-roll aspect of having funny shit to write about every single day.

My life right now isn’t as funny as it was five years ago. It can be, though. I just need to start looking at it like I used to.

Also, I’ve had a Kindle for about a year. Thing is fucking amazing. I’ll write out what’s on it soon.

Crux

2011-07-20T04:00:00.000-04:00

Honestly, the reason I haven’t done dick as a writer – despite being able to write pretty fucking well – is that I’m lazy as shit and can’t get going most days. When your goal was (is) to write something people want to read – and that sells like a motherfucker – it’s a problem when you’d rather do anything but sit in a chair, at a desk, and crank shit out. Forget how long I did this and how much material is on this site. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re supposed to write every damned day if you want to be any good at this shit, and I don’t.

Got some furniture to move? Need a roof on your house? I’ll sit there and bang it out without a break. Need a few paragraphs written? I’ll need a few months on that, thanks.

This post right here is a perfect example. I typed less than 100 words, then stopped what I was doing to see who just texted me.

Then, after typing this last sentence – and I even thought about turning my fucking phone off while I was typing it – I replied to this bullshit text that meant absolutely nothing to my life in the grand scheme of things, then sat there staring at my phone to see what the reply would be. And the reply was more bullshit, but me being me, I sent something back. And so on.

Meanwhile, this post sat here unattended.

For me, it’s about output and discipline. The former is painfully low. The latter, I don’t have. At all, at least with writing. It sucks, and it’s something I have to do something about. Even now, I’m looking at the clock, and I’m realizing I have to go to sleep soon – but I haven’t done jack shit tonight except write a post complaining about how badly I suck at sticking with this tenaciously enough to make something out of it.

And I’ve been sitting here texting the entire time, even though I mentioned turning my phone off a few paragraphs back.

It’s a problem.

Hey

2011-07-18T04:00:00.000-04:00

Hi Everyone.

For the (now very) few of you who’ve hung in there checking this site every day for, well, something, I have some news for you. Of course, if you’re familiar with all my false starts here, you’ll take this with an understandable grain of salt, but I’m going to start writing here a lot more – about just about anything and everything.

Why? Because I’ve spent a couple of years now writing solely for work, and I want to start branching out again and seeing where things lead. I’ve become something of a “professional” – notice the quotes – in this “business,” but I’ve fallen into a rut where I just go to work every day, do the same thing for ten hours, and go home. There’s obviously nothing wrong with this, and I’ve been doing that, more or less, for my whole life, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and I’m ready to do more. I’m also quite capable of doing a lot more.

And yeah, I’m fucking thrilled to death to have a job, but I’m tired of falling back on that as an excuse to not be dissatisfied. People are doing shit despite the way things are. They’re putting out books, they’re making movies and they’re making money, because they’re taking risks and not paralyzed by the lack of self-confidence that’s been murdering me for the past few years.

So, consider this an introductory post for an entirely new chapter in my career – one where I actually get off my ass and do something. That’d be kind of nice, wouldn’t it?

I’m tanned, rested and ready to roll.

Update

2011-04-12T04:00:00.001-04:00

I've been away from this thing for a while, but oddly enough, it still gets a ton of hits, so I guess I owe people some kind of update. It's only fair, right?

Things have been moving pretty well for me, careerwise, for the past couple of years. Right now I have a really cool job doing something I'm pretty good at, and I've been promoted multiple times since leaving "The Life of a Shitbag" behind. Not that there was anything wrong with being a professional shitbag, but I'd had enough of it and it was time for me to start using my mind to make a living for once. Best move I ever made. I always made fun of you people for working in your cubicles and your crappy offices, but now I'm doing that, too, and I couldn't be happier, at least professionally.

Now that I have some perspective on it, my story really is kind of cool. A professional jerkoff -- a "two-pump chump" as my friend Adam once called me -- starts a blog, which gets him a book deal (the culmination of which, let's face facts, sucked...but still), which lands him a job in the publishing industry (and a nice office). What the fuck is that all about?

Anyway, thanks to all of you who've inexplicably hung in for posts that haven't been coming. I've been thinking a lot lately about trying to get another book published. I'm definitely a WAY better writer than I was back then, having done this professionally for a while now, I have a better sense of how things work in terms of putting the shit together, and, most importantly, I have a much firmer grip on reality. Book deals don't grow on trees. Mine was such a weird surprise when it happened that I thought I was entitled. I wasn't, but the finished product was something written by someone who obviously started on third base and thought he'd hit a triple.

If I knew then what I know now...

But you know what? I know now what I know now, and I'm better at this now than I was then, so I'm definitely looking forward to doing more in this business. Things could definitely be worse.

Also, I had a dog growing up, and today would have been his birthday. He was cool.

Whisper

2011-04-11T04:00:00.001-04:00

You’ve got this dog, right? And this dog you’ve got keeps taking shits on the rug. He’s shit on the rug so many times that you don’t even bother cleaning the damned thing anymore. You take it outside, shake off his steaming pile of crap, bring it back in and lay it out where it’s always been. And then he shits on it again. And again. And again. And then he barks at you like it’s your fault.

So you rub his nose in shit immediately after he does it again, and he thinks to himself, “Man, this sucks to have my nose rubbed in shit like this. I’ll never do this again.” But the next morning, he shits on the rug again. And you rub his nose in it again, and this time he takes it even harder. He understands the cause-and-effect here. “How could I have been so stupid,” he asks, “to have taken a shit on the rug again? This blows!”

And then he does it again. And gets his nose rubbed in it again. And thinks it sucks again. And forgets again and does the same fucking thing until you drag his sorry ass down to the pound and leave him there to be somebody else’s problem, because who needs a dog that can’t stop shitting on the rug?

Crazy how shit works.

Wash

2011-02-01T04:00:00.001-05:00

In my office we have one men’s bathroom. It has a bank of urinals and some stalls, just like any other men’s room anywhere in New York. It also has two different sets of sinks – one row inside the bathroom proper, and one row outside in this vestibule arrangement that I don’t understand no matter how hard I try.

This second bank of sinks is probably a good thing, because you can go into the first part of the bathroom and wash your hands without having to step into the fumes of three guys simultaneously taking shits together – a situation which seems to be de rigueur for my office around mid-afternoon or so.

There’s a guy in my office that irritates the shit out of me, which should surprise nobody. The surprise, of course, is that there’s only one guy, but that can change in a heartbeat, given my propensity to blindly hate other humans for the most insignificant of perceived slights. I no longer have perspective, which is fine by me. I just kind of want them all to leave me alone. This is my impossible dream. I’m the Man of La Mancha, only with a hole in my favorite pair of shoes that’s causing me to spend my days with a wet sock every time I forget and step in a pile of slush. I don’t really care about this.

This guy irritates me because he does stupid things like wandering into pedestrian corridors without looking. Sometimes he does this with his head turned in the direction opposite where he’s going. Once, he did this walking backward. This sort of thing is the height of naiveté. I hate it. I have no faith in people to get out of my way, so I don’t do this. Neither should you. It’s the cat having a litter of kittens then expecting the world to raise them. It’s irresponsible.

When this guy takes a leak, he does something unusual. He uses the outer group of sinks to wash his hands. In other words, he takes a leak, touches the door handle without washing his hands, and then takes care of his sanitary considerations outside. I don’t understand this because there’s no difference between the two groups of sinks, and because people are watching him do this. This means he has an absolute lack of awareness – or concern – for anyone and anything around him.

I want to punch him squarely in the face and call it a career.

The Commute

2011-01-31T04:00:00.000-05:00

Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

I get on the train. I find a seat. The train begins to fill. A woman gets on and looks at me. I stand up and give her my seat. I walk to the area where people stand, and I stand and read. After a while, my back starts to hurt, so I hold my book in one hand and put my other hand in my pants pocket – in as far as the spot just above my knuckles.

Try this sometime. When your back gets stiff and you can’t sit down, put one hand in your pocket like this and lean on it. You have to kind of bend your fingers back a little, but it will make you feel better. After a while, you’ll be happy again, like me. When your hands start to sweat and your back stiffens up again, switch hands. Also, shift your feet around a lot. It all works wonders.

The woman I gave up my seat for gets up and moves toward the door. She’s getting off at the next stop. She stares at me and looks for something to hang onto, because the train is still moving and she’s frightened, I think. The train stops. I can’t move. I’m surrounded. I have nowhere to go.

“Why are you standing here in everyone’s way?” she asks. “Can’t you get out of the way when people are trying to get off?”

“Well,” I say, “considering I’ve been standing for the better part of the last 45 minutes because I gave you my seat, maybe you should just get off the train and go home quietly.”

“You’re rude.”

“Let me get this straight,” I say. “If I stay in my seat and don’t give it up for a woman, I’m an asshole. But if I do give up my seat, I’m an asshole for standing in the way when the same lady is trying to get off the train. Why don’t I just step out now, throw myself in front of the next train and end it all so nobody ever has to deal with me again?”

True story.

Since Last Time

2010-12-14T23:04:00.002-05:00

I am the Angry Commuter. I have perfected the Irish Goodbye. I shoved a guy out of the way. I called another guy an "asshole" outside of a Starbucks, which was probably a redundancy. I found out that when you take a shirt that's missing a button to a good dry cleaner, they'll replace the button. I asked a parking enforcement agent if his parents are proud. I had a filling pop out of one of my molars. I got a promotion and a raise. I developed a "routine."

Still kind of trying to figure shit out at the moment.

Dreamsnuffer

2010-10-01T04:00:00.000-04:00

Here’s something of an ethical dilemma...

Let’s say you’ve been working on a project for eight years. You have your share of stunning successes, but you also run into a slew of massive disappointments that rip your heart right out of your chest for months on end. You get to the top of the mountain once or twice, but you also experience a handful of runs of complete futility that make you question why you’re doing what you’re doing and why you ever bothered getting involved.

Still, you persevere. For eight long years. You bust your ass, you do your best, and it doesn’t cross your mind, even for one second, that what you’re doing isn’t good for the world.

Until, that is, you realize it’s all a load of shit, and that the people pulling the strings – of which you’re not one – don’t want you to succeed, never wanted you to succeed, and are doing everything in their power to keep you from succeeding.

So, let’s say you step back from your project for a little which, and you see it for what it was and still is: a big, fat fucking farce that was rigged from the get-go.

And let’s say you wash your hands of the situation and walk away clean and promise yourself you won’t look back.

Let’s say all of this happens.

But then, a year later, a guy gives you a call. A guy in the same position you were in eight years ago – an idealist who’s seen the work you’ve done and wants to do the same thing. And he wants your advice. He wants to know whether he’s wasting his time. He wants to know what you have to say.

Do you tell him?

Thoughtfulness

2010-09-29T04:00:00.002-04:00

I was “assigned” a topic a few weeks ago, and after a few stops and starts where I didn’t think I was on the right track, I think I’m finally onto something. The topic in question is thoughtfulness - something that, unfortunately, has been a foreign concept to me in recent months.

I’m at a point right now where I’m just fucking fed up with myself on multiple levels. This isn’t anything serious, but it involves the level of effort I’ve been putting in with various parts of my life. I’m not “happy” professionally, per se, but I have a nice little platform to advance from, and I know I have – and will continue to develop – the skills to do a hell of a lot more with everything. I’m not unhealthy, per se, but my effort level at the dining table and in the gym hasn’t measured up to my own expectations, and it’s been showing, big time. My complaint about myself here is just a laundry list of shit at which I haven’t been trying hard enough.

That’s where thoughtfulness comes in. The easy cop-out response to a question about thoughtfulness would entail an explanation of how I’m poised to do all the little things necessary to make everyone else happy – or at least to let others know I’m thinking of their well being. That shit’s easy, because I was raised that way, and I’ve always taken pride in having an almost preternatural awareness of what the people around me need in terms of courtesy and consideration. That’s not an issue, and it never has been.

What is an issue, and what will continue to be an issue if I don’t put a stop to it immediately, is my own inability to take advantage of opportunities when they come up – and believe me, they come up all the time. It’s as though I work just hard enough to put myself in position to do something good, and then I turn around and coast and fail to take the steps necessary to put myself over the top.

This piss-poor effort level runs contrary to the concept of thoughtfulness in this case because I tend to raise expectations and then massively under-deliver when it’s time to move on things. That’s been happening a little too much over the past year or so, and it’s a bothersome situation for me because I know the root cause of the problem, and because I also know how to solve it but haven’t taken the requisite steps thus far.

When people expect something out of you – a certain level of performance, or maybe for you to simply be at your best on a certain day – and you mail in some shitty effort because you haven’t taken the time to properly prepare and execute a plan, it’s a lack of foresight on your part, and you’re not being thoughtful. You’re fucking things up for yourself, and you’re fucking things up for others who’ve erroneously invested time and energy in you.

I’m in a position where people expect things from me, and I’m not merely talking about what happens “in public” or professionally. The idea, then, is to be ready when things come around – when I have a chance to do something really good with my own life or for someone else I’d like to either bring into my life or keep there.

If you’re not ready 24/7, and you haven’t taken the time to prepare yourself physically, mentally and professionally, you’re not being thoughtful.

It’s like sitting on the bench for eight innings of a baseball game, then being asked to pinch hit in a clutch situation. If you haven’t been following the game, you haven’t watched film of the pitchers you’ll potentially be facing and you didn’t address the things you needed to work on in batting practice, you’re fucked, and you’re fucking over a long list of people, including your teammates and the 50,000 people who bought tickets to see you play.

That’s where I’ve been recently – sitting on the bench with my thumb up my ass, distracted, not paying attention to the game, and out of shape from not taking my reps in the batting cage. Sorry for the cheesy sports metaphor, but it fits here because I’ve been caught too many times over the past year with my pants around my ankles when opportunities have been sitting there waiting for me on silver platters. And that, my friends, is not what I’d call being thoughtful to anyone. Nor is using fifty different cliches during the course of one paragraph, but that's another issue entirely.

So, fuck that. That’s not going to happen anymore. I’m very much sick and tired of watching shit pass me by while I make excuse after excuse for why I’m not ready to jump. It’s been a complacent year, but all that’s done now, because I’m not a thoughtless prick, whether we’re talking about my treatment of myself or of others. If you know me, or you work with me, or you’re waiting for me to just fucking do something, rest easy.

Shit’s finally under control again.

Definition

2010-09-28T13:00:00.000-04:00

Facebook: A rather unfortunate way of finding out most of your friends are far stupider than you've ever imagined.

Trevor

2010-09-28T04:00:00.000-04:00

This one was originally published on July 14, 2004. I disagree with presenting myself as a "big, doofy white guy," but other than that, I've always thought this was a pretty good story. I forgot about the night when he offered me a cordless phone, but in thinking about it, I also remember him offering me a really shitty bookcase for free, and a weight bench for $20. I barely knew the guy, and dealings with him were always fairly surreal.

I'm going to attempt to interject some racial humor at this point, and we'll see how things go. I'll preface this post by stating that my intention is to relate this story exactly as it happened. I'm just a big, doofy white guy, and I played absolutely no part in the following sequence of events. I'm merely a conduit of information here.

One of the bouncers at the club is a massive Jamaican dude named Trevor. Trevor is stationed, somewhat appropriately, I suppose, in the 'Hip-Hop Room,' which is located on the opposite side of the club from my two spots out on the dock. I've not had much significant interaction with Trevor, other than greetings and goodnights, simply because I only see the man at the beginning and end of our shifts. A few weeks ago, he inexplicably offered to give me a used cordless phone in the parking lot at the end of the night, but I declined.

Saturday night, there was an altercation between two black guys in the Hip-Hop Room. I heard the call on the radio, and saw the familiar cluster of bouncers and ejected customers heading for the front door, so I ran up there in order to provide extra backup. Even if an ejection is not necessarily your 'show,' you still have to respond to the call and mill around on the periphery in case there's a flareup. I've covered this previously.

Outside, Trevor was engaged in a heated argument with one of the combatants. Actually, I take that back. The customer was heated. Trevor's island lilt was so calm I was tempted to go check his pulse. The customer evidently took offense at having been manhandled by a Jamaican bouncer.

"Fuck you, coconut muthafucka!"

"Don't make it be like dat, mon. You got to go home now."

"Yo, fuck you, island muthafucka. Why you even workin' here muthafucka? All you island muthafuckas do is come here and take jobs away from us n*****s!"

"Yo, mon, de only ting you got right is dat you're a n****r."

The future looks bleak

2010-09-24T04:00:00.001-04:00

Here's one from June 2004. Take a look at the weird quote format I used to use -- which I can't really explain. I suppose it made sense to me back then, but I really have no idea what I was trying to accomplish there. The story is still pretty funny, though. I miss working at the place I wrote about here. I made a shitload of money there, relatively speaking, although in one of the other old posts I considered republishing, I was bragging about collecting $20 for letting a guy park his car in an illegal spot. $20? Dude, are you fucking serious? Man, did I throw away money when I first started doing this shit...

Also, "Phil" is now one of my Facebook friends. He can't spell and his grammar is horrendous. Funny guy, though.

The head muckety-muck at the Club -- in a position I believe is akin to being the owner's right hand man -- is a diminutive gentleman whom we'll call 'Phil.' Phil is about 5'5", 125lbs, and you'll see him, throughout the night, zipping through the crowd like quicksilver, flitting from place to place attending to all the various problems with which the night invariably presents him.

As the evening wears on, most of the chatter in my earpiece involves Phil -- dress code and guest list problems at the door, register and liquor supply problems at the bars, and volume or playlist issues with the DJ. I'd estimate at least ninety percent of the calls on the radio come in imploring, "Phil, pick up! Phil, pick up!" Phil seems to suffer from a variety of neuroses, and the constant calls on the radio provoke him to the point where, as the club hits peak hours, he's teetering on the edge of a complete and total nervous breakdown. His responses to radio calls at this point are often hilarious. A case in point occured last night, when I devirginated myself to the phenomenon that is "Phil, pick up."

In one of a series of completely pointless, nonsensical diversions within the club, we evidently employ a psychic, who does readings at a table near my post at the dock. I was unaware of this fact until last night around midnight, when she asked me to call Phil on the radio and inform him that an emergency had arisen, and that she'd have to go home for the evening. The conversation went as follows:

"Phil, pick up. Phil, pick up."
"Go for Phil."

"Phil, it's Rob on the dock. The psychic told me to call you and tell you that she has an emergency and she has to go home."
"Why are you telling me this?!? Why the fuck are you telling me this?!? Do you think I give a shit about the fucking psychic?!?"

"I don't know, Phil. That's what she told me to tell you."
"What's the emergency?"

"I don't know, Phil. She won't say."
"Ask her why she came to work."

"She wants to know why you're asking her that."
"Because she should have known she was going to have an emergency. She's a fucking psychic!!!"

Nothing Happened

2010-09-23T04:00:00.002-04:00

I haven’t written about this much, but one of the reasons posting here has been so sporadic over the past couple of years is because I was living in Los Angeles for part of that time.

This blog, and everything about it – the tone, the scenery, the plotlines and everything else – is all connected to New York for me. This sounds like a load of creative-type bullshit coming from me, but I’d sit down to write something on the blog while I was living in LA, and I just couldn’t do it. It felt wrong. The energy was wrong. Everything about it was wrong. I felt as though putting dispatches from LA on this site was a little like pissing on my own bed, so I didn’t do it.

I liked LA well enough, but I liked it for all the wrong reasons, which means I probably wouldn’t like it if I ever moved back. I liked being alone, I liked having time to think, and I liked concentrating on nothing but building my new career and constantly working. I didn’t know anyone, rarely went out, and did very little aside from going to the gym, reading and watching the entirety of several cancelled sitcoms – my Arrested Development period comes to mind here - on my laptop.

For several months, I lived in Studio City - right off Laurel Canyon south of Moorpark, if you’re familiar with the western fringes of the glorious San Fernando Valley. I chose to live there because a few other people from my new job rented there, and because the commute down the 101 wasn’t ridiculous.

Studio City is boring. Nothing happens there. I wasn’t within walking distance of anything, the Pacific Ocean was little more than a rumor, and I spent the majority of my “going out” time sitting in the In-N-Out drive thru on Ventura Blvd, at Poquito Mas – also on Ventura, where I once cursed out Jack Wagner for blocking the inexplicably tight parking lot – and at either Gelson’s or Von’s, the two supermarkets close to my apartment. Gelson’s has the best hot food and salad bars of any supermarket I’ve ever been to, by the way.

As an adjunct here, I'll just point out that I'm well aware that my time in LA would have been much more enjoyable if I'd lived somewhere like Santa Monica. I know this. I simply didn't give a shit at the time, so spare me the whole "You didn't see enough of LA to judge it" litany, because I've already been through it.

I stayed where I was because I had a terrific living situation. My landlord was the grandson of the guy who played Laverne’s father on Laverne and Shirley, and he charged me a ridiculously small amount of rent for a ridiculously large – and completely furnished, with terra cotta floors and granite countertops – two bedroom duplex with a patio and free parking. I was so lucky to find this place that I’ve probably shot my good luck load for the next decade or so. That’s how nice this arrangement was.

I worked flex hours the entire time because of the freeway traffic situation in LA. I’d either show up for work at six in the morning, or I’d sleep until nine, go to the gym, then waltz in at eleven and stay until seven or eight at night. I didn’t mind that at all. Of course, I work in a business now where people don’t exactly keep normal hours, but since I’ve pretty much been on someone else’s schedule for my entire life, the idea of working flex hours is something I’d be loathe to give up even for a raise.

I didn’t do much sightseeing in California. I went to the Getty, the Brady Bunch house was down the street from my apartment, I went to the Staples Center because I had press passes to a UFC fight, and I spent some time in Orange County – I also drove the length of the PCH at one point, from the end of Topanga Canyon Blvd all the way to...I guess it was Long Beach – but I don’t know what the deal was with my lack of interest in the place. I kind of wasn’t into it back then. I wasn’t into much of anything.

This is going to sound like the kind of dimestore depth-without-depth bullshit that I try to avoid, but I think you really need to take some time to reflect on things once in a while. I haven’t written jack shit about my time in LA in any medium – not here, not over email to anyone, and certainly not for publication. I think that’s because life, during that time, just kind of happened. I didn’t think about anything. I had nothing to do and didn’t particularly want to be there – but didn’t particularly want to be in New York, either – so I just went into this unfeeling mode where there were no highs and no lows. Just rote, automated repetition of the same routine, day after day after day.

I guess the obvious point here is that I haven’t thought about it much. I went there, I lived and worked, and then I came home. I didn’t get back that long ago, and I don’t even remember much about living there. It’s like the place made no impression at all, except for the clueless drivers and the disproportionate aggressiveness of people in LA’s supermarket checkout lines – which I suppose could be the subject of its own post entirely. Strangest fucking thing I think I’ve ever seen. Remind me to tell that story soon.

If you ask me about LA, there’s no emotional reaction I can give you, because I have no emotions connected to it. I’ll just shrug my shoulders and say something to the effect of, “Eh.” It’s like a place without a shadow – the most lightweight major city I’ve ever seen. And trust me, that’s not me badmouthing it. I can’t badmouth it, because I didn’t see enough of it, and the parts I saw made no imprint whatsoever. It’s not like going to Detroit, where you’re scared shitless to walk around and you kiss the tarmac when your return flight lands. It’s nothing like that. It’s not bad. It’s not good. It’s just pretty much of a big maybe.

Whatever. That’s the story of me moving to LA and coming back. Take it or leave it.

Rules

2010-09-22T04:00:00.001-04:00

Apparently, I'm taking requests now. Thanks for reminding of this one, Josh, and thanks for the kind words. This one originally appeared in August 2005.

I'm an authority figure, whether you people like it or not. A stupid, pointless authority figure, in an embarrassingly meaningless job situated directly in the middle of a repulsive environment that contributes absolutely nothing to society, but an authority figure nonetheless. And like anyone in any position of authority, there are rules I've been entrusted to enforce, and I'm perpetually at risk of losing my job if I don't give due diligence to their administration.

Sitting in the airport bar last weekend, my flight delayed, I found, oddly enough, the inspiration for this post when a woman indignantly insisted she had the right to walk around the airport holding a full, open glass of scotch. Reasoning that she was, after all, a 'good' person -- as opposed to a 'bad' -- who obviously intended no malice in her proposed sojourn across the terminal, our inebriated potential passenger couldn't comprehend why she wasn't permitted to traipse out of the bar, into the airport proper, libation in hand.

"Excuse me, Miss?" called the bartender. "You can't leave the bar with that drink."

"Why not?"

"Because it's against the law."

"But I'm just going over there to check the flight board!"

The law is the law, and a bartender, of all people, isn't granted the authority to interpret the law based upon an individual customer's perceived intent. Neither am I, as a bouncer. Sure, some rules are downright silly, but I'm still required to enforce them, otherwise I'll quickly be out of a job, and, as I've said here repeatedly, I'm not going to do that for you. Yes, you appear to be a decent person. You're well dressed, well spoken and polite. In all likelihood, you're telling me the truth about your intentions, but please, do me a favor: Don't fucking ask. Don't ask me to trust you, to vouch for you, or to permit my employment situation to depend upon the veracity of your words in any way, shape or form.

"My girlfriend doesn't have her ID, but she's twenty five."

"She can't come in."

"Why not?"

"Because she needs to have a valid ID to come in."

"But she's twenty five!"

"Listen. The rule is, everyone needs ID to enter the club. She doesn't have ID, therefore she can't come in. Case closed."

"But she's twenty five!"

Yes, I know. The law doesn't apply to you, because, after all, you're you. It's okay to drive a car without a license if you intend to obey the posted speed limit. Then again, it's perfectly acceptable to get drunk and speed if you're in control of the car, right? Or to come into the club wearing a hat and sneakers because you "came all the way from the Bronx."

"I can't accept this ID. It's expired."

"But it's my ID!"

"Oh, in that case, come right in!"

Are you fucking stupid? I didn't mean that. Sarcasm and facetiousness are evidently lost in translation at the front door of nightclubs. No, an expired driver's license isn't going to get you admitted. I couldn't give a flying fuck if it's "really you," or if your "wallet was stolen yesterday." Rules are rules, and we've all got to abide by them. Even you, dear Guido. Honestly, do you think I really care whether you get in or not? If it were up to me, you could all just come right the fuck in, burn the place to the ground, strangle all the bartenders and steal their cash, and then go home. You think I have an emotional investment in the place? Please.

"Yo, could I come back in now?"

"No. You were in a fight, and you're out for tonight."

"But why can't I come back in?"

"Because the rule is if you get in a fight, you're out, no questions asked. You got into a fight, so you're gone."

"But I ain't gonna get in no mo' fights! Could I come back in?"

I intend to mount my soapbox for a bit here, using people's asinine behavior at the club as a metaphor for how I'm assuming they live their miserable little lives:

Guido, get your house in order. If you want to be honored in the way you're always demanding, to be looked at as a figure of colossal importance, you need to strive for a higher level of self-sufficiency. Get your shit together. Don't rely on the goodwill of others -- and especially not the kindness of strangers -- to get the things you need or want. You don't have a driver's license, right? Got warrants out? Take care of them. Had a DWI conviction? Forfeit your eight year old license and go get a valid New York State ID card. They only cost about ten bucks. Don't come up to me and ask me to stake my job on trusting your good intentions, especially when your deficiencies are so glaringly indicative of your status as a scumbag.

Where do you work, Guido? At the warehouse? Are you in a position of trust there? Do you handle cash? Can I come down to your job and start asking you for shit that could get you fired if your boss found out? Would you let me do that? No? You don't know me from a fuckin' hole in the wall? Exactly.

And do me a favor: Save the righteous indignation for someone who cares. Acting like you're mad at me when I won't immediately accommodate you is, at least for me, the most obvious tipoff that you're completely full of shit. I'm incredulous to believe that any responsible -- or irresponsible, for that matter -- adult could possibly be unaware that his driver's license has expired, but I'd be more inclined to buy your version of events if you could at least pretend you didn't know, as opposed to acting like I'm the asshole for doing my job the way my employers have instructed me to do it.

But, as everyone knows, the best defense is a good offense, and when it comes to Guidos, even the most innocuous request, when denied, has the potential, if not the likelihood, of leading to a sidewalk argument of epic proportions. Obviously, the louder they shout at me, the better their chances of getting me to acquiesce, or so, I suppose, they've been led to believe.

"Why, this is absurd! I want to speak to a manager!"

"He's going to tell you the same thing, ma'am," said the bartender. "It's against the law to leave the bar with your drink."

"Well, what do you think I'm going to do with it?!?"

Can I not read my fucking newspaper in peace?

"Holy crap, lady," I said, my irritation intensifying rapidly as the two argued over my shoulder. "You can't walk around the airport with an open glass of booze. Leave the damned drink here and we'll all sit and watch it 'til you get back."

"You people just lost a customer."

"Big loss," muttered the bartender.

"Rules are rules," I added. "Hey, man," I said to the bartender. "Do you ever read blogs?"

One Night

2010-09-21T04:00:00.000-04:00

Something good happened in my life the week before last, so I decided to just start walking. I began in Midtown and proceeded south, down 7th Ave., cutting through the West Village until I found myself on Houston.

I still don’t know why I went this way, but I made a right on Elizabeth, walked south a few blocks, and ended up here.

I walked in, had a shot of whiskey, and ordered the $50 haircut and shave. This was the most I’d ever paid for a haircut, but I wanted to see what would happen and how it would turn out. I was very happy. I tipped the barber $20 and put myself on their mailing list. I resolved to pay better attention to both my grooming and mode of dress. I’ve kept that resolution for over a week. This is good.

I then continued south on Elizabeth and ended up here, drinking Newcastle and telling my life story to a bartender with an odd name who played good music – heavy on the Replacements - on an iPod and bought back every other round.

After that, I walked for a while and ended up here, where I drank dark beer, ate a liverwurst sandwich and cursed at a drunk guy who called me a tourist.

Finally, I ended up here, where I dumped $20 into the jukebox and played a mélange of Soundgarden songs that earned me more free beer.

Then I went home.

Back to the Future

2010-09-20T04:00:00.000-04:00

This post was originally published on June 13, 2004. It was the first one I ever wrote, and I thought it would be interesting to republish it.

In my latest Kramdenesque employment scheme, I'm going to be a bouncer. Lest you scoff, I feel compelled to point out that I've done it before, many, many times. I did a lot of bouncing in college, and even more in the years that followed. I'm rather good at it, too.

The biggest problem with working security in a bar, when you first start out, is figuring out whom you can trust once something starts. I once worked the door in this quasi-club place -- essentially a big bar with a small dance floor -- that attracted a cityish, guidoish sort of crowd. One Wednesday night, the security staff consisted of me, Joe and Bob-O.

Joe, the de facto 'head bouncer' whose primary (and perhaps only) bouncer weapon was his booming, authoritative voice, was recovering from sciatic nerve surgery on his back, and was particularly useless that night. Bob-O, despite being an extremely nice guy, was simply a horrible bouncer. If something broke out, Bob would lurk around the fringes of the action without actually getting involved. Afterward, he'd tell us all about all the people he'd tossed out during the action, and we all knew it was complete, unadulterated horseshit.

That night, something did break out near the back door. I ran back and locked up one of the combatants from behind, while Joe, bad back and all, was engaged in a wrestling match with the other. I had my guy in an absolute vice grip, and was hauling him toward the back door so I could kick it open, push him out, and go help Joe. Bob-O, a good thirty seconds late, runs right past Joe, grabs the guy I've already subdued by the arm, and yells, "I got him!"

Thanks, Bob. Nice work.

There's another type of bouncer around whom you need to tread lightly: The guy who's obsessed with carrying out his duties to the letter, to the point of causing needless hostilities with customers. Dave, another otherwise terrific guy, was a case in point.

This bar had a really choice deal for the drunks on Saturday nights. At the very end of the night, they'd set out a greasy breakfast buffet, consisting of scrambled eggs, sausages and hash browns, served on plastic plates with plastic utensils. The only rule we enforced was that you couldn't leave the bar with a plate. This, obviously, was because management didn't want a parking lot full of garbage on Sunday morning.

Most of us enforced the breakfast rule loosely, because by 3:45 AM on Saturday night/Sunday morning, we simply didn't give a shit anymore. If I saw someone headed for the door with a plate, I'd say something, but that was where it ended. Dave, on the other hand, inexplicably made it his mission in life to make sure that NOT ONE SINGLE PLATE OR UTENSIL made it out of the bar. He'd use extreme force if necessary, often violently slapping plates out of people's drunken hands before they made it out the door, infuriating scads of intoxicated guidos whom Dave had placed in jeopardy of being late to their roadside appointments with the breathalyzer.

Ironically, Dave is now a physician.

Reading List

2010-09-17T04:00:00.001-04:00

Here are the last few books I've read:

Spies of the Balkans - Alan Furst

The Tourist - Olen Steinhauer

The Game - Doug Glanville

Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace (3rd time)

Emergency - Neil Strauss

The Game - Neil Strauss

Prince of Thieves - Chuck Hogan

Devils in Exile - Chuck Hogan

Neil Strauss is fucking cool. I'd read his grocery list on a plane. I think the entire point of the exercise is to come up with some shit like that and be cool like him.

Two posts in a row and I'm feeling guilty for a cop-out reading list entry. That's probably a good sign.

Inspiration

2010-09-16T04:00:00.001-04:00

Someone asked me about inspiration today. Really, someone did. This isn’t one of those bullshit pieces of writing where the author poses some nonsensical hypothetical question that came out of his own head and tries to pass himself off as some guy people are always asking for crumbs of wisdom. This actually happened. I thought about ignoring it and coming up with some excuse for not giving a comprehensive answer, but it’s been running around my head for a few hours and I’m going to give this a try and see what happens.

This is highly relevant for me right now because I don’t have as many sources of inspiration as I once did. It’s very easy to write volumes about bouncing in nightclubs when you’re working as a nightclub bouncer multiple nights each week. You take a pad and pen to work, wait for something to happen, then write it down. Then, when you get home – or at some point soon after – you tell the story as best you can.

That’s inspiration. Now, line by line, it’s a different story. That’s where you have to take a long, hard look at what you’re writing about and decide which parts of it need to be “fleshed out” – sorry for using cheesy literary agent-speak here, but it fits – and which parts are better off left on the cutting room floor.

I didn’t start off as a professional writer. I could write in coherent, grammatically correct sentences, and I pretty much spelled every word right, but I didn’t know anything about this process, so I told stories in a very literal style. I started at the beginning, wrote down what happened, and finished things off with the coup de grace, which was usually some particularly cutting remark by one of my coworkers at the expense of some unfortunate prick who’d been thrown out of the club.

“Hey man, you’d better get home quick! They chain up the gate to the trailer park at three!”

And so on.

The archives of this blog go back a lot further than December 2005, but I took a lot of it “off the air” for various reasons. When I look at those original posts, they’re very different from the way I write now. They’re more succinct, for sure, but there’s an innocence to them that I think was lost when this site developed a following and people started critiquing everything I did.

This has been a terrific way to learn how to write – probably better than any college classroom I could’ve been sitting in for the years I was seriously going at it here. Among the people who’ve suggested ways I can improve my writing over the years have been college English professors, book editors from major publishing houses, literary agents, fellow magazine editors and writers – and yes, I can say “fellow” because that’s what I get paid to do now – and exceptional people from virtually all walks of life. The writing education I’ve received within the confines of my email inbox as been priceless.

Still, those initial posts have something I can’t really put my finger on. I suppose it is a form of innocence. Back then, I was just a schmuck with a shitty $100 a night side job who saw some funny stuff and wrote about it for the benefit of a few of my friends. The story – delivered in a group email to about five of my friends – that spawned this blog is a perfect example. It went something like this:

“Dude, they had these female dancers up on boxes last night, and I saw some dude whip his cock out and start stroking himself in front of one of them, but I didn’t throw him out because who the fuck would want to touch that?”

Back then, I always thought I had an advantage over people who simply went back and forth to mundane jobs, then came home and tried to conjure something up to write. What I was doing was real. I was in the middle of it. I was standing there with a piece of paper and a pen, at the damned club, surrounded by assholes, observing them and writing down shorthand notations I could take home and turn into stories that would make my friends laugh. That was some good shit, and that, still to this day, qualifies as the best form of inspiration I’ve ever had to write anything.

That’s not to say I’m not inspired now, because I still am. Getting paid to do this – and who the fuck ever thought that would happen back in early 2004 when I couldn’t even figure out how to set this site up? – inspires me plenty, especially when I have something interesting to do. There’s a purity to simply telling a story, though, and that’s something I’d lost for a while when I went through my trying-to-impress-everyone-with-my-dimestore-vocabulary phase. Go back far enough in the archives and you’ll come across that period. It’s not pretty, but I learned.

I learned that the best way to get your point across is usually in the fewest number of words possible. I learned which parts of a story to tell, and which to leave out. I learned that this knowledge – knowing the right angle to take – comes from somewhere in my head, and I learned that this is an instinct that develops through extensive reading. You have to write, but you also have to read. A ton.

So, inspiration. Where does it come from? Man, it fucking comes from everywhere. From everything and everyone around you. From what you did yesterday. From what you’re planning on doing tomorrow. From what you’re doing right now, at this very moment. You can take these things and find damned near anything inside of all of it to write about. The person that asked me that question today inspired me to sit down and write almost a thousand words on the subject simply by asking me the question. There’s always something there. Always. You just have to wait for it, but it’ll let you know it’s there. Every single time.

Remember?

2010-09-15T04:00:00.000-04:00

I kind of miss the club business.

Yes, I just wrote that, and I do. I really miss it. I mean, it pretty much sucks with the noise and the assholes and the danger and the stabbing and the sexually transmitted diseases and the mob guys and the complete lack of consideration people have for their fellow human beings from eleven at night until five in the morning most nights, but I do sort of pine away, in a strange and compartmentalized way, for...well... the club life.

Everything about the job but the money and the camaraderie was a fucking joke, but to be perfectly honest with you, money and camaraderie are two pretty major selling points for me right about now. I made friends. I had shit to do. I was doing something. I was a respected member of a high-quality team of guys – respected because I’d proven myself in a variety of different ways over a period of years to a group that had proven itself to me.

And I miss that. Who wouldn’t?

I miss getting home at six in the morning with my two bagels – egg-onion, one with jalapeño cream cheese and the other with sun dried tomato – and my bottle of orange Gatorade and my New York Post. I miss reading the sports section in the Sunday Post while I ate my bagels, drank my Gatorade and watched SportsCenter by myself in my apartment. I miss driving home at 5:30 in the morning with nobody else on the road but the drunks and the cops – and the drunks were easy to avoid because it’d already be light out and I’d see them before they’d be a hassle.

I miss drinking coffee and eating donuts at the podium out front. I miss getting care packages at two in the morning from the guys who owned the Italian restaurant down the block. I miss running “game” on girls at the door – saying shit they couldn’t possibly understand, then searching their faces for some glimmer of recognition beyond the bullshit they’d spew to try to get in. Sometimes you’d see that in them. Most times you wouldn’t. With anyone. That was the sad part of the job – the collection of pointless humanity whose lives, already in the toilet, were seemingly dedicated to being there, hassling me, and not understanding a word that came out of my fucking mouth.

Most of all, and this will be the most hackneyed reason of all, I miss being part of a solid crew of guys I could both have fun with and depend on. I don’t have that anymore professionally. Not the way I had it back then. I miss Tits-On-A-Bull, The Mutant, The Nut Puncher, The Jew, The Champ, The Orange Guy, Johnny, Jimmy, JD and everyone else I shot the shit at the front door with every night. I made friends, and I kept them – night after night, week after week and year after year. You see the same faces in the same place for so long, you wonder where the fuck it went when it’s gone, you know?

I work at a desk now. When I walk in the front door – provided I even show up to my office – there’s nobody there to bust my balls for wearing a jacket with a hole under the arm or for fucking up the haircut I tried to give myself over the bathroom sink. I can’t approach them with that familiar we-all-get-the-joke ease, and I can’t, for the life of me, imagine what would happen if I tried.

Getting the fucking joke was a huge part of it, too. When you’re on a team like that, you all get the damned joke – and that’s all the whole thing is. A big fat fucking joke. But when you’re with a whole load of people who understand that – and around whom you don’t have to censor yourself and watch your fucking mouth all the time – it makes everything fun and gives you things to remember when you’re sitting at a computer screen in the middle of the night getting all wistful about a job you did nothing but complain about for the better part of nearly two decades, off and on.

Do what we do together, and do it for as many years as I did it with some of these guys, and see if you ever feel the need to temper your language. About anything. That’s priceless. I pity you if you’ve never had it.

Would I ever go back? No, not voluntarily, unless I was seriously strapped for cash and needed something immediately. That’s not me anymore, and I’m fine with just the memories. Same goes for a lot of things, like playing ball. I can’t play anymore, not like I used to, but once in a while – for whatever reason, just long enough to make me smile – it sings to me in my dreams and I’m 20 again and I’m down there and everyone else is up there watching, with my father in the bathroom after drinking the home stadium's kegs dry, and all that matters in the entire fucking world is just putting it on someone for all I’m worth. That dream comes and catches me when I fall and lets me know what I need to know.

It’s the same with bouncing, I suppose. You move on, taking the good with you, dropping the bad in the trash heap, and having days like today, where you get shit done, you nail down plans, you remember who and what you once were and the whole wide fucking world is once again wide open and right out in front of you.

That’s what memories are for.

Accurate

2010-09-14T04:00:00.003-04:00

A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes.

-- Clare Boothe Luce

Explanation

2010-08-27T04:00:00.001-04:00

I have no desire to explain why the last three posts I wrote appeared on this website, so for the people who wrote in asking - surprisingly enough - I won't be offering any clarification on that one. Thank you, however, for your good wishes. I really don't need them, though, because the "incident" that spurred the aforementioned posts was precipitated by my own lack of patience, discipline, self-respect and respect for others. I haven't deserved anyone's sympathy in over four years, so I'll politely say thank you and suggest you offer those sentiments to someone who actually deserves them.

As for me, I'm fine. For the first time in quite a while, I'm really fine. My job is going well, I'm starting to get back into halfway decent shape - with serious, specific goals in mind - my financial situation is on a nice little upswing, and most of the basics are going very well.

I just need to take some time out for myself to handle some interpersonal issues that have clouded my judgment, caused me and others some major distress and unnecessarily alienated me from a couple of people - one, in particular - who didn't deserve the ass end of my insecurities and resentments.

I have no right to complain anymore. It's simply been done to death.

Update

2010-08-10T04:00:00.001-04:00

I'm still alive.

I don't know why I don't post here more often. It's kind of a shame to have built this blog up to where it once was, only to simply let it fade away and die.

I've certainly promised this before, but I think I'll start posting here again in an attempt to begin the process of moving away from all the niche writing I've been doing lately. It'd be nice to explain what's been going on and what I've been doing, and maybe I can try and explain how I got from A to B with things for anyone who still gives a shit. Maybe I'll even write something "good" from time to time. Why not?

More later.

Whine

2010-05-06T04:00:00.000-04:00

It occurred to me today, while watching, on a cable news program, a vaguely effeminate sounding young man with coke bottle glasses and a blog that receives - I checked - approximately 10% of the traffic this one does (even though I haven't updated it regularly in three years), that I've squandered an opportunity.

This blog used to be pretty big. People enjoyed it, and - to my astonishment - they navigated here daily to read what I had to write. I liked that, so I kept writing, and people kept reading, and the whole cycle ended up with me getting an advance to write a shitty book I never liked and a job, believe it or not, as a senior editor at a fairly well-known magazine. Not a bad deal for someone with no formal training in either writing or journalism.

What's been bothering me lately, however, is that in the end, I failed to really capitalize on any of it. There are people out there - and this never ceases to fucking amaze me - who actually "blog for a living." They either get paid to do this, or they were savvy enough to use some form of marketing or advertising to make money off their blogs. I probably could have done that, but such things never occurred to me. All I really wanted to do was come home from work and write about what I'd seen there. Instead of taking advantage of what I'd created, I sat home and waited for opportunities to fall into my lap - which, I've found, was not the correct approach.

For the past few years, many of the absolutely fucking mediocre "talents" who took up blogging around the same time I did - and many who haven't been doing it nearly as long - have surpassed me in terms of exposure and blog-related financial reward. This tends to get me frustrated - hence this post - because this site still gets more hits than most of theirs, even though I only update this thing once or twice a month with shit nobody wants to read.

It really has been frustrating to watch as people from the group I'm referring to have received multiple book deals, high-profile jobs in the media and credit for doing the same shit I did - only not nearly as well, in many cases - five years ago. I can't tell you how many times I've turned on the television to see "Joe Slapdick, blogger" announced to a national audience as part of a panel of experts, only to remember that "Joe Slapdick, blogger" emailed me five years ago begging for a link. And in most instances of this, his blog still gets less traffic than this one.

Meanwhile, my fifteen minutes of fame were spent on the fucking Mike and Juliet Show talking about Preparation H.

Now, this isn't Joe Slapdick's fault. It's mine. I created a niche blog I had no idea how to promote, I was too large to ever look like a normal human being on camera, and I've always avoided "blog events" like the plague. Actually, the last part of this isn't quite true. For whatever reason, I was rarely ever invited to them. I remember NBC News having some sort of "New York Bloggers' Panel" thing a few years ago and laughing at the people they'd chosen because there wasn't a single blogger on the panel whose site received even half the number of daily hits mine did.

I'm not really complaining here. It's more like I'm wondering what the fuck I did wrong, and what I can still do to remedy the situation. I know I can write. In diametric opposition to the first 30+ years of my life, where I either carried heavy shit or inflicted violence on people for a living, I now get paid to sit at a desk and both write and pass judgment on the writing of others - skills my employers, by dint of my biweekly paychecks, apparently believe I possess. That my particular brand of humor and my frequent desire to resolve editorial disputes via rear naked choke remain wildly out of place in a magazine publishing environment is neither here nor there.

Anyway, starting this blog was probably the smartest thing I've ever done, because at very least, it got me a new career there's no fucking way I could have broken into otherwise. So, it's a good thing. If there's ever a next time, however, I won't be making the same mistakes, whatever the fuck those were.

Alive

2010-05-04T04:00:00.001-04:00

I ate at the sushi buffet tonight. Typically, when I eat at the sushi buffet, I order green tea and a glass of water. Then I get my first round of food. With my first round of food, I'll often eat mussels. Today, I had a hard time removing one mussel from its shell. So hard a time, in fact, that it somehow detached itself from my fork and landed in my cup of green tea.

I needed the green tea because I was drowsy. I didn't want to drink green tea with a mussel at the bottom of the cup, so I fished the mussel out of the cup and reconsidered my position. I can eat mussels and drink green tea at the same sitting. I could even, conceivably, wash down a mussel with a sip of green tea. I can't, however, drink green tea with even the hint of a fucking mussel at the bottom of the cup. This probably makes me some kind of bad person, but I don't care.

I didn't drink any green tea tonight.

Go

2010-03-15T04:00:00.001-04:00

"Team first, team last, team always. Modest in speech, superior in action."

- Tom Coughlin

Overpass

2010-03-12T10:52:00.001-05:00

I haven’t yet reached my one year anniversary of “retiring” from the nightclub business, but I received an instant message from someone this morning that was something of a milestone in and of itself.

There are a handful of new bars and clubs opening in the city within the next few months, and my old bouncing crew – the guys I wrote about in the book – is running security at one or two of these places. The guy who IM’d me asked me whether I’d been invited to work, and I was very happy to tell him I hadn’t. I was also happy to let him know both that I don’t need to bounce any longer and that I don’t really give a shit that I haven’t been offered a spot.

In fact, I’m ecstatic about the fact that nobody ever calls me to work anymore. There nothing inherently wrong with bouncing – I mean, I did it long enough without worrying about the stigma of needing such a shit job to pay my bills – but there’s a sort of symbolism in having your old crew either think of you in different terms now or, as is the case here, not think of you at all with regard to filling security spots.

I made a lot of good friends in the nightclub business. Some of the people I’m in touch with on a daily basis are guys I’ve bounced with over the past decade. I value their friendship, and I consider myself fortunate to have worked with them in a venue that permitted me to gauge whether I could trust them in pressure situations. I’ve met some really solid people that I know I can call if anything serious ever comes up in my life, and I’m certain they feel the same way about me.

Still, I’m happy as shit to be out of the business. I’m even happier that I have a real career going and don’t need nightclub money any longer, knock wood. Take all your cheesy Guidos, skanks, promoters, superstar bartenders and antisocial management types and keep them. I no longer have any interest in doing anything but walking away quietly and STD-free.

Corkscrew

2010-02-24T04:00:00.000-05:00

Once, in a bar, I saw an obese man become so enraged at another man that he tried to walk over a table in an attempt to get at him.

He managed to stand on the table just fine, but when he jumped off, his legs weren't strong enough to support his saddlebags, and he sunk into the floor like the hopes and dreams of all the local Long Island losers surrounding him.

Then he was stomped, and nobody cared, because an obese man walking over a table in a Long Island bar is so far gone that he's never coming back, if ever he was even there at all.

Do you ever feel like that man?

Cardinal Rules

2010-02-23T04:00:00.000-05:00

One of the most important skills you can acquire in life is the ability to not trust anyone. This is very important.

You're not just born distrusting people. This is a skill that has to be cultivated over years of having various slapdicks, douches and pieces of shit do things you don't expect them to do. You don't expect them to do these things because you're naive. You're naive because you're an idiot. You're an idiot because of poor parenting. Your parenting was poor because your parents had too many kids and didn't have the time to portion out the things that needed to be taught to all of you, so you're lacking.

When you're lacking, you grow up to be fucked with. Sometimes you're fucked with by people you've known for years. When those people fuck with you, you begin to acquire the "skill" of not trusting people. That's when things get fun.

When you don't trust anyone, your relationships all turn nice and dysfunctional. You don't believe anything anyone tells you, because you think everyone else is going to turn around and do the same thing the aforementioned slapdicks, douches and pieces of shit did. You're gun shy, and you're angry, and you say and do things designed specifically to prevent yourself from being fucked with again.

The best part is when it all plays out in your mind, over and over again, until the wee hours of the fucking morning. You learn another skill. You learn to be an insomniac. You learn to read and watch CSI reruns and fuck around on the computer until four in the morning, even though you know you have to be at work in a few hours. It's an amazing feeling. A rush, even. It keeps coming back to you again and again, and all you want to do is go out and not trust everyone you see, because you think everyone is a slapdick, a douche and a piece of shit.

Actually, I was wrong about the best part. The best part - the pinnacle of it all - is when the world acts as though you're immature for wanting a little payback. They act as though you're supposed to swallow it all. They tell you to shut the fuck up and stop dwelling on the negative, because it's "hurting your progress" and "keeping you from being happy," when all you want to do is have someone pay the check for the meal that was eaten at your expense.

These are important things for you to know.

Epic Beard Man

2010-02-22T04:00:00.000-05:00

What do I think of Epic Beard Man, you ask?

Well, not much, although I have to admit his fistic display was both merited and impressive. Epic Beard Man, if you take a look at his follow-up interview, is out of his fucking mind, and that’s something that necessarily has to be factored in if you’re looking to prop some guy up as some kind of hero. So, Epic Beard Man did what he had to do, but that’s about the extent of things.

For me, the issue is one of why the black guy decided to pursue his strategy of fucking with Epic Beard Man when he so obviously had nothing to offer when things got physical. This is something I saw time and time again when I worked in clubs – fat, weak, out-of-shape slapdicks acting tough, realizing they were way out of their league when shit broke out, then talking a blue streak afterward about what could have happened.

“Motherfucker,” I would say, “just go home.”

Here’s what you do.

If someone does this to you on a subway or a bus, do exactly what Epic Beard Man did and jab the motherfucker square in the nose. It stops everything. It will stun your douchebag opponent long enough for you to either split the scene before he breaks out a weapon or land several more punches and end the fucking thing. He’s not expecting that, he’s not ready for any application of force, and in most cases, the dumbass who’s going to unsolicitedly fuck with you while you’re riding public transportation neither has the discipline, the training nor the physical ability to cope with a man – or woman – with a plan.

Debate this shit on your kung-fu message boards all you want. All I know is that, in thirty-plus years of living in New York City and a decade of club bouncing, I have yet to punch someone solidly in the nose and have them laugh it off.

Flulike

2010-02-19T04:00:00.000-05:00

I'm sick this week. I'm getting into posting more, and enjoying it some, but I feel like hell so this promises to be short.

Reading Heat, by Bill Buford. Do yourself a favor and read his first book, Among the Thugs.

Lapped

2010-02-17T04:00:00.001-05:00

I used to bounce in a strip club.

That was one of my side jobs - one I did during the week when I wasn't working at a bigger place. I didn't write about my job at the strip club when this blog was all about bouncing. I don't know why. I guess there wasn't much to tell.

Working at a strip club - being a bouncer at a fucking strip club - is one of the stupidest jobs in the world. Not one of the worst, mind you - just one of the stupidest. I didn't like it very much. I didn't like the people I worked with, I didn't like the dancers, I didn't like the slapdick managers, and I didn't like the owner. The whole thing was a giant clusterfuck, and I ended up quitting within a few months.

This place was pure unadulterated trash. It wasn't Scores, or Hustler or any of the so-called "good" ones. The only good story I have is the one about the time the superstar NFL player came in. I didn't recognize him, so I asked for his ID. I checked it and laughed when I saw his name. Then he walked in and kissed everyone. He was a regular. I wasn't surprised when his career tanked. I was secretly happy it did, even though he played for my favorite team.

I also used to stop at bagel stores a lot on my way home from work. I kind of miss that.

Movie Review

2010-02-16T04:00:00.000-05:00

The best part of seeing Avatar over the weekend was repeatedly - and conspicuously - calling it "Advatar" is the most obnoxious Old Dutch New York accent I could muster.

At least I know why they didn't hand out spoons along with the glasses.

Yeah

2010-02-15T04:00:00.000-05:00

“Anyone tries to give me a free hug,” I said, making my way along the south end of Union Square, “they’re getting knocked the fuck out.”

I love New York, but I hate New York things – the shit that young people, at least people who are now mostly all younger than me, try to pass off as cute or fun or “progressive.” It’s all bullshit, and it’s all been done before. Go see Rent. Leave me alone when it’s two in the afternoon and I haven’t eaten fucking breakfast yet.

The whole thing reminded me of the time I was getting off the subway with a rolling suitcase and some fat lady started screaming at me about being a “motherfucker,” et al. She also not-so-politely linked the “mother” and the “fucker” to my ethnicity, which roiled me a bit, but not so much as the fact that I was in a confrontation with a fat lady in the first place.

I don’t let fat people call me “motherfucker” in my home, so I responded in kind:

“Shut the fuck up! I’M NOT A FUCKING TOURIST!”

Anyway, I’m not that tough anymore. Probably never was, but the point is that I’m looking for something original around here – something I haven’t seen, heard or tasted thirty goddamned times already. That’s my biggest problem with New York right now – that people walk around thinking they’re reinventing the place. Which, of course, they probably are, because as I’ve said for years now, this isn’t the city I grew up in. Not by a long shot.

That place is gone. The city’s learnable now in five easy steps. People have no problem with that, now. Ask some carpetbagger and they’ve probably been everywhere already. They know the city better than you do, at least superficially. Knowing who Jim Jensen was doesn’t carry quite the cachet it used to around here.

Me? I don’t know shit anymore. I walk past a club called La Pomme all the time now, and I have idea what goes inside. I don’t even care. It’s a cloud of cigarette smoke on the sidewalk and a fucking nuisance. I buy food at the market and I cook it. I eat at Energy Kitchen all the time. Try the Tex-Mex Bison Wrap. Ask for hot sauce and put a layer of it on before you take a bite. It’s pretty good, and it costs $5.

I used to call this a holding pattern. Now I call it life – waiting for the next big thing to come along, trying some to get it to hurry up, and hedging bets here and there that it won’t ever show at all.

Also, I saw Avatar.

2010

2009-12-31T01:44:00.002-05:00

2009 can go eat a giant cock.

This, in appropriately cliched fashion, has been a year of highs and lows for me. Exceptional highs, and exceptional lows. The lows, for the most part, outweighed the highs, because although I'm happy, fortunate and in a pretty good spot right now, I spent a hell of a lot more time this year pissed off and digging myself out of problems than I did thanking my lucky stars.

I'd say the ratio there was about 5-1, which isn't so great when you think about it.

Not that anything's bad right now, mind you - I'm employed doing something I love (which you'll hear more about soon), I'm healthy, and I managed to escape from Los Angeles unscathed, which is no easy task. Seriously.

Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks for continuing the check this site despite all my empty promises and false starts. Be patient...it'll get better.

Books

2009-12-30T00:22:00.002-05:00

Off the top of my head, here's a list of what I've read over the past month or two...

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
The Sunset Limited - Cormac McCarthy
Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson
Speedboat - Renata Adler
Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
Where Men Win Glory - Jon Krakauer
Game Six - Mark Frost
The Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
Girl With Curious Hair - David Foster Wallace

There's also been some other shit I don't want to admit to, but these are the ones worth reading. Someone, however, should have copy edited Jon Krakauer's football passages in Where Men Win Glory. Absolutely brutal.

Jersey Shore

2009-12-28T00:30:00.001-05:00

I haven't seen the show, but I've done some research. Here are my two main problems with it.

1. This show has been created, for all intents and purposes, to exploit the comedic value of the so-called "Jersey Guido." Seven of the eight cast members, however, are not from New Jersey. Six of the eight are from New York. As I've stated numerous times over the years, people from this area don't call these jackasses "Jersey Guidos," because the phenomenon originated - and can still be found in its most virulent form - in New York.

Your typical Guido from New York - the five boroughs of New York City and the suburban wasteland that is Long Island - doesn't spend his summers "down the shore." He drives out to Long Island with his friends, makes a jerkoff of himself there, then attempts to drive home, crocked out of his mind, and ends up spending the night in jail. If you're looking for realism, you need to follow that guy through a night of Guido bullshit, followed by his subsequent entanglement with the legal system after his inevitable DWI arrest. Offering him an artificial place to live and a job in a tee shirt store is far less entertaining than the way things really work.

2. The show's oldest cast member is 28. Most are 23 and under. In order to truly bring home what this whole Guido thing is about, they should have gone 35 and over, because you - the public - need to meet people who've actually embraced this lifestyle to the point of altering their appearances and wrecking their lives as a result. You need to meet older guys who've done time, yet still think they're "living the life." You also need to meet the Long Island nail technicians, shampoo girls and all-around receptacles who love them, because there are, seemingly, millions roaming the streets of New York on any given day.

It's a nice idea to isolate these people in a camera-friendly environment and watch how they interact, but it's far, far, far from reality. If anyone wants to give me a call, I'll tell you how to do this right.

Car

2009-10-30T05:07:00.000-04:00

The night flies past too quickly on the LIE – Bayside, Elmhurst, the World’s Fair, an adventitious smattering of businesses and churches with signs in Korean. Asian Christianity intrigues me. Korean Baptist. Laotian Presbyterian. Cambodian Congregational. Japanese Pentecostal.

Lanes are changed. I’m in the back seat of a Cadillac Eldorado, donated to Gerry by the family of a priest – don’t know the relationship there – and peering into the pocket sewn into the backside of the passenger seat. I reach in, thumb tucked between my middle and index finger, and roll back and forth the sand that’s caught in the seam at the bottom as Queens – service road Queens – trundles (trundles?) past in a whirl of shit nobody can understand. A borough without a fucking face.

“I gotta piss.”

Gerry drives close. He’s one of those guys who need to be right up the ass of the guy in front of him. He doesn’t complain, doesn’t pound on the wheel and “fuck, fuck, fuck” the way I do. He just sits there, like he’s drafting in the fucking Tour de France. I can’t do that. Car in front of me hits his brakes, fucked if I’m not slamming on mine, and fucked if I’m not keeping my distance. Crack the window and roll the sand is what I do here.

“I seriously gotta piss.”

“I’m not pullin’ over.”

I blame them for everything, the dancers. Put on some music – that electronic shit – and they jump around and wave their arms and kick their legs and gesticulate in ways that would embarrass a fucking ostrich. I’d prefer to blame Ed Koch for everything – or even Lindsay or Beame – but it’s these fucking dancers who’ll turn the city to shit again, to the point where Tompkins Square Park is smoking tires and anarchy again. They don’t burn tires there anymore, but they did once – and they will again if these fucks have anything to say about it, which they do because they’re everywhere.

“Use a fuckin’ Gatorade bottle.”

My feet are under the seat, its curved, cushioned bottom in contour with my shins. I never know what to do with my hands, except in cars. In cars, I have places to set them. Sometimes I drive with my right hand on my hip. Nobody can see this.

Getting the Kinks Out

2009-10-28T01:36:00.002-04:00

Here's a little test. Right now, I'm sitting here in my apartment and I have to go to the supermarket. I guarantee you I'll find something there worth writing about. Here I go.

Break.

I'm back, and I have a topic: avoidance. I avoided things just now. I avoided the shithead slapdickery of this weird, foreign, out-of-state supermarket in favor of 7-11 and something to eat from a place with a drive-thru that's open late.

Why? Because I'm a guy who avoids things now. When I see a crowd, I walk the other way. If I see a line, I go home. You should see me in airports. Even if it takes me ten minutes to walk there, I'll sit at the gate that doesn't have a plane so I can avoid them. They're hell, is what they are.

So, nothing really happened because I did my best to avoid interacting with anyone who'd be irritating or stupid this late at night. I mean, I guess I could piss and moan about the jerkoff who came flying around the corner without signaling - and with his lights off - as I tried to pull out my alleyway onto a main road, but even he didn't bother me because I floored it and smoothed my way into the left lane before he affected my life or I affected his. I'm a very good driver.

Also, when you see something in a magazine or a book that doesn't look right, it's not always the writer's fault. Start doing this for pay and you'll realize how starched all this shit gets before anyone sees it.

Where

2009-10-27T02:48:00.003-04:00

So, yeah, I'm a bullshitter. I promised I'd post more, and then I turned around and didn't do shit for...I don't know how many days. You won't hear any sob story from me tonight, though. Life is good, and I'm pretty much just counting down the days until I can move back to New York. That's coming soon, within a matter of weeks, and it's something I'm really looking forward to because I think I'll be capable of viewing the city from an entirely new perspective when I get home.

I've lived away from New York for extended periods of time before, but that was when I was much, much younger and had a lot less at stake in terms of not having left any kind of life I'd built up the way I have this time around. I took a big chance moving, but it seems to have paid off. I'll explain a lot more about what I've been doing when I move back home and things get settled a little more.

Suffice it to say that I've net some very interesting people, some of them rather famous, and I've done some interesting writing - which, as you know if you've been reading this site for a while, is something I'm still surprised to be drawing a paycheck from. It's a far cry from where I was and what I was doing a few years ago.

There's definitely more to come. First, I want to show my agent what I've been doing. That should be interesting.

Enthusiasm

2009-10-01T00:10:00.000-04:00

I just checked my stats on Statcounter and I can’t believe how many people are still reading this blog. There’s been nothing new here in months, and nothing of substance for quite a bit longer than that.

So, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do to “reward” you people for sticking with me: I’m going to get this shit moving again.

Why? Because I’m kind of far from home right now, and missing New York like a motherfucker, and if there’s one thing this blog has always been about, it’s New York, all the way down the line. Writing here makes me think of New York, because this site was once pretty damned popular there as far as blogs go. I miss that, I miss home, and I miss the feedback I used to get when I’d put something halfway decent online.

I’ll be home before long, and I’m looking forward to making it a permanent stay, but for now I think I’ll document some of the shit I’m running into out here in America. The world west of Jersey is a pretty fucked up kind of place.

And, as it turns out, the Ed Hardy disease is incurable.

Ode To New York

2009-09-17T04:29:00.001-04:00

I miss it very much, although things could be much, much worse.

Can't wait to get home. HOME.

Update

2009-09-16T03:44:00.000-04:00

Here's an explanation.

I have a "real" job now. As usual, I won't get into specifics, but I'm doing something that's a direct result of having started this blog way back whenever. I don't even remember when I started this fucking thing. Half of it isn't even online anymore.

Anyway, I'm finally doing something with my life that doesn't require the use of either my back or my hands -- at least not in the angry way I've used both in years past.

I also don't live in New York anymore, at least temporarily -- which is very strange and rather uncomfortable at times. People outside of New York are just fucking strange and I don't like them.

Am I happy? Yeah, I am, most of the time. I've been very fortunate.

Am I writing? Yeah, I do it for a living now. More on this when I'm comfortable offering a more detailed explanation. I think I've gotten a lot better at it, and I think I have another book in me - a real one. For now I'm happy in my Howard Rourke role here in the quarry.

Has life changed? Yeah, in a big way.

The blog? I kind of miss the feedback. We'll take things as they come. I'm still getting used to having a job that doesn't require me to sweat or get injured. Thanks for all the emails. All is well.

The Man

2009-09-11T15:04:00.000-04:00

I think he would have been happy with what I'm doing these days.

I really think so.

Monday

2009-05-18T09:09:00.000-04:00

I'm back. Last week wasn't an "I'm done" week. It was just one of those periods where I had very little free time, and what little time I did have was not spent sitting in front of a computer.

Some very good things happened this past week. Also, some bad things happened.

I am status quo.

Quick Getaway

2009-05-08T04:00:00.000-04:00

More professional athletes are currently using illegal Performance Enhancing Drugs than you could ever imagine.

If you don't think this is the case, then you're naive.

Genetics only take you so far.

People who use steroids and growth look a certain way. People who don't use them don't look that way. Those of us who've been around it can discern this look from a mile away.

I know what I'm talking about.

Alex Rodriguez is full of shit.

This reminds me of the 70's and 80's, when people weren't sure whether professional wrestling was fake or not.

Wake up and take off the pink socks. All sports are dirty. Saying your prayers and taking your vitamins won't get you $252 million.

I still love sports.

I am no longer feeling pathetic.

Thank you.

More Running

2009-05-07T12:11:00.001-04:00

I did 45 minutes of Long Slow Distance (LSD) today. I have no idea how far I went, but it was probably somewhere in the vicinity of 4.5 miles. I took it slow, recovering from the past two training days.

Here’s what I thought about while I was running:

I thought about acceptance. I thought about accepting that something is wrong, accepting the consequences that come with something being wrong, and accepting the fact that trying to “quick fix” the various consequences won’t solve the main problem.

Think of me as a guy with the flu.

When you have the flu, you have a sore throat, a fever, a cough, the chills, a runny nose, and pains all over your body. What do most people do when this happens? Well, if you have medical insurance – and some sense – you go to a doctor, get a prescription for some antibiotics, then go home, go to bed, and sweat it out. This, however, is not what I do when I get the metaphorical “flu.”

Here’s what I’ve done for many, many years:

I caught myself a nice little flu bug a few years back, but couldn’t see the forest for the trees, if you will. I only saw a collection of symptoms (consequences), and I tried to attack them one by one instead of putting everything together and going to the source.

I said, “Man, if I could only get rid of this runny nose, I’ll be fine.” So, I went to the pharmacy, bought some nasal spray and made my nose stop running. Meanwhile, I was still coughing and feverish, and I had the chills like a motherfucker. And my throat was killing me.

So, I took some cough syrup and put a few extra blankets over me, but I forgot to keep using the nasal spray, so my nose started running again, and I still had a fever and my throat felt like it was on fire.

I gargled with some salt water and took a painkiller, but I’d kicked off the blankets, lost the nasal spray and forgotten to take another spoonful of cough syrup.

I could go on, but I think you get the point here.

When you don’t treat the flu, when you pretend you don’t have it and go about your business, out in the cold, like it’s not happening, it turns into pneumonia. Ignore the pneumonia and you’re fucked.

That’s my metaphor for stopping a backslide and protecting what you’ve got left. My flu was about to turn into pneumonia. Maybe it already did, but a conversation with a guy I’ll call The Pro made me change the way I look at things.

“Look at the people you’ve surrounded yourself with,” he said to me.

Continuing this flu charade, those people are my arms, legs, mind, heart and talent. I still have those things. The flu can’t kill them off. It tried, but it hasn’t. You treat the flu at the source, the symptoms go away. And, in time, you’re as good as new.

That’s what’s happening right now.

Saturday Final

2009-05-07T04:00:00.001-04:00

“You wanna go?”

“Yeah.” It was getting late. Half past midnight, which for me is late on a Saturday night these days. I’d had enough of the bars, enough of the beer, enough of the locals and enough trying to get around things.

“She’s coming back to the house.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“I’m just letting you know.”

“It’s your house, man. When do I ever give a shit about that?”

“Well, you know...” he started.

I held up a hand and stopped him cold. “Dude, I don’t give a fuck. All night I’m telling you I don’t give a fuck. I told you fifteen times already, I’m just happy bein’ out of the house.”

See, when you’re divorced with a couple of kids, you gravitate toward other people who are divorced with a couple of kids. And when you’re a guy and she’s a girl, you find a night when you both don’t have your kids, and, well, you take care of your needs. This was one of those nights, and our girl friend, Divorced Girl, was one of those girls.

My guy friend, Divorced Guy, has been divorced for a year and a half. This is what he does. This is what they do. It’s a repeating loop. Sometimes I’m the third wheel.

We’re older now, and we’re starting to take some hits.

We walked home. All three of us. Together. I walked in the house, poured myself a glass of wine – it was all Divorced Guy had on hand – sat on the couch and turned on the TV.

“Are you okay?” asked Divorced Girl.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’m fine.”

“Really? Listen, if you want to talk or anything...”

“Look, I really appreciate it, but I’m all talked out. I’m fine. Honest. You guys do whatever you want. I’m just gonna sit here on the couch, drink wine, watch Star Trek and spin my phone around on the coffee table.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” she said. “If you need anything...”

“Stop with the ‘poor thing’ shit already,” I interrupted. “Have I been a fucking sad sack all night? Have I been a drain on anyone’s evening?”

“Of course not.”

“I was good tonight, wasn’t I?” I asked. “I didn’t do anything stupid.”

“Yeah, you were great. You’ve never not been great.”

“That was all I needed for tonight. I’m done. Go have fun. I’m fine right here.”

I poured more wine into a glass with a stem and brought it back into the TV room. I set it on the coffee table, on a coaster. I don’t know why I need to put glasses with stems on coasters, but it seems like the right thing to do, like even though the wine is at room temperature, it’s suddenly going to cool down, form condensation on the stem and leave a ring mark on the veneer. I’ve never seen a wine glass do this, but I always use a coaster.

Maybe it seems to ease the landing a bit.

I put a throw pillow on the coffee table’s glass top and set my feet on it as gently as I could. I tucked my phone under my crotch so I could feel it if it vibrated. I heard laughter coming from the basement.

Then I fell asleep. I don’t remember my dream, but I woke up knowing around wasn't good enough anymore. The only way out is through.

Why Bouncers Are Dumb And Stupid

2009-05-06T04:00:00.004-04:00

In the bouncing community in New York – at least within the one I belong to – I’m a nodal point. Malcolm Gladwell would call me a “connector.” I’m the bridge between disparate cliques, sets and solos.

In other words, I’m one of the guys you call when you need a phone number, or when you need to get in touch with a guy because you need him to work.

That’s how it works with bouncing. The head bouncer at a club usually doesn’t have a master sheet with everyone’s number on it. Head bouncers aren’t that organized. Instead, on a staff of, say, thirty guys, he’ll have five or six guys like me who know everyone. And he’ll call those five or six guys and tell them to spread whatever word he’s looking to spread.

Some guys stay with one little clique and they never move out of it. When we sit around waiting to start a shift, they're always with the same three guys, every night, and they never talk to anyone else. I've done cliques. You get sick of guys. I need variety. Other guys are lone wolves. They sit by themselves and never talk to anyone. Lone wolves don’t last long.

I talked to everyone when I worked in the city. I made friends with everyone. On a staff of thirty guys, I’d have twenty-eight phone numbers by the time I was done. I was Paul Revere. When I put the word out, the militia locked and loaded.

Even in my semi-retirement, I’m still part of the crew. Still a connector. Witness tonight’s timeline of stupidity:

8:30 AM: Head Bouncer calls Bouncer A, asking him to call Bouncer B to tell him to be at work at 7 since it was Cinco de Mayo and they were expecting a crowd.

8:35 AM: Bouncer A doesn’t have Bouncer B’s phone number, so he calls me – even though I no longer work at this club – asking me to call Bouncer B and tell him to be at work at 7.

8:40 AM: After exchanging small talk with Bouncer A, I call Bouncer B, only to find out he’s changed his number.

8:42 AM: I text Bouncer C the following: “Call Bouncer B and tell him to be at work at 7.”

8:45 AM: Bouncer C texts me back with Bouncer B’s phone number. This wasn’t what I asked for, but okay. Bouncer C is a bit of an imbecile, so I shrugged my shoulders and forged ahead with this charade.

8:46 AM: I call Bouncer B and leave him a message telling him to report to work at 7.

Now, note the time stamp here:

6:15 PM: My phone rings, and it’s Bouncer B.

“Am I working at Club Slapdick tonight?”

“Uh, yeah? Did you not get my message this morning?”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t get any message.”

“Why are you calling me, then?”

“Because Bouncer C called me and said I should ask you if I’m working tonight.”

“When was this?” I ask.

“Just a minute ago.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little odd that Bouncer C, who has your phone number and talks to you five days a week, would ask me, who hasn’t spoken to you in six months, to tell you when to go to work?”

“Yes.”

Fast forward again:

10:45 PM: My phone rings with a number I don’t recognize. I pick up, and it’s Bouncer C’s nominal girlfriend. She found my number in his phone one day, and now she calls me whenever he's engaging in shenanigans, which is often.

“Where the fuck is this motherfucker?”

“Huh?”

“This motherfucker,” she says, “told me he was working, and I called there and they said he wasn’t there.”

These scenes happen regularly, even though I haven’t worked at any of these clubs in over two years now. They still call me. They still pull me in. It’s wacky.

Running Man

2009-05-05T11:56:00.002-04:00

I did a post on running last week, but I want to go over it again because it’s something I’m starting to enjoy.

For large chunks of my life, my 5:30 AM runs were a staple. Running early was something I did like breathing throughout high school and through long periods of my adulthood. I’d wake up around 5:15, take a hot shower – my warm-up – and get on the road. I’ve never needed to stretch much or do any kind of extended warm-up as an athlete, so I’d just get going. I know this about myself because, knock wood, I’ve never once, in all my years of running, lifting and playing competitive sports, pulled a hamstring. I had one nasty adductor pull a couple of years ago that was caused by stupidity, but that’s been it.

I get outside and I go.

I started doing these AM runs again last week. Last Tuesday and Thursday, and today – my third run of the week happens on Saturday afternoon – I was up well before the sun came up, showered, and in motion.

Things work themselves out when I run. Dramas play out in my head, and they’re resolved by the time I hit certain objective points on my route. Then something else pops into my head to whirl and churn until I hit the next mile marker, where it fades into the next thought. And the next. And the next. And so on.

And then I have days like today, where I’m rested and ready after taking two days off, and I can push things a little without payback, and I roll through the finish line of my 3+ mile course two minutes faster than I did on Saturday. And when that happens, I start liking myself a little better, which is something I haven’t been able to do in quite a while.

I’m not planning on going crazy with this, because I still love lifting heavy weights in the gym, but I’m sure as hell intrigued by how it’s making me look and feel. When I run at 5:30 in the morning, I’m a 16-year-old kid again with a football season in front of me and a job to get done, and it finally feels good to be me again -- and that's been a long time in coming, believe me.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled cynicism, negativity and antagonism...

Tat

2009-05-05T04:00:00.000-04:00

“You wanna go across the street?”

I wedged the heels of my hands into my eye sockets and rubbed, hard, spreading a half dozen strains of Swine Flu across both my corneas. “Yeah,” I said. “What the hell.”

“It might be a little more crowded over there,” said my guy friend. “Do you mind?”

“I don’t give a fuck,” I replied, pulling a ten off the stack of bills I’d left on the bar. “I like going out the back over there when I need a break. It’s quieter.”

“You’ll need a break from these people.”

“Ah, whatever man. I don’t give a fuck about anything tonight. I’ll just sit and listen.”

I let him lead the way across the street. We slid between two parked cars, me following him, and stopped on the opposite sidewalk. The grocery store where I’d worked the deli counter as a kid had installed new front doors. I wondered what the fuck was wrong with the old ones. I resisted the urge to spit on the sidewalk because I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do that. I liked working the deli counter. When people fucked with me, I’d thicken up their slices. Be a rude shit to your deli guy and you’ll end up with ham steaks in wax paper, or worse. I never took the “or worse” road, but I know guys who did.

Inside, he introduced me to about a half dozen people. Three of them had cigarettes behind one ear. Two of the three shook hands and excused themselves to go out back. That left one guy with a cigarette behind his ear. I knew him once, years ago, but I’d never seen him with a cigarette behind his ear. I figured there’d been a downturn. You don’t wear a cigarette behind your ear if you’re still in the game.

“Hey Tim,” I said. “How you been?”

“Not bad,” he replied, fishing for his lighter. “How you been, man? I’m gonna go out back for a cigarette.”

“Good seein’ you.”

I turned to my guy friend and tapped him on the elbow with the back of my hand. Four times. “Get me a fuckin’ Sam Adams, man. Please.”

“Okay.”

“You need money?”

“No,” he replied. “I got it.”

I shadowed him to the bar, not wanting any engagement with the rest of the crowd he’d come there to meet. I stared at myself in the mirror behind the bar. Talk about a rotten fucking time. I took my first sip of Sam before the head went anywhere. There’s a kind of sucking action there. Then I took another. Quickly. Half the pint was gone before my guy friend pocketed his change.

“What’s this mean?” asked my guy friend, running a finger over a tattoo of Japanese characters on the arm of one of the girls who’d had a cigarette behind her ear.

“This one means beautiful,” she said, her finger on one, “and the other one means girl. Beautiful girl.”

“You sure about that?” I asked, looking at the tattoo, then looking at her. Nicotine was in the air.

“Yeah,” she replied. “I looked it up in a book and brought it in with me.”

“Oh.” I took another long sip of Sam Adams. I was down to about a quarter of a glass left. “I thought it said, ‘I like moose cock.’”

“No, my tattoo artist is a girl.”

I Humped a Pillow My First Time

2009-05-04T04:00:00.001-04:00

“You know,” said my friend, a guy, “I’ve been jerking off to your sister for twenty years now. Maybe more.”

I picked up my glass, took a sip of Yuengling, then put it back on the coaster. “What the fuck is with the Yuengling? Can’t we do a little better than this?”

“What’s wrong with Yuengling?”

“What’s wrong with it,” I replied, “is that it’s all they got on tap in this fuckin’ shithole, and I don’t wanna spend six bucks on a fuckin’ bottle.”

“Did you even hear what he said before that?” asked my other friend, a girl. “Why would you say that?”

“I’m just being honest. She’s hotter now than she was in college.”

“Are you listening to this?” asked the girl, turning to watch me take another sip of warm fucking Yuengling. I need drinks cold. Ice cold. Especially beer. I’m Irish, and I’ve spent a good bit of time getting my testicles kicked in Galway and Limerick – especially Galway for the testicle thing – but the rivers of my aversion to warm, or even slightly chilled, beer run wide and deep.

I also tend to avoid the issue of having an allegedly “hot” sister to whom my friends have pleasured themselves since puberty.

“Yeah, I heard him,” I said. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

“From him?”

“No, not from him, necessarily, which is why this is a little awkward and why I started bitching about the Yuengling, which is still warm and still tastes like cat piss.”

I always say drinks taste like cat piss because there was a guy at my old gym who smelled like cat piss. It bothered the members so much that management eventually sent him a letter telling him not to come in smelling like cat piss. That was the right thing to do.

He used to follow me around the gym, did Cat Piss Guy. I swear he did, even though people said I had some kind of persecution complex, or maybe paranoia. I don’t know about all that, but I always had the feeling Cat Piss Guy was some gay old chicken hawk type who followed guys around the gym, and when I was there, I was a target.

I also have a friend who used to look like Jesus. We went to The Vault in Manhattan one night because we wanted to see what the fuck it was, and when I went into the bathroom to take a leak, a guy laid down on the floor and asked me to piss on him. Cat Piss Guy reminds me of the guy on the floor at The Vault. Also, I sat next to the Jesus Looking Guy at a funeral mass once, and when the priest read the lines “now we turn to Jesus” from a passage, I turned and stared at him.

“Did you have a picture of her or something?” my girl friend asked my guy friend. “How does that work?”

“You don’t need a picture,” he replied. “It’s better without a picture, because you can close your eyes.”

“Yeah,” I added, “I was never big on getting images out of magazines and shit as a kid. When I actually figured out how to do it, I used to walk around school going up to girls and thanking them.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Yeah, I did. I was fucked up. I used to walk up to girls and say, ‘Listen, I just wanna thank you for being so good to me last night.’”

“You’re full of shit,” she said. “You never did that.”

I pursed my lips, sucked in the dregs from my glass, put it down on the bar and slid it forward, adding a little pull-back spin with my fingertips. You spin the glass and you play around with money, and the next thing you know, the bartender’s in front of you. Funny how that works.

Watch your bartender next time he gives you some money back. See if he puts it in a puddle. Bartenders do that for tips because they know people don’t want to put wet bills back in their pockets. Overfill the drink, put it down on the bar, wait for the mark to pick it up, then slap the bills down in the puddle. That’s how they get extra.

“He did do that,” said my guy friend. “I remember.”

“What if he walked up and said that to your sister?” asked my girl friend.

“He knows better,” I said. I was tired.

Books

2009-05-01T04:00:00.000-04:00

Let’s be perfectly frank here. I think everyone who’s been reading this blog for a few weeks is aware that I’m stuck in the middle of a situation (of my own making) that I really, really don’t want to be in, and there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it at the moment, so I’m stuck.

So I’m pretty much just burying myself in work, training and reading. I promised you some book reviews a couple of weeks ago, so I’ll start that today because I don’t want to write another cryptic post about “making changes,” or “acceptance,” or “moving forward” or anything else like that – although I’ve pretty much already done that in these first two paragraphs.

Anyway, I’ve read three books recently. My reviews here will be very straightforward. I’m not planning on doing anything other than telling you to either read the book or not. If you see me “analyzing” anything, it probably means I didn’t like it. Here they are:

High Exposure, by David Brashears: I went through the whole Into Thin Air inspired Everest books phase back in the late 90’s, but the Divorced Guy’s father gave me this one so I read it. It’s definitely more technical, from a climbing standpoint, than any of the others, but it fits into the typical Everest book theme of “I’m right and everyone else is wrong,” and that grated on me a bit – although, yes, I’m aware that when a guy writes a book, it’s necessarily going to be his opinion. It’s just that in all the accounts I’ve read of the Everest disaster, everyone has a different version, and everyone else was at fault.

So, I don’t really know what to make of this one. If you’re into rock or mountain climbing, you’ll like it. It’s not exactly a narrative geared for the general public the way Into Thin Air was, which I think was the problem for me, since I don’t know enough about climbing, or about who David Brashears is, to have enjoyed this book the way I should have.

Ask The Dust, by John Fante: This is one of the better books I’ve read in my lifetime. I don’t know if it’s considered a classic, since I’d never heard of John Fante until a few months ago, but it definitely should be. As the person who recommended this to me said, John Fante writes like Charles Bukowski wishes he could have.

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem: This is another good choice. Read this, especially if you grew up anywhere within the five boroughs of New York City. Absolutely fucking outstanding. This is going to sound cheesy, hackneyed, clichéd and entirely “unprofessional,” but I couldn’t put this book down.

Ironic how I dedicated 176 words to the book I had to force myself to finish, and a paragraph each to what are probably the two best books I’ve read this year. I suppose that’s just the kind of week I’m having – opposite, backward, and spitting in the face of logic.

As for how I feel about this, I refer you to “Danphe and the Brain,” from Mogwai’s The Hawk is Howling album. That about sums it up.

Cardio

2009-04-30T15:28:00.001-04:00

One thing I’ve been doing for a while now is steady-state cardiovascular exercise, or “cardiac work.” I started really hitting this hard last fall, when I realized that although I’d lost a lot of weight – and a lot of body fat – the changes I was trying to make pertained, almost exclusively, to my strength levels and how I looked. I was doing next to nothing to improve my biological power.

So, on the advice of some world class people, I started really blasting away on cardio in the gym. I’ve always been a strong runner, relatively speaking – at least for a guy my size with a background in interval-based sports – but I didn’t want to go out and start running right away with all the excess weight I was carrying.

I started out with this formula:

220 – age = max heart rate

This is very simple, doesn’t require you to go to an exercise lab to find your anaerobic threshold, and is easily applicable to any piece of cardio equipment in the gym. Once I had this number, I used a variety of cardio machines to keep my heart rate within 60-70% of this number. For most of these workouts, I was simply walking uphill on a treadmill and grabbing the electrodes with my hands every few minutes or so to test my heart rate.

I would do this 4-5 times a week, and I eventually threw in some High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) sessions to compliment this work. These HIIT workouts consist of 10-15 minutes of all-out sprint intervals, either on a machine, or running (sprints), or through the use of barbell circuits.

I was still eating like shit and lifting heavy, so these workouts didn’t start manifesting themselves in aesthetic results right away. What they did do, however, was make me feel a hell of a lot better. After a few weeks, I was sprinting up sets of subway steps – and doing other things of this nature that used to make me breathe a little heavy at the top – and not feeling a thing.

Two months ago, a guy I train – I have a handful of clients I train on the side – gave me a $300 Polar heart rate monitor. You strap an electrode around your chest and wear a watch on your wrist, and it tells you your heart rate at any given moment. This was great, because it enabled me to both take my resting heart rate in the morning and know what my heart rate was when doing something other than tediously walking on a treadmill for 45 minutes in an irritating gym.

Long story short, I’ve started running. “Distance” running. I strapped on my heart rate monitor last week, determined to keep the number at a certain range, and ready to simply start walking if it exceeded that range. The idea was to just go for a set period of time, then stop, then see how far I went.

This morning I ran 3.5 miles at about an eight minute per mile pace. My heart rate never exceeded 155. I weigh 240 pounds right now.

Now, I know these numbers aren’t exactly Olympian, but for a guy who’s been doing nothing but lifting and sprinting for several years – I can still bench press over 400 pounds, etc, etc – I don’t think this is too fucking shabby, especially when you consider the fact that I haven’t been killing myself, effort-wise, in any way, shape or form. I’ve just been monitoring my heart rate religiously and keeping a steady pace with whatever I’ve been doing. I wasn’t breathing heavily at all when I crossed the line this morning, and I probably could have done another couple of miles with ease.

The entire goal of the operation here is to cut down to about 215 by the middle or end of summer, with around 8% body fat.

The windup here? If you’re looking to do something like this, get yourself a heart rate monitor and use it. It’ll cut your get-in-shape time in half, if not by more.

Thurs

2009-04-30T04:00:00.000-04:00

I have nothing I need to say at the moment, but I wanted to keep my streak alive and post something. Yesterday was a very transitional day for me -- a Tony Robbins-esque passing from one state to another -- and I'm still trying to process a lot of the information I've been given.

Don't worry, though. It's all good shit. Captain Morbidity has fled the scene. Now it's time to get to work and build this shit back up again.

Summary

2009-04-29T04:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve been making lots of proclamations lately. For the past three weeks, virtually every sentence I’ve said, written or thought has begun with the words, “From now on...”

“From now on,” I’ll say, “I’m going to do this, this and this, and that’s how it’s going to be.” Then, two days later, I’m doing the exact opposite.

I’ve also prematurely declared my head to have been extracted from my ass on several occasions now. For me to have thought my head was out of my ass at the time – and even now – proves how far it really was jammed up my rectal cavity. This is what’s known as being delusional.

Not every story has a happy ending. Now it’s time to sort some things out and fix them and shut the fuck up about it.

So, in a last, sweeping proclamation, I declare that there will be no more proclamations coming from me, no more bemoaning of my head’s anal-bound state, and no more “whining like a bitch.” If you want to know how I feel, I’m referring you to music. Listen to Mogwai’s Mr. Beast album, especially the song “Emergency Trap,” and that’ll about sum it up.

I’ll leave this chapter of shitty blogging with something a friend of mine sent in an email today:

Keep your chin up.

Actually, don't. I don't know why people fucking say that. Keeping your chin up is a fucking great way to get knocked the fuck out. Keep your chin down and your fucking hands up.

Tuesday

2009-04-28T04:00:00.001-04:00

Initial Disclaimer: I made a decision about something today that could potentially make me look and feel really, really stupid for a variety of reasons. Given my current situation, this is also probably a very stereotypical and predictable decision – a fact of which I’m well aware. In the interest of doing something, however, I’m doing something.

So, yeah. There’s that. I’m nervous but hopeful, but I’m also cognizant of the risks involved and the volume of work I need to do to extract myself from this mess I’ve created. I don’t like looking and feeling like an asshole, but I probably should have thought about that before I adopted it as my permanent persona. That’s all I have to say about that.

I did some bouncing this past weekend, as you can see from yesterday’s post, but I haven’t really been able to conjure up anything good out of it because my sense of humor switch has been duct taped in the off position for a few weeks now. Ordinarily, I could probably come up with something pretty good about a skinny fat guy screaming in the middle of a bar, but...well...you know how it is.

What’s good and bad about this is that I wasn’t paying attention to a lot of the stupid shit that went on. The habit’s become so ingrained that I always stand around looking for – and mentally filing away – material when I bounce. This weekend? Didn’t happen. I just bounced, without giving a flying fuck what I was looking at.

When I was involved in a fight, I didn’t give a shit about the guy’s clothes, or about what he was saying, or about what he’d done to the other guy. He was leaving, I was ready, and my mind was just blank. I suppose that’s how it feels to do this job without having a blog in mind every time something happens. It actually felt pretty good.

This isn’t some kind of cockeyed goodbye to job-blogging, mind you. I’ll probably always do that in some way, shape or form. Things happened the way they did this weekend because I was in a bad mood, preoccupied with something, and wanted to “lose myself” in my job for a few hours. That’s all it was. I paid attention to what I was doing, did a good job, got paid and went home.

Of course, that didn’t bode well for Sunday, when I went back to being preoccupied, but at least I know why I’m having a hard time writing about bouncing in any way other than matter-of-factly.

Two guys squared off. I ran over, yoked one up, dragged him out the back door, yelled at him a little, didn’t listen to a word he said, then stood there until he walked off. The end.

That’s some exciting shit, right? You see how I can make a narrative sing when I’m in the mood? I did tell another bouncer who was bemoaning the fact that he was turning 28 to “Fuck off,” which elicited laughs from the other guys, but there weren’t many highlights this weekend. Just a lot of dead space, dead air, and a great big dead zone that I created with my own shit shovel.

Loud

2009-04-27T04:00:00.006-04:00

Saturday night was a long one. Bouncing again. I need the money. Sue me.

I’m standing in a spot just inside the front door, being what you might call the secondary ID guy. I’m there because they like having me inside to keep an eye on things and direct the guys in my section during situations – as opposed to standing outside and spending all my time checking licenses. That’s what you get when you’re “senior man.” You take the lead. I hate that shit.

So I’m there, and a guy about five feet from me keeps screaming. He’s screaming all kind of shit.

“DID YOU GRAB MY ASS?”

He would scream this every time a group of girls walked past.

“FUCKIN’ YANKEES!!! FUCK BOSTON, MAN!!! FUCKIN’ YANKEES!!!”

He kept yelling this at a TV for no apparent reason. There was no game playing.

This went on for at least fifteen minutes before I finally told him to shut the fuck up. I didn’t ask him to move, and I didn’t ask him to tone it down. I told him, in no uncertain terms, to “shut the fuck up.”

He was a skinny fat guy with thin forearms who smoked a cigarette every ten minutes. He was wearing an Affliction shirt. When people like this irritate me at work, it’s easy to tell them to “shut the fuck up” because they’re not doing anything back to me unless they have a gun, which they don’t because we check.

What I need to know, though, is why. Why do they do this? Why do people insist upon screaming like that? Why are there loud-laughers in the world? Why does everything even remotely funny in a bar, lounge or club require some guy who’s borderline emphysemic to guffaw at just the right pitch to elicit a palpable aura of irritation from everyone within a twenty foot radius?

This is what I have for you today. I have this because I thought about it for a while at work. That wasn’t the only time I said “fuck” to someone, either.

A fat guy in a black polo shirt two sizes too small came to the door with four other people. When I asked them for ID, he said, “Oh, dere wit’ me.”

I said, “I need their ID.”

He said, “I said dere wit’ me.”

I said, “And who the fuck are you?”

Then Ray – yes, Ray from the book – told the guy to “get the fuck outta here.”

Since I only just started paying attention to this shit again this weekend – and by “this shit,” I’m referring to bouncing – I’ll tell you this much: patience and tolerance levels are at an all-time low. I could see it up front – you had one chance to be nice to the door guys, otherwise they (we) treated you the way Ray treated the fat guy in the shirt that made him look like a sausage. It happened all night, and I don’t blame the guys for losing it on some people.

Everyone I know has shit going on. Serious shit. So, bar/club problems? No fucking way. Not about to put up with it.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the fight, and the debate over whether Affliction and Ed Hardy shirts are a "weakness" or a "sickness."

Shining the Flashlight of Hypocrisy

2009-04-24T14:29:00.001-04:00

So I’m driving about two hours ago, and I get a call from a number I don’t recognize. It’s a local one, though, so I pick up.

“Hello?”

“Hi Rob, it’s (Mutant’s Girlfriend). The Mutant’s girlfriend?”

“Oh, hey. How are you?”

“I’m good,” she says. “Listen, are you gonna be in (town in Suffolk County) today?”

“Actually, yeah. I’m on my way there right now.”

“Do you mind helping me pick up a piece of furniture today? The Mutant is a lazy piece of shit, and I need to get this for my mother today, otherwise we’ll lose it.”

“Yeah, sure.”

She gave me directions to the place, I loaded the piece into her SUV, and that was the end of it. I didn’t want to feel like a hypocrite (inside joke/reference), so we agreed to tell him she found someone across the street who came over and helped.

Now, ordinarily, I’d be, like, “Fuck, man. Are you serious right now?” But today? No dice on the laziness today. I’m just thankful for human contact. You need your fucking oil changed today, just give me a call and I’ll be right over.

Beats sitting here, that’s for damned sure.

Anyway, I’m on my way home and my phone rings again. It’s The Mutant:

“Hey, did my girlfriend ask you to move a piece of furniture for her?

“Yeah,” I replied. “We just got done.” I couldn’t bring myself to lie to the guy.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“Dude, don’t blame her. Seriously. Ordinarily, I’d have given her a hard time about this, and I’d have given you a hard time about it, but you know my situation right now. She did me a favor getting me out of the fucking house.”

“It’s cool,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable saying no.”

“Listen, I don’t give a fuck right now. I don’t want to get in the middle of a fight with you guys, and I don’t care. I really don’t.”

“Okay.”

“To be honest with you right now? If she called and told me you were hanging off a cliff by one finger, and I was the only one who could save you, I’d say, ‘That’s great, but gimme a second while I tell you about my problem.’”

So, yeah. Pretty fucking ironic. Not too sure about my relationship with God right now, but he’s got some sense of humor.