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?”

(more…)

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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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’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 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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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.

(more…)

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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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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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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