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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First, the weather went bad … literally raining on mine and my bandmate’s plans to get shot for promotional purposes. So I stayed in all day, whiling away the time until my 11:30 hockey game. I spent the bulk of the time working on our band’s webpage. It’s more or less ready, now. We could probably move forward if we had the photos. But we don’t.

I walked to the train at 10 p.m. last night, huge bag of hockey equipment over my shoulder, it’s cold and raining out … but not until I get to the station, three blocks away, and DOWN the STAIRS, do I realize I don’t have my fucking wallet. Yeah.

So, I walked home with all my equipment, got my damned wallet and walked back to the station. When I got to 23rd Street, there were no buses in sight, so I then had to walk the four avenue blocks to Chelsea Piers and then the rest of the way into the complex to the end of the pier, which comprises about another city avenue block.

I’m fit. I’m in good shape. It wasn’t a problem, but it did start to nag at me as the game wore on. My knee isn’t quite back to 100%, though it’s pretty damned close. My team played like shit. I couldn’t score despite a bevvy of great chances … I even got stoned on a sliding two-pad stack save. That was some old school goaltending … but, fuck, did I feel snake bitten; I got great wood on the shot, lifted it too, but all it hit were the pillows. Fuck my life.

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Since I’ve been so busy with CrippleBush lately, I’ve neglected the hell out of Divided Front. Today, I tried to remedy that. I planned on re-recording a handful of tunes but, now that the day is done, I managed three. It amazes me sometimes how I manage to piss my time away without accomplishing anything substantial.

As it is, I’m glad I managed the three tunes. I took a decent chunk of time to tab out “Down and Out in New York City” … it’s been bugging me for so long that no one else in the world has tabbed the song.

It isn’t laziness that kept me from doing myself, though. I can pick out a song, find the notes, figure out the riffs and fills, the chords and the melody … but it’s such an arduous, harrowing process. It doesn’t come easily for me. I don’t pick the correct notes right off and blaze through a tune in minutes. I have to painstakingly dissect it, find a sequence of notes and then use that to determine the key and, from there, I start to learn the song.

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The light in my kitchen died. Typically, it wouldn’t be a big deal of any order … I can replace light bulbs. But this is hardly typical; the fixture in the kitchen uses doughnut-shaped fluorescent tubes that attach by arcane plugs to what looks like a battery. Worse yet, the rings are held in place by three metal clamps.

So, I realized this was outside my purview. It wasn’t unscrew old and screw in new. I went to my superintendent, since he is — theoretically — the person responsible for handling repairs and maintenance in the building. I asked him about replacing the light and he told me he couldn’t.

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So, bread is up to $7 a loaf at Whole Foods. I’ve been wringing my hands about this tidbit for a while, so if I’ve already circulated my discontent, I apologize to my reader.

I heard a rumor it is possible to bake one’s own bread. Hogwash, you say? Perhaps. Still, it seems plausible … I mean, how else do the companies that sell such a fine product obtain said product? Yes, I suppose magic is a possibility, but as much as baking and magic may seem like the same thing, I say the former is more akin to alchemy. And everyone knows how easy that is!

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I just watched ‘Predator’ for the first time in about 10 years. It’s still entertaining. The special effects have held up really well, too, for a movie more than 20 years old.

Yesterday, I watched ‘RoboCop 2′. There was a god awful piece of crap of a movie. Amazing to me that Frank Miller wrote it. Frank Miller, who is one of my favorite comic book authors. The man who rescued Batman from the homo-tastic clutches of the ’60s-era ruination wrought by the Adam West depiction … Miller made Batman dark and gothic, gritty and menacing.

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I’ve never really lived anywhere else than in the area of New York City. I spent a few summers in the bucolic Upstate countryside, four years amidst the flat nothingness of mid-Michigan … but I spent an entire childhood and adolescence amidst the flat nothingness of anti-urban-but-not-quite-rural Long Island only 38 miles from Manhattan, and have now spent close to a decade in Brooklyn.

New York, when I was a kid, was the place where my dad worked and where the Rangers played hockey. It was the place where my poster of John McEnroe walking through a smut-filled Times Square was photographed. But I had no concept of the city as a grand and dangerous place. It was Barclay Street and Madison Square Garden. For a long time.

The nature of this place in the ’80s was lost on me because I was never permitted to be subjected to its vagaries — except to witness what seeped into my limited locales. Unlike the cougar I dated who romped and stomped through the Lower East Side in the Koch years, I was watching Thundercats and Transformers in a cookie-cutter house out east.

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I’m a big supporter of Mom and Pop shops. I was raised by a small-business-owning family and I recognize how difficult it is to own such a business and how important is the support of one’s customers. But I also have a fair amount of indignation for small businesses that cut corners and purvey to their loyal patrons wares of poor quality.

I recognize that to compete against much larger stores, a small business may feel compelled to make sacrifices, but it is abhorrent to me that the sacrifices made would be at the expense of the customers’ well-being. That’s the case with my local butcher, where teemed a mass of flies one would expect to find on a moldering, shit-caked corpse on a hot day.

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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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I woke up a few seconds before it happened.

*pop pop pop*

*pop pop pop*

*pop pop pop pop pop*

So, that’s 11 shots, by my count. Granted my recollection may be a little foggy. Once the shooting started, I decided the smart thing was to stay away from the windows and, besides, I was being held down by my girl, who scurried over and threw her arms around me like I was the Coast Guard rescuing her from a shipwreck.

I kept thinking about that person in the Bronx who was killed when a returning Iraq War combatant thought it would be a smart idea to fire a gun into the air. The victim was looking out the window and *blammo* … dead.

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