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 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 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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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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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 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.

I am conflicted. Although, after tonight, maybe that will no longer be the case. I bitched out. I put my personal well-being above seeing who could piss farther, who would be willing to take the first swing. It seems like the smart thing to do, but that’s the problem, intelligence and bravery are about as synonymous as cowardice and stupidity.

I went to the bar tonight and everything was fine. The place was empty, I had two friends with me to watch the game and it was nice, low-key start to the weekend. Until in walked some Irish dude and his posse of alternatively fat and ugly, or both, friends.

There must be an invisible sign around my neck. Invisible to me, that is. To people like the group that came into the bar, the sign says “If you’ve got a problem, it’s with me.”

I have wondered sometimes why I am a magnet for animosity and negativity. How is it possible that I could be out to do nothing more than watch a hockey game and then go home and somehow still encounter a group of at least five guys that have taken umbrage with the mere fact that I exist?

Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of person that lets shit talk and glances go unchecked. So I started hurling random abuse back their way. One guy was bald with bling in his ear. Instead of the Mr. Clean reference, I called him Kojack. Another one had a Marine haircut, so when I asked what the jarhead’s fucking problem was, it got his attention.

That moment came when almost all of the posse had disbanded. Disappeared. It was just jarhead and he kept looking my way, so I asked him what his gripe was. He got up and came over to me and asked me the very same question, what the fuck was my problem. I clarified that I had no problem other than what the hell was so interesting about me to him and his friends and why the fuck they felt the need to pay me so much mind.

Of course, the obligatory “let’s take this outside” shit came out of the idiot’s mouth. So, vocally, I obliged him. If that’s where he wanted to take it, we could do that. He took a step toward the door. Or we could do it right here, I offered, and that gave him pause.

You see, it’s a pissing match. It’s a series of bluffs to see who is going to show himself to be the cooler head and therefore be the one to have lost the contest. Who is more reasonable is who has lost. Who is more willing to shed blood over nothing or very little is who has won.

I lost. I admit it. I fucking lost.

When it came down to the idea of stepping out into the street and actually engaging someone in physical combat, I thought of the repercussions. I thought first about breaking the hundreds of dollars I wear on my face so I can see. I thought next about being totally on my own because I don’t have the sort of friends who stand up for each other. I knew that this guy did. I knew from the get go that I was at a huge disadvantage if things escalated because it would have been me against five and I can’t beat those odds.

So I asked him why, if he had no problem with me, were he and his friends so intent on me and my friends. He continued to deny that he was doing anything but looking out the window and refused to address the actions of the group. So I said then, look, I don’t have any issue if you’re telling me there’s nothing to it. But if you’ve got a fucking problem, we can take care of it.

He told me he wanted an apology for starting shit. I told him I’d given him as close to an apology as he’d get. He then suggested again we take it outside. I told him to give me a fucking break, if there was a misunderstanding and I saw something in nothing, then he could have all the apologies he wanted. And, because I didn’t want to feel like I’d conceded as badly as I did, I added: “If that’s not enough for you, we can take it outside like you seem to want.”

But it was enough. Apparently, most people abhor physical conflict and, pissing matches aside, will take the opportunity to avoid letting the situation escalate to fisticuffs.

Yet, I still feel I lost the contest. A big part of me wanted to just go for it. Pick up a glass and smash it into the guy’s face … but there’s no place for that in the world I live in. I am not in some Old West bar or some barren frontier. I am a fucking office shill with an ordinary life devoid of intrigue. I am not James Bond. I am not James Kirk. I am not a unique and special flower, I am just a run-of-the-mill schmuck with bills and rent to pay and groceries to buy and teeth to keep in my face and a face to keep pretty.

And, on top of it all, the Red Wings lost.

I got to the bus stop at Fulton St and Clinton Avenue and checked the schedule. Ten minutes before the next bus. I’d barely missed the previous one.

I weighed my options and decided to trek down to Atlantic Avenue to catch the B45. I got to the corner just in time to see it motor on by.

Walking back to the previous stop, I marveled at my bad luck. Moments like those make me wonder if there is a god and if he’s a royal asshole having a laugh at my expense. I needed less than a minute to have made that B45. It often feels like life itself is a series of near-misses. Lots what might-have-beens. It’s a sad commentary that the what-if I’m sharing with the public is “what if I’d caught that B45?”

Well, I’d have been home in less than the almost hour it took me to go barely two miles.

The B26 came and I got on it. Chock to the brim and hot as hell, I navigated my way toward the back door. There was an open seat so I set myself in it; the trip would be long enough to warrant not standing. Sitting put me between one teenaged black kid with loose curls and light skin and a big, bald, dark black dude with a surly demeanor who was chewing on a branch. He intermittently broke out into fits of rapping.

None of this disconcerted me. I’ve spent more time amidst black people than white people for at least the last five years of my life and I could probably argue that it’s been true of all seven years I’ve been here. Rather than disconcert, I felt amusement. Albeit wry and bitter. I had an epiphany, wedged between those two dudes whose wide open legs left me very little room, as I sweat from the heat of the bus…

“This is my quintessential New York.”

Eventually I got to a point where I could transfer to the bus that was going to take me home, and eventually it came. All told, it took me around 45 minutes to get home. If I’d a bike or a car, I could have done it in less than half the time.

Still, on that hot bus I had another epiphany. I’m always in a rush, even when — like last night — I had nowhere to be. I was going home. No appointment to keep, no fete to attend. The company I often had at home is away until the end of May. But I still wanted to get there, quickly, as quickly as possible. I wanted to make every connection, catch every bus in a marvel of great timing. But I didn’t have to. I had time. All the time in the world. No one was going to fret at me if I got home in 10 minutes or 100.

I wish that realization had filled me with relief. Instead, it was almost disappointing that my mad obsession with quick travel was based on nothing except an irrational obsession with spending the minimal amount of time using mass transit.

There’s a logic in my mind about the distance I must travel to get places and get home. The logic demands that, in a reasonable world, it should not take an hour to travel two miles. It should not take an hour to travel six or eight miles, either. But it does. It can take an hour to travel a mile in this city if you get stuck in traffic or in a train tunnel.

I have no power over my ability to get places except to walk, which — while I have a long gait — is still a slow process, or to bike … and I have no bike and I’m not in a position to be putting myself at risk of injury just to perhaps get somewhere faster. But that powerlessness is what maddens me. When the bus crawls, I immediately want to get out and walk. Then the asshole god I mentioned earlier frees up the snare and the bus will race by … but only if I get out. If I stay on, the snare will never disentangle and the slow crawl will continue to chip away at my sanity.

Frustration and uncomfortability and disappointment are my quintessential New York.

It’s not an epiphany I particularly relished.