What’s going on here?

Looking after my neighbor’s apartment has HAD its perks — emphasis on “had.”  And there were things that I had come to expect, like availing myself of loose quarters.  This time around was ever so disappointing – and I’ve never seen so many roaches!

When I went to their apartment to bring the mail and water the plants, though I was attacked by roaches, I still looked for the many packages of cookies T has insanely hoarded for like — ever. But, as mentioned in my previous post – there weren’t any – I would still have eaten them with roaches there – he usually keeps them bagged and in jars and shit.  Okay so fine – I accepted that I’d be responsible for purchasing my own snacks.

Then one night, I steamed vegetables, opened the cabinet for olive oil and had the hideous remembrance that it was on my shopping list since I’d run out.  “Oh dang. But T prolly has some!”  I go downstairs and grab a bottle — I don’t know what the hell kind of oil was in there but, that, was no olive oil!

Okay so next, T has always kept quarters on the foyer table.  Other times when I watched his apartment when he was in Ireland, I would take them if I ran out of laundry quarters and replace them later.  This time the quarters looked like commemorative quarters – I was scared to touch them, so had to wait till next damn day to finish laundry.

Yesterday I came to terms with the fact that I was spoiled when it came to T’s apartment.  The only thing I could partake of in there was the liquor, but I’m not apposed ta drink it.

Back home after dropping their mail and flicking off roaches that leeched onto the black garments I’d worn the last four days, I realized that looking at liquor bottles did much to warm my mind and much to loosen my sphincter – I had to take a shit.

Oh so marvelous, but, alas, no toilet paper… Thank God we live in a century where we needn’t waddle down to the babbling brook to wash our asses when this happens – so I hopped in the tub and got under the spigot.  But what happens upon the ‘morrow, I mused, as it was too late to go the supermarket.  Then the light bulb came on in my noggin, and I dashed down to T’s.  He’d be good for at least one roll.  And.  He was.

Why’d it have to be weird?  It was some generic brand that had been perfumed.  And you know what can happen when you use tissues laced with industrial fragrance?  But, oh, I am happy to report that all is well in the nether regions!

I await now the return of my neighbors, and will disclose not the least of my disappointments.

One Day in the Life of Sandee Denisovich

I love saying this as a way to outline a day in my life.  It’s my tribute to Solzhenitsyn.  I don’t mean to diminish the meaning of the book, which is about a Soviet prisoner.

Either way, here’s one day in my roach infested life:

number A – Saw my friend J. who goes to the nudie beach.  I’m planning to go with.  Only thing it costs 45 fucking dollars to take the ferry there.  He says he’d pay, but does that mean I’d have to, you know, put lotion on his buttocks?

number B – I thoroughly enjoyed hugging a man with a southern accent who smelled like cigarettes.

number C – I planned to come home and unfriend someone on Facebook.   Though we were just acquaintances, I thought we had a mutual interest in each other’s lives.  But while this person is ‘liking’ up everybody else’s posts, they have yet to ‘like’ anything I post.  I have other FB ‘friends’ who ignore me, but with this person it’s rather curious.  It would be fine if they hadn’t acted so friendly and interested when I used to see them.  Wull, anyways, I’m trying to sell books and FB is my poor ass attempt at marketing — when I feel like it.  So when I got home, I decided, maybe I won’t unfriend them just yet.

number D – I got a sweet gift from a blogger — but if I told you what it was I’d have to kill you.

number E – Okay so, I watched a man and a woman emerge from a single unisex public toilet — hubba hubba!

number F — I’m ‘watering’ my neighbor’s apartment while he’s away.  It’s all clean in there since he married his girlfriend.  And I think she threw all his cookies away.  I was planning on grabbing a few but when I looked at the shelves where he usually keeps them, there weren’t any.   I mean — this man stocked up on cookies like he was a Keebler elf — it was insane — once I counted 15 packages of cookies.  So I just dropped off his mail, watered the plants and got the hell out of there.  I did stare at his liquor bottles, tempted to open one just to smell it, but as people who know me know, I need to stay thirty yards away from liquor because it turns me into a damn Gremlin.  The cool thing is that he finally got rid of that furry toilet seat cover.  I HATE anything furry in the bathroom, especially in the vicinity of the toilet with all those bacteria and microscopic organisms — ew!  My ex had one and I was always uncomfortable in his apartment because I knew there was one in the bathroom.

number G — I read this great post on the Outlier Collective about cellulite! Made me proud to have it!

G’night!

Hehehehe.

“Just because” bunny

Pehehe.  I didn’t know that when you unfriend someone on Facebook, you can no longer see them in the conversation stream of a mutual friend’s comment box — haha!  It’s like the person responding to them is talking to themselves — hahaha — like seeing a person dancing with themselves in the mirror.  But, in actuality they’re dancing with a vampire who doesn’t cast a reflection — tehehe!

Hahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

I’ve only been on Facebook over a year and today was my first ‘unfriending’.  I’ve been threatening to do this a while.  I was infuriated by this person’s inflamatory, homophobic, racist  — this person happens to be black — and generally idiotic, delusional and bombastic comments, most of which I simply ignored if they happened to be in response to one of my posts.  With the exception of one instance where I told them that I was offended by what they had said, I held back on other occasions, when I really wanted to lash out and tell them what a fucking idiot they were.  When this happens more than a few times, they gotta go.

But I don’t mind a good natured Facebook debate, as long as there’s intelligence behind it and the discretion that comes with the tact and respect for anyone else happening to be viewing the conversation on a public wall.  This person would just flail all ass out — so I also didn’t want them offending my other Facebook Friends.

Believe me, I’m not on a moral high horse.  I just can’t endorse dumb.  And I’m no grade A number one spell-checker — no prize-winning grammar queen (There might even be errors in this.), but even this person’s bombastic rants contained high levels of misspellings, misquotes and grammatical comedies.  One of their comments in my stream was the size of a blog post — hahaha!  Ass!  This person was the most offensive Facebook personality I have ever seen, even more offensive than the person who posted a picture of anal sex flaming huge on my wall.  But I gave this other person another shot because he dismantled the ass shortly after.  Actually the ass was kind of hot, however I’m not on Facebook for porno.

But anyway — even the way we became Facebook friends was stupid.  I was manipulated.  Weird, right?  Well, I don’t need the numbers.  I’m no Facebook friend whore.

After quiet exclamations of  “What the fuck,”  “What an asshole,” and “I don’t believe you just said that,” I’d hover over the ‘unfriend’ option, just threatening to click it.

So, congratulations to me, today, yay!  No more assholes, hooray!

Have you unfriended any assholes?

Trayvon Martin

A month after starting my blog last year, I was going to write about the Trayvon Martin murder but thought, nah, I’m not writing anything political on my blog.  He had been dead a month then.

So I planned to go to a Trayvon Martin rally at Union Square.  The closest I came to broadcasting anything about Trayvon Martin was a post on Facebook, announcing that I was going to the demonstration, wearing my hoodie.  I didn’t post pictures or say anything else after that on social media, but did subscribe to the Justice for Trayvon Martin Facebook page.

The rally was planned for 6PM but I got there and saw the usual, some left over ragtag Occupy Wall Streeters, skateboarders, students from NYU and homeless people.  There were also police standing in groups at different points of the square.  I looked for signs of a crowd convening but saw nothing, so approached people, asking if they knew about a Trayvon Martin demonstration.  They didn’t but the police did.  “They’re scheduled to be here 7pm,” one said.

While questioning whether to wait, I went to Starbucks, ate a piece of cake, drank coffee and read some old philosophy.  I read from Socrates, who said in this book that physically harming someone else is the worst damage you could do to your own soul.

Later, through the Starbucks window, I saw people gathering and was glad I had decided to stay.  I hopped off my seat and walked to the crowd.

An hour later, holding a memorial candle, I stood center stage amidst a few hundred people of all races, also holding candles.  Now it was dark.  I quoted what I had just read in Starbucks from Socrates, in relation to George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin, and yelled out to the crowd that it is a “fucking shame” – yes I was angry – that this beautiful woman’s son has become internationally known for this, instead of becoming internationally known for discovering a scientific contribution helping to cure neurological diseases.  At the time I had an egoistic fantasy that my four year old nephew would grow up to become a neurosurgeon.  But could he have the same fate as Trayvon Martin?  There’s a picture on my refrigerator of my nephew that resembles Trayvon Martin as a child.

Later on the bus, on the way home, a woman got on and walked by me.  “You were great tonight,” she said.

I’m tired of this shit happening every year.  We’re going in circles in this country.  I’ve written before that it doesn’t make a difference in this republic that the president is biracial.

If Zimmerman were black and Trayvon Martin white, his ass would have been jailed, ASAP!  What are the solutions for black people, whose children aren’t protected in their own country? This is what I mull over now.

In the nineties a fifteen year old named Latasha Harlins walked to the register in a convenience store to pay for an item.  The store owner accused her of stealing the item in her backpack.  So she reached over, tousled with her and wrested the item from her bag.  In defense, Latasha punched her in the face.  The woman pulled out a gun and shot her in the head.  The white female judge ruled that for the murder of this, child, this store owner should get probation with no time served.

There’s “fallout” from living in this kind of a culture — those who fall between the cracks, black, white or otherwise.  And black people shouldn’t make excuses for bona fide hoodlums, but this is evil.

When Bernhard Goetz shot those black kids who tried to rob him on the train, it was justified.  This is another scenario but to paint a different part of the picture – when those twenty children were murdered in Newtown, I was devastated, they were just children, it didn’t matter that they were white.  And if the murderer had been black, I would have been just as devastated, because they were children.  This is the same sentiment I would expect to receive for our black children.

Summer in Vietnam

Willie walked, staring straight ahead with not much of an expression.  Unless you’re a tourist, you should stay away from 42nd Street, especially in this weather.  I’ve known Willie for years, but not intimately.  We have mutual acquaintances.  We didn’t talk much when I ran into him.  I could dig the energy.  It was about conservation.  He’s a heavy-set, older gentleman, Puerto Rican.

He glanced at me wanly.  “It’s tropical heat.  Like Vietnam.  The masters used to say, be still in the calm.”

“You were in Vietnam?”

“Yeah,” he said nodding.

I thought of his age, his demeanor.  I know Vietnam veterans, the ones who have PTSD, the ones who had been drug addicts and alcoholics to cope with the horrors and aftermath of senseless war.

“Stay cool Willie,” I said.  We departed and he waded slowly into the throng.  I went to the Super Runner’s Shop to return running shoes.

Instead of being a pussy and taking the bus, I walked to 49th.  I looked at the tourists and “dirty Elmos” in Times Square.  “Dirty Elmo” is a phrase I learned from my sister.  When she visited once, she and her son were accosted by one.

Today I saw two of them — God bless them in this heat, in furry red suits.

A man caught my eye, an edgy, downtown type, not a technicolored tourist dressed in pastels.  His hair was mussed and he was tall.  The tee-shirt’s the thing that got me.  Black and white, faded.  The tee-shirt had an upside down cross, and the words, “Hail Satan, drink coffee.”  I’m no fan of Satan, but that tee-shirt was, kind of, cool.  Would I wear it?  Hell no!  He walked past me and I turned to look.  If it weren’t for the tee-shirt?  But I don’t do religious zealots uh uh, no — sorry.

I traded in my running shoes and headed for the one train uptown.  This all hadn’t been so bad.  On the downtown side, across the platform, were dull streams of light pouring in from the street gratings above.  The pillars were angular shadows.  A woman in a sharp and casual business suit stood between the shadows, reading an electronic device and holding a briefcase.  Her hair was swept back in a pinned up pony tail.  She was a lone slender figure, her features blotted out by intermittent darkness, the perfect silhouette for a New Yorker Magazine cover.

I couldn’t have said it better…

Ahahaha!  You may have heard this philosophy before but not like this:

Final Revelation, by Bolt Thrower

Songwriters: Jo Bench, Gavin Ward, Karl Willietts, Martin Edward Kearns, Barry Thomson

Born to suffer, through a lifetime of darkness

Controlled by fear, held deep within your mind

As your mind reaches a distant point

Your soul beyond all pain

You shall realize all that has occurred

Were illusions formed from within your brain

You now know the truth, your mind is now set free

You have broken the chains that enslave all of humanity

Perceiving, life’s reality

An insight to man’s destiny

A coherent existence, comprehension you cannot deny

A meaningless persistence, confirmation you cannot defy

We follow without thinking, as our life passes us by

This newly acquired knowledge, clarified as we die

In this kingdom of the mindless

We are born to suffer

Come Hither

I don’t flirt usually unless I already know you.  If I flirt with a man I don’t know, it means I’m overpowered by chemistry.  I saw a man near Park Avenue once, and had an animal reaction.  I locked into him and shuddered a little.  He wasn’t conventionally handsome.  There was just something alpha about him.  He looked at me, and appeared to be nodding subtly to communicate that he understood my reaction — this is part of the reason I think he had alpha chemistry.  He might have been used to this reaction?

I probably flirt with girls more.  I used to be fearful of boys.  They fucked with me when I was sick in junior high school.  They were mean and teased me mercilessly because I was emaciated and flat-chested.  When I got out of the hospital after a month, and got meat on my bones, things changed.  They asked if I had been at the farm — haha!

I’m not a lesbian, but I used to like girls better.  I didn’t gush around boys, I tensed up.   I remember playing in the pool with some boys and girls.  The boys dunked the girls, and they giggled — squealed.  I was horrified.  They’d come at me and my eyes widened, and there would be no giggling — I scratched the shit out of them.  I was frightened of the water and the boys were so overpowering.

I was curious — and suspicious — about girlfriends who had ‘friendships’ with boys.  Although I had boyfriends, I didn’t care to just be hanging around dudes.  I cared about impressing them, but from a distance.

In my thirties, I relaxed, and allowed myself to be “friends” with a couple of guys.  But I knew it’d probably be bullshit.  I had a girlfriend who said she preferred male friends to women friends.  I asked if she was fucking those male “friends.”  “Well, yeah,” she said — hahahahaha!

I believed there would always be an underlying agenda with mixed sex friendships.  In most cases, both would probably need their sexuality validated in some way and that would negate the platonic part.  I wrote a brilliant novel with this premise, but it has yet to be recognized as such — ha!

So, I tried the platonic ‘thing’ with a guy.  We spent most of the time almost fucking, and actually did twice.  Finally I had to let him go.  He turned out to be dishonest.  It just confirmed my theory.  While I do call a few men ‘friends’, I still have difficulty with the concept.  But nowadays, I’m trying to understand men as fleshed out people, and I do like them, not that I ever did really dislike them.

Today I practiced flirting and it worked!  The guy just hung around, asking questions, blushing — ha — so cute!  I think I might be experimenting with this kind of thing more.  Too bad I’m all old and shit trying to do this now.  I’ll keep you posted.