I NEED YOUR OPINION!!!


My novel is in the Marketing Copy stage. I need an excerpt for the back cover and would like to know which one you find the most compelling. Is it:

Excerpt Number One (the opening passage):

There was nothing unusual about the day I died. My death didn’t happen because I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been, or there at the wrong time. I wasn’t on my way to dinner to celebrate a job promotion, running to save a child in danger, or carrying out any abnormal, “if only he hadn’t” kind of circumstance like you always see on TV medical dramas. Those shows may not have taught me anything about medicine, but I did learn that for every unfortunate loss, there has to be some kind of irony to compound the tragedy or regret for someone left behind to dwell on. But, having my skull bashed open in the middle of the street didn’t create either of those things. My life was an insipid exercise in monotony, and its ending didn’t come as the result of anything more interesting. I was just walking home from the subway after work, the same way I did every night, Mondays through Fridays, week after week, month after month, and so on. Early on, I didn’t imagine my existence would turn out to be so dull, but I wasn’t expecting it to end so soon either. At least my life and death weren’t predictable.


Or is it Excerpt Number Two (introduction of lead female character and true start of the major arc):

“Hey. What’s your name?” I asked.

She picked her head up so slowly it looked like she had weights on her forehead. Some strands of hair fell between her eyes, running down the side of her nose and past her mouth, but she let them stay there without brushing them away. Her hair looked even darker lying against her skin, which was so pale you’d think she was still sick from whatever had killed her. She obviously wasn’t, though. She was a soul rookie too, and apparently that was how she wanted to look.

Her face was pretty, but blank, without a single sign of emotion. With what appeared to require considerable effort, she forced a slight smile and said, “Marlene.” Her voice was warm but very soft, as if she was happy to answer but didn’t really want to be heard.

I waved at her. “Nice to meet you, Marlene.”

“Marley.” The word barely escaped her, and I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her right.

“What?”

“People call me Marley.”

“Well, nice to meet you Marley. So how’d you die?”

The smile retreated and her head took a freefall back down. “I OD’ed.”


Please leave a comment here or on facebook. Which one's better? Why? Your help would be most appreciated

Baconnaise and Happiness

Watch and enjoy (hopefully).

from 12/23/08

You're Not Majoring In Rocket Science, Are You?

Abby, that’s so funny, you ended your set with being Jewish on Christmas, that’s what I’m starting my set with! No, seriously, I’m just gonna touch on a few of these things cause I got other stuff to talk about, but as a Jew on Christmas, I can tell you about the mild undercurrent of Anti-Semetism found in the movie A Christmas Story. Yes, we all remember Schwartz, snotty little rat kid, you know, they didn’t even give him a first name for fuck’s sake! And they gave him the most Jewish sounding name possible. When Ralphie says the word “fuck,” it might has well have been like, “Where did you hear that word?”

“JEW!”

I can also tell you about the mental instability of the doll from Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer. That’s right. Everybody asks why the doll is a misfit toy, she seems like a perfectly normal doll, well, she has mental problems. My personal theory is she’s a cutter. Because she fits the cutter profile: young, female, depressed.

Here’s what fits the Holiday Fear theme: Bill O’Reilly’s attempt to exclude all non-Christians from the holiday season by saying that the phrase “Happy Holidays” is an attempt by the political left-wing to destroy the great “American” tradition of Christmas. I wish I was kidding. Never mind that it originates in the Middle East, celebrates the birth of someone who’s Jewish and is essentially the co-opting of the pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice. Fucking asshole, I fucking hate him.

Now, what I also want to talk about is, one of my favorite shows ended last week: Celebrity Rehab. As a writer, reality TV offends me, but I love Celebrity Rehab. When it started this year there were a few people addicted to painkillers. Now, I work for a pharmaceutical advertising agency, and one of the drugs I work on is Opana, which is a painkiller. An Opiate painkiller, like Vicodin and Oxycodon, very addictive. Unfortunately, none of the cast members were addicted to Opana, so we missed out on that chance for free advertising.

My favorite person on the show is Amber Smith. She a model, very beautiful, and an actress, and I use the term loosely, she basically just sits there and smiles, although, I gotta give her mad props because she was in LA Confidential and that’s one of my favorite movies. She was the hooker cut to look like Rita Hayworth. Anyway, it turned out, on the show, she said that she’d prostituted herself, and as soon as I heard that, I went running for the cash machine. I mean, I probably couldn’t afford a whole session, but I should be able to scrape together fifty dollars, that ought to get me thirty seconds, that’s all I need. Twenty seconds even! Just in, bam, boom, out, there you go. Aw, doesn’t matter, if you have dvr you can freeze frame and take care of business for free. It’s good too, it’s also a good idea to get all your porn online, without magazines you’re saving paper. It’s masturbation gone green. So when you forget to throw out a can and someone hassles you, you can tell them you’re doing your part every day. Sometimes twice, it depends on the person.

Anyway, one of the other people is Gary Busy, because apparently he has nothing better to do than star in anti-American movies from Turkey about the Iraq war. Yeah, he played a Jewish doctor who vivisects Iraqi prisoners to sell their organs to people in New York.

(pause)

I realize that’s not a very happy story, so moving on, one of the things they did on the show was, they thought it would be nice for him to have a screening of The Buddy Holly Story. His defining role, his high point as an actor, Oscar nominated role. So Rod Stewart’s son, who as far as I know has never done anything except be in another reality show about being Rod Stewart’s son, says, “What’s it about?” As if the word, “Story” didn’t tip him off. It’s about dinosaurs. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK IT’S ABOUT?! So they told him it’s about Buddy Holly, and he goes, “Who’s Buddy Holly?” And Gary just stands there staring at him like he’s gonna stab him in the head, like he’s gonna punch him in the throat. Then he says,

“BUDDY HOLLY IS ONE OF THE FOREFATHERS OF ROCK AND ROLL.”

Which he is, Buddy Holly’s awesome. How much time do I have left?

“One minute, three seconds.”

Ok, that means I have time to sing a little Buddy Holly. This is my favorite song of his. I had to look up the lyrics on my phone.


(singing)
Dun dun dun dune
Be ne ne, be ne ne, BE NE NE

Blue days, black nights,
Blue tears keep on fallin' for you dear,
Now you're gone

Blue days, black nights,
My heart keeps on callin' for you dear,
And you alone

Memories of you make me sorry
I gave you reason to doubt me

But now you're gone
And I am left here all alone
With blue memories, I think of you

Thanks.

Namaste.

Author's Note:

I realize this rehashes some material from the previous post, but it seemed appropriate, timing wise. The person referred to in the beginning was the previous performer. I know it seems esoteric out of context but I like to transcribe the sets as accurately as memory allows.

from various Decembers over the past five years

Drop The BB Gun And Step Away From The Synagogue, Ralphie:

Answers To Various Christmas Special FAQ's

Q: How do you know so much about Christmas specials when you're Jewish?

I'm very much the pop-culture fan, and they're awesome, plus they virtually define the television experience in December. And there aren't too many Hanukkah specials, except for the Rugrats one. But most importantly, I grew up with Italian relatives. By marriage, my uncle, like a like of Jewish boys from Brooklyn, married an Italian girl, one Marie D'Natalie. We used to go to their house every year on Christmas Day. Then, when I was fifteen, they got divorced, and that was the end of my Christmas celebrations. I think I've been overcompensating ever since.

Q: What's your beef with A Christmas Story?

A Christmas Story is a great movie, and, this is in spite of its mild undercurrent of Anti-Semetism. Yeah I said it. Oh no? When Ralphie says the word "fuck," and his mother asks where he heard it, instead of admitting it's his father, who does he blame? SCHWARTZ. Ralphie blames the jew. And Schwartz, you'll remember, is also best known in that movie as the kid who got Flick to put his tongue on the flagpole so it'd get frozen. They made him a snotty little ratboy, the conniving cheater who jumped from the double-dog dare to the triple-dog dare. And not only him, his parents are so wicked and evil that without proof, they beat him so mercilessly that his screams are audible through the phone. And does Ralphie have any regrets? No, he lies in his bed that night and says that across town, Shwartz was, "getting his," despite the fact that in this instance, he didn't do anything. But he makes the jew the scapegoat. You know who else did that? Hitler. So, am I comparing the film's author Jean Shepherd to Hitler? Yes I am.

And if you want to talk subtle, they fucking named him Schwartz. They don't overtly say he's Jewish, but they not only gave him the most Jewish sounding name possible, they didn't even give him a fucking first name. They would have been more subtle if they'd just named him Christ-killer.

Still, great movie. Directed by Bob Clark, who also directed . . . anyone?

"Porky's."

That's right. Ralphie was played by Peter Billingsly, who's a producer now. He still acts occasionaly, most recently in "Elf." If you're thinking of seeing that, don't bother, it fucking sucks. The kid who played Scott Farkas still acts, he played the brother on Titus and has been in movies like Resident Evil: Apocolypse and Transformers. And Scotty Shwartz, we all know what happened to him.

"From child star to porn star."

That's right. Glad to see things worked out for him too.

Q: What were the Snowmeiser helpers?

I don't know, but those things freaked me the fuck out. They're mini-Snowmeisers or something, but when I was a kid, they gave me nightmares. I had this fucking dream that, not them, but this little creature like them, tiny little things moving around in that freaky stop-motion manner, had grabbed me and immobilized my arms and legs. Snowmeiser was cool but those little ones just looked fucking evil. I think that nightmare is the reason I didn't remember that special with the Heatmeiser and Snowmeiser, "Year Without A Santa Claus," I must have blocked it out of my memory. I didn't see it again until I was in college and when I saw those fucking things dancing with their hats and canes, my fucking jaw dropped.

Snowmeiser was played by Dick Shawn and the cool thing about him is that he died on stage. Not just on stage, he had a heart attack and nobody helped him because they thought it was part of the act. That is punk as fuck.

Q: In Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, is the elf's name Hermy or Herbie?

This is probably the most asked question, and there's a definite answer. It's Hermy. It sounds like the elf nazi taskmaster calls him Herbie at one point, there's a theory that the name was changed mid-production.

Q: On the Island of Misfit Toys, what's wrong with the doll?

This is the biggest mystery of Christmas special lore. The dolly for Sue. Why is she a misfit? She looks like a perfectly fine doll, what exactly is wrong with her? Well, there's an official and an unofficial explanation. The official explanation is that, for whatever reason, she was cast off by her owner and is a misfit by virtue of being a reject.

The unofficial explanation is that she has mental problems. She could be bipolar because she obviously suffers from depression, and it's triggered pretty easily; one minute she's joyously singing, the next she's crying. My personal theory, I think she's a cutter. Because she fits the cutter profile: young, female, depressed. If she was constantly cutting herself and always needing to be stitched up, that'd be a pretty sensible reason to throw something out. Hopefully the child Santa found for her has access to psychiatric medication like Seroquel. That's the stuff Brittney Spears takes and you can see how well it worked for her. Maybe some Ambien too, at one point she says she doesn't have any dreams left. As long as she doesn't start doing any crazy shit in her sleep like climbing into Barbie's car, driving down the fucking stairs and crashing into the basement, she should have a happy existence until the kid grows up. Then she'll get her ass kicked out again and probably feel even worse, but hey, no one ever said sanity wasn't fleeting.

from 10/14/08

Why Don't You Forget The Moose For A Moment

Fear.

Republicans scare me, because they look just like people. The next and final presidential debate is tomorrow. I won't be watching, because they just infuriate me. I think the reason I get so filled with rage when I hear these motherfuckers talk is because I know there are people out there who believe their bullshit. Now, Obama has a lead right now but it's important that we stay on this course, because, there's still this cadre out there of undecided voters.

Now, undecided voters are the biggest fucking idiots on the planet. After all this time, how can you still have no opinion? And you probably know an undecided voter, you've talked to them, or you hear them ranting at a bar or something, and they'll say something like, "Well, I DON'T like John McCain, but Obama, I just don't know!"

"So your solution is to vote for McCain?!"

"No, I'm saying I just don't know."

"What the FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"

It's obviously difficult to get through to these people, and I'm here to help. Now, if you're trying to sway one of these people, don't try to discuss the issues, because you're only gonna confuse them. Pick a superficial story, one that relates more to the candidate themself. A good example is the Gravina Island Bridge. You probably all know the story by now; in the 2005 Highway Bill 233 million dollars was earmarked to build a bridge to an island where fifty people live. It became a symbol of wasteful pork barrel spending and a national embarrassment, especially after congress wanted to divert part of it to help Katrina victims, and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens stood on the floor of congress shouting, "NO!!!." (pounding fist) You know, Ted Stevens, the one who's in jail now. So after it became embarrassing, they removed the earmark.

Here's what you might not know, "THEY KEPT THE MONEY!!!" Not earmarked for the bridge, but Alaska still kept the funds. Here's what you might not realize; they didn't give a fuck about a bridge. They didn't want a bridge, they wanted to bleed money from the government. And still, Sarah Palin,within a week of her candidacy, said in six or seven of her speeches, "I tooled the kengress, 'thenks, bet noo thenks." And by the way, let me just say, god bless Tina Fey for pointing out that Sarah Palin talks like a fucking reject from the movie Fargo. The press doesn't want to say that, it's not nice. They say it's "folksy." What the fuck is that, "folksy?" Woody Guthrie was folksy. Bob Dylan is folksy. Susan Vega is folksy. Sarah Palin should have been the one in that fucking wood chipper!

Aaaaaand I sense I've gone too far. Morbid sense of humor. Don't judge me.

So anyway, to explain this issue to an undecided voter, you've got to give them a way to relate to the material. So just say,

"Ok, so, Paris Hilton asks her dad for five thousand dollars to buy an iPod. He says ok, and lays five thousand dollars on the table. Then somebody, I don't know, maybe Nicky, says, 'Paris, wait a minute, iPods don't cost that much. Plus you only have two cd's and they're both Maroon 5.' So Paris proudly says she's not buying the iPod to TMZ or Page Six or whoever the fuck it is these people talk to. She KEEPS the money, and spends it on what she really wanted to: shoes, cocaine and crates of condoms."

Now, the Republicans are content to let Sarah Palin settle in this role of mudslinger so McCain can appear to be taking the high road. And the issue she was bringing up last week was Paul Ayers, who was a member of the Weathermen back in the fucking '60s. They're making a big deal over the fact that he and Barack were on the same charity board ten, fifteen years ago, and he threw him a fundraiser or something. So Sarah Palin goes on about Barack pals around with terrorists. This is when her husband, who I assume she pals around with, was part of an Alaskan separatist group. Fucking Alaska. You know, they keep saying she's a former beauty queen. Yeah, in Wasilla, a city with the same population as this fucking block. She wasn't Miss Alaska, she took third. She got Miss Congeniality. If there was ever a time when Sarah Palin was the most congenial woman in Alaska, I say, let it go. Fine, see ya. I don't a fuck about your polar bears, your ice fields, I don't care how much I loved the show Northern Exposure, let Alaska go.

And speaking of that, remember Cynthia Geary? The blonde actress, she played Shelly the dumb waitress. She wasn't really acting. I remember she was on the Arsenio Hall Show back in the day, and she was saying how much she liked living in Seattle, that's where they filmed the show. And she goes, "And there's cool music! You know, Nirvana's from Seattle."

Nirvana's from Seattle? Really? Wow, I never heard that. Like she's making a fucking revelation. I know I sound like I've gone off on an irrelevant tangent, but I said that to tell you this, these are the motherfuckers who vote. So stay the course, ROCK THE VOTE, AND FUCK THE REPUBLICANS!

NAMASTE, MOTHERFUCKERS!

from 4/23/08

Michael Stuart, You Hurt My Feelings

Last summer, I was over at Slainte, with some of our friends, Michele was there, Courtney was there, and a few others, I don't remember. And I started talking to these two girls. I was drunk, yes, but not drooling crazy fall down drunk or anything. We were having a pleasant conversation, they were actually doing most of the talking, so I know I wasn't bothering them. Then out of no where, for no reason at all, the bartender appears and says, "You have to leave."

I was stunned, so I just said, "Excuse me?"

He said, "Yes, you have to go away."

I was too shocked to say anything, and since I was gonna go in a minute anyway, I politely said, "Nice to meet you," and went back to rejoin my friends. After about an hour, everyone left. Before I did, I had some unfinished business, so I went back to the bar, went to the bartender and said, "Hey." He smiled and leaned in, and I said, "You're a fucking asshole."

I turned and walked out, and I'm halfway to the door, he comes up behind me, grabs my belt and collar and pushes me out. And I didn't fall, that was my personal victory. But it was like, ooh, big man, you pushed me out as I was already leaving, you made me . . . leave faster, by creeping up behind me where I couldn't see you, wow, way to go tough guy, you FUCKIN' pussy.

I vowed never to go back there, but hey, it's right next to the fuckin' Bowery (Poetry Club), and after a few months, I popped in to catch the end of the Giants game one night. The asshole wasn't there, so went back a few more times. One night last month, this is about nine months after the big incident, I'm in there with a beer, waiting for some food, and this guy appears, and I think, "Is that the asshole?" I can't really tell, it'd been such a long time, but he sees me and says, "You have to leave. You finish your beer but then you get out of here. I don't want any argument."

Then he grabbed my beer and poured it out, and I said, "I thought you said I could finish my beer."

He said, "No."

Now, I'll add, this is nine months later, I hadn't cut my hair that whole time so it's much longer, and this guy, who'd seen me for a grand total one minute at the most, still recognized me, like he's obsessed with me or something. I guess I emasculated the poor fuck. I got up to leave, and before I go, flash a huge smile, wave, and yell, "GOOD NIGHT!"

So evidently, those four words I said to him have gotten me banned for life. For four words. What a fucking asshole. So I call upon all of you, at your leisure, whenever you have time, go over to Slainte, and look for the tall, thin, slightly spiky brown-haired guy. Have a beer or two. Chat a little. Gain his confidence. Then, before you go, loudly, so that everyone can hear it, say,

"BYE! HOPE YOUR RAPE TRIAL GOES OK!!!"

Namaste.

from 3/26/08

How To Recognize Certain PATH Stations From Quite A Long Way Away

Last October, my friends invited me to go to The Hunt, which is a giant tailgate party that takes place inside a horse track. It's in New Jersey, but I went anyway, and we ate tons of food, drank a lot of beer and had a great old time.

Late in the afternoon, I felt myself sobering up. Not wanting to be hungover before the sun even set, as has been the case on similar occasions I rationalized, I decided I had to get drunk again quickly. I grabbed a bottle of vodka and downed a double shot. It felt smooth going down, so I took another single shot for good measure. Around 4:30, it was time to go, and as we were getting ready, my friend Jason asked me if I wanted them to drive me back to the PATH station in Hoboken. I live in Manhattan and had taken New Jersey Transit out, and as I had no desire to repeat that experience in reverse, said, "I would love that."

That's the last thing I remember from that day.

I woke up in an emergency room, lying on a cot, having no memory of how I got there. The nurse there asked me if I knew where I was. I had overheard someone say it, but only caught the last syllable. I said, "Brooklyn?"

She answered, "Hoboken." I thought, "Well that didn't sound very good," and fell back asleep. I came to again when I received a text message from Jason. "You left your wallet in our car."

I typed back, "Hold on to it, I'll get it back from you monday," and promptly passed out again. It turned out they'd dropped me off, and I'd disappeared into the station when Jason realized my wallet was still there. They waited for me to come back, which obviously I never did, and Jason figured I had the cash on me to get through to the train.

The nurse came in and out repeatedly through the night to check on me, and by the time morning came around, she was my buddy, the welcomed sight that made the experience slightly less disastrous. I woke up around 6am to overhear someone outside cheekily say, "I HATE drunks." At which point the nurse looked at me and said, "Well, there's my friend Michael here," and continued, "Time to go."

I thanked her and asked where the bathroom was. When I got inside and looked at the mirror, the first thing I noticed was the right side of my face was all red. I figured it was sunburn, then I saw the rest. There were cuts and scrapes all around my left eye and a deeper gash below my neck. I had bruises below my left elbow and I realized my entire left arm was sore. I had big bruises below both my knees and a big swollen bump below my right one. And I thought, "What the hell happened to me?" I'd been thinking this whole time that I was there because I was drunk, they never even told me I was hurt. I even found out later that they'd given me a head CT. And they never told me any of this! I'm not a doctor, but if I gave someone a head CT, I'd mention it to him. The best theory I could piece together was that I'd fallen down the stairs, but as I have no memory of the incident, that remains speculation to this day. I firmly believe I was concussed, I've been plenty drunker than I was that day and I've never lost that much memory.

I walked out looking for the nurse, but she wasn't there. I needed to get the hell out of there, so I just left. Now, I didn't have my wallet, so I had no cash to get home, and I was too embarrassed to hit them up at the hospital for it. I don't go to Hoboken very often, or New Jersey at all for that matter, so I don't know it too well. I was hoping maybe there was a bridge with a footpath like the Brooklyn Bridge has nearby so I could walk to the city. I asked the security guard by the entrance if such a thing existed, and he said, "Go outside, make a right, go down three lights, make a left, go down and make a right at the stop sign, then go down . . . "

And I just asked, "Can you write this down? Because I'm never gonna remember this ."

"Just make a right out the door, you'll see it."

I ventured out as the sun was just rising, made a right out the door, walked down a few lights and had no idea where the hell I was. I wandered around Hoboken for about forty-five minutes. I asked I guy at a gas station if there was anyway to get to Manhattan, but he said the nearest bridge was about ten miles away. With visions of panhandling in my head, I kept walking until I found a cop car. Trying to play into the policeman's sympathies, I told him I'd been mugged and was trying to get back to Manhattan. He said, "Make a right then the first left and go down two blocks to the PATH station." Much simpler directions than the last ones, so I went and managed to find the Newport/Pavonia Station. More after the fact revelations, this is over a mile from the hospital; not that far on the grand scheme but nearly three times the distance farther than the actual station I was looking for.

It was about a quarter to seven and no one was around, so I hopped the turnstile and sat, waiting for the train, wishing desperately to get out of New Jersey and back to my New York home, which I could have reached ages ago if I was Jesus and could only walk on the water.

The train came and soon I was back in Manhattan, where I walked from the last PATH Station at West 33rd, all the way to my apartment in the east 90s, all the while with a splitting headache and raging nausea. I thanked god I still had my keys, threw myself onto my bed and fell asleep for a long time.

And that, my friends, is how I gave up vodka.

Namaste.

from 8/19/08

Tell Laura I Love Her

Anybody else fucking sick of hearing about Michael Phelps? I'm happy for him, but I really don't give a fuck about swimming, and in about a week and a half, neither will anyone else. I don't care, he wants to impress me, he can pay my rent. I'm glad the U.S. is getting all these gold medals, but they're acting like he's the second coming. You know, Jesus walked on the water, he didn't swim the backstroke through it.

But I don't want to talk about him, I want to talk about my favorite Olympian. I talked about her back in 2004 after the Athens games, any old schoolers remember who she is? No? Good, that means I can tell this story again.

Her name is Laura Wilkinson and she's a diver. For those of you who don't know her story, she was training for the 2000 Sydney Olympics when she took a nasty spill and broke three bones in her foot. She was laid up in bed for six weeks and had to train by visualizing the dives in her head. When she got to the Olympics to compete in the Ten Meter Platform, she had to wear a special shoe just so she climb up the ladder, and do most of her dives starting from a handstand because she couldn't stand on the edge of the platform. With three dives to go in the finals, she was in fifth place and considered to be out of medal contention. Then she nails the last three dives, the Chinese divers mess up theirs, BAM, she wins the gold.

I thought, "What a wonderful story." And I didn't hear it until 2004. I didn't watch too much of the Sydney games because I didn't really care. But I watched the 2004 games in Athens because I was holed up for a week in my parents house, because my grandmother had died. Grandma had taken ill earlier that summer, and for two months she was going back and forth; she'd get better, she'd get worse. Finally, the morning that the opening ceremonies were due to start, I got the call, saying it could be any minute now. So I sat in my room, waiting for my Grandmother to die, for two full days. Finally, I got the call saying Grandma was dead.

As you can probably guess, I didn't take it all that well. She was my last grandparent, and also, my other grandparents all died before I graduated from college, so she was my only grandparent for my adult years. So this one really hurt. Now, in Judaism, we have something called "sitting Shiva," which is a morning period where you're not supposed to leave the house. So I went out to my parents' place in Long Island and spent the week there. The Olympics were going on, and at the time, the Olympics were the last thing that I cared about. But I had no control over the tv, so I was gonna watch it whether I liked it or not. But I became fascinated with Laura Wilkinson's story. I thought, "This girl's a fighter! She's awesome!" And she's really cute, that counts for something.

I became obsessed with following her; I watched her dives and I checked the paper and caught the rounds and followed her progress. Because, it was the only thing that could take my mind off the fact that my grandmother was dead. So by the time the finals came around, I was glued to the tv. And it was like, she wasn't just doing it for her, or for the USA, she was doing it for me, she was doing it for Grandma. Unfortunately, she didn't win, she took fifth place that year. But I still loved her, I still think she's awesome. And I didn't care that she turned out to be a major league bible-thumper. Her favorite movie is Passion Of The Christ, I mean holy fucking shit. She might think I'm a Christ-killer, who knows. But that didn't matter to me.

Then I went and I did something really stupid. I wrote her a fan letter. I never do that, but you can do a lot of dumb things when you're grieving. I told her the whole story, about Grandma, about how I loved her fighting spirit, everything. I just needed to get it out there, in her direction, it was comforting to me. So I did it, and forgot about it.

Then about three months later, I get an email. In the "from" line, it just says, "Diver." And I had no idea what it was, I thought it was spam, probably short for muff diver, they're trying to sell me something about cunnilingus, I thought, "I know, push up the hood, look for the little man in the boat and lick the alphabet, I got my technique down already." Then I see the subject line says, "Big Fan," and thought it sounded familiar. I open it, it's from Laura Wilkinson. I know, it could have been an assistant or something, but she's not a rock star, she's just a diver, so I choose to believe it actually came from her. She wrote:

Michael,

(She called me Michael!)

Thank you so much for your email. I completely understand how difficult it can be to lose someone you love. My family has lost several loved ones in recent years. It's wonderful that you were able to stay with your parents during that time.

Sometimes we have to go through difficult times, but they can definitely make you stronger inside.

Well, I will be using that "fighting spirit" as you called it to try to win gold again in the 2008 Olympic Games. I have a long road ahead of me and many battles I'm sure, but I feel like each time I face an obstacle, when I trust Him, God turns it into an opportunity.

Laura


The Preliminaries start tomorrow. So I'd like everybody to join me, let's pray for Laura Wilkinson:

God, I'm sorry about all the times I said, "Fuck you." And you don't like me, that much is clear, and I don't like you. But please, instead of praying for that thing with Marissa Miller and the massage oil, I'm taking a break, and praying for this, please, bring Laura Wilkinson the gold.

Amen.

Thanks.

Namaste.

Author's addendum, 8/21/08
Sadly, troubled by a strained tricep muscle, Laura made the Finals, but failed to medal, finishing in ninth place. She did, however, nail her last dive, capping a worthy and fitting end to an incredible career.

from 8/5/08

Perhaps I've Gone Too Far

. . .
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Do you think Morgan Freeman narrated his own car crash?

Too soon?

This is the morbid sense of humor I was referring too last week. I work at a pharmaceutical advertising agency, and one of the drugs we represent is Ambien. And I came up with what I thought was a pretty good tagline, so I told it to one of the copywriters:

Ambien. So good, Heath Ledger can't stop taking it.

They didn't seem to like it either.

Tonight's theme is milestones, and I haven't really had any recently, the closest I've had is last week when I came back to the open mikes for the first time in nine months. The thing that truly shocked me about that was people actually noticed I was gone.

The only major milestone that even comes to mind is when I turned thirty. I wanted to celebrate by doing something I'd never done before. I didn't know what, but I hoped it would come to me by the end of the night. That night I went to a club with some friends, and after we left, I was walking back to the subway and I really had to take a piss, so I pissed on the sidewalk, and I realized, "I've never done this before. Mission accomplished."

I pissed on a subway platform once. Not my proudest moment, but when you've fallen asleep on the subway and wake up in the south Bronx seventeen stops past yours and it's 4am, you do what you have to.

But I what I really wanted to talk about is my neighborhood. I live in the East 90s, which I consider to be a subset of the Upper East Side. I'm not saying that we're better, it's still the Upper East Side. It's still frat boy hell and yuppieville, but there's a few things that distinguish it. First of all, it's right by the First Avenue Projects, which is First Avenue and around 92nd to 94th Street, and East Harlem, which officially starts at 96th Street. So it's a much more diverse area than your typical whitebred Upper East Side neighborhood.

This is unrelated, but we also have a very impressive population of rats. Not the little ones, I'm talkin' the big nasty Willard rats. And it's not like you hear them scuffle around and every now and them catch a glimpse, you see them running across the sidewalk every night. So if you know any city vampires who don't want to bite people and need to find some form of nocturnal wildlife to feed on, send them up to 93rd street.

Also, because of it's vicinity to East Harlem and the projects, it's the only Upper East Side neighborhood that's regularly patrolled by police. Crime used to be really bad there but it's been cleaned up for a long time. It used to be you didn't go above 86th Street, there were gangs and violence back fifteen, twenty years ago. But then they started developing the neighborhood, which they're still doing. More and more high-rises are going up. Remember that crane that fell about a month and a half ago? That was three blocks from my apartment. Usually when you gentrify an area, it becomes a safer neighborhood. Apparently that's not how we roll up there.

But the one thing that we still have a lot of is homeless people. It's not overrun or anything, but I see more homeless in my neighborhood than I do downtown. And the homeless people up there are, well, I'll just say it, they're assholes. Something about the place, it's like, "You spare some change?"

"No, I'm sorry."

"FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!!!"

It's like they have the same sense of entitlement that the yuppies do. That's why it was so nice when, a couple of weeks ago I was coming home and decided to stop by the bodega for a soda, and there was a homeless guy sitting on a milk crate in front of it. It's his regular spot, and as I walked over, I see him jump up and run around the corner. When I came out of bodega, he's sitting there with a pizza box. I guess someone was gonna throw it out and he asked for it. Anyway, he holds up his cup and shakes it, and says, "God bless you sir." I was feeling generous, so I dropped a few coins in there, and he said, "Hey, are you hungry? They gave me all this pizza."

I laughed and said, "No, that's ok," and realize, that's the first time a homeless person ever offered me food. What a pleasant surprise.

Namaste, motherfuckers.

From 7/29/08

What'd You Do That For George? (Oh, God, He Knows)

George Carlin's posthumous cd It's Bad For Ya came out today, and it made me think about the impact that George has on my life. Not only is he my favorite comedian of all time, he's been a major influence on me; I'm not a comedian but he's influenced me as a writer, both through the love of social criticism and by teaching me to be unafraid to be morbid or sick. I have a very morbid sense of humor. Here's an example: last week, my friend Krista wanted me to go to a happy hour benefit for the Jimmy Fund Cancer Institute. I couldn't go, so Krista tried to convince me by saying, "Come on, it's for a good cause," and I said, "So what? My brother's already dead." Because my brother died of leukemia years ago. I find this funny. Krista didn't seem to think so. I guess she's not a Carlin fan.

But one thing that people who know me know is, I curse a lot. I used to attribute this to being from Long Island. It's a regional trait, like NEVER wanting to "change at Jamaica." Also, you either really love or really hate Billy Joel. I fucking hate Billy Joel, he's not bad but I'm sick to fucking death of him. To make things worse, I went to college in Allentown Pennsylvania, people used to sing that fucking song to me all the time, and I'd think, "Ooooooh, please get a tumor in your eye the size of a basketball."

ANYWAY

Sometimes people are surprised when they hear how much I curse, I guess the angelic face throws them. But the people I work with are used to it. In fact, I've become the benchmark by which cursing is measured. A number of times, I've been told by someone, "I was so mad last night, I was cursing as much as you." It feels good to be so accomplished. One person once told me I had a remarkable ability to string together a sentence with such a high number of uses of "fuck." I myself didn't even remember doing this, but apparently the sentence was something to the effect of, "I swear to fucking god, if I ever fucking find out who took my fucking folder, I am gonna fuckin' kick their fucking ass." Or something like that. Another coworker told me, "You use the word "fuck" more than anyone I've ever met." And she's an editor, she gets paid to notice things about words.

The cursing come out the most when I get mad or when I get caught up in a rant about something. Like when I read what that fuckwad Donald Trump said about gorgeous actress Anne Hathaway when she dumped that loser cumfuck con man asshole boyfriend of hers. She should have stood by him? Is he out of his fucking mind?! He turned out to be a scumbag and so she dumped his ass! So if he kills somebody she's just supposed to fucking hang around?! Smile and nod and talk about we don't know the better side that we don't, the one that doesn't fucking kill people?! And who the fuck asked Trump anyway?! You know who? NOBODY!!! He didn't say this in an interview, he issued a press release. What, is he working for fucking TMZ now? He's gotta open his fucking mouth about celebrities? I hope he dies. I hope he fucking dies, I hope that fucking thing on his head comes to life and fucking eats his brains, that fucking scumbag fuckwad MOTHERFUCKER!!!

And at this point, one of my coworkers will ask me if I've taken my medication, and I'll say, "Sadly, yes I have." This is me with my mood stabilized. Be grateful.

ANYWAY

When George died, I looked back and realized that I've been listening to him since I was five years old. It was 1975 and Class Clown was still popular, so my grandparents used to listen to it all the time. I'd hear it when I visited them and eventually they'd let me borrow it and I'd run it over and over again at home. And amid all the stories about Catholic school, Muhammid Ali and knuckle cracking, was the famous Seven Dirty Words routine. And so, at a young, impressionable age, I was introduced to the idea of profanity as high art. Maybe being from Long Island isn't reason I curse so much, maybe George had more of an impact on my life than I realized.

But one thing I'd like to add, something that really pissed me off when George died; the day after he died, they did a show about him on Larry King Live, and he was interviewing Jerry Seinfeld. I gotta be honest, I could give a fuck what Jerry Seinfeld has to say about George Carlin. Now, I know he's one of the more famous comedians in the world, but they're both comedians in the sense that Adam Sandler and Laurence Olivier are both actors, it's just not the same.

To be honest, I've hated Jerry Seinfeld ever since he hopped on the laptop bashing bandwagon. "These people buy a cup of coffee and they think they're opening a business." No, I don't think I'm opening a business, I just like to get out of the house every once in a fucking while. I live in a studio, I don't live in a mansion-sized apartment, that was bought with money earned, FROM A TV SHOW, THAT SOMEBODY ELSE FUCKING WROTE!!! FUCK JERRY SEINFELD!!!

NAMASTE, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Somewhere Down In Disturbia, It Ain't Right

I watched Disturbia on cable a few weeks ago. It's actually a pretty good movie. I know that detractors will just say it's Rear Window for the Gossip Girl generation, but I think it still weaves a good yarn, and David Morse is effectively big time creep city.

BUT

the love story falls a bit flat. so Shia Labeof (I know I spelled his name wrong, I'd learn the correct spelling but it's just not important to me) is basically an everyman, an average boy. that's fine, but his love interest, Sarah Roemer, is extremely gorgeous. Not just gorgeous, a gorgeous girl who wants him immediately. maybe it's because he's under house arrest which gives him a bad boy thing going, but then her reaction to catching him spying on her is to invite herself into his house like she's in the grips of her mating season.

THEN

when he tries to ruin her party and she confronts him, he goes on to describe all her idiosyncrasies and habits in frighteningly meticulous detail, the kind that in a normal society would be grounds for a restraining order. she responds by KISSING HIM. If I'd known that, I would have set up a telescope in front of Jennifer Love Hewitt's house years ago (you know, when she was hot). This is possibly more "disturbing" than all the bodies they later find under David Morse's basement, unless the whole point is that ultimately, Labeuf's behavior leads to Morse's in the real world.

and the film was a hit, possibly because it gives hope to all the stalkers out there suveillancing the girl of their dreams. it's not usually not the girl next door because not too many of them live next door to supermodels, but the internet has turned our computers into the ultimate pair of binoculers. this is no secret of course, but the parallels become increasingly vivid that further you wander into this vietnam, especially with the self-imposed house arrests of cyber-stalkers who never leave their parents' basements. Disturbia gives them hope that their dreams can come true. until then, cyberstalking will still be the most sincere and anonymous form of flattery.

New Kids On The Block

So New Kids On The Block are getting back together. the obvious question is why, but I suspect that one reason is the economy. not because those guys don't have any money, which they may or may not, but seeing as one of them became a real estate agent, with the real estate market being as bad as it is, he may be having a problem without the cash coming in. therefore, George W. Bush is responsible for New Kids On The Block getting back together, all the more reason to vote democratic this election and for the Hillary motherfuckers to not vote McCain out of spite if (and when) Obama gets the nomination (don't fuck this up like the Nader supporters did).

What happened to Donnie Wahlberg's acting career? After Band Of Brothers, even I had respect for the guy.

This is just what the world needs, a 40 year old boy band. Next we'll see a reunion of the original Menudo line up, they've got to all be 60 by now. Should we call them New Men On The Block? Don't they realize their fans are not eleven anymore?

Forever Your Girl


P: Do you have to take a girl to dinner if you want to make her feel special?

J: I don't think so.

P: Or can you just make her dinner at home?

J: That's even better. A nice intimate dinner.

Me: You know what really makes a girl feel special?

J: What?

Me: Anal.

A Few Thoughts On Spitzer

so our former New York governor was involved in another prostitution ring. first of all, "involved in a prostitution ring" is a bit of a suspect phrase. it makes it sound like he was actually part of the business, which I guess is the grammatical collateral damage of the press' inability or unwillingness to simply say "governor hires prostitutes" or "governor pays for sex." Spitzer's not sitting in Albany with velvet green mack-daddy hat and fat gold chain with a dollar sign.

now, in some respects, this isn't really a big deal. should prostitution be illegal in the first place? maybe not. this is the "free" vs "paid" debate. If a 22 year old fucks the balding, middle-aged governor for free, it's ok, but if he gives her compensation it's illegal? what if there's a grey area as far at the distribution of wealth? say spitzer instead were to take private lessons from the dude from "The Pick-Up Artist." then he sees a hot chick in a bar and feeds her that "excuse me, my friend has a jealous girlfriend..." bullshit, gets her number, takes her out for drinks, shows her the governor's mansion then takes her to the master bedroom and fucks her. he essentially is still paying for sex, but his money is distributed to the girl and her employer it's illegal, but if the guy that made the sex happen is the one who profits, the coitus proxy if you will, then it's ok. so you can pay to have the girl manipulated but you can't let the girl herself benefit from the sacrifice of getting nailed by some old freak. not that spitzer's a freak, but look at him and look at "ashley" or whatever her real name is. maybe she deserves something there.

and look at it this way. is there a difference between a guy paying to fuck a high-end prostitute and a guy getting a lapdance from a megahot stripper and then going home and rubbing one out while she's still fresh on the brain? (it happens) well, for one, the second method is essentially a 2 step procedure for an inferior product. what the governor's done is excise waste by cutting down on procedure, while achieving the same end product: an orgasm without his wife. On the other hand, this is also the costlier option, about $2,000 apparently vs $20 and the two-drink minimum. I guess the choice between cost, quality and project management is for the voter to decide.

I guess the biggest problem is the political pandemic of hypocrisy that this epitomizes. would we think more of spitzer if he hadn't helmed a crusade against prostitution businesses. maybe, maybe not, but when I was 15, I wouldn't have thought much of myself if I criticized someone publicly for running into the bathroom with a copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue. then again, god for fucking bid we actually get honesty from a politician.

don't know what I was thinking.

I Belong on the Cover of ‘Tard Magazine


When you’ve become accustomed to working from 8:30 in the morning to 6:30, 7:00 or 7:30 at night, the greatest thing about unemployment is the amount of free time it gives you. When I was told that my job was being eliminated, I felt the emotional shock arrow hit me in the chest as I thought, “I’m unemployed. Who could love me?” When the jolt lifted and I remembered that I’d been miserable for the entire two and a half years that I’d worked there, I realized that this was the best thing that could have happened to me. That job was killing me. Now I had severance, department of labor unemployment and two and half months worth of transit check unlimited metro cards. Was this ever sweet.

And now that I’d been emancipated from that midtown gulag, I finally had plenty of time to sleep, go out, look for a new job, and any tasks or errands I may have. Thusly, one Saturday, I woke up to realize that despite the fact that my daily allotted “me” time had been disrupted by three interviews that week, I’d completed any necessary personal tasks I’d had and had been left with nothing to do for the afternoon. And it was nice outside, sunny and cool. I can’t bear to be inside on a weather permitting day, it’s a trait that my mother branded into my brain by screaming it at me every non rainy weekend of my childhood as she shut off the tv and took away my comic books. Ok, so she was right about that, I just wish this had happened today, just so I could say, “Hey Howard Dean, wanna tone down the decibel level?”

Anyway, how to spend the day? I could walk to Best Buy and look at the big screen tv’s, dvd box sets and video games I can’t buy, dreaming about the day I have enough money to afford them. But now that I was unemployed, I could do the same thing just by going to the supermarket. Since I’d picked up my weekly supply of ramen noodles and generic Mac and Cheese the day before, that was out. Hmmmmmm. As I felt the specter of ennui approaching, a thought from the back of my head, one I’d apparently shoved down and tried to bury there, saw its chance to leap forward and be counted. And thusly, for no other reason that I could possibly fathom, I thought, “I think I’ll go to Hoboken.”

This Hoboken thought had obviously been languishing in the recesses of my mind long enough. It had lived in the shadows of ideas like, “I think I’ll go to Avenue A and hang out at Mo Pitkin’s,” “I think I’ll play Resident Evil 4 for an two and a half hours,” and “I think I’ll get stoned, eat salt and vinegar chips and watch Finding Nemo.” Now it was determined to have its day in the id. And the next thing I knew, I’d taken the subway to 14th and 6th and was headed for the PATH station.

I’d been coming to New York City ever since I was a kid and living here for nearly 10 years. In that time, I’d willfully explored or found myself in pretty much every neighborhood in the four boroughs I’d care to (I’m not counting Staten Island, as I don’t consider it part of New York City because you have to take a fucking boat to get there). It’s something I enjoy doing, it’s like exploring the world without leaving your hometown. My last neighborhood adventures had taken me to see the heavily Irish sections of Woodlawn in the Bronx and Woodside in Queens. I was also drawn to Woodside for Donovan’s Pub, which allegedly makes one of the best hamburgers in the city. I found mine to be good but nothing to sing from the top of the Chrysler Building about. But I don’t consider any journey to be a wasted one, plus it gave me a good story to tell a young lady I met soon thereafter. She would later go on to tell me she that was a vegan, but I don’t think she held my six-mile trek for tasty ground slaughtered cow meat against me. And if she did, well that’s living in the real world. I’ve been known to deny friend requests on MySpace because the person listed John Mayer under their favorite music. Even the most open-minded people have their limits.

So after all this time, I hadn’t lost my thirst for adventure, but I was running out of new places to go. One afternoon, I was so desperate to escape the monotonous familiarity of my own neighborhood that I went over to Morningside Heights, the area of northern Manhattan bounded by the Upper West Side and Harlem. My primary motivation was to check out the new Kim’s Mediapolis store on Broadway and 113th Street, but the more notable features of this sub-locale are Columbia University and Barnard College. It’d been about ten years since I’d ventured farther north than 112th Street (the location of Tom’s Restaurant, an essential stop for Suzanne Vega fanatics like myself) and that was to meet a girlfriend, who was a Barnard student. Being hopelessly in love as I was, I wasn’t really paying much attention to anything beyond the 5-foot radius around her body, so going back was essentially an all new experience. Years ago, native residents liked to refer to the neighborhood as “White Harlem,” but now it might be more accurate to call it “Columbiatown.” It’s like a little college town that’s been crane dropped into the big city. It’s cute. And by cute, I mean adorable in a sincere but condescending way. It might be in Manhattan, but it’s not New York. It’s an embassy for 18 to 22 year old diplomats. Nothing wrong with that, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s foreign soil.

Normally, this is as close to leaving the confines of my home state as I like to come. It takes a lot to get me to traverse our borders, being the obvious New York ethno centrist that I am. When I’m watching New York 1 and they get to their regular, “World Beyond New York” segment, I always think the same thing, “There’s a world beyond New York?” The 2004 Presidential election pushed my state bound jingoism even further. My old philosophy had been, “I don’t have to like Bush to love my country.” But after that November, I declared, “I am not an American, I am a New Yorker. I renounce any allegiance with a country who would willfully put that ignorant, corrupt and incompetent man back in power.” But now, over a year later, despite the fact that I’m still dreaming of the day that New York succeeds from the union, I’d actually decided to cross the Hudson River into alien territory. I’d exhausted the hamlets of Father Knickerbocker. I had to accept the fact that if I wanted to continue exploring the new, I’d have to branch out a little.

Hoboken carried the draw of, well, I didn’t know what, but it was close and easily accessible. I’ve always heard people from New Jersey rave about how great Hoboken was, but then again, they were people from New Jersey. An old coworker of mine once gushed with excitement over the new Hoboken apartment he’d just found. “It’s great, it’s so much better than New York, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper, it’s like the Upper West Side across the river.” About six months later, he told me he was moving back to the Upper West Side.

“But I though you loved Hoboken.”

“No, it’s a fuckin’ dump.”

I should have taken that as a warning, but part of why I’d become a happier person over the course of 2005 is the belief that if I want to do something, follow the instinct and do it instead of giving myself excuses not to. Whether it was walking up to a girl cold and introducing myself, singing onstage at an open mike or competing in the Mr. Lower East Side Pageant by doing yoga poses in my underwear in front of the packed crowd at the Bowery Poetry Club, this concept had served me well. Perhaps it was the lure of the unknown or the prospect of finding a McDonald’s where the items on the dollar menu actually cost a dollar, but going to Hoboken was what I wanted to do that day.

I boarded the PATH train and eventually felt the instinctual cruel shiver that told me that I’d broken the state seal and was now in New Jersey. I walked out of the station onto the sidewalk off Court Street and looked around. It looked unsettlingly familiar. I’d been there before, only then, it was nighttime. So this was Hoboken in the daylight. Didn’t make much of a difference as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything to look at. Just a newsstand, traffic light and some kind of bar or restaurant type thing across the street.

So I actually had been in Hoboken once before. Very briefly, and as it should be noted, against my will. After our boss’ Christmas party in Westchester, my friend Bill was driving back to New Jersey with his wife and fellow coworker Nicole, and offered to drop me off in Manhattan along the way. I got a little concerned when Bill’s wife lit a joint and passed it to him while we were rollin’ down the highway, but this dissipated shortly after she passed it to me. Bill handled his herb, plus, all the beer, wine and champagne he’d consumed that evening, well enough to avoid any life-threatening accidents. Unfortunately, his focus failed enough for him to miss the Manhattan exit. When we both realized what he’d done, Bill offered, no, issued, a solution I wasn’t quite expecting.

“Mike, you’re goin’ to Hoboken.”

“I’m going to Hoboken?”

“Yep.”

“But I don’t wanna go to Hoboken.”

“Don’t worry, it’s cool. Nicole lives there, I’ll drop her off and take you to the PATH.”

Bill’s plan came to fruition. I’d never taken the PATH before, but he assured me it was an easy transit system to figure out, and by that point, it was far beyond the level of choice for me. It was several hours past midnight, and I stood by the entrance on the empty, barren street, feeling like a five year old who’d come from the circus only to have his parents leave him in the parking lot and drive off saying, “You find your way home.”

And I said, “Bill, I’m gonna fucking kill you. And I am a smart enough person that I will do it in such a way that your body will not be found and I will never be caught.”

Bill said, “See ya Monday,” and drove off.

Before I could enter the station, I was approached by a young Hasidic man carrying a large plastic garbage bag. The image was more than a little odd and slightly frightening, but he was actually rather polite, “Excuse me sir, do you happen to be Jewish?”

It was 2 o’clock in the morning, 35 degrees outside, and this guy’s out on the town looking for Jews. In spite of my vice laden physical and mental state, or more likely because of it, I found this very amusing. So with great enthusiasm, I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I am.”

“Well I’m from the Chabad Lubavitch, we’re giving away free menorahs to anybody who wants one. All we ask is for is a small donation.”

And I thought, Hey, I don’t have a menorah. I’d like to have a menorah.

“Sure, I’ll take a menorah.” I fished a couple of singles out of my wallet and forked them over, then he reached into his garbage bag and pulled out a menorah made of bent sheet metal and box of menorah candles. I thanked him and made my way into the station.

Once inside, I discovered my gifted IQ was sufficient enough to plan Bill’s murder, but not enough to overcome the double-edged substance blade and figure out how to buy a PATH ticket. The coke-machine styled automatic ticket vendor I’d submitted my dollar to had produced nothing. Admitting failure, I opened my wallet for another go, only to discover it was now empty. Turned out I’d been abandoned in Hoboken with just a few dollars in my pocket, and had unknowingly given all but one of them to menorah boy. Without a transit employee or ATM in sight, I stood there in frozen panic over the prospect of being trapped in this desolate, foreign land that god forgot called New Jersey. Fortunately, I finally noticed a light on the turnstile by the machine that seemed to indicate that my dollar had unlocked it for safe passage. It was my first correct deduction for quite a while, and soon I was on my way back to my safe Manhattan home.

Now, years later, I was standing on virtually the same spot as I was when I threatened Bill’s life and took candles from a stranger. Well, it was time to create some new memories of our little friend across the river. Time to discover the real Hoboken. I crossed the street and continued down the road, desperate to find something worth looking at. To my dismay, but not my surprise, I failed miserably. Mostly just a long concrete side walk and empty walls. Except for the occasional restaurant front, bank entrance and a parking lot, it was more like an oversized alley with traffic lights than an actual street. Eventually I came to a park, but not much there either, except for some children’s swings, monkey bars and a couple of young girls I couldn’t help noticing. They looked about 18, which in these times of mass-distributed milk saturated with bovine growth hormone, meant they were probably about 14 or 15, which meant turn the fuck away and keep walking.

As I prepared to go to hell, I moved off Court Street and shifted over to Washington Street. Apparently this was the cancer-ridden heart of this delightful burg, as it was lined with stores and pedestrians. I headed north, clinging to the hope that I could find something interesting. There were a number of restaurants that might be described as cheap, affordable, modest or shithole, depending on your level of income and condescension. I also spotted a few shops that sold nothing of interest to me, and a whole lot of small run-down convenience stores. I hesitate to call them bodegas because the term always implied New York. These places were in New Jersey, they didn’t have the right to be called bodegas. And as uniformly crappy across state lines as they were, at least New York bodegas had their selling points, like the pot and crack behind the counter, at least in the pre-Guiliani days. I couldn’t imagine these places storing anything illicit that appealed to the general public of Hoboken, except for maybe bootleg cd’s of The Dave Matthews Band.

Venturing further, I saw a building with a large golden statue of a deer outside it. Now here was something interesting. A beautiful animal, big and shiny, and no one around enraged enough by it to smash the Ten Commandments on the ground. Then I got closer and discovered that the building housed Lodge 74 of the Elk’s Club. I’d like to repeat that, THE ELK’S CLUB. The organization with a mission to inculcate the principles of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love and Fidelity; to recognize a belief in God; to promote the welfare and enhance the happiness of its Members; to quicken the spirit of American patriotism; to cultivate good fellowship. All I really knew about those types of places is what I learned from The Honeymooners and The Flintstones; that apparently they consisted of grown men in stupid hats who used it as an excuse to get away from their wives and drink beer all night, with a chain of command that harked back to the backward days of feudalism. It sounded like a club for middle-aged frat boys who’d advanced thirty years without bothering to grow the hell up. It figures there’d be one here.

Carrying on, I saw a bunch of twenty something dudes drinking on the stoop of one of the many brownstones that lined the street. Or, maybe it wasn’t right to call them brownstones. These were walkups. Brooklyn has brownstones, not New Jersey. A brownstone is a walkup with an attitude; it says, “welcome to my home” but will just as easily shout, “get the fuck off my steps.”

Anyway, these guys were drinking beer out in public, which I gathered from their lack of concern was fine as long as you were behind your gate. Or that in a place as badly in need of an urban defibrillator as this, nothing ever happened to warrant the need for much law enforcement. These guys were clearly future Elksmen; baseball caps, sweater vests, shorts in January, and the self-impressed sneers on their faces that come with their stockbroker commission checks. One of them was even wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. Now, that doesn’t bother me because I’ve been a Yankee fan since I was nine years old and every blood cell that pumps through my veins carries a sheer hatred for the Red Sox. I happen to love the city of Boston and bear no malice against genuine regional Bosox fanatics. It’s the sudden influx of Red Sox paraphernalia that mysteriously appeared on the streets of New York the year the Red Sox won the World Series that makes me lose faith in humanity. It begs the question, was there an unforeseen mass emigration from New England into New York? Did they decide it was time to leave once the curse of the bambino was broken? Or is it more likely that there was a preexisting legion of asshole pseudos that lack the individuality to pick a fucking side and stick with it? If you don’t like sports, fine. If you do, don’t be so transparent that your idea of loyalty and strength of will is to knock over the flower arrangement and jump on the horse in the Winner’s Circle. Especially if you’re a Met fan. No disrespect, but don’t just shift your loyalties up north for the schadenfreude of cheering on the club that makes Yankee fans suffer. It’s not our fault that your team hasn’t won a world series in over 20 years. Well, it kind of is because we beat you in 2000. But regardless of the motivation, the Red Sox hat has become the uniform for the New York phony. If I were from Boston, I’d be pissed about this athletic perversion. As for this guy, it seemed fitting that the lodge wasn’t far down the road. It couldn’t far down the road for him metaphorically either.

I walked as far down Washington as I could bear, desperate to find anything that could have justified the price of my PATH train ticket. But I found no success. When I even glanced around for indicators of signs of life after sundown, there wasn’t much that I could find. Enthused Hobokeners always talk about the active bar scene. Maybe they’re all talking about the same bar. Maybe there was one magic bar in this drought of urban worth that convinced the locals that they shine in the shadow of Manhattan. Yes, Hoboken was just like the Upper West Side, without the sea of pubs, without the good restaurants, without said Tom’s Restaurant, access to Central park, the Museum of Natural History and Lincoln Center. Without the attempt at urban hipness that’s debunked by the yuppie demographic and kept in check by the family domesticity and small town feel, enough to keep it from becoming too unjustly self-impressed. Without all the things that make it a place where I would never live but actually, not such a bad place to visit. Hoboken is a place that actually makes me defend the Upper West Side. I think that says it all.

And when I was passed by a BMW that was blasting some pussy emo band like Taking Back The Brand New Story Of The Hawthorn Heights or whatever, I knew I had to get out of Hoboken as soon as possible. In New York, you’ll often hear hip-hop blaring out of car windows, and it’s fitting. It’s is the music of the streets. Apparently, the music of the streets of Hoboken is Fallout Boy. Emo, screamo, whatever the fuck you want to call it, is not punk rock. It’s the hair-metal of the 21st century. The kind of crap makes a pretense of being the loud, hard and edgy battle cry against the establishment, but is really just a non-threatening genre smokescreen that attracts weak poseurs by convincing them that they’re being rebellious rockers. They’re hardly exclusive to Hoboken, but the German yuppiemobile was the roaming audio proof: they’re here. And judging by everything else I’d seen, probably in great numbers. These are the same people who clog the arteries of downtown Manhattan, looking for their martini lounges and hookah bars. The ones who turned the phrase, “Go back to Jersey” from an astute, observational witticism into one of the most heinous insults you can strike with on the streets of the empire state. They can’t handle life in a real city, but use my home as their playground. And for some reason, for some motivation I could not explain, I had returned the favor. Why did I come here? Why did I do this to myself? Why did I spend three dollars to remind myself why I’m a misanthrope? ‘Cause I’m an idiot, that’s why. I could be home, lying across my bed, drinking iced tea and watching Mythbusters. And not just any episode, an episode with both the cute redhead and the pretty blond with the body who can fix cars. Just as I realized this, I passed a shop that was called “Greetings From Hoboken,” and was forced to wonder, who would send anyone a greeting from Hoboken? Isn’t that an open admission that they’d actually been there? Who would admit to that? I’ll tell ya who. ME, that’s who. In cultural circles, we call this, “suffering for our art.”

I was scampering back to the PATH station with a power walk that could have gotten me on the Olympic track team when I looked up and saw it. The one good thing about Hoboken. The view of New York City. Looming past the Hudson River is a clear shot of southern Manhattan, the sated infrastructure of buildings shooting up out of the smooth surface of the water like a lush garden of steel and concrete blooming from the garden soil. You don’t get to see New York like this when you’re there, it’s a shame that you have to go to New Jersey to do it. Back in August of 2001, while on my way to a concert at Liberty State Park, we surfaced from the PATH station at Exchange Place to see Jersey City in one direction and a breathtaking view of the southern tip of Manhattan in the other. Front and center were the Twin Towers, standing proud and tall like the all-powerful patriarch of architecture. We were in a hurry to catch the Light Rail, but I remember thinking that I’d have to come back there to take some photographs. I had plenty of time because I was off from work the following week, but I never got around to it. Then, just three weeks later, the towers were gone. The view would never be the same again. And I’d missed my chance to capture it. You really don’t appreciate what you have or where you are until you leave it, and maybe you need to do that every once in a while, no matter how painful it is. You know what they say about “when it’s gone.” Maybe there really is no such thing as a wasted journey.

Wasted or not, my travels that day were done. I hopped the PATH to the 6, and made my way back to my apartment. I collapsed onto my bed, grateful to be back to the sanctuary of my New York home, and watched my taped episodes of Mythbusters. They made a crossbow out of rolled up newspaper, homemade glue, a piece of a cafeteria tray and underwear elastic. How fucking cool is that?

(fiction)

My Good Friend Nomar

I’m at the corner of 33rd street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. And I walk. Then I’m at the exit of the tunnel that goes underneath Grand Central Station. And I stop walking. I hear a very loud horn, followed by a screech. Suddenly, I feel a sharp pain in my thigh, then a piercing pain on the side of my head. And I’m flying. Nothing compares to the feeling of euphoria you get from weightlessness. Even if it’s only for a second and a half, you know that’s the sensation to have as your last. Then I feel a rough, tearing pain on the back of my head and then everything goes black.

That was a few years ago. The next day they discovered I have Bipolar disorder. Two days later I was institutionalized. Did you know that certain forms of Bipolar disorder go undiagnosed because the mania is less extreme than the depression? That might have been useful to know before I decided to jump onto my desk, smash my computer against the floor, storm out of the office building and walk into the middle of the street. Geez, all those years of medical school and they can’t come up with a better way to figure out that I’m fucking crazy than me trying to kill myself. God damn, I’m mentally ill and even I could have figured that out. What the hell do those doctors do all day?

Anyway, I could tell you about the time I spent at the institution, but I’m sure you’ve heard enough of those kinds of stories. And trust me, it’s not what you think, it’s very boring. Institution life is very structured; it’s all about the routine. Every day, you eat at the same time, watch tv at the same time, take your meds at the same time, blah blah blah. I swear, more people went out of that place with obsessive-compulsive disorder than went in. It’s ok though; a few of them became professional house cleaners. Hey, you won’t find a better house cleaner than an OCD patient. Trust me on that.

A year later, I was out. Still bipolar, but armed with Depakote. It’s a mood stabilizer, which is good for you I guess. I kind of missed being on Thorazine though. That’s what they gave me in the beginning. Apparently they sometimes do that with suicidal behavior. Plus, smashing my head against the X-ray light board in the emergency room didn’t help. But what the hell, you ever been on Thorazine? Oh, you gotta try it, it’s awesome. It reminded me of all the times in college I got really drunk and then smoked a lot of pot. Imagine walking around in slow motion with a heavy lead blanket draped over you and you should get the general idea. Boy, those were the days.

But that was ages ago. I was released from the institution, and then, at the age of 33, I moved back in with my parents. I know, you’d think that that would make you even crazier, but I actually like my parents. They were 60’s beatniks who grew up and went to law school. They were professionals, but without the strict conservative tendencies. And they listened to jazz, so I never had to hear all that bullshit about how rock n roll died with Jim Morrison, like my friends who grew up with hippy parents did.

And when I moved back in, they were really supportive. I was very fragile, and I hadn’t dealt with the real world for quite a long time.
Everything was scary to me, because I never knew what was gonna set me off. Depakote only goes so far. Sure, I don’t wanna take my toaster into the bathtub, but that’s hardly the mark of unshakeable stability. One time, near the beginning, my mom picked me up a Pepsi instead of a Coca-cola and I went berserk. My poor mother.

Like I said, the real world frightened me, but my parents were ok to let me recover at my own pace. So I didn’t have to do anything. It was like being a kid again. Because, after your mental state’s been shattered, that’s basically what you are. You can come back lucid, with your old knowledge intact, but you’re still reeducating yourself in becoming a functioning part of the social structure. So I spent a lot of time in the beginning, free from responsibility and focused on relaxing. All I did was sit in my room, watch tv, play video games and eat ice cream. Remember when you were a kid and got sick, and you’d stay home from school and have a ball by sleeping until 12 o’clock and watching game shows all afternoon? That’s what it was like, only now I was mentally ill and staying home from work indefinitely.

And I watched a lot of baseball. I know, it got me worked up and emotional, especially when the Yankees were in a tight spot. But after quite a few one-on-one sessions with the doctor in the institution, I had accepted that it was just game. They figured that realization would be crucial to my recovery, after they made the mistake of letting me watch the Yankees play the Boston Red Sox a few weeks after they took me off thorazine. The Yankees lost. Boston’s shortstop, Nomar Garciaparra, in particular had killed us that day. He had four hits, including a home run that won them the game in the 9th inning. I’d thrown two chairs through the tv room window by the time they pumped me full of sedative just to shut me up. I just kept screaming, “That Nomar Garciaparra! I hate him, I hate him I hate him, he’s RUINING MY LIFE!”

But that was then. My friend Depakote won’t let that happen again.

Anyway, after a few months holed up in my room, I’d had enough. I had to go outside, or else I was gonna drive myself crazy again. So I spent every afternoon walking. I gave myself a goal to turn it into an adventure and feel a sense of accomplishment. One day I’d go to Gray’s Papaya to eat a hot dog. Another day I’d go to Riverside Park and look at New Jersey. One time I ate a sandwich at Tom’s dinner and then walked to Harlem and bought an oversized Fat Albert T-shirt. Just to say I did it. That was a fun day.

But eventually, I’d gone everywhere I thought I could go. I needed something to give my life a greater sense of purpose. And to that end, I started working at a record store. I came across it on one of my walks, but I didn’t start working there until much later. I had a few rather inauspicious initial meetings with the manager. He was quite unsavory. He had that kind of stern, crabby, bitterness that so many middle-aged retail clerks seem to have. I walked up to him and said. “Hi, my name’s Coltrane Tamberlaine. What’s yours?”

“What the hell’s your name?”

“Coltrane Tamberlaine.”

“How the hell’d you get a name like that?”

“Well my parents are really into jazz and so for years I assumed that they named me after their favorite saxophone player but then I found out their favorite saxophone player was Ornette Coleman and so I said, ‘Why’d you name me Coltrane then?’ and they said that I was conceived to a John Coltrane album, which they really shouldn’t have told me because I haven’t been able to listen to him ever since, which is a shame because I really like him, but anyway people call me Cole for short.”

“Yeah, that’s fascinating. In fact, why don’t you go over there and tell the cashier that.”

“I did. She said I should come over and tell you.”

“I must have pissed her off.”

“What’s your name?”

“IT’S JERRY! NOW WILL YOU GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE?!”

I started crying right on the spot. I ran home, slammed a Depakote and went to sleep. But I still came back next day. They were playing a kung-fu movie on the monitor in the video section. “Hey Jerry, did you know that the Jackie Chan movie Operation Condor was actually the sequel to a movie called Armour of God? And when they released Armour of God in the states on video they called it Operation Condor 2, so the movie that’s the original in the rest of the world is the sequel in the US to the movie that’s the sequel in the rest of the world?”

“You talk to everybody like this?”

“Yeah. I don’t restrain myself verbally.”

“Well, maybe you should.”

“I used to.”

“How’d that work out for ya?”

“I tried to kill myself.”

Oh that shut him up pretty fast. I guess he believed me, ‘cause he never yelled at me again. So I just kept coming back. Every now and then I’d buy something so that I wouldn’t seem like a freeloader. In fact, I became such a good customer, that Jerry had to tolerate me whether he wanted to or not. And so when winter came around and the store started hiring extra help for the Christmas rush, I said, “Jerry, my main man! What do ya say?”

He gave me a look as if the very thought utterly horrified him. But eventually he said, “What the hell. You’re here every day anyway. You might as well make yourself useful.”

And after Christmas, I ended up staying on. Even Jerry had to admit that I was a valuable employee. I was the only one who could answer customer’s questions about Miles Davis, Iron Maiden and Abba. Sure, I threw the occasional conniption fit, like the time I realized that the short and really hot woman I was checking out was actually a girl who was probably all of 14 years old. When she left I started screaming about how girls didn’t look like that when I was 14, and how it must have something to do with all the bovine growth hormone they give the cows who make the milk now, in an obvious conspiracy to make us feel even worse about our own decrepit sense of aging. Minutes later, I was on the floor with tears in my eyes, crying about how I was old and lonely and no girl could ever love a crazy person. But it was late spring by then. Jerry was just shrugging that stuff off. That’s what’s great about living in a city like New York. You can be pretty god damn manic and not scream anything worse than what bums yell out in the subway on a daily basis.

He just did what he always did when his patience wore thin, which was send me out to Xando to get him coffee. While I was in there, by coincidence, I ran into my dad. He told me a client had just given him tickets to see the Yankees play the Red Sox that night. “I was gonna call your uncle, but, do you wanna go?”

“Oh, YEAH!”

And later that night I was at Yankee stadium, at the ballgame, with my dad. It was great until the game started. At every game, there’s always at least one jerk who’s gotta spoil it for you, and it turned out that there were a couple of loudmouth guys from Boston, sitting right behind us. First inning, Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter comes up to bat, and there go the guys behind me, “Nomah’s bettah! Nomah’s bettah!” Third inning, there they go again, “Nomah’s bettah! Nomah’s bettah!” Fifth inning, guess who drove in the tying run? “NOMAH! AH RIGHT NOMAH!” Seventh inning, still tied, things very tense, Derek Jeter’s up again, and there they go, right on queue, “NOMAH’S BETTAH! NOMAH’S BETTAH!” I tried to stay calm and avoid any conflict. But this was beyond Depakote. This wasn’t just about brain synapses or chemical imbalances. I was offended. Offended, as a New Yorker. And so I turned around and faced them.

“NoMAR.”

“What?”

“Nomar. His name is Nomar.”

“That’s what I said. Nomah.”

“NoMAR! With an R in it. He’s your best player and you can’t even pronounce his fucking name!

He turned to his friend. “See? That’s what happens in New Yahk.”

“New YORK, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” And I grabbed him, pulled him to the floor and starting shaking him. “Pronounce the R! Pronounce the fucking R!” His friend started hitting me but I wouldn’t let go. It finally took three security guards to pull me off of him. They dragged me kicking and screaming to the security office and tossed me into a little room. I cried so hard that I nearly threw up.

When the game ended, they let me out and told me not come back to Yankee Stadium until next year. They were gonna ban me for life, but my father explained that I was mentally ill. It’s amazing, the advantages of being crazy in the era of political correctness. But of course, the big question remained. “Dad? Who won the game?”

“The Yankees did. Derek Jeter hit a home run in the 8th inning.”

“YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

I started jumping for joy, right in the security office. My dad looked at the head security guy and pointed at me with raised eyebrows, to which the guy nodded his head. But I didn’t care. We hadn’t just won the game, we’d won the argument. Nomar’s better, huh? Not tonight. Guess he’s not ruining my life after all.

When we left the stadium, it was pretty late. The only fans still around were the ones who were waiting for the players to come from the locker room. There was a big crowd around a few of the Yankees, who were signing things left and right. Then I noticed that a few of the Red Sox were walking out as well. I excused myself and went up to them before Dad could stop me. “Excuse me, Mr. Garciaparra?” He smiled and said hello. “Could I please have your autograph?” He seemed a little confused, considering that I was wearing a Yankee cap and t-shirt. But he seemed more than happy to do it. He even asked me who to make it out to.

“Ah, could you put, ‘To my good friend Coltrane?’” And so he did, “To my good friend Coltrane, Nomar Garciaparra.” He’s a hell of a nice guy.

Ok, so I know that getting an autograph from a baseball player is hardly a profound epiphany. But when was the last time you made peace with a personal demon of yours? Do you have a tangible manifestation of redemption that you can look at when you need to be reminded that personal dilemmas can be overcome? Well I do. Even if Nomar doesn’t play for Boston anymore, I’ll always have it. And I have a job, the support of my family, and Depakote. All I need now is the love of good lady. And would you believe it, I actually feel a sense of optimism about that. It’s not so ridiculous to believe that a mental patient can find the right girl. I just hope it’s true what they say. You know, the pretty ones are always crazy.

It Couldn’t Be Any Worse Than The Fox News Network


I once heard about this kid from New Jersey, who brought new meaning to the phrase, “party down,” when he jumped from his Daytona Spring Break hotel window into the pool below. He made it, so he tried again. Again he made it, so he tried again. Again he made it, so he tried again, slipped, fell to the ground below and died.

This story taught me a great deal about myself. I’d had my suspicions, but I didn’t really know what a misanthrope I was until I realized that I didn’t feel sorry for this kid. In fact there’s a little part of me that’s happy about the microscopic rise in the average American IQ that we have with this imbecile gone. I just don’t see this as a tragedy.

That’s when it hit. Maybe this is actually the way we can save the country. We could save money on a lot of education and social programs if all we did was just let the stupid people die. Not every stupid person, I mean, there’s not a single person on the planet who’s above the occasional act of idiocy.

That being said, I think we need to return pointless acts of stupidity to the airwaves bringing back more programs like Jackass. If some kid is stupid enough to set himself on fire because he saw it done on show with a self-deprecating title and a clear, “Do not try this at home” disclaimer, he doesn’t live to pass the DNA on. Natural selection. Not just a theory, a good idea.

Here’s another modest proposal. A few shows might not be enough. We need a whole network of this. A whole channel specifically designed for stupid people to imitate, so they’ll die and exit the gene pool. The Deathtime Network. It’ll have shows like, The Camouflage Wearing Deer-Hunting Hour, Dick Clark’s Shotguns, Switchblades and Practical Jokes. We’ll have game shows like New York Rush Hour Jaywalking. It’ll be great, just imagine Chuck Woolery standing on the median at Broadway and Houston in Manhattan, saying, “OK, it’s Timmy from Omaha, the sign says, ‘Don’t Walk,’ let’s see if he can make it, OHHHHH! I’m sorry Timmy, too slow. But no one goes home empty-handed. Jack, tell Timmy what he’s won.”

“Yes Chuck, our second place contestant wins a free trip to the Emergency Room at St Vincent’s Hospital, deep in the heart New York’s fashionable West Village. That’s St Vincent’s Hospital, come for the triage, stay if you’re insured, courtesy of the nearsighted commuter from Bayonne, New Jersey who ran you over.”

We’ll have our own sports, too. Not the “putting a ball somewhere” variety like you sees on the broadcast networks. We’ll have automotive sports. You know the Indy 500? Daytona 500? We’ll have Death Race 2000. Like the Roger Corman film. None of this going around in a circle bullshit, we send the cars into the streets to earn points by running people over. The only question is where to do it. You could have it in New Jersey, since that’s pretty much how they drive anyway. Texas is another good option, they execute people for jaywalking there, no one will pay any mind to another missing pedestrian.

No, Death Race won’t be any fun unless you have it somewhere where people will actually know the difference. Plus, ideally, you’d want it in a place with an expendable population, like, say, France. But doing it overseas would be too complicated; your best bet would be somewhere close where the people are inconsequential, like Canada. You know, people who won’t really be missed.

Then we come back to New York for Celebrity Death Car, out in the Hamptons. Then every spring, we have the college tournament, but only for Fraternity brothers. We have it during one of those four day breaks, when most of the students are gone; we just bring the frat boys back for the taping. It’ll be easy, you just promise them a free T-shirt of some kind. You know, something like, “Co-ed Naked Lacrosse,” “Tau Delta Gamma Beach Party ‘04,” “Fred Flintstone Says Yabba Grabba Brew.” Hey, if they live, they’re gonna need something to put on under those sweater vests they like to wear so much.

Anyway, Death Race will have a point system for different types of pedestrians. But no points for children or senior citizens, I’m not completely insensitive. In fact, you make the mistake of hitting a child and you’re out of the game. That’s too cruel. The same pretty much goes for running over senior citizens. Everyone gets…, 8 warnings, but then with the 9th old-timer, you’re out of there. Then the finalists, in order to become champions, must cross the finish line, which happens to be at the edge of a fucking cliff. That way, we all win.

Now, the network doesn’t have to be completely negative, we could provide some balance by including some heartwarming content. The Nazi Execution hour. Now, there’s an idea worth imitating. Wouldn’t you love to hear that a fifteen year old bashed in the brains of a neo-Nazi with a meat-tenderizer, because he saw it on TV? You know, ‘cause we made killing Nazis look really PHAT? Come to think of it, we could integrate it into the other shows and make that the lynchpin of the whole network. Every day, we start the morning with Live with Regis and Nazi Electrocutions. Regis gets the comfy cushion seat, the guest gets an electric chair. You start small at first, local skinheads and clansmen. Then hopefully, as we become more popular, we could get the bigger high profile guests in time for sweeps, politicians and sports personalities, like David Duke and former Major League pitcher John Rocker. You think people wouldn’t be showing up late to work, because they didn’t want to miss the sight of some hateful, fascist government official with smoke billowing out of his ears? Who would object to that? I mean besides Bill O’Reilly? Did you ever notice that Nazis tend to vote Republican? Don’t mean to imply anything. Just sharing a thought.

Of course, at Deathtime, we’ll have to sell commercial advertising space. But the advertisers are gonna be involved with the population control too. Not necessarily the stupid people though. I’m not sure if it’s right to commercially endorse this form of genetic engineering. So just be fair, the ads will shave points off every IQ demographic, and we won’t have to look far to find clients that fit in with the ethic of the network.

First, we’re gonna lift the ban on television advertising for cigarettes. There’s a goldmine waiting to happen. Why the hell not? Why can’t I run a cigarette commercial if I feel like it? What are they gonna do, fine me? Who cares? I’ll pay the fine! Do you have any idea how much money RJ Reynolds will shell out get Camel commercials on tv again? You could write the fine estimates into the advertising contract, they’d slash their finger and sign the damn thing in blood if they had to.

And if I get arrested or sued, I’ll just do what the Tobacco executives and conservative politicians always do, I’ll say I didn’t know.

“Do you think advertising cigarettes on television is amoral and illegal?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer.”

Well, it is the truth, to a certain degree. But I digress. Next, we’re gonna run ads from all the major drug companies, but we’re gonna cut out the part at the end of the where they list all the possible side effects. All you’re gonna see are the old dancing couples, the thirty-something men walking down the beach, and the women doing Tai Chi in the park. No mention of the possible fatigue, headache, hair loss, body pain, cramping, night sweats, shedding skin, heart failure, bloody urine, gang green, galloping hallucinations of Tim Roth and Marissa Tomei riding on a giant cow’s tongue commanding an army of flying piranhas, and of course, certain sexual side-effects. It won’t kill anyone, but it’ll fuck with them real good.

Of course, the network is going to upset people. Everybody from parent groups, religious fundamentalists, right wing political organizations, and naturally, the rays of sunshine who are proud members of all three. So if it makes them happy, if it’ll shut them the hell up, I’ll make believe I give a crap about what they have to say and create disclaimers for all the programming. I could just put up something like, “If you think the following program could be dangerous, amoral, or if you just plain don’t like it, here’s a novel idea, shut it off.”

No. Maybe something like, “The following program may be considered offensive to people who don’t believe that anyone else has the ability or the right to decide on their own what they may consider entertainment.

No, that side of freedom of choice never seems to work with the types. The disclaimers will have to be more specific. I think a show like, “Oncoming Highway Traffic Skateboard Jumping,” will be preceded by something like, “The following program features numerous scenes of skateboard jumping over oncoming cars in various interstate highways. Do not attempt this yourself. And do not purchase the skateboard at Jackson Sporting Goods at the corner of Cold Spring Road and Jackson Avenue in Syosset, Long Island. Do not go to the Extreme sports section and ask for Matthew, the experienced staff member who will help you choose the right skateboard, in-line skates or any other extreme sporting equipment that’s right for you. That’s Jackson Sporting Goods, We Make Having Fun So Easy.”

And so, the Deathtime Network shall endure, boosting the brainpower of our youth by cleaning out the system. Another generation of this kind of natural selection and the youth of tomorrow would be positively gifted. This way, you could spend less money on education; the Republicans would jump at that in a second. On second thought, I think we’ll have to wait a while. I think our current president’s advisors would see the downside of the “letting stupid people die” policy, even if Dubya himself didn’t. Come to think of it, it would go through, the Vice-President would be all over that in a heartbeat. So call your local cable operator and demand The Deathtime Network. Just don’t forget to look both ways before you cross the street.