A GENERAL UPDATE or "Moan, Moan, Moan"

Dear Vaulties-

It's been an emotionally draining week and a half, let me tell you. I've had a hell of a lot on my mind and I have not been my usual chipper self at all.

I'm currently weathering the cumulative effects of the continuing fruitless job search, my withering lack of funds, the death of Tura Satana — which I will write about soon — , ending my seven-month relationship (the woman in question is in no way a villain; things simply did not work out, so please no derisive comments), and just a general sense of zero motivation. I know that such is not the case, but I feel like more than a bit of a failure and it seems like everything I touch or attempt either yields no fruit or outright turns to shit. I could really use a vacation away from my cozy (read "tiny") apartment here in Park Slope, but I have nowhere to go, no money to get there and enjoy the place wit, and no one to go with, so bubkes. There's even a potentially very interesting party going on tonight in mid-town, but I'm not in a festive mood and as a result I'm pre-emptively removing myself from that particular playing field because I don't want my current malaise to bring down everybody else's good time. And, frankly, I don't think getting drunk would be the best of ideas at the moment.

I'll be fine soon enough, but right now I would like nothing better than to just sleep on something resembling a normal schedule. I'm certainly no stranger to insomnia, but the last few nights have found me staring at the ceiling and gleaning short periods of slumber mostly during the daylight hours. At least it's the weekend, so I have no job interviews and I can just crash out as much as I like.

But enough of my grousing. I just wanted to let you all know that I'm still here. Just a tad emotionally debilitated.

Pfooey.

A WEE RAMBLE, FUELED BY FISH BROTH

Yer Bunche, enjoying a late night/early morning cup of miso soup.

Current random iTunes soundtrack: "Voodoo Doll"-Toyah Wilcox, "Agent Double-O-Soul"-Edwin Starr, "Action Woman"-The Litter, "Ahead"-Wire, "I'm An Agent"-Gary Numan, "Run for Your Life"-Al Hirt, "There'll Always Be An England"-Alfred Piccaver, "The Mob Rules"-Black Sabbath, "Needles in the Camel's Eye"-Brian Eno, "Praying Hands"-Clawhammer, "30 Years"-Electric Deads, "Margaya"-Fender Four, "The Big Beat (theme from "Front Page Story")"-Eric Delaney's Big Beat Six

(Regarding the above playlist: I always write with music on random. Helps my thoughts maintain their skewed rhythm.)

As I begin writing this it's nearly 12:30 AM and I am not sleepy in the least. One of the things that happens to me during periods when I don't have to answer to 9-5 programming is that my nocturnal nature returns with a vengeance, and lately my average bedtime takes place right around sunrise. Don't worry, ladies; I assure you that I am not a vampire (also vulgarly referred to as an "undead suckface") and I definitely do not sparkle.

This schedule can be both a blessing and a curse, allowing me to work on various writing projects without the annoyance/distraction of noisy daytime sidewalk and street traffic, but also meaning that by the time I wake up I've lost a good portion of the day and therefore available hours when stores and some restaurants are open for business. It's also rather lonely because everyone else in the world, at least those counted among the employed, is home from work and completely worn out by the time I'm ready to play. A re-adjustment is clearly in order, although I have altered this pattern for the days when I have had job interviews...

I swear by Cthulhu, if I hear the fucking phrase "You're ideal, but you're over-qualified" one more goddamned time...

...I will do nothing. Nothing except press on and say "Next!," a catch-word that I usually reserve for when the pursuit of whichever woman I was chasing at the time doesn't work out.

I'm working on two book manuscripts right now and have the notes for two more works ready to rock, so this moment of being adrift in the sea of mid-life is at least a period of free-flowing creativity. I'm approaching the books from the standpoint of them being things that I just need to let out of my head, rather than anything I may get rich off of, but if that happenstance occurs, I will not turn up my nose at filthy lucre. All I know is that even in this odd period of creative isolation in a tiny apartment that sometimes feels like a cell with amenities, I'm feeling wheels turning in my mind, heart and soul that have lain dormant for too long and there has really been no excuse for that state of affairs. Too much time has been allowed to pass without producing anything to satisfy my own artistic needs, and that will no longer stand.

I'm writing all of this and publicly stating it in order to keep my forward momentum going and send that positive energy out into the aether. With creativity expressed comes a great and fulfilling freedom and for too long I have gainfully toiled crafting what amounts to a surfeit of bullshit, especially at the job I was laid off from around four months ago. Flowery copy for churned-out consumer products, right-wing news organizations, spoiled heiresses and style guides for bad TV shows (HEROES, anyone?) may have paid the bills to some extent, but the price for that was a part of my soul, a soul I felt atrophying with every hour I spent in the design 'ho house. My time in comics had its ups and downs, that's for certain, and it may have ended on a very sour note, but my heart was in that line of endeavor, something I cannot say for writing mindless horseshit when not proofreading the boring minutia found on the sports-related trading cards that the 'ho house regurgitated back to its main client.

In short, I have been a whore for the past three years, selling the textual equivalent to man-pussy, and I'm glad to be done with that mess. I made some good friends at the design 'ho house, some of whom also got cast into the winds and some who remain within its creatively bankrupt walls, and I miss them, but right now it's all about the freedom, the centering and the enlightenment to be found by not trying to please a massa what don't give a shit 'bout his niggers (including the white ones).

With that thought in mind, I have just lit my fuming incense stencher (as the late, great Frank Zappa so eloquently once put it), cracked open a brew and am readying to sit through THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS before I retire for the morning. Tomorrow is another day, and it is looking pretty good.

Holy shit! I just realized: I turn 45 in less than a week. Hunh...

ANTICIPATION

As I start writing this it is 2:36 AM and I'm enjoying an ice-cold Sanpellegrino Limonata "sparkling lemon drink" (translation: "lemon sodie pop") while suffering from one of my periodic bouts of insomnia, but at least this time I know why sleep will not come.

This Friday evening I leave for my first vacation of a decent length in almost exactly four years and my anticipation of getting the fuck out of my job, Brooklyn and the States in general is keeping me awake. I'll be visiting one of my favorite people on the globe, running around in one of my favorite countries, and just plain flat-out making an all-too-brief escape from my daily routine. No subways. No loud and uncouth shithead neighbors. No worrying about the well-being and employment of friends and family. This will be some well-deserved me time, and I welcome it like I would welcome a new and kind lover.

While across the Pond, I intend to divorce myself from my day-to-day New York programming and allow the many charms of the UK to work their ancient magic upon me as I breathe air rich with the flavor of ancient myth and legend and stuff my face with some of the best comfort food the planet has to offer. The mere thought of the assorted items that comprise the British breakfast set me to smiling from ear to ear, and the promise of authentic Yorkshire Pudding and real fish and chips ignites olfactory memories that kicks my salivary glands into overdrive. In fact, if I have my way, the first thing I'll do once off the plane with luggage retrieved is snag a couple of sausage rolls, perhaps the most perfect treat in the annals of culinary wizardry.

I'm also looking forward to seeing what effect the coming of Spring has on the amount of clothing worn by Britain's females. There's a lot to be said for the daughters of England, in terms of both visual allure and personality, so while I'm not embarking on "the pull," as they say, when I get there, my eyes will be open and appreciative. Don't get me wrong; I'd love to go on the pull, but at my age I doubt I'll realistically be able to get anywhere with that quest in the limited amount of time I have at my disposal, plus I wouldn't care to impose my on-vacay sexual escapades with assorted "birds" upon my dear friend who is kind enough to put me up for free. (Mind you, I don't think she'd really care, but I'd like to be considerate.)

Anyway, It's now just past 3AM and I'm beginning to experience one of those over-tired headaches that signal the need to turn off the lights and TV, close my eyes and simply rest my mind, the possibility of sleep being a bonus rather than a guarantee. Only two days until Blighty... Only two...more...days...

AND SO IT CONTINUES

It's now 2:40AM and I've been awake and staring at the ceiling for nearly an hour and a half. Before I went to bed I got a call from a friend and former colleague from my days in the Marvel Bullpen and the friend in question informed me that he'd been laid off and now he, his wife and kid were moving to Pennsylvania sometime soon.

Folks, if you have a job in these uncertain times, even if it's one you hate, keep in mind things could always be worse. That's just what I'm trying to do, but thinking about all of this stuff makes it hard for me to sleep. Not too long ago I would have remedied this malaise with beer and tequila but these days I no longer find that a valid solution. Time to break out a boring movie.

SAVED BY AL BUNDY

The brilliant Ed O'Neill as the indelible Al Bundy.

As regular Vault readers well know, Yer Bunche regularly suffers from bouts of insomnia and if I can't somehow lull myself to sleep I turn on the flat-screen and pray for something to bore me into the realm of Morpheus. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't, and those nights/mornings when there's no fucking way I'm gonna drift off I wait until around 5AM and set the channel to TBS, there to await the credit roll of whatever piece of shit movie was on and spend some quality time with the last of the great "guy" characters in American television history: Alphonse Hercules Bundy, better known merely as Al.

The hapless patriarch of MARRIED...WITH CHILDREN's Bundy clan, Al is a complete failure at damned near every endeavor he's attempted since his days as a high school touchdown god, now trapped in an existential purgatory comprised of his money-grubbing, lazy, stupid, promiscuous and perverted family — those descriptions pretty effectively covering the chief attributes of his wife and kids — and his pray-for-slow-death job as a shoe salesman at the local mall outlet of Gary's Shoes (which is run by a ball-busting woman named Gary).

Once a football hero, now a balding, middle-aged purveyor of shoes to elephantine housewives.

The few instants of happiness he can claim stem from memories of has faded youth, the occasional TV airing of John Wayne movies, futile lusting after nubiles half his age, his collection of "Big 'Uns" magazine, sporting events, and an undying love for the bizarre and borderline-sociopathic Western series "Psycho Dad," but those moments of bliss are inevitably torpedoed by the torturous reality of his family, his neighbors and his job. For Al it's a tried and true recipe for enduring torment, but for the repeat viewer of MARRIED...WITH CHILDREN, that formula spells the stuff of "lowbrow" yucks and a surprisingly deep and heartfelt look into one man's waking nightmare.

What could easily have been a one note role was crafted into a signature and indelible character by the vastly underrated Ed O'Neill, a man whose live-action encyclopedia of facial expressions and gestural nuances would give a classic Warner Brothers animated cartoon character a run for its money. The guy was both deeply likable and easy to empathize with, and his balls-out willingness to explore the darker and more pathetic recesses of the workaday Joe Sixpack's emasculated and psychologically impotent psyche was the stuff of true Herculean comedic greatness. If there were any justice in this universe, there would be a thirty-foot statue of Al Bundy, in his patented (and pathetic) football-passing pose, festooned with solid inches of crusty birdshit somewhere within the Chicago city limits, there to stand for eternity and remind us of dreams deferred by the responsibilities of family and our own total insignificance to a universe that mocks us while we suffer through our own personal, daily Tartarus.

Al, enjoying the benefits of "Bleen" and looking like the the foulest of sex offenders.

I found the anti-adventures of Al Bundy and his brood to be funny from the get-go but as I grow older I understand and appreciate Al's struggle more and more, and I curse the heartless network powers-that-be that allowed Al to take his place among those granted cathode ray immortality without giving him a proper final episode. I have no suggestion as to how his journey should have played out, but perhaps the sudden cancellation after eleven years fits in just perfectly with the baleful energy known as "the Bundy Curse." Somehow I doubt that the Bundy family winning the Illinois State Lottery or saving the world from an alien invasion would have rung true — despite Al once actually having saved the Earth and "a hundred other worlds" in the path of a titanic comet from extinction by giving a crew of friendly extraterrestrials his unwashed socks for use as concentrated spaceship fuel —

Al Bundy, galactic hero, with friends.

so maybe the endless reruns that perpetuate Al's misery serve as an inevitable and appropriate coda to his place among American pop culture heroes. But whatever the case may be, I thank Ed O'Neill for his portrayal of Al Bundy from the deepest and warmest part of my tequila-fueled heart for not only making me laugh my ass off, but also for making my insomniac desolation considerably more tolerable.

I'm astonished to realize just how often I find myself performing this very same gesture. I hear you, Al. I really do.

BUS RIDE TO NOWHERE IN A DESOLATE DREAMSCAPE

So I'm back from a weekend at home in Connecticut and the memorial service for my friend's father and I am so emotionally wound up that sleep once more eludes me.

The service and the subsequent reception went just fine — an Italian feast, even during a time of mourning, is always a plus — and my friend seems to be doing okay, but due to concern for him and all the other mishegoss that's been piling up I'm just psychologically and emotionally exhausted. If I could, right now I would hop on a plane to Arizona and spend a few weeks in the desert communing with scorpions and snakes, Billy Jack-style. I really need to just get away and get centered, but that simply is not an option at the moment.

I went to bed around 10:30 PM and have been wide awake for about the past two hours, following a weird dream: I was on a cross-country bus, bound for nowhere, with my friend who's dad recently passed and we just sat there staring out of the vehicle's window, watching the scenery smear past us. The other passengers were a largely nondescript lot who would have been at right at home in some independent black-and-white 1960's horror film, all old, expressionless faces with deep eyes that may have stared once too often down some nameless abyss as the waited for the bus to drop them off at the final destination of either death or eternity in limbo, I'm not certain which. The landscape that the bus drove through was an endless vista of barren plains with maybe a leafless tree or a cactus or two providing the most meager of scenery. That lack of camera-ready sights forced all on board to look within themselves and ponder whatever personal purgatories they found themselves in, mine mirroring the sparse expanses that blurred by.

My friend's thoughts remained known only to him, and I left my seat to stretch my legs. Then, as often can occur in dreams, the interior of the vehicle altered slighty and its seating layout became that of a typical New York City crosstown bus, packed to the gills with old, bitter people bundled up to fend off the cold. As I stood and grabbed the overhead handrail some emaciated stoner with long curly red hair smiled dopily at me, the guitar he wore slung over his back rudely poking a standing pensioner in the gut. I turned to ignore the latter day Grateful Dead follower stereotype, but no matter what direction I turned he was always in my face, THC-fed grin scrawled from ear to baked ear. I then made a concerted effort to avoid him, but he was as unshakable as the Old Man of the Sea and in no time he began to dance and gyrate in a manner that brought to mind some intoxicated variant on a mutli-limbed Vedic deity, his arms disolving into a psychedelic display that began to mesmerize me. His body swayed to and fro and his green eyes widened to the size of saucers as his voiced issued forth with an otherworldly effect and said, "We're bringin' it back, man!" I didn't bother to ask just what we were bringing back and instead asked the driver to pull over and let my friend and I out.

As we stepped out of the bus and watched it drive away into the distance, we looked at our surroundings and noted we were in the middle of nowhere, some once-thriving town that was now nothing more than a mom-and-pop lunceonette here, a stationary store there, humbles oases in a graveyard of failed businesses whose storefronts were boarded up or displayed huge, faded signs emblazoned with the telephone numbers of the nameless agencies one could call if they desired to rent the empty space. Judging from the dust evident through the unwashed windows, those calls never came and most likely never would.

With that realization I awoke, and here I remain.

I debated calling Jewish Warrior Princess in England, but thought better of it in case she was still asleep. Considering how desperate I was for slumber myself, I figured I had no right to possibly deprive anyone else of its comfort. I don't think she would have minded, but I also hesitated because hearing her voice would have painfully reminded me of how much I miss her every day and I don't feel like dealing with that right now.

I just looked at the blue light of my clock's digital display and note that I now have just under five hours until I absolutely must be out of bed and readying myself for the start of another fucking inane work week. After work I'm going to visit a friend who's been hospitalized here in Brooklyn, and although he's still in the ICU I'm just glad to know he's alert and able to accept visitors.

And on that note I'm going to attempt to get some sleep, hopefully lulled there by the low budget anti-splendors of MISSILE TO THE MOON (1958) in a colorized version. Yeah, it's a thrill.

WHEN INSOMNIA PAYS OFF: DISCOVERING THE AWESOMENESS THAT IS UNGDOMSKULEN

Upon returning to Brooklyn from the Mother's Day weekend in Westport, I went to bed as usual, dreading the start of the work week the following morning and hoping that Nigella Lawson would have somehow gotten lost and ended up on my face. Sadly the Lawson scenario did not pan out and I drifted off to sleep, only to find myself awakened at 2:45 AM by the incredibly loud idling of a garbage truck outside my building. After about five minutes the truck headed down the street to remove more of the block's detritus, but, alas, I remained wide awake, so I took the time to cruise the web and do a bit of channel surfing. The offerings on TV at that hour are almost always a disappointment and the only thing on that was worth watching was the Bruce Lee classic THE CHINESE CONNECTION, but I opted against watching that favorite because it would have only served to pump me up, exactly the opposite of what I was looking for.

I would have had a myriad of late night TV distractions to choose from had I still been living on Manhattan's upper west side during the early 1990's, thanks to the excellence of the Manhattan Neighborhood Network (aka MNN), the fancy-schmancy way of saying "public access," and boy do I miss those bygone days. The only other public access programming I'd seen that I could weigh it against is the largely family safe stuff found on Connecticut's airwaves, and that stuff doesn't even begin to hold a candle to the twisted and often illegal material found in the Big Apple; the Senator Jerry Jer Show was the lone exception, featuring as its host a foul-mouthed black dude with a (simulated) bloody maxi-pad adhered to his forehead who, among other vital issues of the day such as his flagrantly uncensored hatred for a multitude of celebrities and public figures, liked to discuss how he's "dying to fuck a retarded bitch."

Senator Jerry Jer, the nastiest guy on Connecticut television.

I only got to see this guy sporadically, when I visited my mom or when my buddy Chris remembered to tape the show, and I loved every sophomoric second of it.

The sordid wonderland that was the MNN during the early-to-mid 1990's more than made up for the deficiencies in filth and weirdness on Connecticut public access and I had the good sense to tape twelve VHS tapes-worth of it, including talk shows hosted by garish drag queens, a show in which heroin addicts actually demonstrated how properly shoot up — I swear to God!!! — , a Brazilian activism forum that was for some reason hosted by an irate guy with half a cabbage on his head, Life With Jeem (a show so balls-out bizarre that it's worthy of its own separate post), creepy religious children's shows hosted by disturbing puppets, "you are there" filmings of actual brandings and penis piercings, med school training footage of male genital dissection (something I seriously do not recommend wandering in on after an eight-hour tequila and beer bender), the unintentionally hilarious rantings of those berobed an turbaned black dudes who consider themselves "the true Israelites" (their ruminations on homosexuality in the Bible being flat-out hilarious and un-PC to a staggering level), and the demented Sick & Wrong, a show that lived up to its name in ways that make you shit, especially the episode that made me stop watching that series, in which the show's creators beheaded a live Iguana on camera simply for shock value; I'm down with all manner of sick shit, as long as it's consensual and no one is hurt, but I don't condone animal cruelty in any way, shape, or form.

Then I moved to Brooklyn and found out how comparatively tame Brooklyn Community Access Television, or BCAT, is, but every once in a blue moon I'd find worthy stuff like the fantastically machismo-driven Spic 'N' Spanish (a wacky Puerto Rican guy runs around strip clubs and beaches interviewing bikini-clad mamis and naked Hispanic strippers, one of whom memorably offered girls tips on how to prevent their inner labia from looking like roast beef), a half hour for an aging metalhead to run rare clips of bands from the seventies and expound upon how he wouldn't be the man he is today without the influence of AC/DC's Bon Scott, a so-bad-it's-great video in which an alien (a guy in a "Gray" mask and sweats) rocks feeble lyrics about his excellence as an "intergalactic rapper," and assorted video shows that ran music segments and excerpts from gory exploitation movies. But in recent years BCAT has been dominated by an endless parade of bling-bling-laden rap videos, most featuring the overused tropes of voluptuous black chicks in thongs, much pouring of champagne while strolling through tableaux of flashy cars and ostentatious mansions, and the "artists" in question modeling fur coats and a surfeit of tacky gold jewelery while bragging about their material possessions and "bitches." I hate that shit, and after a while it seems like one very long and bad blaxploitation musical as one cookie-cutter video follows another, so I pretty much gave up on BCAT about two years ago, with the exception of the excellent old school children's horror frolic/cheesy showcase for rockabilly acts Ghoul A-Go-Go.

Yer Bunche meets Vlad and Creighton, the hosts of Ghoul A-Go-Go, the only worthwhile entertainment program on Brooklyn Community Access Televison (BCAT), at a Cramps show nearly two years ago.

Which finally brings me to a revelation that happened during my Monday morning bout with insomnia.

Somewhere around Jesus o'clock in the morning, I flipped past the usually dormant at that hour BCAT and saw a wild-assed video by some band whose beer-gutted guitarist was partially rendered in computer assisted "cutout"-style animation. Acting quickly, I grabbed my VCR's remote and hit "record." The guitar-wielding fatass made me exclaim "What the fuck is this?" as the acid-flashback backgrounds reminded me of something from an installment of Old Gray Whistle Test and my attention was riveted by the goofy teddy bear bonnet that garnished his bespectacled pate.

While absorbing this lysergic infusion, my sleepy mind was hypnotized by the strange music issuing from the TV's speakers, and I fell deep into the song's strange groove and began to head-bang. When the video ended there briefly flashed a blurb crediting the tune to a band named "Ungdomskulen," and the song itself was entitled "Modern Drummer," but before I could commit those bits of info to memory the scene shifted to what I guess may have been the green room at BCAT. In this space were about twelve primary school children of every possible ethnic/cultural background, several of whom offered up their candid opinions on the band and the video, and with the exception of one Hispanic kid all of the reviewers were overwhelmingly negative in assessments, particularly one under-ten-year-old black girl who labeled the video "childish" and declared that the band obviously needed more practice before having the nerve to step in front of a camera again, at which point the show's credits began to roll.

It was an hilarious stroke of genius to have a bunch of kids critique a band that was about as far removed from what they're exposed to on TV and the radio as possible, and the looks of outright, stunned confusion on their faces was priceless. My own confusion over Ungdomskulen spurred me to seek out their video on YouTube, and once I found it I must have played it at least eight times, allowing "Modern Drummer" to thoroughly hypnotize me, and thus hypnotized I plan to pick up their debut album, "Crybaby," as soon as possible. And while they may have a death metal-sounding name and come from Norway, Ungdomskulen is a bizarre and seriously talented combo whose sound could be described as metal/jazz/post-punk/psychedelic fusion, and their musicianship is beyond reproach. Here's the video so you can judge for yourself:



So at last I got something out of being awake in the wee hours on a "school night."

IN THE WEE HOURS: ANOTHER LONELY LATE NIGHT

It's 3:15 AM and I'm wide-awake, slightly buzzy from what may be MSG in the obscenely huge meal I finished eating just over six hours ago. The TV is on and I found some brief and juvenile amusement in filthing up the songs being shilled by Dion (of Dion & the Belmonts, and his subsequent solo career, "Runaround Sue" and such) in one of those half-hour Time-Life CD collection infomercials; I'm truly ashamed that it took a bout of insomnia for me to convert the opening of "The Great Pretender" into, "Yes, I'm the Great Rear-Ender" (insert plaintive doo-wop keening here), but better late than never.

Before going to bed and catching the few zees I was able to manage, I had a huge dinner with my high school pal and fellow Westport cynic Ethan, with his wife, kids, and sister in tow, and I had a blast. We ate at Todai, an enormous all-you-can-eat Asian buffet ($25.95) on 34th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues that features Chinese, Japanese, and Korean eats in shocking abundance, and I was frankly overwhelmed by the sheer variety of fresh, tasty tucker. Between rounds of stuffing my face, I got to catch up with Ethan, now a family man who teaches in California and spends the off-seasons in China. He's a guy who radiates a Vulcan-like intelligence that hides a blink-and-you-missed-it sense of dry-as-a-nun's-pussy humor, and though we hardly ever get to see each other these days the guy still cracks me the hell up. The last time we saw each other was back in 2001, a couple of months prior to 9/11, and it was then that I met Lee, Ethan's fun and very cool spouse. Tonight I got to see how well-suited to parenthood the pair is, and their kids were not only adorable, but also charming as hell. And the coolest thing about them is that, thanks to having the parents they have, the kids are growing trilingual; English, Mandarin, and Korean are spoken fluently in their household, and it still amuses me to see Ethan, a blondish Jew, rattle on in Mandarin, an occurrance that never fails to stop speakers of that language in their tracks.

Once I got home I had a too short conversation with one of my favorite women on the planet, and I'm quite pleased to see her in a good place, psychologically speaking. She's been through some major mishegoss lately, and I'm just glad to see she's doing okay.

Anyway, that's all I can think of to say at the moment. I'm going to throw some dull, low budget grade Z flick into my DVD player and hope that will lull me into a four-hour torpor. Perhaps 1935's JUNGLE BRIDE.

I wish I had someone here to talk to.

IN THE WEE HOURS: THINGS FALL APART

As I write this it's just turned 4AM.

One thing I learned very early during my formative years is that you do not get in the middle of a couple having a loud, furniture-destroying domestic dispute, and for the past hour and a half I've put that lesson into action. The volatile couple who live just down the hall are loud as hell at the best of times — once notoriously not caring to close their apartment door while they fucked like it was prom night — and they often quarrel at a volume that could wake the long-deceased. But tonight I was awakened by their usual histrionics coupled with the concussive sounds of heavy furniture being overturned, glass shattering and any object that hadn't been nailed down rebounding off of walls. Apparently the male of the couple came home quite drunk and the lady just wasn't having it, so they predictably argued and their spat escalated to the level previously described, things only dying down when two of my other neighbors yelled at them for waking up half the building, then calling the police. The male of the couple then managed to get his shit together enough to stagger out of the building and back into the night, presumably to hit one of the local dive bars.

The weary-sounding cops have just left after getting a statement from the still fuming lady and it is now nearly four-thirty. I hope to get back to sleep and stay that way for at least another hour or two, but that seems unlikely now that a large garbage truck sits idling outside my building. Oh, well, at least it's not the whores from the brothel down the street fighting over which Heineken-soused pensioner they'll be blowing before calling it a night.

IN THE WEE HOURS: SOME VERY TWISTED SISTERS & OTHER MUSICAL DIVERSIONS

Dee Snider: not my idea of Mister Sandman.

As I write this it's nearly four in the morning. Why am I awake? Well, here's a new one: I was awakened twenty minutes ago by a group of very drunk females standing out side my building, merrily slurring the words to the loudest rendition of Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" I've ever endured. These chicks yowled that eighties chestnut for all they were worth, and even though I fucking hate that classic of faux metal I have to admit that the spirit was infectious. Somehow I just knew they weren't gonna take "it," whatever "it" was, and they made damned sure the world — or President Street, anyway — knew as well, repeating their bourbon-soaked statement no less than three times.

Needless to say, I am now fully awake.

Luckily there's a very good BBC documentary playing on PBS, POPULAR SONG: SOUNDTRACK TO THE CENTURY, to keep me company. The segment I came in on focused on the Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building songwriters and crazy-assed Phil Spector, so the music was generally excellent, scouring "We're Not Gonna Take It" from my sleep-deprived consciousness. The next episode just started and it's focusing on the thermonuclear impact felt when the Beatles hit, as well as that of the legion of blues-based white boys that followed in their wake (big focus on Eric Burdon and the Animals), and there's no way I can get back to sleep with that kind of stuff on the air.

Good thing I went to bed at nine-thirty.

VENTING IN THE WEE HOURS

It's about 1:20 AM on this Friday morning and I can't sleep. The past couple of months have seen quite a few changes for Yours Truly and few of them have been for the better, a fact that's been nagging at me nearly every waking hour.

I've been working at the design sweatshop since early May, and while I'm at least employed I've moved past the point where I merely dislike the gig and can now flat out state that I fucking hate my job. The pay is abysmal, the hours drag by and are filled with inane tasks, and the people on the staff whom I actually like can be counted on one hand. The atmosphere at the place is toxic in both a literal and metaphorical sense; the air, depending on which section one enters, is filled with minute particles of sheetrock and who the fuck knows what else that's been kicked up by a seemingly endless renovation that's carried on since shortly after I got there and appears to have no coherent planning behind it, while the entire staff toils away on thankless, mindless projects, each person being completely miserable in their own way, something I know as fact since I've been told so to my face. Adding to this is the fact that a large number of the staff are snotty twenty-somethings who are a bunch of phony, condescending assholes whom I wouldn't piss on if they were ablaze. Cliques and petty power struggles are the order of the day, and I'm frankly fed up with the lot of it. And don't get me started on the company selling out to a corporate interest, a bunch of personality-void pod people whom I seriously doubt bring anything to the table and will most likely kill what little artistic feel the place possesses. Plus, the new owner's hair contains so much product it looks like a flock of pigeons took a massive group shit on his ill-advised Prince Valiant 'do.

Those of you who read this blog regularly have seen the pathetic joke that passes as my work station, and once the construction finally ends I doubt things will improve by much. My new area has been described to me and I don't like what I'm hearing, but as I don't intend to stay with the company for any more than a year I guess it really doesn't matter. I began looking for another job about two weeks into my current gig, but as of yesterday I stepped up the search another few notches. Wish me luck.

Aside from my job completely sucking ass I'm consumed with thoughts of just how badly my non-work existence is in need of a boost. Nearly all of my friends fled NYC for parts north, and the few friends I have left in the area are seldom available to do anything, or have apartments with pets that set off my allergies so I can never visit them.

I recently got the brush-off from a friend of over twenty years, someone who was occasionally more than a friend, and having had about a month to reflect on just how she ended our relationship I have to say that I'm deeply insulted, the words of her eleventh hour email pretty much amounting to how my attempts at maintaining a friendship with her weren't worth her time or effort (if she reads this and writes me to rebut that, I still have the email in question; I'll probably never read it again, but I'm keeping it just in case). She's pretty much chosen to cut herself off from the rest of the world, and I find that a sad, pathetic waste of a person who has a lot to offer. She's attractive, smart, and, when she lets herself be, a lot of fun, but that's all moot. Despite having known her for twenty-four years, I have to accept that she doesn't even want to be bothered with me as a casual friend, so I've deleted her contact info from my email address book and removed her from my rolodex.

The one woman I trust and treasure more than any other is on the other side of the Atlantic and I won't be seeing her again for the foreseeable future, thanks to work schedules, the logistics of international travel, and family obligations when she's in town with extremely limited time. We're both classic neurotics, but I can honestly say that we understand each other like no one else does in each other's lives, and while we don't neccessarily work as a couple I do rely on her a great deal for emotional support. No one else on the planet gets me like she does, and I miss her terribly each day.

Another close friend recently found herself single again after a nearly ten year relationship and is now on the market, and I find myself having conflicted thoughts about that. She smart, curvy, very attractive and a hell of a lot of fun, and despite a purely platonic relationship during the time we've been friends I would be a flat out liar if I said I never thought of getting with her. She a major fox in every way and I would have to be a corpse not to respond to that, but I have doubts about whether I should take a stab at asking her out. She lives in another state but is in NYC often enough, so should I risk it? When she told me her long term relationship was definitely over I foolishly mentioned that I thought of her like a sister, preemptively sabotaging a potential fling since I greatly value her presence in my life and don't want to fuck things up, but she's been in the forefront of my desires for quite some time. Why can't I just be a stereotypical male and care nothing for her feelings, enjoying her sexually and not giving a damn if things go bad? Sometimes I think I'm the dumbest motherfucker ever to draw breath when it comes to the women in my life...

My ongoing lonliness has been hitting me very hard lately, and at the moment I find no prospects for romance on the horizon. But perhaps that's for the best at the moment because I've been in such a blue state, and that's a drag to be subjected to. All of the things that have been getting me down have weighed upon me to the point of me getting home after another day wasted at the design gulag and going to bed as early as 9:30 PM and attempting to sleep, sometimes succumbing immediately and sleeping for as long as ten solid hours, sometimes lying awake in contemplation of my lack of a mate and how at the age of forty-two my life and career seem to have amounted to a squirt of rat's piss.

Tonight is one of those sleepless evenings, and I just need to vent. I'll be okay eventually, but for right now it sucks to be Bunche.

Signing off at 2:34 AM. Still not remotely sleepy, maybe I'll watch a movie.