On Tuesday, I looked at Pisces:

If something no longer works for you the way it once did then get rid of it. Yes, you may have a sentimental attachment to it, but sentiment cannot be allowed to come between you and the kind of life you are striving to create for yourself.

Today, I looked at Aries:

If you want a better tomorrow you are going to have to sacrifice something today. You can be remarkably ruthless when the need arises, so cut out of your life anything that no longer serves a useful purpose. That includes friendships too.

I was born on the cusp. It means that both of the above horoscopes may pertain to me. Now, I really try to be objective (let’s all have a hearty laugh about that) and logical when I can, but I am usually taken aback by the accuracy of horoscopes on the rare occasions I look at them. It really isn’t in my nature, I think, to be either objective or logical; which speaks volumes over how those two methods have controverted my actual nature.

The world would be very easily navigated if everything were black or white, but very, very few things are either and nearly everything is gray. It’s not easy to excise something that may be so overwhelmingly positive in some very crucial ways yet disappointing in other, perhaps equally, important ways.

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I had a conversation with one of my more favorite cohorts the other day about a particular business with which we are both familiar. We are both incredulous at how many bad decisions are made on a daily basis and how no consequence ever seems to come of it. At one point, he dubbed it insanity per the definition of “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

Maybe it’s masochism, but I am sometimes compelled to pore over the shit that is purveyed to women about men. Insipid, shallow, stereotypical drivel like: 5 Types of Guys to Avoid at all Costs and 10 Things he’s Thinking when he Sees you Naked.

Now, do I agree that Bluetooth- and popped-collar multi-polo shirt-wearing douchenozzle cuntbags aren’t worth a woman’s time? Yes. Absolutely. But this article doesn’t share anything insightful at all … and it doesn’t call women out for their habitually stupid behavior of going for exactly the guys they complain about. All the while these insane — per definition above — women decry the lack of good men out there, while intentionally overlooking the ones that fit the criteria they condemn the dipshits for lacking.

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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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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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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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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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