Maybe people were crazier back in the day, or at least a lot more gullible, but if someone today came around talking about a burning bush and having spoken to God, how credible would be that person? Would anyone believe them? Anyone who isn’t already drunk on the “word” and thumping their own bible or religious text, reading it on the train and at every spare moment? I doubt it.

I’ve been watching ‘Deadwood’ lately. It is marvelous. Very gritty and unapologetically vile … true to how I imagine frontier life to have been: filthy, objectionable, brutal, hard, miserable, coarse and unpleasant.

In the show, there is a preacher. The speculation is that he suffers from a tumor that is causing him to do wonky things. His sense of smell is so fucked up he thinks his own flesh is rotting. He has seizures. His eyeballs are askew. His short-term memory is unreliable. Finally, he is talking utter nonsense with regard to scripture … that is to say, even more nonsense than when the scripture is read verbatim.

When last I saw the preacher, he was talking to a bull about circumcision. He would stand upright and say something, then double over to view the bull’s johnson. The guy is touched in the head, surely.

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Being the best at something is not always worthwhile. It depends upon the environment. If one works with error-prone individuals and one’s own eagle-eye for typos and copy-writing mistakes always catches their errors — and the environment is such where there is no checking of work before it is purveyed to the public, making every citation of each error an event in itself — it promotes a culture of resentment.

In sum, the error-prone take umbrage with the person devoted to maintaining a high standard of quality. If this does not evince a dysfunctional relationship, I cannot imagine an example that would.

However, if one’s great skill at recalling the proper spelling of names and English-language words in general is appreciated and employed at a stage prior to the dissemination of mistake-riddled product to the public, this defense against errors would be welcome and appreciated, and the defender might even be rewarded for their good, invaluable work.

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I love breakfast. I love lunch. I make a killer breakfast and my sandwiches are nonpareil. One might think that a person who so fully enjoys two meals that, when combined, make something (in the parlance of our time) called “brunch” … would also enjoy the combination.

I don’t. God, I fucking hate brunch.

Brunch is neither breakfast nor lunch. It is a misbegotten concept of taking only part of what is good about either (breakfast food and lunch time) and coupling them long into the afternoon, depriving the opportunity to those of us who might want to actually eat fucking lunch food at fucking lunchtime.

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Excerpted from a correspondence of mine to an old friend:

I was just reading through this week’s Time Out and it’s all about brunch. I remembered that place we used to go to, I think it was on Court Street, near the hell-hole you rented on Luquer Street. It was a country kitchen sort of restaurant, with a few tables up front, a patisserie in the middle and a bigger dining area beyond that opened up onto the back patio.

All I really remember was overpriced food that wasn’t very good and the typically cramped experience of dining out in this city, but the pleasant recollection was us sitting by the window on a beautiful day and how overridingly nice it was …

Despite that I lived with a drunk in a dilapidated shithole atop two decrepit, racist cunt landlords and their piss-ant cocksucker dogs, and that you were stuck in a roach-infested nightmare on a block from the twilight zone where roving gangs of flies swarmed to attack and the overwhelming stench of vile, rotting garbage served as a doorman to a place whose inside aroma was only slightly less offending …

Despite the heaping mounds of life-shit that provided no inkling of hope or reason for contentment, I still recall being happy.

I saw ‘Slap Shot’ a year or so ago, in a bare apartment into which I’d just moved, during the throes of a shit break-up, as if there are good ones. So, there’s the mood: stark walls, a microwave box for a coffee table and constant, bitter acrimony. It has led me to commit sacrilege.

Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for the movie, which was — in some ways — quite brilliant, but not in the way I expected. I think of it more as a tragedy than a comedy. It is a dejecting snap shot of pathetic losers bound for nowhere, their dysfunctional lives and relationships in a bleak, working class hellhole of a town.

I think the movie’s crucial flaw is that it is purveyed as humor. It is not funny. At least, it wasn’t funny to me. I thought the cheap attempts at comedy were either cringe-inducingly brilliant examples of how unfunny real, boorish and uneducated people are … or just shit writing that fell flat.

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The prevailing thought on my mind has been: “Wow, amazing that someone can be accused of being a pedophile, be so odd that eccentric doesn’t quite cut it, mangle their appearance with surgery to the point of abject disfigurement … yet still be mourned by millions. It says a lot about one’s accomplishments.”

Or, it at least cites how highly suspect is the value of public opinion. People, in general, have notoriously bad judgment and dubious taste.

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Walking down the street here in Flatbush the other day, I came upon a truck parked in front of a house. Emblazoned on the door of the truck was “Mobile DNA Testing” and on the window, a picture of a baby with the question: “Does he really have his father’s eyes?”

Ho, snap!

Why not just put a sign outside your house that says “Cheating Bitch”?

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A building in my old ‘hood collapsed on Sunday. I used to go to the Sushi / Korean food joint next door all the time (Sushi Okdol. They’ve got great Bulgogi). The verdict is still out on why the building came down, but I’m sure the consensus will be that the landlord was a cheap, slumlord cocksucker.

The landlord was cited in May for a crack in the building’s facade. The crack was an inch wide and ran from the first to the third floor. Tenants complained regularly about the building shaking, but their cries fell on deaf ears.

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It’s a rainy day. Rainy days tend to be ruminative for me. It’s because the forbidding weather prevents outdoor sojourns, except in the case of necessity, and it leaves a lot of idle time indoors during which the wheels spin and spin some more.

Looking at my “home” page on Shitbook (I’m loath to mention the comination of visage and reading material for fear of giving the dreck a reverse plug. As much as I’m used to using it, I still revile the obnoxious and oft insipid, growing colony of bacteria-like narcissism), I saw the post of my misanthropic rant about a cross-dresser and a sad-sack twerp who was just shy of public masturbation.

I rarely take the time to look any deeper than what people present in public and form my perceptions on what I see; I use the immediate picture. I don’t think that’s so strange … in fact, I imagine it to be quite common. First impressions are just that.

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I mentioned the old, hideous, bat-shit crazy dude who was wearing a dress on the train the other day. Here’s the photo I took. But as I recounted the encounter, I remembered there was another freak on that train near to whom I had the great misfortune to sit.

Picture a short, flabby, unattractive man. The kind of man most people would assume still lives with his mother and hasn’t seen a pussy since he was squeezed out for the first time. He was strange and odd and he held in his hands a book by the unapologetic skank who subjected humanity to ‘Sex and the City.’

The book’s title was something to do with one-night stands. Obviously a book written by a slut for sluts or at least women who are not sluts but wish to live vicariously through one. Either way it breaks down, it’s chick-lit … and this sad-sack schmuck was reading it while licking his lips like he’d been sat down before a full-course meal after starving for a lifetime.

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