Today’s soundtrack: bruises bigger than dinner plates
Today at 9:02pm: mesmerized by Bollywood flick on 27” TV at Indian restaurant in the east 20s



Anytime I leave the house without my camera I end up regretting it. There should be a word for that, like cameremorse.

The other night I was walking home and I passed a guy on Broome Street walking a fucking monkey. The leash was attached to a harness around the monkey’s tail and ass.

The monkey walked on all fours. It was a little Capuchin or whatever you call it. I wonder if it knows how to wash its hands. ‘Cause the thing eats with its hands, you know? I just can’t imagine wrapping my mitts around a sandwich after I’ve walked across the dirty streets of Manhattan on ‘em. If that was my monkey I’d train that little motherfucker to use Wetnaps.

Truth be told, the monkey looked relatively clean. The unshaven, ratty-trenchcoat-wearing guy on the other end of the leash was a different story. He needed a Bodynap.


Master And Commander, the movie, is much like the seafaring vessels of the time--slow, lumbering and ponderous. Everytime I saw the waves swirl across the screen, it was rather like flushing a ten-dollar bill down the toilet and watching the water go round and round.

Still, what’s not worth seeing for me may be well worth seeing for you. I’m of the opinion that chicks will dig Russell Crowe’s squinting, and guys will dig chicks who do not.

At first I thought I was being overly critical but no, the truth is there just aren’t any good movies anymore. It would be great if you could pay for a movie after you’ve seen it, and only as much as you think it was actually worth. Master And Commander is worth more than two pieces of toast but less than a sandwich.


Consumer Reports placed my car on the “Used Cars To Avoid” list, citing poor reliability. But that’s not gonna stop me, Lam and Tony from climbing into it in Manhattan and stepping back out of it somewhere in Montreal, Canada. Roadtrip time. We’re shooting for the second week of December.

It’s been a year since our last roadtrip, last time we went to Toronto. It was our first time in Canada and all of us were taken aback by how nice it was, despite Alex’s repeated attempts to hump us as part of some North American cultural exchange. Alex puts the “ass” in Cultural Ambassador.

I hear it will be cold as fuck, but I also hear Montreal has an elaborate system of underground walkways so pedestrians can avoid the frigid temperatures. Is this bullshit or not?

I’m tempted to ask my friends in Montreal “What there is to see,” but I will not, for two very good reasons. The first is that when people ask me what there is to see in NYC I find the question too impossibly broad to answer--there are a million things, and it’s all a matter of personal taste. What I love you may hate, what I see may blind you and what I eat may give you horrible gas.

The second reason is because I don’t have any friends in Montreal. Come to think of it, I don’t even have that many friends in New York.

Tomorrow I’m taking my car into the shop for a check-up. Perhaps I will befriend the mechanic. I’ll hang around while he loosens the lugnuts and say things like “So...what kind of music do you listen to?” or “Read any good books lately?”

Yeah, that should work. And if it doesn’t maybe I can gussy up the monkey anecdote to make it more interesting.

Today’s soundtrack:
As the masters rot on walls and the angels eat their grapes
I watched Picasso
visit The Planet Of The Apes
Today at 11:02pm: Watching my pilot light die for the sixth time in a row



Every year on his birthday, my roommate’s parents take the lot of us out to dinner. The lot of us being me, Shady, Shady’s girlfriend, Photographer Mike, his Japanese sidekick Tommy Chops, Wingman Jerry, Streetwear Jane and Bartender Agnes. Dinner is always at the same place, Mr. Tang on Mott Street. I purposely avoided eating all day so I could stuff all eight courses down my gullet.

Afterwards Shady’s parents split and the rest of us headed to Winnie’s--a dive karaoke bar, what a shithole. Everyone loves it there but to me it feels like the waiting room to Hell. I hate dive bars more than I do regular ones, and when you add the karaoke I feel my human rights are being violated.

The crowd at Winnie’s is mostly screamingly drunk Chinatown locals and a grip of white hipsters who either think it’s funny to sing out-of-key or are completely tone deaf. Tonight when we walked up it sounded like they were killing a dog inside.


After half a drink the noise proved to be too much so we went down the block to Yellow. There’s no letters on the sign, it’s just a solid block of backlit yellow. As bars go, this place was much better; all local crowd, no hipsters. The male/female signs on the bathrooms are written in Chinese. We got there early, around 11:30pm or so and managed to score a table at the back.

We’d only been there a few minutes when this older Chinese guy wearing an overcoat and a flower in the lapel walked in. Right away I realized he was a Somebody. The flower caught my eye, and then I noticed his entourage--younger kids, maybe early twenties, with punkish haircuts. All of them kept their jackets on and scanned the area around the older guy, as if scoping out potential threats.

The gangsters ended up getting a table downstairs, which was good. If they’d sat at the table next to us I could just imagine a loud, drunken Mike making loud, drunken jokes that would result in the eight of us lying in an alleyway, quietly bleeding to death from small holes in our torsos.

All of us sitting around a table and quietly sipping drinks was a far cry from any of Shady’s previous birthdays, which are typically balls-to-the-wall DJ-driven packed-house boozefests loaded with hot chicks and pumping bass. But what can I say, we’re getting older. More of us are in our thirties than our twenties, and sleeping early sounds better than sleeping with strangers.

We walked out of the bar well before 4am. A strange sensation--both the early hour, and the fact that we were walking as opposed to stumbling. Oh, what’s going to become of us.


Work’s going okay, thanks for asking. I scored another freelance project but this time I’m working for Americans. I’m usually so desperate to get the work I underbid, but this time I said “fuck it” and took a cue from Bechtel and asked for an amount well over what I’d normally charge, and the client actually said yes. Debt-free future, here I come.


I’ve been away from The Corporation for nearly two weeks because work dried up and I am being repaid for sins I committed in a previous life (or maybe last year). Today I went back to my workstation.

Someone at work stole:

- my mouse
- my powerstrip
- my ethernet cable
- untold precious hours of my life

What kind of ghetto-ass shit is this? This is a multinational conglomerate and motherfuckers are vicking mice. I need to have RFID tags on all my stuff so I can track shit like Lo-jack. The thought of my mouse rolling across someone else’s desk makes me feel...well...actually kind of happy. But still, if you have an excuse to seek vengeance, especially at a multinational conglomerate, I feel you should take it.

No, no, forget it. Lately I’ve been so idle I’m losing the line between what is important and what is not. Today some psychopath e-mailed me a letter that I think was some kind of threat (their English was pretty ESL-style so it was hard to tell), made oblique references to this journal and listed twelve reasons for why I am an asshole--and I actually responded for clarification purposes.

The internet is a frightening thing! It’s almost not worth the free music.


I can’t get the pilot light of my heater to stay lit, and as a result my apartment feels like Outer Space. I mean it is so cold in here it’s a fucking vacuum. It’s so cold that when my friends come over I find myself wishing they would fart, for the heat value. As I type this I’m fully bundled up Sir-Edmund-Hillary-style, ski cap and everything. I dread that moment when I have to get out of the shower later tonight.

Are you a Morning Shower person or a Night Shower person? I used to be Morning but I switched to Night after I moved back from Japan. The reasoning is this: You walk around all day in the city with millions of people’s germs bombarding you, not to mention the pollution, then you come home covered in it and go to sleep? That’s crazy. Sleep time is when your body recharges and needs fresh air. So showering at night gets all the city shit offa you and you can sleep in pollutant-free cleanliness.

The one thing I miss about morning showers is they wake you up, like in those old Coast commercials. Remember those shits? That Ken-doll-looking-motherfucker would get in the shower all sleepy-eyed, then he’d smell the Coast and his eyes would pop open like he just mainlined fifty cc’s of some hard-ass methamphetamines. By the end of the commercial he’s grinning like he just slept with your wife.


I’m so cold. So very, very cold.

I can’t feel my feet.

But tomorrow’s another day! Take my mouse, steal my power strip, sabotage my pilot light, do what you will, you can’t get me down. Because

I

know

the

secret

of

life.


I mean I can’t remember it word-for-word, but I’ve got it written down on a napkin somewhere.

Today’s soundtrack:
Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still.
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.
Today at 9:02am: On the phone with the bank



Warning, warning: Matrix 3, not a good movie. Such a letdown, though I guess I should’ve known. It’s not as bad as Kill Bill--now there’s a fucking awful movie--but it’s still only worth five of the ten bucks.

Kill Bill is worth like, a buck-fifty. My friend Bootleg Randelman (not his real name, you fools) dropped a DVD of it off the other day but I can’t bring myself to put it in.

The only thing left to look forward to is Return of the King. After that I may actually have to begin searching for meaning within my own life instead of looking forward to movies and well, that doesn’t sound very appealing.

Soul-searching would be easier if I had internal Google. Then I could type “meaning of life” or “last time I had fun” into it and stuff would come up, little boldfaced headings I could make sense of and click on to investigate.

I could bookmark relevant headings and e-mail them to a girlfriend so she could make sense of me without me having to fumble through the awkward interface of spoken language. Also if she clicked on one of the banner ads then I would get ten cents.

Looking in a mirror tells me nothing except that my face is getting a little older. It becomes shockingly apparent when I see myself in old photos. Back then I had even less of a soul than I have now so I don’t know who’s better off. I’m getting kind of...gaunt.

On that note, as a writing exercise I’m going to write a quick personal-ad description of myself.

Gaunt thirtysomething writer, short, indigent, seeks _____ female for misunderstandings, awkwardly silent meals, and philosophical disagreements that degenerate into frosty stand-offs. I am slightly smarter than a dolphin, have skin that gets worse by the day and may or may not have scoliosis. No freaks.


Reasons why Matrix 3 is ungood:

It’s basically Matrix 2 without the action. I mean there’s one or two mildly diverting action sequences but by the time they shake out you’re already half-asleep. Most of the movie consists of dialogue that sounds like it was written by throwing magnetic poetry at a refrigerator and transcribing the results.

Morpheus is still expanding laterally. The first time you see him it looks like he ate Neo.

There is, alas, no Nebuchadnezzar or as Mike likes to call it, the Shizza-ka-nizzle. Matrix 4 starring Snoop Dogg.

Overall, the dialogue fucking sucks. Here’s my impression of it:


NEO: What should I do?

ORACLE: You know what you have to do.

NEO: The only thing I know is what I don’t know I have to do.

ORACLE: Well what do you think you should do?

NEO: What do you think I think I should do?

ORACLE: I think you shouldn’t think what I think you think you should do.

NEO: So what do I do?

ORACLE: Don’t you know?

NEO: Yes.


I couldn’t help ad-libbing the dialogue in my head, and it ended up going like this:


NEO: What should I do?

ORACLE: You know what you have to do.

NEO: Bitch, if I knew, would I fucking ask?

ORACLE: All of us have our purpose.

NEO: Right, so why don’t you save me some fucking time and just tell me what mine is? I mean I came all the way down here and everything. Aren’t you a psychic or something?

ORACLE: Each answer comes in time.

NEO: I could be out there getting involved in some really spectacular barfights and instead I’m stuck here playing Who’s On First with your gerrymandering ass. Jesus Christ, you make Yoda look like William Jennings Bryan.

ORACLE: I like candy.

NEO: You know what I like? Straight fucking answers. So why don’t you spit some out before I twist Seraph into a fucking pretzel, break your ceiling lamps with my feet and fly right the fuck out this window.

ORACLE: Each answer comes in time.

NEO: You already said that, freak. They should call your ass the Bore-acle.

Today’s soundtrack: he’s on quality street
Today at 12:02pm: wondering if anyone else in this theater speaks fucking Wachowskian



Well I haven’t written in a while, and a good many things have transpired. The Movie Talkers projects is finished, at least for now and it was a success. I went to Houston to see two friends of mine get married, that was also a success.

Mike and his girlfriend broke up and he’ll be moving out Saturday, so no more good times down the hall. My roommate bought a condo and is moving out in January.

With Mike and Shady gone and most of my friends living in Queens I will be all alone, all alone. Guess I’d better get cable or a cat or a 1972 Pontiac GTO with with the H.O. 455 cubic inch V8 and posi traction.


A good friend of mine--the first to flee New York for the west coast back in the ‘90s--has announced he’s moving back, having since made his fortune. Must be nice to make a fortune. He told me he was looking for a Manhattan apartment and when he told me how much he could afford I almost dropped the phone and spit my drink out.

There is something I dislike about myself, and is is that when my friends succeed and do well, after the initial feeling of happiness for them wears off I find myself reflecting on how I graduated college and made a left turn somewhere.

Well you know what, I am through feeling sorry for myself, and through lying to myself. I am through with--oh...wait a second...no I’m not. There’s still a couple stops left in this train after all.


People steal. I read through journals linked to mine and sometimes I find sentences that I typed with my own fingers. I don’t know why they do it, perhaps it’s unconscious. I get really depressed when people take my words because it’s all I have. (cue violin music)


I start teaching at Hapkido again this Thursday and it looks like I’ll have a regular shift. I’m actually looking forward to teaching again. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to cultivate patience or maybe it’s because I enjoy making people do push-ups.

If I have a son he is going to do lots and lots of push-ups. I will teach him to do push-ups anytime he has a conflict with something or needs to make a decision. He will do them so often that he will be surprised once he becomes socialized and finds that other people do not solve their problems by doing push-ups. Then he will probably start smoking crystal meth to get back at me.