Today’s soundtrack: pretty-eyed, pirate smile
Today at 3:20am: making midnight confessions to the walls



An apartment for two expands to hold twelve. Steamed fish is served. Wine is to anecdotes as beer is to off-color jokes.

Friday night in Manhattan and I’m at a dinner party on the LES. Somewhere in the middle Film Guy and I step outside for a smoke. We man a railing in front of the building.

On the sidewalk across the street, a grip of Latino cats having a good time. They’ve got a social club going. It’s a Latino thing, an Italian thing, a Greek thing, an immigrant thing. A rented storefront with an open front door, interrupting the row of steel-shuttered stores that are closed for business.

Through the doorway I can see wood paneling, a crush of bodies standing and laughing, and a large-screen television that doesn’t need to be turned on because when you’ve got twenty of your homeys it’s entertainment enough. You pool some cash together and you can get a space, escape from domestic noise, get away from your kitchen where the bills are stacked up on the table like Jenga, forget about the shit you’ve gotta do to pay the rent.

In front of the store is a white minivan with the doors open, a living room on wheels. Cats sprawled on the benches, jawboning with homeys standing on the curb. Mixed into it all, peculiarly, is one white hipster chick.

“I want a minivan,” says Film Guy.

“Me too,” I say.

Somewhere behind us, inside the building, the dinner party continues. Used to be everyone would be smoking inside at these things. Before, during and after the meal, like it was the ‘70s. As I’ve gotten older most of my friends have either quit smoking or quit the group (marriage and so forth), so now smokers are the anomaly and I have to go outside.

Film Guy just got back from L.A., as he has to on the regular to conduct business. I ask him how it went, he says so-so.

“So you movin’ there, or what?” I ask him. He’s been talking about it for a while.

“Not yet,” he says. “I’d rather struggle in New York.” I echo the sentiment. The weather’s too nice in L.A. to struggle, at least for us being from here. You can’t take a guy from a place with brutish weather and drop him in a place with vacation weather and expect him to perform the same. If I see the sun and it’s warm five days in a row I feel like I’m on vacation. In those conditions deadlines don’t stay dead, they get up and run over to next week.

I always felt there was a reason countries like England or Germany did the colonizing and warmaking, and part of that reason is because the food and weather sucks there. Know what I’m saying? Like, if your culture develops on Barbados or Maui or Costa Rica and you’re eating pineapples all day and chilling out at the beach, the last thing you’re thinking is “Man, I need to go out and conquer some shit.”

You watch a sunset in Hawai’i and it won’t even occur to you that you can invent a rifle and use it to put holes in someone else’s torso.

Film Guy knows the situation in L.A. better than I, since I’ve only been a handful of times, and he asserts it’s better to land there when you’ve already got some shit on. I’m inclined to believe him, especially because I’ve been watching Entourage. Have you seen it? The show is so-so but the characters are great, because they’re from Queens and they’re soooo outerborough. And I mean that as a good thing.

Which is not to say I don’t wish I was in L.A. sometimes. To be surprised by yourself or others. But yeah, it would be nice to have some shit on.