Today’s soundtrack: Moving sidewalks, I don’t see under my feet
Today at 11:49pm: Saying to myself “Someday I will have my locker in that big F-Wing in the sky.”



I know too many people. I’m not bragging, I mean in a city of 13 million it becomes very easy to know too many people. And frankly speaking if I was stuck on a desert island with two fellow castaways--I’d still know too many people.

More importantly, too many people now know I keep an online journal. Which has sucked a lot of the potential entries out of this journal the same way I might suck all the oxygen out of a room by loudly announcing how much I hate your lasagna.

I realize the previous two paragraphs are doing nothing for you as a reader. I would apologize but, ironically enough, I don’t even know you. Maybe.


I got bills up the yin-yang this month. I write checks like the U.S. Government. At my desk it’s a beehive of out-of-control spending, on stupid things like Emergency Room bills and magazine subscriptions and an airplane ticket to Texas.

Tonight I picked Ed and Betty up at the airport. They just came back from Houston where they were finalizing their wedding plans. Picking the pastor, dealing with the invitation-responses and choosing the menu, which amazed me in particular.

Every night for my own dinner I’m like “Okay...Subway, Vietnamese sandwich or the humus joint?” I try to get dinner for $3 to $6 dollars and most nights I can get away with it. On the nights that I can’t I have a backstock of canned fucking fish that I have to eat because it beats the hell out of going to bed hungry, which reminds me too much of college.

If I ever do “make it big”--or fuck, just make this city’s idea of a reasonable salary--the first thing I’m gonna do is throw my fucking can opener away. I hate that damn thing. I hate things that remind me I’m poor. People with money don’t have to eat stuff out of cans.

When the liquid soap runs low in the bathroom my roommate fills the bottle up with water, which drives me fucking nuts. I don’t want to have to do that. You know?

- Yes Rain, I do know. I too earn a pittance.

Well thank you. You and I are brothers in arms and sworn enemies of the rich.

- No Rain, I don’t know. I have far too much money to let such trivialities occupy my time.

Oh, really? Wow, that’s pretty cool. Hey, are you free later? What are you doing? Do you wanna hang out?


Not being able to go to Hapkido is driving me rather nuts. The good news is I think my foot is healing. I drank the disgusting medicine today using my new system, which is this: When mixing the medicine powder, use very little water. You might be tempted to use lots of water to dilute the stomach-churning mix, but that adds up to more gulps and more chances to interrupt the procedure by vomiting the entire mixture onto your roommate.

With just a couple shots of water, yes, the resultant mix is repulsively thick and chalky, but you can slam that shit down like a homicide detective with the black coffee. Not breathing through your nose is key. For lunch I slammed a ham-and-egg sandwich from Maria’s (60 cents) and chased it with the Nasty Medicine Shot. Then I stared at the counter for about sixty seconds before moving.


I got to LaGuardia a little early because I was starving. With a half-hour to kill before Ed & Betty’s plane touched down, I drove to the Burger King off Astoria Boulevard.

I ordered their new Sourdough Bacon Cheeseburger offering into the dented drive-through -- pardon me, drive-thru -- intercom and drove up to the window. The “window” is actually a bulletproof, rotating glass box that you put your money into. 360 degrees later you get your sandwich, with absolutely no chance of sticking a Glock in the cashier’s face and demanding he hand you a “Supersized” bag of cash.

Then I pulled the car in front of a row of houses and spread my pathetic little meal out, with the burger in my lap, a sweaty Coke perched above the radio and a ketchup-laden napkin under the emergency brake for fry-dipping.

The front lawns in Queens are not what you people from out of town think of as front lawns, so the house I was parked in front of was about ten feet away from me. The window was open and I could hear the sounds of a family eating dinner inside. Children’s voices and the clink of silverware. For some inexplicable reason this suddenly made me feel bad about myself, sitting there in my little hatchback with mayonnaise all over my face and messily scarfing a perfectly disgusting burger with my messenger bag staring back at me from the passenger seat.

The majority of meals I’ve eaten in the past ten years has been Party of One and it didn’t start to bother me until recently. Must be some biological clock kinda thing. I need to rip the hormonal glands out of a 22-year-old man and implant them in me so I can continue to live my life. I want no grief, no hassle and a full stomach.


It’s too bad file-sharing is illegal, or I’d recommend you go download Dan Hartman’s “I Can Dream About You” and think about that time in high school when you really liked that girl and at that one dance you tried to talk to her and this song was playing but she wouldn’t have anything to do with you because your locker was in D-Wing, where all the freaks have their lockers and all the cool kids had their lockers in F-Wing. After that, finishing up the semester was pretty damn brutal because you had to see her all the time in Social Studies.

Anyways you can’t possibly relive this experience because the RIAA will sue your ass if you download the trigger.