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’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 dislike very many things, but I like what I like, no matter how uncool, ridiculous or risible it may be. There are also things towards which I am ambivalent. I dislike Incubus for many reasons, most of them related to the exes of mine who loved them but, at the same time, I do enjoy some of their music. Right now, I’m thinking of the lyric: “To resist is to piss in the wind / anyone who does will end up smelling.”

It is simultaneously insipidly puerile and insightful. I think that description can be universally applied to all of their music. Not to delve too deeply into something about which I have no insight, but I wonder if that dichotomy is the result of the songwriter’s urge to be meaningful while unable to avoid stooping to superficiality, hedonism and inanity.

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I am sick of hearing about Michael Jackson. He is dead. Let the person be. There wasn’t much of him to go around based on his weight at the time of death, but everyone is picking at and squeezing his carcass for every last vestige that can be monetized.

But because they won’t leave it alone, I’ve got something to say about it.

One of the bigger topics, glossed over by the major media networks, is Jackson’s purported pedophilia. A cement-headed Long Island stereotype, Republican representative Peter King, griped that society is “glorifying” a “low-life” instead of giving press to salt of the earth types like firefighters, soldiers and other champions of the lower class.

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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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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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The mirror in my bathroom is broken. The super told me the replacement vanity would be something like $29 and that he’d contact the landlord about getting it fixed. Simple enough…

Today, though, on my way out the door to go to work, the super told me the landlord refused to replace it. He said it wasn’t his responsibility. It made me angry.

To call the guy who owns the building in which I live a “landlord” would be too generous. Slumlord is far more appropriate. His argument for the broken vanity not being his responsibility is just the latest in a string of hemming and hawing to avoid fixing the results of his own cheapness.

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The weather is gorgeous today. A little on the warm side, but still nice, particularly indoors, out of the sun with the windows open for a nice cross-breeze.

Sunday is great even when the weather is bad because it is a day without work for most people … but its greatness is severely hampered by the monkey on its back that is Monday, a return to the mind-numbing time-suck that for most people is not even close to what they’d rather be doing with their time, just to get paid a wage that insults their humanity and barely pays for life.

But that’s tomorrow. Today, it’s gorgeous. Even if I never take a step outside today, I’ll still have enjoyed the breeze, the sun coming in through my many windows and that I’ve been able to do whatever I want with my time.

Being rich must truly be great.

At least, so says an ad on Facebook (see below, right).

The ad says “Want to be a Detective? The Government is hiring like crazy! Get Free information on how to become a Detective right now. Financial Aid available!”

I don’t know whether to make fun of the syntax, the random, albeit obviously planned, capitalizations or just its overall absurdity.

What strikes me more than any of the above is that I bet some asshole got paid a ton of money to write that shit.

I wrote copy once for a mobile video game company and made money hand over fist for minutes of work. Granted, my descriptions were eloquent things of beauty, but that’s not the point.

Interestingly, the guy who runs the company employs some dickhead asshole with a huge attitude to manage his finances and me and finance guy had a disagreement over my invoices, so I got the persona non grata treatment.

Best of luck boys, hope you run your piece of shit company into the ground, you fucks. At least you’ll still be OK because the Government is hiring like CRAZY!

I work in “the business.” Yes, I know that means nothing without context because there are tons of “the businesses” just like “the city” is relative to whichever metropolis is closest to your non-metropolitan locale.

But, come on people, the only “the business” is Journalism and the only “the city” is New York. And I hate them both, but I love them, too, damn it. Well, I tolerate them both … kind of like a wife and a child.

In “the business” we have something called “the wood” and, well folks, my wood was on the front page of the paper today. Now, before you get excited that I’m talking about my cock again, by wood I of course mean “the headline of our top story.”

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