A Boon

Something weird happened the other night on the way to the senate. By senate I mean bar and by weird I mean fucking awesome.

About three years ago, my favorite bar in the whole wide world closed down. Without hesitation, without warning and certainly without reason. It was called “International Bar” on first avenue and seventh street. For years my best friend, Sunshine, and I would go there monthly and drink cheap drinks and laugh as I tried pitifully to hit on the bartender.

It was a seriously dodgey dive bar. The actual bar surface area was made of warped particle board that was flaking in many places. The smoking area in the back was cracked concrete with a clogged storm drain. There was one bathroom the size of a post office box. It was covered in band stickers and it always smelled like four week old piss.

This picture was from there:

For three long years we’d walk by the shuttered bar and cry about how much we missed it. Surely it was being turned into some awful trendy clothing store or something. We found a new place, hardly a replacement, but we considered it gone.

But on Saturday night I walked by it, fully intent on telling the person I was with all about my long lost favorite bar…

… and it was OPEN.

Three years closed and it reopens with the same exact fucking sign, same address, same chairs but with a new non-particle board bar.

When does that ever happen? In New York!

When has a tiny little dive bar closed for three years and reopened?

Never.

Life is good. Like, really good.

Seemingly Unrelated

Last night I went out drinking.

I’d had a super mega ridiculously bad week at work and needed to drown my vocational sorrows under pints of vodka and the leers of bow legged women.

For the mot part it worked. I’m definitely happier today, but that’s besides the issue. I witnessed a bizarre little vignette last night.

I was sitting in a McDonald’s, half-timing between bars, and I saw first the most multi-culti little group of gay boys ever.They were like the UN of mo-ness. Cute.

But behind them in the window I saw a hipster wearing a scarf.

It was ninety fucking degrees last night. And it wasn’t even a little scarf, it was long. Like seventies era Dr. Who long. Argh it made me so angry for some reason. It’s summer! Leave your Billyburg passport in the bathroom with your stepped on coke and over tattooed girlfriend. She wont notice you’re gone.

While I was kvetching silently, another person passed my field of view. An old man. He looked just like my late grandfather. He was alone and in a McDonalds.

Where was this man’s family? Maybe I was just feeling pointlessly nostalgic for Pop. Surely not all old men have bouncing grandchildren affixed to their knees. Maybe he was an eighty five year old bachelor getting some eats before hitting the clubs in search of a snizz.

Then again, maybe he was every bit the lonely octegenarian he seemed to be. Maybe he sat at the same molded orange and tan feeding slab every night in the hopes that someone would accidentally drop their bag near him and strike up a spontaneous conversation, freeing him at least momentarily from the smothering loneliness that living in such close proximity to millions can breed.

I hoped he was on his way to APT instead.

My Favorite Game

Livin’ out here in the hood my roommate and I have a game that we play. It’s called Gunshots or Fireworks.

That’s right.

Whenever there’s a loud boom or bang we sit for a second in uneasy silence while we figure out if we should be staying away from windows or blushing a little bit of nationalist pride.

This game is only fun in the summer.

As we fast approach our nation’s birthday the ratio of fireworks to gunshots soars to happy fun time levels. During the winter, it’s a little less so. I mean, who sets off fireworks in the winter? Teenage hooligans, that’s who.

This game is also made more fun by just telling scared people who come to visit me that we even need a game like that.

Hey man, it beats the PS3 any day of the week.

Well it Ain’t My Socks

One of the problems with having a supersized nose is that you also have supersized nasal cavities which then means you have a supersized sense of smell. This sucks because you can smell things that other people can’t, or maybe ignore, and it can drive you crazy.

I came home early today only to play a rousing game of “What’s That Smell?” Some odious scent had found its way into my living quarters and I spent three hours trying to find out what it was. It was so faint I wasn’t even sure if it was a bad smell, or if it was just different than the usual aroma of stale cigarettes, masturbatory sweat and cheap tequila.

Every time I think it’s gone I smell it again. I’ve showered, swept, mopped, done dishes, cleaned the filter on the air conditioning unit and sanitized the disco ball which was used in an unholy sexual act some weeks ago.

Argh, it’s driving me crazy.

Escape from Real Life

A very good friend of mine, Colleen, started up a travel blog recently.

http://escapefromreallife.com/

Go there if you like the following things:

• Good writing
• Beautiful locations
• Puppies
• Candy
• Babies

She’s taking some time off and booking it around the globe doing all that stuff that you wish you had the balls to do. She’s been in Santorini for the last couple days and if you want to mentally change your drab little cubicle into something fantastic for a few minutes, I wholeheartedly suggest the jump.

Good luck out there girlie.

Seeing Eye Dogs

Midway through the week and it looks like I’m just going to talk about sex and depravity the whole time. Maybe I should do theme weeks. Next week will be all about China’s human rights violations, I swear.

But I got to thinking the other day while I was standing out front of my neighborhood strip club having a cigarette that there cannot be a more worse place for a woman to walk around on the street. Sure, women in New York have to deal with cat calls all the time, hoots and hollers from construction workers, honks from “scrubs” in their best friend’s car, perusing the Proust section at a Barnes and Noble bookstore, what have you. There is no place where a woman’s low cut blouse and high riding skirt that just barely shows off the bottom of her pert buttocks is safe from malicious, voiced affection.

However, right outside of a strip club? It’s even worse. The guys out there have just spent the last two hours whittling away their meager paychecks looking at single mothers wriggle up and down a greasy poll. Women with their clothes ON are a foreign site to them and as one of those slimeballs I can guarantee you that it is physically impossible for them to NOT picture a woman naked as she picks up her stride and heads for the subway.

But they never say anything. The overriding shame of being seen in front of a strip club by a woman basically shuts a guy up because all men assume all women know each other, especially their girlfriend or wife. So they just sit there and watch the women go by, envisioning them in a ten dollar I Dream of Genie hooker costume from the back of Ricky’s.

I think in some ways that’s worse.

Even More Disgusting, I Know.

On the topic of boys being gross, as Ally so specifically and correctly put it yesterday, I wanted to muse out loud about something. Men are pigs, we all know that… though I wonder to what extent most women know it. The sheer level the mind bending effects of a man’s sexual drive is something that I truly believe most women will never understand.

There’s the commonly mentioned urban legend that men think about sex every seven seconds. In truth it is much higher than that. Men think about sex every second of every day. They think about sex with everyone and everything. Take a look around you and find something with a hole in it, I can guarantee that a man has thought about putting his penis in it. Men, feel free to go mentally crazy on the picture at the top of this post.

It’s a little like Tourette’s syndrome of the brain. You can’t help it, the best you can do is hope to push it to the back of your brain. Some are better than others at this. We call these people successful, as in they’re successful in suppressing their base sexual desires long enough to go to college and get a job.

Some women like to say that they’re just as horny as men. Sure, maybe every now and then when the tides are just right, someone complimented your hair and you just beat a bitch down for that last handbag at the sample sale. But men are that horny every hour of every day. Why do you think men always wake up with an erection? Because when they are dreaming there is no limit to the depraved level sexual encounters they can experience. I’m constantly surprised more men don’t wake up with priapism and a monkey claw.

Is it any wonder why we only ever elect old men to office? It’s not because of experience, it’s because we know their penises stopped working years ago and we’re secure in the fact that they won’t drop the ball in a high pressure situation because they’re thinking about what Star Jones looks like naked. And every man has thought that thought once and if they never have… they will… right… now. Egads, all that extra skin.

You’re welcome.

This post has been brought to you by Friends of McCain ’08.

Disgusting, I Know.

My roommate’s out of town for three weeks. I’ve got this gigantic apartment all to myself. Thus begins a twisted little ritual of mine that I’m usually remiss to tell anyone about because it disturbs even me. When no one’s around, I like to put my balls on things.

It’s nothing sexual, I assure you. Simply a little game of two degrees of separation between you and my balls. It’s also sanitary, I keep an extraordinarily clean set of testes. Double washings, extra lather, the whole shebang.

When people come over to my place, I keep a little mental catalog of the few places where I’ve dropped nut and then laugh quietly to myself should anyone every graze the spot, step on it, brush up against it, or in my youth when I was more brazen, when I marked a doorknob.

It’s usually just two or three places, my aging and withered mind really can’t handle any more locations in memory. They’re never obvious. Usually the underside of something, like a counter or desk chair, something that would require a strange situation in order for it to be touched. Sometimes I get literary and mark a specific book, not the most interesting one in my collection, but usually a large text that most people would ignore. The target must have a low percentage of success.

That way, if and when I see contact, I get instant amusement. Though it’s a quiet inside laugh that no one knows about but me.

Except for the few friends of mine that I’ve let in on the joke. For them, trips to my apartment are a little like traipsing through a field of land mines, constantly looking at me to see if they’ve hit a trip wire. They’re terrified. It’s a little like winning a slap bet and getting to slap someone but never telling them when it’s coming.

Man, seeing it written out like that makes it even worse. Excuse me, I have to make some tea.

Close Shave

You know what sucks? Getting a bad ass new razor, cleaning yourself up for the night only to shave off a piece of your lower lip. it sucks on a couple levels. 1) I’ve got some real juicy lips and apparently they’re just packed with oodles of blood. So it refuses to close up no matter the amount of tissue I pack on it in hopes of coagulating. And of course 2) I now look like I’ve got some sort of bloody open sore on my lip and we all know what that looks like.

Ugh.

Now I’ve got to preface every conversation I have tonight with this exact story. How boring.

Hope on a Rope

At a time when everyone’s hope seems to be riding on the Obama Presidential campaign, here are a few things I’m hoping for:

• Against all odds I’m hoping that The Love Guru doesn’t suck harder than a Thai prostitute. Perhaps it’s some grand viral marketing campaign thought up to make a piece of comedic genius seem like it was written by a team of monkeys with Downs Syndrome, which may seem like a recipe for hilarity but in reality would just be a string of nonsensical consonants.
• I’m hoping that someone somewhere trademarks the word, “brother” so that Hulk Hogan can no longer say it every five seconds during his pointless interviews that seem to happen every five minutes on the new American Gladiators.
• I wish every night on a star (or a low flying passenger jet) that Joel McHale will accept my many gay marriage proposals telepathically sent though they may be.
• Immediately after that I hope and wish that E! will make another reality show about another non-celebrity so that I can watch it and spend all the rest of my hope on yearning for a Hummer to crash through the wall and grind the star to botox-y dust.

Denise Richards you ceased your usefulness the moment you put your shirt back on in Wild Things.