August 21, 2010: What’s Your Message? August 21, 2010

I ate at Olympia Kabob House, went to Starbucks and just before passing out in a food coma for 2 hours, I noticed a goth kid dressed in black, tatted up with a mohawk spiked literally 2 feet high sipping on a cappucino.  And I thought, “Oh yeah dude, punk rock is alive and well at corporate coffee.”

When I awoke 2 hours later, the sight was still fresh in my mind.  What would possess this kid to fuck himself up so unfashionably and yet, still be seen at a lame coffee house like Starbucks.  I mean, if he really did carry the “fuck you” attitude he seems to represent to the world, I would think he’d be at some indie coffee house or not at one at all.

Did he dress like that to convey an attitude?  Or was he just screaming for attention; to be not just another nameless face in Santa Generica of Southern California?  It really boils down to those two facts.  I mean who REALLY feels comfortable in a 2 foot high spiked mohawk?  There is one other remote possibility and that was he was in some sort of theatrical performance and he was in costume, but I highly doubt it.

I then started to wonder about my own question, and subsequent answer.  And I think I found it in looking at my own history.

In high school, I had jock itch.  So, I turned to sweatpants.  It wore them EVERY day and had them in EVERY color because quite simply, they didn’t press on m groin and cause a grotesque amount of itching.  I never told anyone that because it was embarrassing.  But the sweats took an already out of step kid and made him that much more out of step.  It was my equivalent of a spiked mohawk.  The sweats came in wild colors of magenta, neon blue and on days of malaise, flourescent 80s green.  Saying I cast myself out of social centers was an understatement.

Then came the true height of the 80s.  I remember one summer, I vowed to get in step with the fashions; to not be the outcast I was setting myself up to be.  I went to Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, NJ and invested a heap of Roy Rogers Fast Food and Family Restaurant wages into truly horrific fashion choices.  I became a parody of the 80s, not an icon of it.  Donned in parachute pants, a shirt like Michael Jackson’s in his “Thirller” video and a belt that wrapped twice around me with “stylish” holes all along its 3 foot length, I entered 11th grade feeling like I was going to be the ultimate fashion plait.  It lasted all of about 3 days as I remember the parachute pants were making my nuts a scratching post as the heat from the vinyl would make a tropical depression down in my nether region transform into a category 5 hurricane.  So it was back to the sweats.

In college, I entered the 5th largest university as a nameless face, so I turned to a multi colored plaid golf hat which I wore everywhere.  I probably looked like a first rate tool trying to be someone amongst the masses.

By the time my 3rd year of college came, I had lost my identity entirely and decided to have a makeover from a friend who claimed he was a great surfer.  I should have known better when I realized he was from Wisconsin, but I threw better judgement to the wind and donned Vision sneakers, surfer Ts and board shorts and a visor.  A VISOR!!!!  What the fuck was I thinking?  I CAN’T EVEN SWIM!  And I was dressing like a surfer?  I wouldn’t be caught dead in a pool, let alone in a place with waves!  That lasted about 5 months before I realized that my nuts didn’t itch as much as they once did and so I was able to start wearing “normal” clothes.

So I guess what it all boiled down to was a lack of identity, lack of confidence in who I was since I had no idea who I was and a desire to cause attention to myself in order to give meaning to a pretty meaningless existence.  I purposely outcast myself in a weird self fulfilling prophecy that I would always be on the outside looking in and made myself ostracized to the masses.

Now, I am 42.  I can honestly say that that phase has passed.  The fashion choices I make now are just plain BAD.  Too baggy of pants, old men shirts and lames shoes.  But the worst part is, my ignorance stems from the fact that I just don’t know what looks good or modern.  So, with Hilda’s help, she discarded literally 85% of my wardrobe (her “OUT” she would shout as I showed her each article of clothing still rings in my head) and today, I am off to replenish some of the flotsam and jetsam of my bad fashion sense.  Let’s hope she knows what she’s doing.

August 16, 2010: Issues, Volumes and Trial Subscriptions August 16, 2010

In danger of being cliche, glib or just plain simplistic, life is like a magazine subscription.  Our lives are a series of articles bound between the front and back covers of our time here on earth.  The table of contents are actually a fluid laundry list of events and experiences that continuously get added to with each passing hour.  Most of the articles are mundane and never make final print.  But some are worthy of a few chapters.

We all have issues.  Some of those issues turn into volumes in and of themselves.  And then once in awhile, there is a VERY minor issue that is more like a trial subscription to a different magazine, but it comes and goes without much thought.

I have issues.  You have issues.  We all have issues.  The question is, can issues be worked through or just plain managed?  My feeling is there is no all or nothing.  Some issues CAN be worked out.  Others can’t.  Psychology has always fascinated me.  There can never be a one size fits all solution to the same problem.  For instance, if someone can’t achieve sexual intimacy because of a guilt feeling toward sex, some people can work through their history on where the train derailed, others learn to live with it and grapple with it when it arises.

Part of people’s problems as a whole is not understanding what their own issues are.  This is where “self awareness” comes in.  By self awareness, I mean being able to really know yourself thoroughly; to understand your shortcomings and strengths and more importantly, to have them not come charging into your everyday life creating problems in your relationships.  Allow me to provide a textbook example of the psychology of an issue.

All seemed well between Hilda and I.  I had lunch with her one Saturday.  She said she was planning to meet me at a pub after work.  Quitting time came and she called from her car saying she was asked to check out her nephew’s rash so she will meet me for dinner afterward even though she really didn’t want to go to her family’s pad.  She got there and they had dinner ready, so she said she’d meet me for dessert.  Plates were washed and she was too tired and was opting out.
THE PSYCHOLOGY: I interpret that as she would rather do something she did not want to do rather than see me.  Then it lead to me thinking she was just not that into me anymore.  Which led to the realization that I would never hear from her again.  In this case, I did not transfer my psychology to being angry at her which I think most people would do.  I transferred the anger to myself tearing myself down.  I think much of domestic abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse of a partner comes from a person not recognizing their own dysfunction and transferring it to their counterpart.  Self awareness is in very short supply.

So, how did I ever get from  Point A to Point Z and fill in these huge holes in my head?  It comes from THE ISSUE.

THE ISSUE: This stems from low self esteem.  In my head is the voice that tells me that I am not worthy of someone’s love, to ever be a priority in someone else’s life and to always be the guy who people love to be around, but not WITH.  So, where does THAT thought come from?  My low self image is a part of my miswiring.  And I am indeed miswired.

THE HISTORY: My low self image comes from early childhood.  Between being the smallest kid in the class, even smaller than most of the girls, to never being able to compete athletically, to being picked last for every team, to never being chosen to be someone’s square dance partner, to batting .000 for three years of little league , to being used as a battering ram by my dad, to being made to ALWAYS feel out of step with humanity, it is little surprise why I developed a low self esteem.  I never felt worthy of being someone’s boyfriend and rejection after rejection were experienced when I would FINALLY venture forward and go out on a limb and ask a woman out.  So everything piled up into an issue, if not even a volume or two of baggage.

But now, it is too late to actually rewire myself.  The electric was laid over the course of 42 years and quite frankly, I can’t restrip from scratch everything that has happened.  So, I have learned to insulate the bad wiring.  I am in a constant state of psychology always battling the voices in my head that is the issue.  I have to recognize that it is the ISSUE that is speaking and not reality.  People that don’t have this issue usually cannot understand why I just don’t pull up the bootstraps and quit my whining.  They usually look at things like this as an excuse.  Well, I am happy for them that they are so stable and functional.  But these are the people that usually have more issues than me and don’t recognize it only to have it manifest in their own personal life, most probably in the form of unhappiness.  As I wrote prior, everyone has issues, including people who don’t think they have issues.

The reality of what happened with Gilda is just what happened in reality.  She went to see her nephew, she had dinner, was too tired to meet for dessert.  It had absolutely nothing to do with not being into me, not putting me a priority or anything else deeper than that.  And after discussing my issue with her, she is more aware of what my problems are and knows now what I deal with.   I am glad she is understanding and not one of those women who just don’t want to deal with their counterparts issue and move onto the next broken and less self aware person.

August 14, 2010: Mental Fatigue August 14, 2010

I’m tired.

I’m tired of stupid people.  I’m tired of responding to stupid people, but still, I find I must.  I ran into someone today who still thinks 9-11 and Iraq were connected.  That same someone thinks Islamists are out to convert the world.  I can’t stand people who rave about the movie “Inception” when in all reality, that movie is garbage.  Yet they just tend to gloss over it, letting the waves of ignorance wash over them without the slightest of higher thought.

Stupid people are everywhere.  Now, I am not calling myself an elitist.  I think people are stupid for a number of reasons.  Let’s analyze, shall we?

1.  Laziness:  It takes just too damn much work to educate yourself even though with today’s tech, education is a few clicks away.  For instance, someone sent me a bunch of drivvel after Katrina’s debacle in the form of an article that stated that after a 1929 Category 5 storm destroyed them, they picked themselves up by the bootstraps and rebuilt without government help.  And with this tidbit of pseudo information, he went on to ramble on how he is sick of people asking for handouts.  A few clicks later, I was able to forward to him the record of all hurricanes documented for 1929 and none hit New Orleans.   So here was a guy absolutely nullified by a bit of faked information which he was too lazy to research on his own to see if it was true.  These are the same people who want government to determine what their child should watch, read, and learn in school.

2.  Denial:  Because of deep seeded beliefs and ideologies, they are absolutely cut off from ANY new information contrary to what they believe getting through their cranium.  Godforbid if they opened their minds and actually processed a different point of view.  Because they have absolutely no humility that what they may know is wrong, they are in complete denial of what may actually be real.

3.  Fear: I think many people are actually AFRAID of thinking for themselves because then they realize that maybe they are in the situation they are in today because they have a lifetime of stupidity.  And then they can’t blame OTHER people anymore for their own misery or status in society (or lack thereof).  These are the same people that cry about how cigarettes gave them cancer and they were manipulated by big tobacco.  If they actually overcame the fear that what they did they did to themselves, they would be that much more miserable.

4. Ignorance: You will find these people were the “C” and “D” students of society.  These were the kids of yesteryear that can barely comprehend the payout structure on a lottery let alone the complexities of the Iraq invasion and subsequent overthrow of the Baath party.  To them, the “Baath Party” will always be a poor man’s alcohol induced soiree with a tub substituting as a jacuzzi.  These people will never understand the dynamics between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq.

5.  Hubris: These are the people who beat their chests and believe their god is better than your god, their country is better than our country and frankly, their beer is better than your beer.    Humility is nowhere to be found in their dictionaries.  They believe we should just nuke em all and let God sort em out.  Their motto is “Fuck em all” even though they are the ones who will ultimately be fucked.

These are just a few reasons off the top of my head that they are blissfully ignorant and choose to stay that way.  I get razzed on how my attempts to educate are actually interpreted as snobbery, but to be honest, it is just more frustration than it is elitism.  I am far from an intellectual giant; I have just chosen to consume information wiser than most people.  I can only request that of you too.

A) Ask questions even if it coincides with your own philosophies.

B) Realize that EVERYONE has an agenda.

C) Stupidity is a disease which must be cured one mind at a time.

D) And it is stupid to think you can cure everyone.  But to give up trying is well, just stupid.

July 25, 2010: Starbucks or Bust July 25, 2010

Why is it that 80% of the time I order at Starbucks, my order is made wrong?  Now, am I ordering a grande half-caf mocha frappucino with extra caramel and extra whip with a spleen?  Just for the record, you will  NEVER see me ordering ANYTHING with more than 2 adjectives.  And people ordering more than that for a beverage should be shot on sight.  So what’s my drink of choice that tends to absolutely BAFFLE the hired help?

A Venti black iced tea with one Sweet and Low.

Let’s go through the ingredients and materials needed for such a mind scrambling conundrum.  First, you have the plastic cup.  Second, the ice.  Third, the actual pre made iced tea and finally, the most cryptic part of this, the packet of Sweet and Low.

For all you math majors out there, that’s four parts making up the whole.  And rest assured, up to 75% of that concoction will be made wrong 85% of the time.

25% THE CUP:  Now this is the LEAST amount of error I have encountered.  They usually just grab the right sized cup and write the contents on the side of it.  So I have full assurance that if I were to ever order JUST the cup, I would be certain that my order would be filled correctly 100% of the time.  But unfortunately, an empty cup does not a good beverage make.  And so comes the mind blowing variables.

25% THE ICE:  Ranking close to the odds of THE CUP, THE ICE is usually filled correctly.  Sometimes, they skimp on the ice and it is melted before it even reaches the pick up counter.  But blame that on the off chance the tea was just brewed and is still hot or just an incorrectly filled cup with ice.  But either way, it’s a low percentile of error.

25% THE TEA: Yes, this accounts for 50% of the errors.  I get passion.  I get green.  I get half lemonade-half black.  And the combinations of black, green, passion and lemonade in every imaginable mixture.  I think I even once got ALL of them in one cup.  I felt like a lottery winner that day!

25% THE SWEET AND LOW: Now THIS is where it ALL falls apart.  And for the record, I used to put the packet in myself, but a barrista with a sweet smile and the ability to forever change the wiring inside my skull convinced me to just mention the Sweet and Low when ordering and they will add it.  So I did and things went smoothly for a little while.

I am one of the few people who can taste the difference between Equal, Splenda and Sweet and Low.  I know my artificial sweeteners like nobody’s business.  Equal is too mild.  Splenda tastes like, well, the best comparison is sweet metal.  But Sweet and Low actual tastes sweet without an aftertaste or being artificial.

Now for all of you who are about to rail on me screaming that Sweet and Low has been known to cause cancer in lab rats and it says so on the packet, well, wake up!  That was eliminated long ago because they found that the levels of saccharin needed to give those rodents cancer was the equivalent of feeding humans a gallon of it per day, mixed with an IV drip of it every other hour followed by a saccharin enema.  In other words, 1 packet of Sweet and Low each day has about as much cancer causing crap in it as say, bottled water.

The barristas give me Equal.  They give me Splenda.  They give me TWO Sweet and Lows.  They give me a Sweet and Low with their classic stomach churning sweetener.  It’s when they do that that I almost hurl on the spot as it’s like drinking Log Cabin syrup straight out of the bottle.  One historically horrific time, they actually made my drink wrong THREE TIMES IN A ROW!!  THE SAME GUY!  I mean that either takes a whole lot of dope smoking or just a desire to fuck with the customers.

So now, mix it all together and you see why the variables for such a simple drink can absolutely blow the minds of people like myself. 50% of the drink has about 123 combinations thereof and so I roll the dice every time I order my Venti black iced tea with one Sweet and Low.  I guess the easy answer is to just step up to a REAL drink with 12 adjectives like most of the patrons do, but that would be my interpretation of selling out and I am not a sellout.  Selling out will be documented by me either sitting at Bux writing a screenplay, highlighting passages in a Bible or talking loudly on my cell phone hoping everyone in earshot realizes I am doing business with muckety mucks who are probably getting their orders wrong at the other Starbucks across the street.  But before that will ever happen, I will be ordering a grande half-caf mocha frappucino with extra caramel and extra whip with a spleen.  And then, I will expect for you to shoot me on sight.

July 19, 2010: “Luck” is Just A Four Letter Word July 19, 2010

And my oh my how many OTHER four letter words have spewed out of my mouth when it comes to luck.

The million dollar question is, “Are some people BORN lucky?”  I am a firm believer that they are.  I am also a firm believer that I am NOT one of them.  Everytime my friend Susan goes to Lemoore Casino, she wins hundreds to thousands of dollars on the same keno machine.  My friend Jim gets good cards at poker.  I walk by the slots in Vegas hotels and hear nothing but bells and whistles and cheers from the other patrons.  But me?  I am always stuck in the mud when it comes to Lady Luck.  The bitch never smiles on me when it comes to games of chance.

Now let’s get the disclaimer out of the way.  Yeah yeah, some people are born with bad genes and I have been lucky enough to only have to endure 3 wisdom teeth extracted, a broken finger and two stitches in my skull from a rock fight.  But that’s not really luck.  That’s genetics and some people have quality ones and some others don’t.  It is an interesting fact that my mother’s maiden name was “Eugenides” which translates from Greek into English as “good genes”.  So I do have that going for me.  But again, that’s not really luck per se.  I am talking about games of chance.

It’s always been like this.  You know those seven tiles you get to pick at the start of Scrabble?  K, X, P, B, S, S, and Blank.  Backgammon?  1-2, 5-1 and 6-3 are my opening rolls du jour.  Scratch off lottery tickets?  All I get are the silver filings on my clothes for the next 6 hours.  Raffles?  Hardly.  Chinese auctions? Forget it.  Coin flips?  Always the other side.  Rock, Paper Scissors?  I’m internally bleeding within minutes.  Slot machines? Spaces across the board.  Roulette? The ball hops off the wheel.  Craps?  The dice roll off the table.  Carnie games?  Fat chance.  The list goes ever on.

I do remember one carnie I went to as a kid, I think it was the St. Phillips Bazaar and I swore I would FORCE myself to have luck.  I invested something like $23 into one of those fixed carnie games and FINALLY got my $2 glass mirror with The Who etched into it that I had been trying so desperately for.  Now, for starters, why I even WANTED The Who is beyond me as I had no clue who they even were.  But a win is a win and I walked away high as a kite.  But as luck would have it, I tripped and it smashed a mere 12 minutes later assuring me of another 7 years of downright hellaciously bad luck.

There was one time in which I blew my proverbial luckload .  I actually once won a 15 inch black and white TV.  You can see how long ago it was because they were actually MAKING black and white TVs.  I mean, think about that one.  There will be a day sometime soon when kids will be like, “They consciously CHOSE to make a TV in black and white when there was color available?”  But the win was a win nonetheless and I remember going absolutely jizz crazy thinking I had just won a million dollar lottery.  I was whooping and hallowing and making a general fool of myself, but hey, I was only 11, so that gave me the green light to go batshit.

And there was one time that I actually DID break the cosmic toilet flush of luck by being at a poker table where two other people won a jackpot in which the entire table shared some of the prize.  Pull?  $1200.

But barring those two fleeting moments, luck has always been something this side of a unicorn and leprechaun; myths that you hear other people have witnessed like sightings of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster or UFOs.  Luck just does not reside anywhere close to Paul Peter Argyropoulos.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t keep trying.  I do continue to play the lottery hoping against hope that I have been building up my lifetime of lucklessness for a HUGE orgasm of a win.  But yesterday, I threw my hat into a very big contest.  Apparently, this swank museum in Chicago is awarding someone 10K and a stay in their museum for 30 days.  I guess that is not a contest of sorts as it seems more like employment.  But I made my video, filled out my application, took my photo and am throwing my chances against the wall that I will get picked for the challenge.  Frankly, I think it’d be a great opportunity.  The 10K is just icing on the cake, but it is a kind of contest that I really wanted to roll the dice with.  So with that said, I ask you to all do me a favor….

…wish me luck!

July 18, 2010: The Art of Rambling July 18, 2010

I’ll be honest.  I am reading Stacy’s blog more out of competition than not.  Meaning, I have started at the beginning of her entries and begun reading her musings.  I think in a way, it is inspiring me to keep blogging.

She rambles.  I ramble.  So what’s the difference?  I think it’s the delivery.  She has these esoteric, lofty comparisons of life like how you should take an avalanche and make snow cones which is just another tired take on the lemons-to-lemonade comparison.  It is very educational insofar as I do not want to be a blowhard longwinded armchair philosopher.  NOT that I am calling her a longwinded armchair philosopher, mind you.  It’s just that her blog is a little, well, dry.

For instance, she talks about how music can inspire your soul and get you thinking about life and blah blah blah.  Me?  Fuck that.  I am ALL about the hook.  If the song has a hook, then I am all over it.  She talks about the deep possible stories between a homeless man talking to a business yuppie on a street corner that she witnessed.  In my mind, I have twisted it into some type of solicitation for prostitution from Mr. Wall Street looking for some low budget loving.  She has these gloriously sweeping analogies on how some things in life are simple like hummingbirds floating between flowers.  Me?  I hire the Mexican to come with a weedwhacker to mow down the fucking garden and then take pot shots with his b-b gun at the hummingbird.  In other words, I want my blog to be colorful because I think colorfully.  Well, make that OFF color.

The Art of Rambling is indeed an art.  It’s taking the mundane and making it germane without you realizing it.  Once you start making all these fantastic Dali Lama-esque allegories and life lessons, you lose the audience.  To keep the masses entertained, you need to throw some spices into the stew.

For example, let’s go back to her music musings.  She expounded upon the relevance of music and lyrics and so forth.  Not me.  To me, music is 90% escape, 5% meaning and 5% this crap they have filtering through the sound system at Starbucks.  I mean really guys, REGGAE?  More like REALLY gay.  I mean JESUS… we are in FUCKING VAN NUYS, CALIFORNIA!!!  Like do I see ANY Carribbean themed ANYTHING in this place?  There isn’t even a black person IN here!  Godforbid if they piped in some 80s tunes.  Instead, it is the 92 minute version of “I Shot The Sheriff”.

I digress.  Music to me is something to sing along to and for that reason, it needs a hook.  For those who are oblivious to “the hook”, it is that part of the song which you walk away to still echoing in your head that sticks like bubble gum to the bottom of a shoe.

It includes guilty pleasures, rock mantras, big hair bands, one hit wonders, obscure songs from Broadway plays…ANYTHING goes.  I’ve got a tune from Schoolhouse Rock, “Man of La Mancha” and the opening theme from “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” all in the same playlist.   If you could psychoanalyze someone based upon their iPod contents, I would be committed on the spot!  I’d be thrown into the deepest padded room and be forced to forever listen to the 92 minute version of “I Shot The Sheriff” until I was begging for dreds and a bale of marijuana.  I have a slew of one hitters and no namers that have some of the best hooks ever known to hit a recording studio.  Substance?  So overrated.  Give me a dose of Britney Spears’ “Circus” any day over the 23 minute Pink Floyd masterpiece “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.  If it’s bubble gum, I’m blowing bubbles.  But any sign of actual substance, you can just keep it to yourself.  I guess what I miss most of all are the days when fun did not come loaded with judgements and deep meanings (aka the 80s).  Just like this blog, empty calories are sometimes just the thing you need.  So, on behalf of all those superficial people out there, for this installment, I hope you snacked well.

July 17, 2010: Making Enemies July 17, 2010

Some of the wisest advice I was ever given, and I do not know who exactly gave it to me or when, is “You cannot be friends with everyone in life.”  This is absolutely invaluable and can only be so very thankful I received it in my early twenties as opposed to late in life.  It is because of this that I have lived a life of honesty and being true to myself.

Now, with that said, enemies are made at many different turns.  Some just happen because you may just LOOK like someone the other person didn’t like in their past.  Some happen by accident through some bit of poor judgement on your part that sticks for the duration of life.  Some are by the mere fact that you are already behind the 8-ball contending against a lifetime of stereotypes and misguided lessons passed on by the people in another person’s life.  But some enemies are made because of the honesty that I wrote about a few sentences up is not appreciated by the person receiving it.

Today, I very well may make an enemy with someone I have no intention of making an enemy with.  But here is the rub of it.  If you are throwing out a product open for public critique, you need to rise above the personal sting of the critique and empirically process it without equating that to a personal attack.  In layman’s terms, get over yourself and ask if what I am spitting has some weight to it.

I am not sure how I even navigated to the blog of a co worker, Stacy Halbach (her married name escapes me), but I stumbled upon her musings, much like the ones I do here.  I read about 12 entries on how she is pedaling to publishers her manuscript of a book she wrote  and her receiving rejections.  One of her posts involved a comparison to life with speed bumps and how to approach both in terms of speed; slow, medium or get some air Mach 3.  She told of a situation between her and another woman at the gas pump which she inadvertently made an enemy of.

Her three choices were: ignore her (go slow), acquiesce and apologize (medium) or fight (Mach 3).  She felt she took the middle road and she acquiesced and apologized.

Now immediately, you see the problem.  Her VIEW of what the middle road is was not even close to what a middle road is.  Ignoring her should not have been even a choice as that is not going forth with speed, it is coming to a stop and avoiding the speed bump entirely.  Yeah yeah, I know, ignoring her IS actually a choice, but it is a real lame one.  Her assessment of choices was wrong to begin with.

But none of the details of this situation is the point of my entry today.  The point is, I have no idea how she will receive my critique.  I told her that her solution was boring, and it WAS boring.  She talked about her zen approach to this potential conflict.  Rarely does zen make for a good story and knowing that makes all the difference in storytelling ability.

I have always been a good storyteller.  A large part of me LOVES and THRIVES on conflict.  Call it being Greek, blame it on me being from Jersey, attribute it to Short Man’s Syndrome, whatever the fuck it is, I have a HELL of a lot of good stories, and many times they involve conflict.  This gas station powderkeg could have exploded into a plethora of stories, but it fizzled into a very unremarkable display of nothingness.  I suggested next time, fight like your life depended upon it.

I do like to critique and I think this has made enemies in my lifepath.  I remember I critiqued a screenplay from a coworker of mine.  I pored over the thing THREE TIMES and made three separate sets of notes.  I think the notes were longer than the screenplay.  Our relationship was never the same after that.  I made an enemy by being honest.

I want to be honest with Stacy.  I love her to death.  She throws AWESOME parties which I still want to get invited to.  But I really want her to improve her writing.  And I wonder if she gets an honest critique of it.  I once took a writing class and the most important info I gleaned from the $620 pricetag of the class was to NEVER give the piece of writing you want critiqued to someone you know because you will never get an honest criticism.  I think it is because of that very notion that I am honest and  is usually the proverbial deal breaker in my relationships.

I have to ask Stacy, does she REALLY love to write?  I actually do.  I have been keeping a daily journal for now something like 17 years.  I look forward to writing in it and it takes precedence over most everything.  It’s a passion.  I have been writing poetry since I was seven.  I lived on word searches, cryptoquotes, Scrabble and Boogle as a child.  I would win contests of who could make the most words out of a single word.  Graffiti had its place at one time in my life.  But the irony is, I hate reading an that includes my own swill.  Even these blogs I pore over so that every word is spelled correctly, punctuation in its proper places.  I see misspellings on her page and can only wonder if these are in her own manuscripts.  Poor grammar and misspellings are those speed bumps when it comes to reading.  You want the road to be smooth, and the reader to not bounce around no matter how small those bumps may be.

Anyway, I inadvertently accidentally may have turned other people onto my blog because I had to give my blog address as a verification for posting a comment.  And lo and behold, it now has a link to here.  I was happy with 5 fans, but I may be getting more traffic than I wished to at this point.

But I must say, I do applaud Stacy and anyone who throws their stuff out there for rejection.  I just hope she can rise above my pseudo venom and take what I spit out for what it is, just a critique.

July 16, 2010: The Shiver July 16, 2010

Yesterday, I ventured out for tennis lessons and I baked.  I mean BAKED!  It was at least 115 degrees on the court.  I had never remembered the San fernando Valley being that hot in July and running around on a tennis court for an hour and a half was just plain hell.  I was dreading the tennis lessons scheduled for today if the weather was going to be anything comparable to yesterday.

I was en route to the court when I noticed puddles on the ground getting more extensive as I drove.  By the time I got to the halfway point, I received a call saying the lessons were cancelled.   And so I decided to have my morning workout at Starbucks.  Yeah, I know, I am not burning as many calories as an hour and a half of tennis, but I could suck down some iced tea which would eventually lead to a flushing of my bladder which is in itself healthy in a different way.

Well, as I sucked down my Venti black tea with 1 Sweet and Low, sure enough, the urge to purge came on.  I made my way to the urnial.  All went swimmingly well.  No stray splashing, steady stream, good color.  Even the anticipated shiver came at the right spot.  Tap tap tap; back to the table.

But then I got to wondering… why the hell do I shiver at the end of my evacuation?  Now although this thought will probably turn off my friend Christine who reads this, it very well may intrigue my friend Donnna who is in the medical field.  I got to wondering, WTF is up with the shiver?  It’s always been there but I never really thought about it until this morning.

I started my research online.  Apparently, there has been none done.  It just isn’t worthy enough to research it.  Wouldn’t it be a hoot if the pee shiverers of the world had some unique antibody that cures cancer or reverses aging?  What, our disability is not good enough for the medical community?  I bet the people who don’t feel the need to research this are not shiverers.

I started to think about the social implications of the pee shiver.  I mean us guys stand at the urinal and we tend to not consciously pay attention to the dude alongside us.  But the truth is, we actually are quite aware of what is going on inside the crapper.  There is an unwritten, unsaid etiquette that when you enter a commode, you should leave a urinal open between you and the next person whenever you can.  And if perchance there is that God awful stainless steel trough where you just hang out like horses in a summer scorcher, you give ample distance accompanied with looking up and away so as to not catch the other guy’s junk in your peripheral vision.  And of course, when sitting on the crapper itself, you wait until there is someone utilizing a hand dryer or there is a conversation going or there is no one else in the water closet to let out that blast of methane and last night’s dinner that has been storing up for the past 8 hours that would scare most little kids and pets alike.  And let’s not forget, we opt to maintain radio silence during the deed so as to not break the moment and hex the task at hand making it an aborted moment having you to suffer another 1/2 hour for you to make another trip back to the men’s room.

But the shiver is something very physical that I wonder, are the other dudes around me noticing my convulsion?  Did they blink and miss it?  Do they share in my affliction and can relate?  Is there group therapy for pee shiverers like myself?  And do non pee shiverers just think that the shiver they just witnessed was just something this side of an orgasm, and can only WISH they had something that gloriously pleasurable as a shiver, when in reality it is not even close to either of those two adjectives.

My research revealed nothing.  So I can only give my own theories, the first scientific, the second, science ficition.

1) The nitrogen found in urine reverses in the urethra, reverse flows back up to the bladder releasing inside it causing a shiver.  My evidence that this is happening?  Absolutely none other than I can spell the word “nitrogen” correctly.

2) The aliens that keep stealing my shit have implanted a non detectable microdot in my bladder wall and I am now part of some twisted interplanetary subscription web service where members get to send a shiver into any implantee of their choice.  If that is the case, then where do I sign up because I think it would be a blast to make the dude in the next urinal have a shake because well, there was an empty urinal between us available when he came in and he broke men’s room etiquette!  A good shiver or two could perhaps teach him a lesson!

July 10, 2010: A Lifetime of Murder July 10, 2010

Guilty as charged.

Yes, that can be the only verdict for my reckless abandon of 1st degree murder.  You could even call me a serial murderer as I have been killing for over 35 years.  And although my closest friends and relatives kind of had this idea that I could be a serial murderer, they really didn’t give it all that much thought.

My prey cannot really be quantified per se.  I mean I am not like the Green River Killer or the BTK serial murderer.  And I have no real stories like Gacy or Dahmer who end up in dark anthologies of mass murderers.  My victim is not a tally that can be easily measured.  What I am guilty of killing is time.  And boy have I murdered a lot of it.

The genesis of me becoming the serial killer that types before you today lies in childhood.  I was one of those kids who chose to play by himself rather than reach out to neighborhood kids.  They always tended to play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers.  I was more high brow opting for my own adventures inside my head moreso because no one wanted to join me in a game of Congressional Lobbyist and Senator, a VERY riveting game if you gave it half a chance.  Sure, not a whole lot of physical contact, but the paper cuts could be VERY brutal if you were not careful.

I created games on my own.  I would routinely play chinese checkers and chess by myself.  I even enjoyed playing Monopoly by myself, trying hard to outwit me but somehow always falling short and losing the game nonetheless.    And me being a sore loser would end up with something being destroyed by my wrath.  Now don’t go throwing in my face how by logic, I also WON the game because somehow that winner was not me, even though it WAS me.  Yes, I was an odd kid with an even odder outlook on life.

But soon, I found that I was choosing more to entertain myself because I pretty much had more fun with myself than with people.  This didn’t mean I was a hermit.  It just meant I was very adept at passing time with myself as opposed with other people.

My Atari 2600, my Atari 800XL were all instrumental in me becoming the future killer.  The arcades also contributed.  How many Saturdays was I waiting outside Willowbrook Mall’s famous Fun N Games arcade waiting for the doors to get unlocked?  And how many late nights was I up posting messages on the BBS systems in the North Jersey area.  (For those of you who do not know, BBS systems were mini internets that a person set up inside their own home which could only have one person logged onto it at any one time.  And they had threads which you could leave messages on and some really crude online games all without graphics).

I started to really kill time as I started to acquire hobbies.  I had this one REALLY bizarre hobby as a child which involved me keeping a journal of every cigarette ever made with an account of its tar and nicotine count.  I had it sectioned off into 100s, lights, ultralights, hard pack, soft pack, menthol.  It was just downright weird.

Then I started keeping lists of all the Tom and Jerry episodes ever made.  And then I started keeping a journal of every license plate.  It was borderline obsessive compulsive behavior rather than hobby.

Next came baseball card collecting and chasing down those sets.  Wacky Packages followed suit and then came Alarm record collecting.  Each one had the common denominator that they were all solo ventures not needing a counterpart to partake in the sheer orgasm of jotting down a Kansas license plate or finding out the nicotine count of a Chesterfield.

The Alarm was a Welsh band in the vein of U2 who never really caught on like them, but still had talent nonetheless.  I was for about 3 years actively chasing down, documenting, researching memorabilia from them.  That killed a LOT of time.  I guess it was during college that I really honed into the idea that I was not just passing time anymore, I was actually killing it.  I found I opted more to be with myself than mingle with other college folk.

I took a lot of my free time when I got a job at the PBS affiliate in Phoenix to invest time into learning the equipment; editing, switcher, camera, and the like.  That killed PLENTY of Saturday nights.  When most normal people were busy getting laid, I was finding the absolute thrill of regenerating vertical interval timecode on beta tape and could not understand for the life of me why ANYONE would choose to pursue sex over that.

By the time I got to Bakersfield, my skill at massacring time was legendary.  I had rollerblading, Java Jazz, journal writing at length, writing books about Wacky Packages, the gym; the list was long.  And when i got to Los Angeles, I added poker playing, metal detecting, road tripping to Laguna Beach and now, online blogging to the weapons of choice.  All the while, time keeps becoming collateral damage.

Well, today, I decided to kill some time yet again.  I actually logged onto CNN.com to watch at length the work they are doing on the famous Deep Horizon Oil Spill vent.  I was actually riveted as I watched the underwater subs unscrewing bolts, trying to loosen pieces of the topcap and actually cheering when they finally were able to pry loose a piece from the cap.  I would have continued killing time had I not actually had REAL plans with a REAL person.

I had lunch with Hilda and it was over a Kobe burger at Ruby’s that I realized that I had not been passing time all these years, I had actually been murdering it.  Should I be held up to account for my sins?  Perhaps.  But to be honest, I don’t feel all that bad about it.  Like a psychopath, I have no remorse for my murders because ultimately, I am in a good place.  And I don’t encourage people to follow my path.  But I do say, when time does slow down for others to where they have a crash course with what they call “boredom”, I find the concept absolutely alien since I am an expert on never being bored.  Somehow, I think I have obtained the skills from my kills to never have to worry about ever being bored.  And for that I am grateful even if it has come at the expense of lost time.

Now please excuse me.  I have some more CNN live oil well capping to watch.

July 4, 2010: Independence Remembered July 4, 2010

Today was a life altering day for me in 1998.  July 4th, 1998, I sat atop the highest hill on the Greek island of Delos and right then and there, something very cosmic happened.  I grew up.  But of course, there is a backstory.

I was living in this patch of desert called Bakersfield, California and I was convinced by Laura, a friend of my friend Donna, to join her on her trip to Greece.  I had not been there in over a decade so I figured why not.  But, I was sort of seeing this woman in town and I really didn’t want to leave her behind for fear she may get back together with her fiance.  Now, don’t even remotely try to wrap your head around that for fear that it might just explode.  That’s not the backstory at hand here.  What is important about it is that she said, “Throw caution to the wind on your trip.”

Well, the trip started out pretty miserable for me.  I found that I really did not want to strike out from Laura or her stepbrother Dean’s side for fear of, well, who knows exactly why.  But I was either glomming onto them or just shuttering myself up in my pension’s room.

Our first island stop was Mykonos.  Laura and Dean did nothing except party beyond hard and crash during the day.  By the third day, I realized I was so out of my element on Mykonos that I truly felt like a stranger in a strange land.

One morning when Laura and Dean were absolutely cashed out, I woke up and decided to venture out for a day trip to the uninhabited island of Delos, rich with ruins and rubble.  It was a short 45 minute boat ride from Mykonos so I could be there and back before nightfall.

I got to the rock and ascended the tallest hill.  From up above, I could see the world below me.  Off in the distance was Paros and Mykonos and Naxos.  I turned in 360 degrees to see the blue waters below me.  And the wind was kicking something fierce.  I felt more alive than I had ever been.  I was alone atop the hill when Veronica’s words hit me: throw caution to the wind.

With that, I stripped down and sunbathed for about 3 hours in the wind and glorious warmth.  I felt refreshed and clear of mind, like I realized I was my own person and didn’t have to rely on Laura and Dean for my trip itinerary.  Right then and there, I realized I could shape and form my own experiences.  It truly WAS  independence day for me.

Things changed entirely when I got back to Hotel Delos.  I told Laura and Dean I was going solo for a bit.  From there, I experienced Paros, Antiparos and Folegandros.  I got myself into some misadventures.  I experienced things I never would have and learned that there are some very definite plusses to travelling solo.  It was because of Delos I was able to find autonomy and move forward not only with my trip, but my lifepath.

The ironic thing is that toward the latter end of the trip, it was me who was figuring out our itinerary.  I encouraged the two to go to Rhodes which turned out to be both their high points.  I found our swank pad Kolitsani View based on my sister’s recommendation.  I spearheaded our jaunt to Crete and the Minoan Ruins.  Things turned around 180 degrees.

Since that day, I have now ventured to 36 different Greek islands and experienced more than I ever thought I would or could.  I am blessed for that July 4th.

So every Independence Day, I remember Delos and the gift it gave me.  That and a VERY bad burn on my bum.  Note to self… areas not usually exposed to sun, burn quick.

July 1, 2010: Representin’…sort of July 2, 2010

Well, yesterday was the big day.  I got to Van Nuys Superior Court with plenty of time hoping Mr. Ramos and Ms. Urbano would be a no-show.  As soon as the elevator opened I heard a scrawny woman with a loud tinny voice, “This is America and you have to speak English!  That’s why my grandparents died in war too!”  Somehow, I knew my and this woman’s paths would cross.

I took my place out in the hallway with the other 100 or so people who were also experiencing our glorious legal system.  Sure enough, this woman felt a need to strike up conversation with me and launch into her entire spiel about why she was there.  She found it a perfect opportunity to preach about how people like the woman who hit her are abusing the privilege to drive and how she was the innocent person and blah blah blah.  I wish I had a gavel so I could crack her melon open with it but that would probably just release a cloud of cyanide gas and kill us all.  I was actually looking forward to hearing her case because I think this chick was a live wire needing to be put in her place.

The doors opened up to the courtroom and en masse, we had to raise our right hand and take the oath to “tell the truth so help me God.”  The disconcerting thing to this is that about half the people did NOT say, “Yes” or “I do” including the plaintiffs in my case.

They took roll call, announcing each party.  I had no idea what my plaintiffs looked like so when they said “here”, the first thing I saw was that Mr. Ramos had WAY too much gel in his hair.  And when I answered to my name, since I was sitting behind them, I knew they would want to turn around and see me, see fear in my eyes, see the nervousness so I made a point to cover my eyes in the palm of my hand like I was napping.  Anything to throw them off.

Apparently, Mr. Ramos and Ms. Urbano had an interpreter with them,  She was this woman the size of a farmhouse.  Everyone was told to go into the hall, exchange evidence and then come back in.  This was where I could see what cards the plaintiffs were holding, what aces they had, what potential high cards I had to contend against.

Well, the highest card in their deck was literally a 7 of clubs. They had nothing; no witness testimony, no cop testimony, no investigation, only bills and their word.  I was shocked.  I could only imagine their surprise when I pulled out a 3/4 inch stack of evidence but then again, they didn’t look too swift and figured they would not know a train wreck even after the conductor ended up in their laps.  My case was won barring the judge being an absolute head case of dimentia, which I kind of was expecting based upon my meeting with the paralegal 3 weeks prior.

Minutes turned into hours; case of a rental property being left a mess, a vacated office space which the owner couldn’t rent out, a car that was bought and then sold out from under him before he could pick it up, cases of that sort.  The most educational part is just because the other party did not show up did not mean the plaintiff won anything; the plaintiffs still had to prove their case.  And in many times, they actually didn’t.  I mean if you can’t win a case without the defendants even being there, that’s a pretty weak case.

The wiry woman from earlier was eventually called.  She had no pictures of her damaged car and the east Indian elderly woman who was being sued barely had command of the english language.  The first woman made a point to get on her soapbox about how driving is a privilege being abused and the judge shot her down within the first 3 sentences.

The vibe I got from the judge was that she was no nonsense and far more mentally stable than I had imagined.  She tended to just ask “yes” and “no” questions.  She had tried pushing mediation numerous times on the people in waiting, but my case would have none of that as I was not involved with Mr. Ramos (whose real name is Mr. Vega) and his damages.

Our case finally got called at 4:00.  FINALLY, it was SHOWTIME! This i what I had been practicing for two months for.  I had my spiel ready and everything.

Ms. Urbano said she saw what happened and then was sent into the hall while Mr. Vega testified.  First off, he got the direction we were traveling WRONG!  How can anyone go 3 months and not know we were headed west and not east is beyond me.  Secondly, he claimed that I did all the damage.  The judge was savvy enough to find he did not have auto insurance.  He presented his bills and injuries and then it was my turn.

My Perry Mason defense was about to get underway.  However, much to my shock, it ended up being more of a one-liner.  All was going okay, as I stated it was actually TWO collisions happening at TWO separate times which she found genuinely interesting.  And once I presented the accident reconstruction investigation, she said loudly, “STOP RIGHT THERE!“

She turned to the plaintiff and said, “Why are you not suing the other cars?  How do you know the vehicle BEHIND you didn’t hit you?  You only felt one impact not two?  How do you know the Camry didn’t do the damage? What makes you think Mr. Peter (that’s me FYI) did your damage?”  This is where he mentioned the cop’s assessment that I did everything.

I countered that the policeman did not ask me ANYTHING and I did not offer up anything either.

Then, the unexpected totally happened.  She actually LOBBIED him to sue the other defendants so we could get into court and the three drivers duke it out while he just sits back and lets the dust settle.  I was like, “What the fuck?”  She asked him point blank, “Do you want to continue this or do you want to come back and get everyone here in one shot?”  He answered he wanted to continue this.

“WHAT?  So you are just going to roll the dice like in Vegas because sir, he has an accident reconstruction report that states that he was not at fault and well, you don’t and I am not saying he will win, but it could be that what he is saying is true, that he didn’t cause your injuries or damages.  Are you sure you want to continue because I can delay this for a later date?”  That’s when he buckled and said, “Yes.”  So…no justice was served, but a delay of yet another two months resulted.  I was seething but I did not show it.  Then came the ultimate kick in the groin.  The judge forced me to give the addresses of the other drivers to him so he could do the legwork and get them into the courtroom.  That was bullshit.  He had no idea who the other drivers were.  Now he will rustle them up and then let the circus begin.

I gave him the info in the hall (he was actually about to leave without the information and the bailiff told him to get it from me) and in that short time, I told him, “Look, I have from the LAPD the records that show 2 accidents happened,” and I showed him the incident reports.  He flatly denied that happened and went along his merry ignorant way.  I was like, “See you September 8th, dude.”

In essence, it was a totally wasted day outside of the fact that it will be interesting if he can get the non-English speaking Kims to show up.  How he will do that is beyond me.  We have a specific court date of Septemeber 8th.  Until then, it’s 2 more months of night terrors.

To be continued…..

June 29, 2010: Whoring out June 29, 2010

I am a whore.  Not a sexual whore, oh no no no.  How I WISH I could be that, but alas, frumpy hairy hobbit-like shaped people such as myself do not get that luxury.  No, I am a job whore.  I will take any job that comes along providing there is a paycheck along with it.  I have always been like that and although it has made me financially secure, I must admit, it has probably taken decades off my life.  The drivel of projects I have edited is long and pretty much as relevant to TV history as say the TV show “What A Country”.  I will whore myself out to whomever offers me a paying gig regardless of whether it is is low brow or has some legs to it.  I have yet to do porn, I must say.  It is not below me to cut porn, but to be honest, I think it would get pretty old after about 13 minutes.  There are just so many teacher-seducing-student plots a person can put together without going bat shit.

I got word today that I am going to be editing a show for The Game Show Network entitled “Baggage”.  I had actually lobbied to be a cutter on it, but in reality, I just wanted work.  There is no project too lowly for my punching the clock.  This gig comes with one very cool perk; I am now employed up until October!  It has been a VERY long time since I had any type of predictable  schedule.  I won’t have to worry as much about my upcoming rape from Uncle Sam and his taxes.

I don’t hate nor love editing.  It’s hard to edit knowing I have way more experience than the people I am cutting for.  It’s harder to endure the writing of the 50-something year old men trying to be hip to 1 17 year old and they just come out looking just plain sorry.  I have been asked many times why I just don;t head up my own show.  truth is, I do not have the motivation.

One really strange thing about the places I have worked is that to this day, I still have dreams where I am back at that station and I am due to run a camera live on the air but I have entirely forgotten how to do the job.  Or I am back in the old bays at E! from 10 years ago and I have no idea how to start.  But then I wake up screaming causing the hooker to run out the door without her 12 dollars and I am left alone.

Sometimes I wonder if I could be great if I just had the ambition.  I get it.  I mean I REALLY get it  And by “it” I mean TV.  I understand the projects made to be done quick and cheap so they could be sold to unsuspecting third world simpletons sick of shows that feature some kind of a farm animal as the main character.I understand budget, demographics, politics, history, and to not fall in love with a project, but in LIKE with it instead.  I understand good writing, and bad management.  But what I don’t understand is why I don’t move on or have ambition to begin with.

The place I work for mostly is the absolute textbook, poster child case on what NOT to do when creating a TV show.  And it is not only this project that is like this, but EVERY project.  I was once told from a co-editor of mine that there is something entirely lacking in me to 1) do a GREAT job of editing each and everytime and 2) that there is something lacking in me to have me keep coming back without packing weaponry.  The place I work for is the WKRP of TV.  And as close as my razzing is to biting the hand that feeds me, it is necessary to vent so that the kettle doesn’t explode under the pressure.  Case in point on how ridiculous this place is where I work.

EXHIBIT A:  Exec Producer for a show called “101 Celebrity Moments” comes down and asks how it is going.  I tell him everything is great except the show is 2 minutes light.  he tells me not to worry as he has a plan; he will just make another moment.  I cautiously asked fully knowing how much of a tool this guy was, “Well, wouldn’t that make it 102 moments?” he realized that that wouldn’t work and worse, couldn’t even save face by saying something like, “Duh, stupid me.”

THESE are the people I work with.  Dumb as stumps and yet in positions of power.  How they got there, I have no clue, but got there they did.  Most likely, they started in the mail room and failed upward.  I figured that the people in charge of promoting underlings are easily swayed by a good talker.  I have never really been a quality salesman.  Maybe that is why I m always called upon for work.  I don’t take myself too seriously and just am the diligent worker bee.  There are editors who call their work their “craft”.  I call it my “job”.  I think I like it that way.  It keeps my belly full and me traveling to Greece every year.  I’ll swim in a sea of mediocrity because I realize there is more to life than just a .33 rating.

June 28, 2010: T Minus 3 Days June 29, 2010

It’s a mere 3 days until I stand before Judge Judy in the Van Nuys Courtroom Department Z.  On the line is my honor, my integrity and countless hours of me practicing my defense.

To catch you up to date, on October 28th, 2008, I was involved in an accident with an accident that had already occurred.  I was the back car and so everyone jumped on the chance to say I caused all the wreckage and mayhem.  That would actually hold water if it was ONLY TRUE!  You see, I have amassed about a 3/4 inch thick stack of evidence that clearly supports my defense.  The only thing that is going against me is apparently, this dumb ass cop that came to the scene told all the drivers it was my fault entirely even though the clown never asked me for my version of events.  I mean he didn’t even take a police report.  So how can he say with certainty it was my fault?

I was the back car.  The dude suing me was in the frontmost car.  He had no auto insurance.  Was HE given a citation?  No, of course not.  WTF was up with that?

I have found out that the judge I am to plead my defense against has bats in her belfry.  She is known to award plaintiffs money with no evidence.  And 85% of all her cases ruled in favor of the defense are overturned in appeal.  So she is the wild card in all this.

This is uncharted territory for me.  I will admit, I was a fan of People’s Court in the Wapner days.  I love Judge Judy and probably mount her withered ass screaming, “YOU LIKE IT??  AND “UM” IS NOT AN ANSWER!  ”Cum” may be, BUT “UM” ISNT!”  And I was a fan of The Practice and courtroom movies too.  So I have prepared myself for the big day as best I could.  I am so tempted to scream like Pacino in “Justic For All”, “I’m out of order.  You’re out of order!  This court’s out of order!!!” Just start screaming for no reason.  Freak the judge out and have her throw the book at me.  I just hope the book is a softcover.

I am trying to anticipate what the good Mr. Ramos will say.  I don’t think he will say much because he apparently only speak Spanish.  I am also wondering if he will have surprise witnesses or something to throw me a curve ball.  I am hoping he will only have his bills and weak case to offer the court.

This should be very interesting to say the least.  I wish I could record the proceeding for posterity sake because if they let me speak, it will be a most glorious defense to rival the Scopes Monkey Trial and Roe v. Wade.  I am ready for the face off.  USA vs. Mexico.  Bring it on!

In all honesty, I am actually finding this fun in an obsessive way.  I have been honing my arguments, becoming intimate with every nuance.  And just waiting for the confrontation.  You see, being from Jersey AND Greek, I thrive on that!  It’s like a crystal meth rush followed by a speedball chaser.  Don’t let my 5’4″ frame fool you.  I am a short man with a shorter fuse.

Well, we will see how it all pans out in three days.  I am as ready as I will ever be and will have my A Game ready to shred him apart.  Send his ass all the way back to Juarez.  He picked the wrong dude to sue.

On a different note entirely, Hilda actually came over today and bought me a slew of shirts.  It was extremely sweet of her.  You see one thing I know I need help on is my wardrobe and she has good taste.  So I am all over new clothes.  She said the clothes she picked really looked good on me.  I am going to wear one of them tomorrow to work.  Hell, I may wear all of them and change every 3 hours or so.

June 26, 2010: The theory of work June 27, 2010

There are two types of people in the world; those who think their career is their identity and those that well, don’t.  And identifying yourself as one or the other is critical to your own happiness.

Now, I am not speaking out my asshole here.  I know FULL well what I am talking about because I have been NOTH those people at some time in my life.  During college, I was Joe Broadcaster and it was my identity in full.  Everything revolved around broadcasting and excelling at it.  I worked alongside my peers who were not as rabid toward the field as myself.  And because they did not share the same fire as I did, I looked down upon them like ants running aimlessly around a morsel of candy corn.  Because of this bizarre misperception of self, I actually missed out on a lot of my college life.  I did not get laid once in college which takes about as much work as batting .000 in two years of little league.  I am telling you , I was detached from myself as much as a person could be because I thought all I was was my career.

I moved to Bakersfield and although I was not as hardcore, I still pretty much defined myself by my job as an assistant editor, then producer/director.  And then when I moved down to Los Angeles, I got wrapped up back into the same trap I did in college.  But something happened when I got fired from my place of work after 10 years of employment there; I figured out who I was.  And more importantly, I realized I would never fall into that trap again.  And so, I wish to share some revelations I found out along the way.

Why is it that so many of us create a sense of self based upon a paycheck?  I mean here we are slaving over whatever it is we slave over in order to make another person or company richer.  And then when something bad happens at work, or we inadvertently get laid off or whatever it is, we tend to tear ourselves down on a personal, if not spiritual level.  Where along the way was it etched into our being that our career and subsequent job is the foundation of our sense of self?  How did it ever come to that?

I can’t say it was my dad as he passed on early in the game before anything regarding career was ingrained.  It wasn’t my mom as she just wanted me to have something that put food on the table.  Not my sister or any of my relatives either.

I think it comes out of a need to counter a low self esteem.  If you don’t have the self confidence of just being a person, you tend to overcompensate in the workplace, overachieving, focusing on obtaining respect through job advancement and other stuff like that.  And when the unspeakable happens and everything is pulled out from under you, many times, you just don’t have any sense of self for you to pick up the pieces and move on.  Or if you do, the road to a better place is a long one indeed.

When I got released from my job in LA, I was absolutely devastated.  I was so beyond lost, I actually was contemplating a move back to Arizona.  I questioned if I was a personality for LA, if I was worthy of the big city, if I was worthy of ever finding a woman because a woman would DEFINITELY want an ambitious man.

Well, it wasn’t long until I was reemployed by another company.  It was then and there that I swore to never fall that far for a career ever again.  And since then it’s been a much more fulfilling life.

I can see how a lack of an income in a chosen career can really fuck up a mind.  But what you have to remember is that this is AMERICA (insert patriotic theme here).  There is always another buck around the corner and another career in the next town over.  It is the land of comebacks and everyone loves a comeback.  And with enough knocking on doors, something will eventually open.  So if you are one of those people who are down for whatever reason about your career, realize, it is ultimately just a job and no one has ever said at the end of their life, “I wish I would have worked more.”

Peace!

June 25, 2010: Dumpster Diving June 26, 2010

Today, I went dumpster diving in my garbage receptacle in my backyard.  You see, I had to retrieve something that I had thrown away .  It’s a good thing I live alone where my refuse builds up quite slowly.  Especially when I eat out every night and so have no food waste that needs discarding on a regular basis.

The reason for my trash trek is because today at around 1:30pm, I got a VERY unexpected text message…from Hilda.

“I just want you to know that I filed the divorce papers 2 days ago.”  And in a second text message, “Oh and wish me luck.  I have a job interview with a doctor.”

This text was ENTIRELY unexpected.  In all honesty, I really expected about a 6.235% chance I would ever hear from her again.  And there was a 12.764% chance that I would one day contact her to lay it on the line with her.  Couple that with a 2.3367% chance that I would find another woman in the interim and you can see why my shock was something this side of stroke inducing.

Well, she wanted to get together and talk.  And so, I dropped everything and took off early from work to chat with her.  And a good chat it was.  In essence, she still is in love with me and vice versa.  But she needs to finish this all out with her current relationship before she builds another.  She convinced me that she actually thinks better when she is alone and that things progress more rapidly without me in the picture.  At this rate, I am okay with being placed in cold storage because the filing of the papers is a big step forward.  As much as I would want to start seeing her regularly, I have to respect the fact that she feels it is unethical to continue seeing me while still married.  I feel that a relationship would have the legs necessary to go a very long distance, and if I have to wait a bit, why not?  I mean I have waited 42 years to finally feel “right” with someone.  I mean isn’t that  what it is all about?  Feeling you are “right” with the right person?  Someone you can truly be your goofy self with; someone you can sing off key in the car alongside of; someone you can actually just have those comfortable silences with?  Well that’s Hilda.  And that is what I am waiting for.

I think about the women I have gone out on dates with and none of them felt really right for me.  Jackie Sheehan in college was entirely wrong.  Veronica I never felt right with.  And all those one date wonders through various channels was all wrong.  But I have never felt so right about something like this.

One of my inner circle blog readers is sitting alongside me on my couch right now as I write.  What she doesn’t know, but will shortly is that I went rummaging in my backyard garbage bin retrieving all the rememberances of Hilda that I had thrown out on June 10th.  I felt that bringing them back inside was a little bit of the hope I needed to think that she will actually go all the way through with the divorce and end up dating me.

As for a potential longer term relationship with Hilda, I know that I am going into this with a healthy dose of naivete.  But here’s the reality of naivete; it is not always a bad thing.  Naivete can be an asset at times, especially when you are at a crossroads in your life.  Naivete hides in your subconscious, just lounging out influencing your decision in a subtle way.  If it wasn’t for naivete, I would not be right here right now.  I would be living a miserable life in Bakersfield, California believing I could NOT make it in Los Angeles.  But it was naivete that made me think that I could and by a bunch of luck and Divine Intervention, I did make it work, and well.  Naivete is probably going to carry me over the long stretch of waiting and into whatever future that lies ahead with Hilda.  Because if I were to know now what I will know in 5 years, I would probably never venture to the next place in my life.  So I guess my main point is, embrace naivete and don’t pummel yourself if your naivete does not pan out to a life of wine and roses because ultimately, you are in a different place than you were before, and that is good even if for now, it may not feel so good.

I’m not sure how long it will be until I can actually can officially date Hilda.  I am a man of patience.  I have endured the ups and downs with her for this long for a reason and it is not out of desperation for a relationship, it is not out of a desire for regular sex; it is because I can become a better person from her, and I think she will from me too.  If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

By the way, Hilda got the job!

June 24, 2010: Terrors Part II June 24, 2010

No, I am not running out of things to write already.  It’s just that last night was EXTREMELY bad.

I related in a post a few days ago that the sleep disorder du jour for me are night terrors; anxiety attacks in my sleep that revolve around scenes of me dying in some very unglamorous way.  Let me try to elaborate a little bit more on what the hell these things are.

The first time I EVER heard a name put to these things was in a college psych class and we had a chapter on sleep disorders.  And as plain as day, there they were.  I was relieved to think I wasn’t some freak of nature.

Out of all the hundreds of these demonicesque trances I had as a kid, I only remember three “dreams” associated with them.  The first, I was in a grocery store where one of the aisles was literally like a mile wide and I was the only one in the center of it chained to a doghouse.  The second, I was sandwiched between three monstrously huge tumbling mats, 2 of them gray, the middle one, green.  Finally, there was a dictionary the size of a house and I was in the middle of it in the “M” section.  Now, until I just wrote that, I never connected that in all three, I was in the MIDDLE of something pressuring me from both sides.  The emptiness of the grocery store could be a crushing void so to speak.  Kind of like a deafening silence.

Well, since they returned after my brief encounter with Senor Heimlich at Goose Loonies in Bakersfield, the terrors would sometimes turn violent against myself.  I have at times had the choking dream where I wake up and I start to try to furiously hack up an invisible piece of bread in my trachea only to realize afterward that it was a dream, that I ripped my throat raw.  I also once hurled myself over my coffee table in my living room for some stupid ass reason.  And as potentially damaging as these have been, let me stress that I BARELY remember them in the morning.  That is the mystique of a terror; it’s almost as if the entire scenario both while asleep AND awake was just entirely a dream.

But last night, it was a new one. In my “dream”, I was squeezing my toe and if I let go, I would die.  And when I awoke from this most ridiculous bit of anxiety, I found myself squeezing….my eyeball.  Yes, you read it right.  I was gripping my eye through my eyelid so tight, I swore I was going to pop it like a zit.  It hurt like a motherfucker.  And the worst part is that even as I was coming out of the trance, I was still squeezing it.

Last night, I had three terrors, all within an hour’s time of falling asleep.  I don’t remember two of them in terms of their visions, but I do remember waking up in a panic.  I don’t know if it was the eyeball one or one of the other two, but I sat at the edge of my bed and I remember saying out loud, “Is this how it is going to be for the rest of my life?”

Now, you are probably wondering why I am not going to a sleep therapist.  Good question.  The only answer I have is that I am afraid that if I DON’T wake up, I WILL die.  And at least I can awaken from the terror right now.  So I don’t want meds. And I also feel that once they put me to bed, I am not going to have one of these things and I will look like a hypochondriac or wanting some type of attention.

Someone once asked if maybe I stop breathing in the night, like having sleep apnea.  No, that’s not it.  There are plenty of nights I get thru without a terror.  Also, I have been asked if I feel stressed out within my life.  Sure, the Hilda thing really bummed me out and sometimes I wonder if I had her next to me in bed if that wouldn’t chase them away.  But how does one actually measure stress?  I laugh a lot at work, I don’t have any pressing bills, I am financially secure, I am healthy, I go to the gym every day (or try to).  Maybe I am SUBconsciously stressing.  But if that’s the case, how am I going to CONSCIOUSLY get rid of something SUBconscious.  Seems like an impossible task to me.

Each time in the dream of the terror, I think “My mom is going to be devastated by my death.”  I have actually written goodbye notes to my mom while coming out of one of these things and in the morning when I look at it, it’s downright creepy.  It looks as if Rosemary’s Baby had written it in some possessed scrawl.  That is one piece of writing I never seem to go back an reread later.  I wonder if the terrors will stop once mom passes on.

Well, either way, I will be trying to get a good night’s sleep yet again tonight.  I promise not to haze you guys with anymore terror stories for awhile.  They may actually cause you nightmares.

June 23, 2010: Disclaimers June 23, 2010

Today, I added a 4th customer to my blog list, my friend Bob “Hy Tyde” Hanna.  For those of you who are wondering how he ever got the nickname “Hy Tyde”, the story is as follows.

In college, we had this mutual friend, Steve Schaefer who was just a tool of a person.  To give you an idea of how much of a cerebral giant this guy was, we once went to a friend’s apartment to pick him up and as we approached the gatearm and security gate, he darted under it following the car in front of him almost ripping the arm off.  The guard jetted out of the guarhouse and we continued to his friend’s place.  By the time we exited his friend’s pad, they had towed his truck out of there.  For the next 3 hours, we hunted down his truck and I had to post bail cuz Steve was broke.  And after all said and done, Steve knew the code to raise the gatearm!  As I said, a tool.

Well, Bob was a friend of Steve’s and everytime I met Bob, I was drunk off my ass.  I introduced myself to Bob at least 23 times before I finally remembered him.  Steve always introduced him by another nickname, “Hurricane” coined after some athlete of some sort, “Hurricane Hanna”.  I could never remember the nickname but it had to do with the ocean or weather or tides, and then it hit me…HIGH TIDE!  And so the name stuck after sobering up with a slight variation of spelling along the way.

I am choosing the people I let read this with care.  I guess the thing that each of the four have in common is that they are not judgmental toward me.  It may be like I am stacking the deck in my favor by having a cheer squad as my fan base, but I don’t want to just jump into it.  As it is, the beans were spilled to my other cousin Alexis that I was starting this blog and he took the opportunity to tell me that it was not a good idea to blog my personal life.  But you know what?  Who gives a fuck?  I mean really.  I think that is the problem with society in general.  We are so worried about what other people will think, we believe it is nobody’s business, we keep things inside and never talk about them, we think that the problems we are experiencing nobody will relate to and then you wake up one morning with high blood pressure, pre diabetes and just plain miserable.  Godforbid if we actually TALK about things that bother us.  As Americans, we are already taught that men don’t cry and suffering in silence is some type of badge of honor.  But frankly, by me speaking about things, I get valuable insight from other people who had I just shut up and not said anything, I would have never gotten that viewpoint.  And so, I don’t really fear about what I post.

But disclaimers must be made.  If by some chance you see yourself in these posts, I will respect your privacy and not use your names.  I know not everyone shares the same enlightenment as myself and have to adhere to that.  The last thing I want to do is alienate those in my inner circle.

And if I do offend, I can only hope that you contact me and not stew about it causing you to wake up one day with high blood pressure, pre-diabetes… I am blessed to have a lot of good friends and wouldn’t want to piss them off because that is not in my nature to purposely offend, unless of course you are Steve Schaefer.

June 22, 2010: tick…tick…tick… June 22, 2010

I am so sick of stupid people.  I work for stupid people, I encounter stupid people on the street everyday, I read about stupid people on the web.  But the reality is, I am surrounded by stupid people.  And that includes myself which makes me even MORE frustrated.

Today is Hilda’s birthday.  For the past 8 days since she texted me, e-mailed me AND sent me a birthday card with well wishes, I wondered if I would do the same and what would the form of it be.  Would it be me texting at EXACTLY midnight so I was the first one to wish her “Happy Birthday”?  Would I blow it off completely hoping to mind fuck her into thinking I have stopped thinking about her?  Would it be a short one liner, “Happy Birthday”?  Would it be the former with an “I miss you” tacked onto it?  Would I send a card?  An e-mail?  All three?  TWO of the three?  Would I include a passive-aggressive quip like, “Hope your birthday is a good one cuz mine SUCKED!”?  Would I wait until the very last minutes of June 22nd so to make her think I had forgotten?

The scene in my head played out like a Hallmark card; her husband decks out the entire home in a variety of flowers, showers her with a trunk full of diamonds and promises a life of ponies and rainbows and follows through on it.  She falls madly back in love with him and I am purged out of her short and long term memory for the duration of our lives.

The question still lingered; what to do.  Without warning, I became inspired during my drive into work during the song “How To Save A Life” by The Fray.  I texted her, “I wish you the happiest of birthdays hilda”.  She responded a few minutes later with, “I thank you and miss you”.  And this is where it was a coin flip.  Do I not respond and make her wonder if I didn’t miss her?  Or do I text her what I was feeling?

What made up my mind is sticking to my philosophies and not play the mindfuck game.  I HATE mindfucks and so I was not going to NOT do things to PURPOSELY fuck with her head.  Whether it would or not is inconsequential.  The point was I would be consciously doing something to purposely fuck with her head and I will not play that twisted game, period!  I will die alone before I sell out to what countless other stupid people do.  And so, I texted her, “I miss you very much.”

Who the fuck am I kidding?  I’m not moving on and wonder if I can.  This is a very serious “what if” in my life.  I locked my text message from her so as to not delete it because that text message gives me a pubic hair of hope that maybe she will find herself and some wisdom soon, because right now, she’s acting stupid.  Because if two people enjoy each other’s company, miss each other and have all the means in the world to be together, who have professed their love for each other, who have talked about a possible future together to the point of who would be responsible for which chores, and then choose NOT to be together?  THAT IS FUCKING STUPID! And that is what I am dealing with right now.

I guess what frustrates me to no end is knowing that each second that passes is one more second off our lives.  You can hear the clock ticking down to the end.  And as grim as it sounds, it is actually enlightening.  I am done with the games, done with the veiled meanings in what I am feeling, done with the bullshit.  Time is ticking and it seems as if so many people don’t get the bigger picture.  And that is what makes them stupid.

And the worst part is that even WITH this jewel of wisdom that I share with BOTH my readers at this point, I am not chalking it all up to a loss and moving on but instead, dwell on hopes that are closer to miracles than possible realities.  But I feel the course with Hilda has not reached closure.  My friend Susan has told me this will end only when I want it to end as Hilda will keep this hope alive until our expiration dates.  Frankly, I would rather hang onto hope than have none in my life at all, and that makes me the MOST stupid person in my little world.  And yet, perhaps it makes me that much more enlightened as to why stupid people are stupid.  Maybe they just HAVE to be to make it through the day or just perish prematurely.  For now, I will just hope she comes around in her 42nd year of life and makes a change that includes me while the ticking clock in the back of my head keeps time with the world.

June 21, 2010: Terror in the Night June 21, 2010

Last night was bad.  Real bad.  I had a total of about one hour’s worth of sleep due to not one, not TWO but THREE night terrors.  For those of you who have no idea what a night terror is, it’s basically an anxiety attack that happens within the first hour of sleep.  It is NOT a nightmare that has some glorious romantic horror scene complete with monsters and aliens, but these are more non-descript images that cause me to freak out pretty much nightly.  My night terrors now all revolve around me dying in some VERY unromantic way, like for instance, if I blink, I will perish.  And so, I force myself to not blink which I know I will blink and sure enough, I blink and then starts the panic attack.  Or if I inhale, I will die.  I rate my terrors on a 10 scale, a full on “10″ being I run outside to pull myself out of “the spell”, my name for it.  A “1″ just has me wake up and I roll my eyes and go back to sleep.  It’s definitely classified as a sleeping disorder, but I figure if that is the worst of what is wrong with me, I am doing okay.

I have always had terrors since I was around 2.  I would have hundreds of these and never remember them in the morning, another sign of a terror as opposed to a nightmare.  So I would never be scared to go to sleep because I would never remember them later.  I can’t say the result was the same for anyone watching them however.  I am sure many times over when my parents took us to a friends house who were entertaining and I would fall asleep, when I would start tearing through the house like a hound from hell, I am sure it freaked the party goers something fierce.   Frankly, I am told the kid/person having a terror looks absolutely demonized, almost as if Satan is possessing his or her soul.  Maybe that is why my parents had me exorcised.

After taking me to the very creepy Dr. Feld and being told that I would outgrow these things, the idea that time was a cure  just wasn’t acceptable to my parents as they wanted results yesterday.  So they enlisted the help of our local priest to purge the demons.

Father John was this greeky greek priest who scared the living bejesus out of me on Sundays, so imagine my horror at seeing him at my home on a TUESDAY!  He had this goatee/beard and a thick Greek accent.  Well, he came in to “bless” me but it was more of a curse.  Being scared of him, I bolted for the living room closet which they promptly ripped open the door.  Father John was chanting a series of  ”Kyrieleisons” while throwing Holy Water on me.  I was absolutely LOSING it at this point.  I managed to bolt between their legs and run upstairs to the safety of my imaginary friends and blue teddy bear named Jonathan.  The good father and the bad mother were in hot pursuit.  They figured, “We got the devil on the run now!”  They cornered me, and amidst wails of fear, they doused me and prayed for the saving of my soul.  Little did they know they probably damaged me for life.  Mom’s heart was in the right place, her brain on the other hand, not so much.

Needless to say, the terrors were full on “10s” for the next year.  My parents tried to do everything to get them to stop; making sure I didn’t sleep in a fetal position, making sure I watched no TV before bedtime, saying prayers every night.  Nothing worked.  Godforbid if they looked at themselves and the oppressive household we were all living in with my dad’s corporal punishment methods as being a source of anxiety.  But no, it was easier to blame The Fonz for my spells.

They did go away for awhile when I turned 15, but then they came back with a vengeance once I moved to Bakersfield and dislodged a piece of bread from my friend Susan’s windpipe.  Sometimes they will go away for a few months, other times, they are with me for a month straight.  It’s all part of what makes me, me.

Well, it is getting close to bedtime and I am wondering what rank I will give tonight’s terror.  Last night, I actually put on my clothes and was heading toward my side door to go to the hospital across the street because I thought I was dying.  Then, reality catches up to me and I realize I am perfectly healthy and try to talk myself back to sleep.  Yeah, it’s a drag but I am not at the point where I need a sleep therapist….  yet.

June 20, 2010: Pseudo Father and Father’s Day June 20, 2010

Today is Father’s Day.  And it has been close to 30 years that I have been without a father.  Every year, I remember him and every year, it gets harder to not want to forget him.  You see, this is NOT a fairy tale story of a great guy who had a “Courtship of Eddie’s Father” relationship with his child.  This was a very intimidating man who literally put the fear of EVERYTHING into me as a child.  He was the epitome of a manly man; charismatic, confident, loud, brash, opinionated, with a wall of soccer trophies on a shelf in the basement.  I on the other hand was the smallest whimpiest kid in the neighborhood, sometimes getting beaten up by girls.  And that was more than a manly man could ever handle.  So his approach to toughening me up was to get tough on me which did nothing more than tear me apart.

The thing I remember most about him being alive were the beatings.  The thing I remember most about his death was the years of guilt living with the fact that the first thing I thought when my mom told me he had died was, “Thank God..no more beatings.”  In fact, the last memory I have of him alive was he was in a wheelchair at St. Joe’s during one of his last days and I got in the way and he took a swipe at me.

Dad rarely smiled at home.  I try to think of fun times I had with him, but even the supposed fun times were marred with bad memories.  He once took me to a soccer game and I promptly fell asleep.  He took me to the circus and I got lost on the way back from the bathroom and found the security guards.  We belonged to this pool club and being scared to death of the water, I would make a beeline for the pinball games which would send him into a frenzy of anger.

Luckily, as off the tracks as the train had derailed, there was one man after my dad’s passing who helped get the locomotive back on course.  The man was a next door neighbor, Jack Pianezza.  He’s the one that probably saved me from a very damaged psyche.  He was more a dad than a father.  He guided me through my formative years, was a good role model and helped me become the man I am today.  I would always give him father’s day cards as he was a pseudofather of sorts.  We joked that we adopted each other.  He showed compassion and care and took an active interest in all my pinball playing.  Sadly, he passed away last year.

I think the lessons my father passed onto me were inadvertent ones.  He was a good provider of food and shelter even though he was absolutely void on the personal touches of parenting.  He knew the mechanics of domestic life well, he just wasn’t a very good driver.  I have learned what NOT to be through him, and what to be through Jack.  It was a very unique experience to see two opposite ends of a spectrum raising me.  Some of the wounds my dad inflicted still linger, but much of the first aid Jack administered keeps me together.  In a way, I am thankful to both even though perhaps I shouldn’t be.  I just believe in giving credit where credit is due, even if it is an accidental bonus.

To all of you who have fathers still around, appreciate the things you can, learn from their mistakes and be a better person because of them no matter their strengths or weaknesses.

June 19, 2010: Lost and Found June 19, 2010

Today, I lost my 9th Bluetooth headset.  ”Big deal,” you say.  ”Is this really blog worthy?”  Answer is, “Of course it is dammit!”

You see, what makes this Bluetooth loss different than ANY other losses in my life is that now, I didn’t even get angry or frustrated.  I’ve given up.  Fate’s kicked my ass and then kicked it again.  I give up.  I have absolutely given up on ever being able to actually think I will be able to keep either a pair of Ray Bans or a bluetooth headset for more than a month in a row.

I am king of “losers weepers”.  I have made a population of those who were part of the “have nots” a little closer to the “have some”.  Over the course of 42 years, I have lost so much shit, it isn’t even funny.  The Ray Bans are a sore spot.  I remember one day in college I had bought a pair of Wayfarers for $100 and lost them THAT SAME EXACT DAY!  I mean that takes work!  I am just happy I was drunk off my ass at Butt Hutt (otherwise known by it’s proper club name, Devil House) to have given a shit.

Sometimes, my losing streak is contagious.  I once handed over a pair of Ray Bans to my friend Donna’s sister Denise while we were tubing down the Salt River.  ”Sploosh,” gone.  I once had a pair of Bans custom made as a reward when I found Pearle Vision Center’s entire ledger and bills scattered along highway 46 in Jersey.  Yep, MIA a mere 3 weeks later.  On my recent trip to the great northwest, my smoking pair of Bans went AWOL.  And the list goes ever on.  I lost a camera I had found at an Alarm concert.  I’ve lost camera filters.  A journal on the island of Folegandros.  Various clothes. An ipod.  I am seriously scared to ever have children for fear I’d lose them too.

The Bluetooth headsets are now chumming up to the Bans.  9 pairs in 2 years.  I really wonder if I can get the next headset to last longer than a month.  It’s almost like a personal challenge to see if I can beat the record.

In college, I was ALWAYS losing my dorm room key.  It got so bad after they had to change the locks literally four times that I started actually wearing my key around my neck on a string.  I was the poster child for geekdom, but it worked.  If I could, I’d wear everything of value around my neck so I wouldn’t lose them.

Amazingly, I have only lost my wallet once in my life.  I have never lost a set of keys.  I’ve had stuff stolen, but that’s not what this post is about.  I lost Dire Straits’ “Borthers in Arms” CD the day I bought it.

But for every yin, there’s a yang.  I have the gift of finding lost shit.  It’s just not MY lost shit.  Dropped a contact on the ground?  I can find it.  Lost stone from your ring?  No problem.  When I was a kid, I would find money practically everywhere, mostly in telephone change returns and under vending machines where coins would roll under and stay hidden until I discovered them.  I used to be mesmerized by the old men who trolled Albion Park looking for lost shit with their metal detectors.  When my friend Tim Runnels in junior high got one, I would latch onto him like a leech as he combed the parks.  Finally, I decided when I moved to LA to purchase my own.  I have since found over $550 in loose change, a bullet, a peso, and about 35 rings.

Ending this blog on a creepy and sobering note, I did once find my father-by-proxy niece’s dog, Mandee who had gone missing for 3 days.  I decided to help in the search.  I parked my car and without any thought, hopped a fence and walked about 300 yards up the highway to the exact spot where Mandee had perished.  I was “searching” for all of about 3 minutes.  I just had the knack at finding shit.

I just wish I could find a way to win Hilda’s heart.  But I think it’s kind of a lost cause.

June 18, 2010: 100% June 18, 2010

Today, the last piece of the puzzle came in.  But more importantly, it was the thing I needed to send me into 100% surety.  It was the last piece of evidence I needed to secure a win in my upcoming trial.

Yes, you read it right.  I am being sued  for $12,500 by two people in small claims court.  I go before Judge Judy in small claims court on July 1st.  If I was ready before, I am so beyond that point with this arrival from the LAPD.

When I was a boy, during fights with my dad, I remember him saying, “You should become a lawyer because you like to argue so much.”  In fact, it was kind of pushed  from him as he had to make sure his kid ascended to something respectable with the promise of money.  In 5th grade, we had to do a report for Mrs. Kenning’s class on what we wanted to be when we grew up.  My report was on becoming a lawyer.  The only thing I do remember from it was my dad became livid because the cover of it was a very poorly done Scales of Justice.  Now I have as much artistic ability as a double amputee who is blind in one eye.  And people…I was in 5th GRADE!!!  I mean I still hadn’t mastered the eye-hand coordination necessary to whack off!  The Scales of Justice were as obtainable as say, the Sistine Chapel.  So dad made me redo it with rulers and protractors and some other gear I probably hurt myself with.  To this day, compasses put the fear of God into me.

In all honesty, I think I would have made a good lawyer because I can build an argument pretty easily.  I wondered how I would do in a court trial.  I definitely enjoy all those court dramas like “The Practice”, “Perry Mason” and even “Night Court”.  I was an avid viewer of “the People’s Court”, love ANY of the court reality shows on TV barring the really silly ones that amp up the drama.  So imagine how jazzed I was to be served papers telling me I was being sued in small claims court!

The backstory is this.  Aug. 29th 2008, I hit a vehicle.  I got out and saw there were two other vehicles in front of the vehicle I hit with pretty substantial damage.  I was 98% sure I did not cause the chain reaction collision because I was braking very hard at the time I impacted.  There was absolutely no way I could have done all that damage.  There must have been an accident prior to me colliding with the Camry.  MUST be…I think.

Well, today, the final piece of evidence came in; the incident logs from the 9-1-1 calls  to the LAPD.  In there are TWO specific calls 3 minutes apart, the first one saying there were three cars involved, the second stating FOUR cars.  Definitive proof that I did not do the damage.

This is not my only evidence.  Like a crazed Parry Mason, I have got a printout from Griffith Observatory proving the sun had set that night at 6:03 and my accident occurred at 7:45 so it was dark.  I have photographs showing there were no streetlights where I had my collision.  I have the plaintiff’s own testimony stating he has no idea what happened between me and the Camry.  I’ve got an accident reconstruction report from the Insurance company which states my speed was too low to have caused the damage.  I have photographs.  I have the 2nd car’s testimony she heard screeching tires and I have proven my car could not have made those noises because I have ABS brakes and the Camry did not, proving that it was them that collided into the car in front and pushing them into the plaintiffs.  Shit man, I am READY!

Frankly, I want to go into the judge and just say, “Look your honor.  You got a pair of Mexicans driving without insurance suing me, you got a chick in the next car and a pair of Koreans in the next.  That ALONE should dismiss the case.  It’s a fucking trifecta of tragedy !  A quota of catastrophe!  It’s an equal opportunity calamity!

And as locked up as this all seems, I was told by a paralegal counsel that my insurance company set up for me that the judge I am to appear before is NUTS!  Absolutely bats in the belfry.  She has been known to award damages to plaintiffs on no proof.  She postpones cases for other days.  And the other judges in the courthouse hate her because she has about as much respect for the process as Billy The Kid did in the Wild West.  The good news is that 95% of her cases are overturned on appeal.    A crack smoking circus chimp could get more verdicts correct than her.

So I now await my time seeking justice with the full knowledge that I did not cause the chain reaction collision.  It comes down to a dice roll, but at the least, it is me who is rolling them.  If I crap out, it’s not because the roll was bad, it’s because the house is crooked.  I’ll keep you posted.

June 17, 2010: Alone June 17, 2010

“I have a jumbo shrimp and steak for Christopher party of two.  I have a chicken and shrimp combination for Rebecca, party of two.  And I have a filet mignon and chicken for a party of one,” Chang, our Benihana chef said aloud to the group of five around our teppan grill.  A little bit of bile crept up to the back of my throat.  How I DESPISE the term “party of one”.  As if one ever constituted a party.  If that was the case, masturbation would be a gang bang!  All eyes were upon me.  I could tell they were wondering what was up with my story.  Why would I ever come alone to a teppan grill where 3/4 of the draw is the show the chefs put on so you can laugh and cheer along with your company.  And here I was at the far end of the grill all by my lonesome like some lone weight counterbalancing the other side of the grill with the two couples facing me.  I felt like I was under a microscope.

Luckily, I had my video ipod to distract me from a crushing flash flood of ideas going through my skull.  That took up the 15 minutes or so that Chang was gathering his stuff in the kitchen for our dinner.  But after he arrived center stage, I had to put it away out of courtesy.  I may be alone, but I am not an asshole.

But being alone gives me an opportunity to observe and note.  I always considered myself a spectator in life rather than a participant and maybe that’s because I have been alone for 95% of it.  Again, it gives me the opportunity to observe and note.

Christopher and Jenny were easy to place.  Probably a third date.  There was very little conversation between them.  Yes, I know I just said I was preoccupied with my video ipod but at times, I would pause it and take notes on my dinner pseudo companions.  When one of the hired hands offered up forks starting with Christopher, he declined, opting for the chopsticks in front of him.  The rest of us grabbed for forks.  Then just as the help was leaving, Christopher asked for a fork anyway.  I mean this was an easy call.  Somewhere in his head, he equated using a fork with Asian food somewhat, unmanly, uncool, square.  But he came to his senses realizing that he probably had as much skill with chopsticks as with his conversational abilities.

The other couple were relatives: mother/daughter or aunt/niece.  Whatever they were, the younger of the two looked like she wanted to be anywhere but at Benihana.  She did not smile once the entire evening and that was a shame because she had nice eyes.  There is nothing worse than eyes that were made for smiling to be gray and cold at a dinner place like Benihana.

At the next grill was a family of 8 complete with 3 children, and 2 teenagers, ma, pa and granmama.

Christopher ordered for her date.  This struck me odd.  I have had this conversation a few times with Donna (who by the way became customer number two to my blog).  I always found it strange and downright cocky to order for a date.  I almost feel like I am back at the Majestic Queens Diner as a child when my parents always used to order for me instead of letting me tell the waitress what I wanted.  I don’t want to daddy my date and so I have a problem with ordering for mine.  Donna says it could be romantic though.  That’s one form of romance I have to pass on.

Aunt and niece were high maintenance.  At one point, the elder lectured Chang that his mushrooms were burning.  I was quite sure Chang had everything under control.  Chang was very versed in his teppan skill.  The other chef however was obviously still in training.  At one point, his salt shaker came flying across to our grill and landed squarely in the middle of it amongst the veggies.  The two women also did not want salt, they wanted garlic butter instead of the other butter, they wanted their meat a little more cooked a couple times, they asked what kind of tea we were all being served, as if the green glow of it didn’t tip them off.  Meanwhile, Christopher was just uncomfortable the whole dinner but his date was quite chill.  But then again, gay women are always chill.  Yeah, she looked pretty butch.  Poor Christopher was headed for a world of hurt.

At the other table was a celebration.  A birthday?  Hardly.  Anniversary?  Not even.  It was a graduation…FOR THEIR  5 YEAR OLD!!! At one point they all said, “Congratulations Amanda.  Good luck in kindergarten!”  I mean come on now, do you REALLY need to be wished luck in kindergarten?  I mean are they in danger of failing nap time?  Will they get left back for not coloring inside the lines?  Will they get sent to the principal’s office for skipping the letter “q” while singing the ABCs?  I mean do you really need to wish anyone luck for something as simple as entering kindergarten?  Hardly.

Hilda and I were supposed to go to Benihana one night for a date many moons ago, but the wait was too long, so we went to the Trattoria right next door.  It was a pretty forgettable night but the highlight was I was amazed she showed some public displays of affection out in plain sight.  I started wondering what Hilda was up to at that very moment.  Was she working?  Making googly eyes at her husband?  Was she not even thinking of me anymore?

I started feeling lonely sitting by myself at the end of the grill.  I wondered when I will be having my talk with her.  This will eventually come to a day of reckoning between us; a day when I give her my last best sales pitch and then finally move on for good if that is what awaits.

When I left, the date was still in full swing but the women had gone before me.  I wondered what made the niece so cranky as to not smile once.  Life couldn’t be THAT bad could it?

Well, actually it could.  And with that realization, I counted my blessings and shook off my loneliness for another night.  Tomorrow, I’ll go back to Subway where there are no mental traps I can get myself into.  Nobody really scrutinizes you over a 5-dollar footlong.

June 16, 2010: The Road To Wellness June 16, 2010

You know you’re fat when you are sitting in Starbucks and you actually undo your belt to make yourself more comfortable.  It is the ultimate in sloth, paying homage to one of the seven deadly sins.  It was right there that I realized, I have to do something about my weight.  That was last night.

They say the first step is the hardest.  BULLSHIT!  By the 12th minute on the elliptical trainer, I was coming dangerously close to my own mortality.  But I jump ahead.  Allow me to back up a spell.

My kinship with the gym is not a new one, not hardly.  I had been frequenting the gym on and off, (more like off) since college.  My favorite flavor of exercise was racquetball.  That lasted awhile until I got bored.

It wasn’t until  my pseudo relationship crashed and burned with a young lass named Veronica while doing time in Bakersfield, California that I decided to venture forth again.  THIS time, I got a personal trainer because as God as my witness, I was gonna become an Adonis so Veronica would regret ever staying with her fiance instead of becoming my girlfriend.  And two years later, I was looking damn good.  But what resulted out of a desperate way out of depression, ended abruptly when I walked away from Bakersfield in a glorious “fuck you” to my boss and the city of narrow minds.  I moved to Los Angeles and found some semblance of sanity and didn’t quite need the gym anymore.

But as time wore on and I got fatter, I realized I needed to rein in the girth and I ventured forward once again.  At one point, I invested a good 10 months into a religious routine and got down to something really height-weight proportionate.  And then I got bored and porked up again.  I have tried to restart the regimen numerous times but always failed at getting further than a month into it before as usual, getting bored.

Since the “goodbye” on June 10th, I have become absolutely reckless in my life.  I have gambled $800 in two days.  I bought a bag of cookies and chowed down on them in one sitting.  I feasted on Stouffer’s French Bread pizza, but at least I loaded it up with sardines as a topping.  I bought 3 chocolate chip cookies with my Subway turkey sandwich and followed it up with a chocolate biscotti.  And then I had to undo my belt and I said, “This is so beyond wrong, I am scaring the barristas behind the counter.  And so today, I decided to reacquaint myself with the gym.

I’m in bad shape.  I have a 36 inch waist and a 28″ inseam.  I’m fucking shaped like a water barrel. I knew I was in for a shock as I mounted the scale to see my starting point.  I figured, maybe 170, 175.  The last thing I remember was someone yelling “CRASH CART!”  The 24 Hour Fitness staff had to crack out the defribulator after I flatlined at seeing 185.  I saw my life flash before my eyes and it entailed a hell of a lot of Subway turkey sandwiches.

After coming to, I made my way to the equipment.  The first thing that greeted me was this one woman on an ab cruncher.  My GOD…  this chick had the most amazing Hugemongous fake boobs I had ever seen.  I mean they were seriously as big as half watermelons.  Every time she crunched, I cringed.  Her rack would slam into her chin with each crunch.  I screamed for the staff to bring the defrib back more out of concern for her than me.  I was sure tomorrow’s headlines would read, “Woman Dies From Triple F Cup Trauma”.  Her workout outfit was this leotard thing with a plunging neckline that went down to around the parking garage.  She was definitely proud of her boobs.  I was so tempted to just go up to her and say, “DAMN WOMAN!  A man could get LOST in that cleavage!  Where do you dance?  I got a wad of Washingtons right here, right now just begging for a place in your G string.  George is just DYING for a sniff of your manufactured sex.”

I was so stunned by the sight of her that I passed out yet again.  After being rejolted back to life, I opened my eyes to have her angelic vision replaced by a black guy the size of an armored truck.  His one bicep was as wide as Baby-Got-Rack’s bustline.  I was tempted to go up to him and say, “DAMN MAN!  You got one of those bodies you only get in PRISON!”

I wondered, “Why the hell am I here?”  My first two contacts on the floor were specimens of humanity I could only wish to be reincarnated as.  I figured it was a lost cause to continue with this fool’s errand, but continue I did.

By the 12th minute on the ellptical, I was hyperventilating and flatulating!  Every gas that was in me was punching its own hole into the ozone!  Send your bills for your melanoma chemo directly to me, my methane was INsane.  I was a mess!  My eyes rolled back into my head, my nose was dripping, I saw things floating around me and they were not those beautiful melons of Miss Chesty Love.  But I kept going.  I swore I would make it to the 45th minute or die trying.

Eventually, I got there and things were not good at all.  I could handle the noxious secretions coming from my body.  The pain on the other hand was a real drag.  It started as “the burn” and turned into “the nuclear holocaust.”  The mud flaps between my thighs had started to spark.  I was like, “Awesome, a fireworks show right here in my crotch!  But why does my roman candle look more like a cherry bomb?”  It mattered not, I was too far gone to even care if my gear had fallen off for all to laugh at.

Heading back to the locker, the last dread was hoping against hope that some other locker room roomie was not bursting out into song.  I cannot fathom for the life of me why 9 times out of 10, there is someone breaking into the chorus of “Cabaret” while fully in the buff.  I mean do they actually think they will be discovered in a men’s locker room at 24 Hour Fitness?  DUDE… our dues are $19/month.  Real talent agents are not slumming at bottom feeder gyms!  GET A FUCKING CLUE! Luckily, the AmIdol wannabes were staying home tonight.

Well, I got in my car wondering how long this stint will last.  I’ll give it a stab tomorrow praying the pain will not be as bad.  The good news is, I feel better today mentally.  The bad news, I need about 62 Advil to dull the aches and pains.

June 15, 2010: The Day After June 15, 2010

Today I am missing her.  A lot.

For those of you who do not know the backstory, I will try to be short.

Back in Clifton High School, Spanish III to be exact with Mrs. Fernandez, Hilda Skolakian sat behind me.  I helped her on tests through a generous gap in my posture allowing her full access to my answers.  I think I did it mostly because she had a nice rack and I wanted her tits in  my mouth so badly, I drooled without shame.  I should have known that her cheating was a harbinger of things to come.  I did venture once and asked her out in the form of an acrostic poem where each first letter of each line spells another word going down.  It was a whimpy kid’s way of whimply asking out a girl.  She said “no” and Hilda soon joined the ranks of Christine Yarumchuk, Charlene Sakoda, Barbara Bischak, Ellen Giovine and the other 23,822 women I have asked out in my lifetime who have all said “no”.  I’ve been to towns that have smaller populations than the number of women who have turned me down for dates.

Flash forward to August of 2007.  Out of nowhere, Hilda contacted me off of Facebook.  I noticed her profile said she was married, and I wondered why she would contact me.  Surprisingly, she lived about 10 minutes away from me.  Immediately I thought that maybe she was ripe for an affair; that things had gotten boring and she needed a little side sex to spice up her drab life.  After two cancelled meetings for drinks, I finally wrote her off until New Years Day 2008.  It was Francine and I’s New Year’s Resolution of “Living In The Moment” that made me send a text to her wishing her Happy New Year.  And from there, we actually connected and started up an affair that lasted a year and a half.

It was supposed to be just sex, but something happened along the way.  I fell for her pretty hard.  My friend Susan told me that the sexual affairs are the hardest to negotiate because there are no expectations and so you are yourself from the word “go”.  There is truth to that.  I think Hilda fell for me too but now, I am not so sure.  I mean we exchanged “I love yous” only AFTER her husband found out about the affair so it continued between us even after the jig was up.

But then came the jerking around from her side.  She’d give me access, then shut me down.  Give me access and shut me down.  Over and over until this last time, I just had enough and I told her “goodbye”.

I am so tempted to  send her the link to this blog.  Maybe up the audience to two.  Maybe have Demis have someone to share my anecdotal ramblings with.  But I personally know I need to just back off from her.  But I wrestle with that against wondering if maybe her reading what is going on in my head would somehow sway her to my side.  It’s a cerebral vicious circle.  But I won’t because I really don’t think it would do any good in the long run.  She is so beyond wishy washy, she borders on absolutely lost.

It’s funny.  I never thought I would EVER fall for a woman like Hilda.  I remember I used to make up my lists of who I would be attracted to; petite, non smoker, fiercely independent, big boobs.  Hilda isn’t any of that.  So why did I fall for her?  What exactly is it that made me fall hard?  Was I desperate for ANY relationship?  No.  Am I confusing sex with love?  No, that’s not it either.  Am I looking to be needed or looking for someone to save?  Nope.  I think what it boils down to is that she would be good for me in certain ways and conversely, I for her.  We could both grow from each other.  We have things in common, same sense of humor and enough differences to frustrate, but not rage over.  She is not my perfect match.  She can’t play pinball, will never go metal detecting with me, and will pass on backpacking.  But nonetheless, those are not deal breakers.

Anyway, I am rambling.  The bottom line is I miss her today.  I wonder if I will ever hear from her again.  My cousin Alexi and best friend Donna both say I definitely will.  She was always the one to reach back out to me once she threw the brick wall up in front of me so if the past is any indication of the future, the same will happen again.  It’s just hard to play that mental game with myself to just shut her out, trying to convince myself that I will absolutely NEVER hear from her again and that there will be NO chance whatsoever at ever having any future with her.  But the truth is, I don’t think it is really the true end.  Somehow, I feel as if closure would FEEL differently.  This feels comatose, not dead and buried.

I wonder if I should be fighting for her.  I was always professing that this was not a choice between me or her husband, it was a choice between herself or her husband and I would just be the reward for finding her own independence.  Now, I am not so sure that is what it was.  Maybe this was a choice between two men even though the other guy is a manipulative, abusive mentally ill husband.  There’s a part of me that says if I cannot sway her away from someone like that, how could I attract ANYBODY?  I mean when someone chooses a dead on arrival marriage with no passion, no love and no sexual attraction over someone like myself, how can I actually hold onto hope of ever finding someone?  Hope becomes a ghost in the wind trying to be caught with a butterfly net.

Yes, I miss her today.  And I am sure I will miss her tomorrow.  I just hope I won’t miss her as much the day after tomorrow.  But somehow, I doubt that will happen.

June 14, 2010: Turning 42 June 14, 2010

It’s 5:48 pm and I am sitting at Starbucks on my 42nd birthday.  I have pretty unmemorable birthdays as far back as I can remember which I would like to share with you all.

One of my earliest memories regarding birthdays is around age 5 when after receiving a vanilla cake instead of a chocolate one, I climbed out onto the fiberglass canopy covering our back patio.  Talk about spoiled?  I guess all I really wanted was  just my day to truly be MY day.  Well, luckily the canopy had a weight tolerance of 75 pounds and I was clocking in at around 23 and so it held up quite well.  My butt didn’t after I got down and dad was waiting there for me tho.

The summer of 1988 was a memorable one for all the wrong reasons.  I spent my birthday in Chelsea Park in Clifton, New Jersey with two people who ended up being the bane of my existence for the remainder of that year: my ex-girlfriend Halina Maria Regina Bryja and ex-best friend Larry Nibbling.  In a nutshell, Halina had broken up with me about 2 weeks prior after I moved back to New Jersey from Arizona to transfer to Rutgers University so I could spend the rest of my life with her.  It was literally 6 hours after touchdown that she broke up with me.  It was the first of many hearts broken, but after this past week, I feel that my coronary arteries have callouses on them.  Larry decided to spill some secrets to Halina about her that I had told him and he ended in the same shit can as her.  The punchline is years later, they married and years after that, divorced.

My co workers in Bakersfield, California once threw me a birthday bowling party somewhere around 1996 and invited this waif of a girl named Mia to it so that maybe I’d hit it off with her.  I had gotten my buzz on and was rapping with her when I said, “Well, grab a ball and start ten pinning it!”  She replied, “I can’t,” and raised her hands up from under the table.  The poor lass had deformed wrists which made me feel REALLY foul.  Totally harshed my buzz.

My 40th birthday was a total wash.  I was supposed to have dinner with my sister thinking she would pick me up and take me out.  She called up and said, “Well, you can come down here at around 7pm..” and I was like, “I thought you were taking ME out.”  She then squawked about the traffic and how she had so much work to do and I felt more of a bother than anything.  So I let her off the hook and spent it by myself at Denny’s.

Last year’s birthday MUST have been forgettable because I didn’t even enter it into my daily journal.

So you get the idea.  This year was supposed to be memorable.  A week ago, I was making plans for an evening with Hilda and today, it’s a movie entitled “Get Him To The Greek” with a coworker of mine, Francine.  She is probably the only person I can really call a “friend” that I have after 13 years in the Los Angeles area.  I don’t hang out with anybody, and my closest good friends are an hour and a half up the road in Bakersfield.  So it’s me and Francine for the evening’s bill of fare of no dinner and a movie.  She’s working until 7 so it’s just us after that.

I’ve never had a surprise party yet always wanted one.  I guess that will never come to be moreso because nobody in my circle knows my circle of friends.  They are all vaguely aware of each other, they just don’t interact.

I did get two surprises today.  First, it turns out that I got something like 30 Happy Birthday wishes from people on Facebook.  And although it seems a bit impersonal to just send a short sterile “Happy Brithday” in Helevetica font as opposed to a birthday card, it still made me feel good that people took the 4 seconds to throw a well wish at me.

The second surprise was that Hilda actually texted me a birthday wish.  I really didn’t think she would.  I figured she’d either forget or got the hint that “goodbye” meant “goodbye”.  She wrote: “I know the ”goodbye” rule just wanted to say, have a wonderful birthday you’re in my thoughts.”  I wrote back “thank you” but there was so much more I wanted to write, like, “What the fuck is up with you?  If you actually enjoy using my head as some sort of plush toy, then you need to be shot at dawn.  I’m in your thoughts?  Like how?  Like, “Gee, I wonder how I can chisel another sliver of his cerebellum off of his brain until he’s a walking eggplant.”  Talk about a mindfuck, it’s shit like that that cause a cerebral person such as myself to practically shut down from Cray Computer like computations on how to interpret that text.

I talked to my friend Donna today about that.  As much as I say “goodbye” is “goodbye”, I think I am just sort of fooling myself.  I know that if I do hear from her, I will be keeping it short and simple; “Have you moved out?  No?  Bye.”  I can’t be jerked around any longer.

So here I sit at 42 years old, June 14th, Flag Day.  I’m going to finish off this entry with a little weirdness to really tweak you out.  I am not into numerology, but get this list:

My birthday: June 14th.

Sister’s birthday: August 4th

Mom’s brithday: December 24th

Mom and Dad’s anniversary: December 14th

Aunt Elsie’s birthday: January 14th

Grandma’s Passing: December 14th

Dad’s Passing: August 14th

Dad’s address grwoing up: 14 Krisila Street

You see where I’m going with this?  Bizarreness.  These are the things that keep me up at night.  That and lines of cocaine.

June 13, 2010: The cusp… June 14, 2010

In 2 hours and 20 minutes, I will be turning 42 years old.  And although that may not mean much to either you or me, it is a fact.  Here I am sitting naked on my sofa, typing up a blog with “House MD” on to keep me company.

I guess I decided to start this blog more as therapy to myself than anything else.  ”Therapy from what?”  I hear you ask.  Well, I am broken.  Actually, that’s not fair.  I am actually just kind of dented up.

You see, what I have actually figured out on the cusp of 42 is that we are all damaged to some certain extent.  Even the people who don’t think they are damaged by the mere fact that they don’t think of themselves as damaged.  But it all comes down to how deep and extensive does the damage run, and more importantly, who is your collateral damage in your lifepath.

Let me be upfront.  My dents are relatively deep, but I am aware of them and try to keep them in check.  So many people have issues and either are blind to them, refuse to acknowledge them or worse, just are indifferent toward them.  They wake, live and sleep day in and day out thinking their issues are not affecting anybody.  But what they don’t see is that their issues affect THEMSELVES.

Here I am, hours before I turn 42 and can honestly say I have never had a relationship with a woman EVER.  Now, that doesn’t mean I haven’t had RELATIONS.  I am king of “What the hell is this?”  Allow me to exemplify.

I once asked a coworker to dinner and a movie and I picked her up at 7pm sharp.  She was dressed in a wife beater and shorts while I donned a silk shirt and pants and shoes.  All through dinner, I thought, “What the hell is this?”  Was it a date?  Just friends?  A business meeting?  I never did find out what it was and a second whatever never happened between us.  That’s a taste of my relations in a nutshell.

In all actuality, I have no idea why I am even starting this blog other than I enjoy writing.  I mean I do have some funny stuff to share and you may actually find some humor in it all.  And then there will be some serious stuff in here too.  Some days, I will vent and some days there may just not be anything newsworthy.

But I guess a very good place to start is telling you where exactly I stand right here right now.  On the cusp of 42, I am about 1 year into 2 years of IRS audits for 2006 and 2007 where it looks as if I will be owing around $5000.  I am also about 16 days away from my day in small claims court where I am being sued for $7500 by two people who were part of an accident back in October 2008.  I have just told the woman I was sort of having relations with “Goodbye” and I am feeling really bad about ALL of that.  What a glorious exit to 41.

Well, I won’t make my ramblings too long, but today, I’d like to just say, “Hello.”  I have no idea who may actually see this and I don’t think I will notify any of my peeps that I am blogging.  I have an audience of zero which is a good round number.  Literally.  But for now, zero is all I want.  Maybe in time, I’ll float this onto a few in my inner circle.  But for now, it is all me.

Anyway, you got off easy today with a short intro.  Hope to see you back here tomorrow.  Peace out!

P.S.  Okay, I have decided to actually start with ONE viewer, my cousin Demis Mavrellis; my first fan.  Why Demis?  Because he is one of the few people who say they actually enjoy my writing.  So, if I happen to get a fleet of fans, I think I will have to shanghai him as president of my fan club.  But until that happens, he is now the fan base.  I mean he IS the fan base.