Today’s soundtrack: roller concrete clover
Today at 10:02am: Shivering. When the hell did it get so cold?



Morning coffee at the diner. There’s a news van parked out front and you’d have to be Helen Keller not to hear the cacophonous clanging of Chinese drums down the block.

I take the coffee to-go, to see what the commotion is. Down the street is a huge throng of people and a Chinese lion-dance going on. I wince, because I’m still not fully awake and those drums are giving me a fucking headache, but move closer anyway. Looks like some type of opening ceremony.

As I draw near, a group of men in dark suits cut through the crowd, who part for them compliantly, the way fish squirt out of the way of sharks. Who should I see right in the middle of the suits but Mikey Bloomberg.

Let me tell you something, Bloomberg rolls deep. Around eight bodyguards, two tinted-out Suburban SUV’s and a Crown Vic chase car. When Mikey saddled up the security guys fanned out and faced outwards, each of them looking like they were finnah fuck someone up. No one came near. All were impeccably dressed, they looked like burly, angry Ivy League graduates.

I was disappointed to see Bloomberg’s security detail is entirely white. He’s the mayor of New York, for chrissakes! He ought to have a security apparatus more reminiscent of the actual ethnic breakdown of the city. If I was Bloomberg’s security chief, his posse would consist of:

- one of the Ivy-League-lookin’ guys he already had
- one huge black bouncer, of the type that work those clubs in the Flatiron
- one tough Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx who’s small but really quick
- one renegade Shaolin monk in the orange robes
- one big, fat Italian guy in a Sergio Tacchini jumpsuit
- one middle-aged Korean guy who runs a Tae Kwon Do school in Flushing and always looks dissatisfied
- one of those old-school burly Greek diner owners who still keeps a bat behind the counter
- one super-cut gay dude who spends most of his time pumping iron at Equinox

Also they would all be armed with boxcutters. Except for the Italian guy, who would beat interlopers with domestic items like telephones and bowling trophies.

Everyone has their own vision of New York.

Today, Serenity.

Today’s soundtrack: a red house over yonder
Today at 6:32pm: teaching one of my last



iTunes seems to know of my recent breakup and has been rubbing it in. How the fuck does a music player set on “random” spit out Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor,” Al Green’s “What a Wonderful Thing Love Is,” Caetano Veloso’s “For No One” and a Ronnie Dove track whose title is too embarrassing to print here, all in a sitting? I’m getting hassled by fucking computer applications.

Not a fantastic week. In addition to the girlfriend pulling the plug I just found out my martial arts school is shutting down. Not permanently, and not the Brooklyn outpost, but there is some problem with the lease and after November there will be no more Manhattan dojang until we can find a new location. So my regular Thursday teaching gig evaporates come December.

Must think positive, there is an upside to everything. Well, not everything, I mean I can’t think of an upside to accidentally inhaling mustard gas or driving a motorcycle into a farm combine. A Kawasaki jockey getting his face ripped off by a wheat thresher is not something you can put a positive spin on. But wait, I’m losing the point--problems are opportunities, right?

Maybe this will be better for the writing, at least in terms of output. Longtime followers of this blog know the amount I write is inversely proportional to my contentedness. If you are a fan of this blog it’s in your best interests to sabotage my relationships, steal my things and get me fired from shit.

Getting dumped under deadline is no fun. One of the reasons I haven’t been writing here much lately, aside from contentedness is because the first draft of my book is due next week. Next week! I won’t say it’s close to finished, but I do have a stack of paper in a folder that’s roughly shaped like a book. I have been working on it for some months and that’s the good news. The bad news is, I’ve looked at what I have so far and I’m afraid it’s simply not very good.

I wouldn’t mind if it was really bad, like if I tried to go for something new and failed, but I have a bad feeling it’s just mediocre. Hopefully this is just jitters talking but time will tell.

So right now I’ve just got my head down and I’m trying to power through this thing. Writing, writing and rewriting while trying to ignore the fear. Fear of mediocrity is much worse than fear of failure. In the report card of working life I’d rather get an “F” than a “C.”

Anyways the book will eventually be on sale in some capacity, because I’ve decided that even if publishers hate it I will try the self-publishing route. And if that goes nowhere, at least I can get the "F" and move on to some other shit.

I’ve also been editing a shitload of articles for Theme Magazine, the next issue is nigh. But I’ve decided tomorrow I am going to take a break and do something nice for myself, which is to go see Serenity. I got hooked on Firefly a few weeks ago and have now seen all the episodes. I know that by getting addicted to an obscure sci-fi series I’m not doing myself any favors, socially speaking, at a time when I need it, but me and the series have something in common: Cancellation.

Unfortunately by tomorrow Serenity will only be playing in one theater in all of Manhattan, and it’s in Times fucking Square. I’m still strategizing the best time to see it so I can minimize my exposure to fuckery.

There is one more little mini-disaster that befell me this week, but that one won’t make the blog because it’s turning into one of those calamitous entries and I’m sick of complaining. Anyways Nietzsche said “Adversity breeds strength.”

Then again, sometime after sending Ecce Homo off to the publishers he apparently went bitchcakes and started talking to horses. Nietzsche, you little scamp!

Today’s soundtrack: ...
Today at 12:02pm: shaking my umbrella out



Whenever a client leaves the studio I shake their hand at the door and wish them good luck. After shutting the door I always run to the sink and wash my hands immediately. That might look strange if you were watching it on a security camera, but it’s cold-and-flu season and I ain’t taking any chances. Don’t like getting nasty surprises.

And yet nasty surprises roll in, I just got one last night. Girlfriend up and broke up with me. I didn’t see it coming but maybe that’s because I didn’t even have the radar on. That’s what happens when you get comfortable. My radar operator was in the mess hall playing ping-pong with the cook and the artillery guy. “Now look what you’ve done,” I tell him, but hear only the sound of ping-pong balls while the green line spins around and round.

In the relationships I’ve been in, it used to be me, consistently, who bailed out. I was always the first one out of the plane, practically pushing women and children out of the way at the slightest drop in altitude; I couldn’t get the parachute on fast enough. As I got older that changed, and once in a while I’d look up from my book and notice it was suddenly windy, the airplane door was open, and the seat next to me was empty.

The most common reason girls break up with me is because I am emotionally unavailable. (Terribly original of me, I know.) This is the equivalent of being fired for gross incompetence at a corporation: You show up at the office and put in the hours, but you just ain’t doing the job right. The Powerpoint presentations go over your head and you have no idea how to work the fax. One or two performance reviews later Security is escorting you from the building.

I knew about the emotionally-unavailable thing, I knew deep down inside I was a robot. In fact if you were to look deep within my emotional core during moments of intimacy, you would see a tiny little man doing The Robot.

This time around I thought it was different, but apparently it wasn’t. It’s also possible I simply got downsized out of the picture; there was a corporate re-org, and when the dust settled, no more room for my name on the flow-chart. Either way you slice it, I got an apology written on a pink slip.

It’s out of my hands.

Meanwhile I keep washing them.

You can’t make your girlfriend stay but you can try to kill flu germs.

Today’s soundtrack:
I'm just calling
on the wise man’s communion
Today at 2:51am: draining dregs and typing



Dust is dead skin.

Your skin sloughs off piece by piece until eventually, every given piece of skin you had on a particular day is gone, and you’re walking around in totally new skin.

New York City is like this. First your favorite café closes, then a restaurant you used to go to because the waitress was cute and they had killer sandwiches disappears. Then your late-night haunt shuts down and a store where you bought your notebooks turns into a fucking electronics shop. You can’t cut through that parking lot anymore because it’s filled with four brick walls holding up a condo.

You don’t really go to bars anymore, but one night you stop in at a bar where you spent many nights and dollars two dozen skins ago. Are you surprised to find the new bartender doesn’t know you from Adam and the management’s changed? That the crowds have cycled? Nightlife generations are like dog years, they go a lot quicker. The streets are right where you left them but your New York is gone. Houston’s still four blocks north of Canal but nothing will be the same. You think it’s just different, but the attenuation is profound.

You walk around in your new skin while your old skin gathers in the corners of your apartment. A mirror tells you your body is just the same, but the mirror lies like the rug you sweep the dust under.