Archive for the ‘The Commute’ Category
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
The first thoughts may well be: “Wait, you mean you HAVE a filter? You DON’T have Tourette’s?” To which my response would be: believe it or not, I do filter myself. Just imagine what I’d say if I didn’t. Sometimes I wish I had Tourette’s just to have an excuse to blurt out what I’m feeling / thinking.
Yesterday:
I had a duffel in which I’d brought both my pairs of hockey skates to be sharpened. After dropping them off, I had a more-or-less empty duffel. While walking down Nostrand Avenue, two middle-aged dudes in conversation stopped talking as I passed. I noticed one of them sizing me up, his jaundiced eyes standing starkly out against his Special Dark complexion … and I laughed.
Neither one of them said a word to me. Maybe they were put off by my laughter; it was of the mildly insane variety. Mirth did not inspire it, rather the recognition of absurdity and a general sense of just not caring.
I imagined what they might have said, and my responses, and the conversation as it played out in my head is what caused the outburst.
Dude: “Yo, whitey, what’s in the bag?”
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Tags: Diane Fossey, Flatbush, halitosis, Nostrand Avenue, Times Square, Tourette's Syndrome, tunelessness
Posted in The Commute, incredulity, miscellanous bk, piss poor | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
The MTA, once again, is hitting the little people (no, not dwarves, per se; regular, everyday folks) where it hurts the most: our wallets.
They aren’t hiking the fares again, not just yet, but jacking up the price of a Metrocard is but one way to deplete the ridership’s funds. By curbing essential bus and train service, the MTA is denying New Yorkers the opportunity to easily travel to where is the best (perhaps this should be in quotes … read: highest paying) — or only — available job.
I know people who commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx because the latter borough is where they found work, despite that they already lived in Kings County and therefore could not easily relocate closer to work; nothing locally or in Manhattan availed itself to them, so they took what did.
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Tags: Brooklyn, bus, Flatbush, local, Manhattan, mass transit, MTA, Queens, subway, the Bronx, The Greater City of New York, train, walking
Posted in The Commute, incredulity, piss poor | 1 Comment »
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
It’s just after three in the morning. There are flies swarming the newsroom like it’s a rotting carcass. It might as well be … newspapers are becoming outdated, soon-to-be extinct creatures.
We’ve had infestations of ants, fruit flies and now house flies. As I recount the pests with which we’ve dealt, I’m reminded of something I saw last night, while walking through Times Square at midnight, on my way to the office.
I stood on the southeast corner of 43rd and Broadway and noticed two young girls, one white and one black, at the forefront of the crowd on the opposite corner. The white girl was screaming and pointing at the street, so I looked down to see a cockroach so large, it was only a saddle shy of being a conveyance.
This elephant cockroach was trying to cross the street, ambling to and fro, trying to safely navigate the cars heading west through the green light. I lost sight of it as a fleet of taxis crossed Broadway but, in the gaps between the cars and the crosswalk, I caught glimpses of the roach playing Frogger.
When the light changed to red, the broken, retired-M&M-Brown-colored cockroach was mashed into the crosswalk, oozing guts like marshmallow filling. Dead roaches make me very happy.
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Posted in The Commute, entertainment, incredulity, miscellanous bk, piss poor | 1 Comment »
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Almost everything I experience sticks in my mind. I have so much information in my brain that serves no practical purpose, it’s patently absurd. My propensity to recall music lyrics or dialogue from movies is a useful party trick. I can even recall mundane details from other people’s lives, told to me in passing, that the people to whom it happened eventually cease to recall.
Having a long memory is so much more of a curse than a blessing.
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Tags: Flatbush, misanthropy, MTA, racism, xenophobia
Posted in The Commute, miscellanous bk | No Comments »
Friday, July 10th, 2009
Page views are down because output is down. Not as though I’ve monetized this thing, so tracking how many times it’s been viewed is little more than an exercise in gauging the little niche of interest I’ve staked out.
It’s a good sign that a handful of people still will tune in despite nothing new to see, but if I alienate that readership by not providing new content, I’ll be back to utter obscurity instead of nearly utter obscurity.
The dearth of writing is the result of a dearth of inspiration. Sure, there have been things to write about, but as angry and vitriolic as this place can be, I’d much rather it not be used as an outlet for woe. Woe has been in large supply of late and using it for inspiration is like trying to fashion a skyscraper from literal horseshit.
On the train last night, a bum was making his rounds. But this bum wasn’t like the bulk of his cohorts. He wasn’t asking for money or selling a sob story for years on end about how his house burned down the week before … he was belligerent, abusive and confrontational.
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Tags: boo-hoo, bums, cowardice, death, Flatbush, misanthropy, MTA, racism, xenophobia
Posted in The Commute, miscellanous bk, piss poor | 2 Comments »
Friday, July 3rd, 2009

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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Tags: Deadwood, ennui, God, heavy metal, iPod, Jehova's Witnesses, Mastodon, misanthropy, nihilism, proselytizing, Puritanism, religion
Posted in The Commute, incredulity, miscellanous bk, piss poor | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
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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Tags: Bed-Stuy, cheating whores, Flatbush, infidelity, laziness, mobile DNA testing
Posted in The Commute, entertainment, incredulity, miscellanous bk, piss poor | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
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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Tags: cross-dressing, misanthropy, perverts, sex-offenders, transvestite
Posted in The Commute, incredulity, miscellanous bk, piss poor | No Comments »
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
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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Tags: cross-dressing, Flatbush, masturbation, misandry, misanthropy, misogyny, perverts, sex-offenders, transvestite
Posted in The Commute, incredulity, miscellanous bk, piss poor | No Comments »
Friday, June 19th, 2009
I hate khaki pants. It’s not an objective decision; they just offend me. In their original form, they are a bland color. Their cut is never flattering, especially to women who have asses.
They bring to mind images of entitled preparatory school children, flouting rules and date-raping girls while the interest on their trust funds accrues. Couple one with a blue blazer and it’s like waving a red cape at a bull to me.
If I had Tourette’s — and yes, I know I’m borderline — I would shout: “Goddamned, fucking cocksucking piece-of-shit motherfucker, fucking blue blazer khaki bullshit creep fuck!”
As for leopard print. Ladies. Please. Stop. It’s not sexy. It won’t make you sexy. It makes you look tacky and cheap and, in most cases, it’s an advertisement of that very truth about you. Next time, just wear a sign that says “I’m a cheap skank with no fashion sense.” We’ll interpolate the spots.
I said there would be other Crimes against Humanity, so I’ll expound on tattoos. I couldn’t care less if men have them; they’re already almost universally ugly and stupid … but when women have them, what a waste. It’s like if the Venus di Milo had a tramp stamp or a butterfly tattooed on the inside of her hip. I imagine a lot of leopard print gets worn by women with tattoos.
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Tags: cross-dressing, fashion, khaki pants, leopard print, misandry, misanthropy, misogyny, Sony, tattoos, transvestite, Venus di Milo
Posted in The Commute, incredulity, miscellanous bk, piss poor | 1 Comment »