areyoulistening

I have more free time on my hands now since I don’t work at the Daily News anymore. Some of the classes started this week but it went get crazy for a few weeks or so. So I went for a run the other day around the ol’ hood and saw two injured birds (that were clearly on their way to being dead) struggling in the road. The first one didn’t make much of an effort to get of my way and that is how I knew it was hurt. It hopped a few inches away and that was when I noticed it had lost a leg and was bleeding out. The second bird was jumping up and down while bumping it’s head against the curb. I’m pretty sure he had broken a wing and was attempting to fly.

I don’t care about birds but it was still unsettling to see something struggle to survive. I watched the bird attempt to fly with it’s broken wing and couldn’t help but feel bad for the little guy. I thought about stomping on him to put him out of his misery but chickened (no pun intended…not!) out. I wonder how long he spent flying himself into the curb? No doubt he died a terrible death.

Which reminds that the smaller cat my family has, Casey, brought a dead bird into the house and was playing with it last week. She rolled on her back, threw the corpse into the air and walked around the house with it hanging from her mouth. My father finally got it from her and said that she had snapped its little neck. I’ve seen the cats we’ve had slowly kill things a number of times. They often injury their prey and than let it wobble away for a few feet before they swat it again or bite it a little bit. In the end, the poor thing probably dies from having a fucking heart attack out of fear. I’m no Dr. Doolittle or anything but I think I would die of fright if a giant cat played a game of death dance with me.

Last weekend I also went to a beach town in Connecticut and saw hundreds of dead fish floating in the harbor. Dead fish? Dying birds? It is only a matter of time before the river runs red with the blood of the non-believers.

As I’ve said before, I love the show “True Life” on MTV. When they run a marathon of those bad boys I stay watching them! They should have an MTV channel that shows only” True Life.” The other night I caught a new one, “I Can’t Stay Thin.” It follows two people that are attempting to keep wait off or lose weight. There is a guy and a girl. The girl’s story is a fucking snooze fest. She basically just doesn’t stick to the diets she puts herself on. She wants to lose weight before she goes on spring break. Her spring break trip is staying with her aunt somewhere in Texas. The aunt makes all this homestyle food when she gets there; I’m talking Mac ‘n Cheez, ribs and biscuits like whoa! The girl doesn’t lose any of the weight.

The guy’s story is where this episode gets the job done. He weighed something like 340 lbs at one point and he limits himself to 1,000 calories a week. I caught this one like 15 or 20 minutes into it so I missed how it all got started but this guy’s problem is that he’ll go a week only taking in 1,000 calories and binge like a bastard in the middle of the night. It was disgusting. He would eat 4 big burgers, fries and shit–it would be all over the floor. He shoves the shit in his face, talks about how good all the food is and how he had just ate more calories in a few minutes than he had in the last 10 days. He would make a big mess with all this food and not clean it up until the next morning. For some reason that really bothered me. He goes to a Chinese place and orders two dinner combination plates, goes into an alley, takes the food out of the Chinese food bag and puts it in a brown grocery bag so no one will know what he is going to eat. This boy has some deep shit to work out.

He goes to Cancun for his sister’s wedding and everyone in his family is telling him how good he looks (he was down to 199 lbs the day he left for the trip). He has a few drinks with a family friend after they went out for dinner and he keeps talking about getting some more food. The two of them go back to his room and crush some room service: pasta dishes and cheescake…the boy was back, babay! He does this for three days and starts to feel bad. He decides to weigh himself. He weighed 211.6 lbs! He binged so bad that he gained over 12 lbs in three days! Think about that, he must have brushing his teeth with Mayo or putting bacon fat in his Smack ‘Ems in the morning. He laughs to himself but it’s really sad. This fucking guy had worked so hard for so long (He went about it all wrong but he did get the weight off) to lose this weight and he just went all Mamma Cass on himself as soon he goes on a vacation.

In the end, they say he was able to put himself on a 3 meal a day diet and was down to 190 lbs so good for his fat ass, you know?

True Life, you are good. I would like to suggest a new topic for the next True Life. True Life: I Love True Life on MTV. I’ll be on it.

I walked by the Garden last night as I was leaving work and saw that there was a large group of people lined up by where the players enter the Garden. Usually that is where hockey dorks stand 5 hours before a Ranger game and I guess where Kinick fans did the same back when the Knicks played actual basketball games in 1994.

 However, the group that gathered on 33rd Street yesterday had a different “flavor” to them…if you will. It looked like there may have been two look alike contests taking place: Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg. Let me tell you this, it was going be a close fucking call on both fronts. You see the Liberty were playing that night.’ Who are the Liberty?’ you may be asking yourself, apparently they are a team that plays in something called the WNBA. Which, from what I can gather, fancy themselves to be an even more unwatchable form of professional basketball association than even the NBA. The W stands for women…so I’m assuming they have a very large lesbian fan base. That is the joke here.

I had a meeting this morning at 10 am and going to a meeting when you’re leaving a company in like 30 hours or so is kind of like going to a travel agent and planning a trip a week after you are going to be dead and buried. People preface everything they say to you with “Well, you’ll be leaving us” or “Not that you’ll be here but…” And let me tell you, I was never very good at this meeting shit anyway. People sitting around a table taking fake notes, drinking bad coffee while some jackass is pointing to a pie chart about how we can get people to read newspapers again. I was always asked stuff like, “What do people your age do for news?” or “How often do you text message with people?” Most of the time I’m in the middle of a few text messaging storms during the actual meeting, you know? So pretty often, Carol. Pretty often. Oh, and I have no idea how to save newspapers. I did draw a star here in this worksheet you handed out so…I hope that. Nevermind.

Tomorrow is my last day here and it got me thinking about the last day of high school. I was happy to be moving on but there was part of me that was going to miss all that I was leaving behind, all that was going to be lost. Anytime you leave somewhere or you know a certain part of your life is over, you are better off looking at the situation as a whole. There will be good and there will be bad and if you pretend that it’s all good, you’ll end up crying in the shower or feeling like you want to kick a puppy.

It goes both ways, like when you have someone die that you love. People are always saying shit like, “Hey, think of all the good times and take something good from that!” or “They’re in a better place.” People say these things because they don’t like seeing you upset and want you to be able to look at the situation as a whole. No one wants to say to you on the day you graduate from college or something and you are happier than a pig in shit, “Hey man, just don’t forget you are leaving behind a lot here at school. Don’t just think about all this great stuff you have on the horizon; think of what you lost.” But the truth is, you have to think both sides. Being able to see and feel what you lost will make the next thing you have coming up that much better.

Alright, I’ll stop all that for this next little segment. So there was this protest in Manhattan yesterday because the word “retard” is used 17 times in the new movie “Tropic Thunder.” That is the movie with Ben Stiller , Jack Black and Robert Downey, Jr (who is a white guy playing a white playing a black guy…but is not retarded.) They (short)bused in a whole load of these wacky sons of bitches from group homes all over the state. They had them standing outside this theater chanting “No more R word!, No more R word!” I cringed and died a little on the inside thinking about what we would have yelled out of the ol’ Suzuki Sidekick if we drove by. Who am I kidding? We would have been driving back and fourth all Goddamn night. Denis would have brought his slingshot, the video camera would have been there…thank God this movie did not come out in 1998…

…it would have been retarded.

I asked Pete Shikar to send me a text everyday to tell me how his bike ride through New York State was coming along. I said I’d update it here on the blog and figured we could have a laugh. He sent me “I’m in Englewood, NJ” on Friday night and there hasn’t been much since…until today. He sent me this video. Be sure to have the sound on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGxOfkC2zFo

 I imagine he is up in the mountains by now. Godspeed.

Here is another video I uploaded on youtube today (It’s of Tony and Pete from 2006.)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlZGFov7tNM

At the Drive In’s “In Casino Out” was released sometime before the summer of 1998. I guess I bought it around that time and decided after listening to it maybe once that it was not for me. I made the mistake of giving it to Mike Tracey. Something he reminds me of everytime I talk about how it is one of my favorite records ever.

I bought the album a second time a few years later only to have it stolen when my car was broken into by the Stadium in the summer of 2002.

Last week I bought the album for a third time on iTunes and it is still a great album. I wish the 1998 version of myself had better patience but it is a little late for all that.

My senior of high school I took crafts and ceramics. They were two different classes not one class. One was crafts and one was ceramics. Some mornings I would have crafts followed by ceramics; which meant I had like three hours of bullshit right off the bat. We made Chrsitmas ornaments in ceramics and doilees in crafts. No big deal; I wasn’t parading around the school showing off.

But there was a group of students that did just that: the stained glass class. These fucking people thought they were the mutt’s nuts. They had a special classroom on the nice floor that always seemed to be dark and I don’t really know why. They would always talk about how they were working on a special project or some shit.

“I gotta go back to stained glass, bro. Working on a Yankees championship piece. It is gonna be sick.”

“Oh yeah, well I made a little stuffed bear with a top hat in crafts. So, I got a pretty full plate here too man!”

Guys are walking around with hot iron tools, bending metal and melting glass. I’m in the Goddamn crafts room in the frigging basement looking through the yarn bin trying to find a fushcia for my bear’s hat to match the saddlebrown I chose for his tummy! I was in honor’s English and History! They couldn’t get me in the stained glass class? Pull a few strings for me here, Asst. Principal Gebbia!!!

One of my best friends in the world was in the stained glass class, Pete Baker. You would have thought he was working on the fucking Mars Rover in there, using technical terms and what not. It was unreal how they acted about that class. I just wish there was someway they could have all burned themselves a little bit with a hot glue gun or something, ya know? Nothing bad, I don’t want people with melty faces or anything like that. Just a little singe to say, ‘Hey, it’s not all roses in here pal. You gotta work a little bit, okay?”

Truth is, I wanted to make a sick Yankee championship piece, you know? It wasn’t in the cards and I couldn’t really complain all that much about the classes I had but they used to make me so mad! I hope they still cherish their gay little designs today because I know my teddy bear is around somewhere.

I fell asleep with my iPod on last night and it made me dream about S & M sex. You see there is a Green Day song (big fucking suprise, huh?) called “Blood, Sex and Booze” and I can only assume it was on when I had the dream.

I was sitting in a room and knew I had to wait for whatever reason. There was a loud speaker that would say stuff to me like in grade school when the principal made announcements. It was basically saying lines from the song. Stuff like: “Head down, head down, do you understand me?!?!?” “Don’t dare move. The pain I’ll put you through is what you need, you want to bleed” and “This is another lesson to be learned from a girl called Kill.”

So the crazy broad on the other side of the door that is going to do whatever to me is named fucking Kill! I don’t know how I get into the next room but I’m there and I say, “The handcuffs are way too tight.” She doesn’t say anything to me. She turns away from me and when she turns back she is wearing a hockey mask. If this were really happening to me I would have died from sheer terror at that point. She walks around the room opening draws, looking for something and after awhile she stops looking. She tells me, “This is not what it looks like.”

She never really hit me at all or anything and there was no sex but it was really scary to wake up from. When I woke up Kanye West’s “Roses” had just started on the iPod.

“I know it’s past visiting hours but can I please give her these flowers?”

Take that Freud and stick it in your ass! 

If I hear one more person say “It’s 08/08/08, ya know?” I’m gonna gut them. We’re dealing with numbers here people…shit like this will happen. If this were Must See TV week or Shark Week people wouldn’t notice it.

I’m still not crazy about going into strange places if it is really dark. I don’t mean bad neighborhoods in East LA or something; I mean like attics and basements. Am I ever going to not feel like that?

There is breaking news coming over the wire now that Russia just invaded Georgia! They have gone into the Coke factory and pissed in all the secret formula tanks! They are using Chipper Jones’ jerseys to towel off their sweat! They are, however, impressed by how nice the airport is! Oh wait, we’re getting word that Georgia is also a region near Russia. The Russians have not invaded the peach basket. Ok, that is a shame though because the Thrashers would have had a sick penalty killing line! http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/08/08/georgia.ossetia/index.html

Okay. Brett Favre is on the Jets. Let’s get back to baseball. It is August 8th. I can deal with this in late November, don’t you dare try to take August from me.

Sometimes I feel like Ben and Jerry’s just goes too far.

When I was down in LBI, a bar had a “Christmas in July” party on July 25th. Get it? Because it is halfway to Christmas. What a bunch of losers, huh?

My last day at the News is August 15th and I have mailed this motherfucker in! I did have quite a bit to do this morning and early afternoon but I have spent the last 45 minutes watching Juno on youtube.

Somethings I came across today:

Some crazyass bastard cut another person’s head off on a bus in Canada. He walked around with the poor chaps head in his head, took chunks out of the body with his knife and ate it like an old man taken slices off the side of a nice ripe granny smith. Say what you will about Canadians, they know how to keep things fresh on those long bus trips through that beautiful Communist country.

An old Chinese man having a smoke in front of the New York Public Library…spitting blood into a pool of deep red by his little sneakers.

Pete Shikar is riding his bike up to Buffalo State University tomorrow. Maybe, if he is reading this, he could text me a little something everyday about how it is coming along and I’ll put it up on here. What do you think?

My birthday is a week from today and I’ll be 28 years old. When I was a kid, 28 was how old my “older” cousins were. The cousins that had recently graduated from the kids table in the living room during Christmas and other holidays to the extension section of the “main” table. Those cousins all have kids now and they don’t come over for holidays much at all. A couple of the last few years my mother has had a pretty big Christmas party that they will all attend with their army of children but it is usually the weekend before Christmas or something.

Twenty years ago I turned 8 and my parents told me on that birthday that we were going to Disney World that October. I was pretty amped about that and my party was at Grand Slam USA in Yonkers. My father has a picture from that day hanging in his office at home. It’s me, Joey Farin, Billy Parker, Paul Guida, Brian and John Hichhack, my cousins Danny and Brian, my siter, Adi and Trina from my street. We all seemed to be having a pretty good time. My father is in the right corner of the picture trying to relax himself. Someone bought me a tee shirt that had the cover the Thriller album that year.

Ten years ago I turned 18 and I don’t recall what I did for my birthday at all. I do remember that my parents got me a birthday card with Mickey Mouse on it. I think I saw Green Day near my birthday with Patti, Greg, Tom and Keri at Asbury Park. I was still young enough to jump around and scream the lyrics at the top of my lungs. That was some fucking summer though. That summer after high school and before college is tough to beat. I feel like I was doing something everyday and I didn’t get a job until late July at Starbuck’s (which went about as well as bacon at a Ramadan party.) That summer had a funny feeling to it at times. There were days when you felt like no one could stop how great you felt but then you’d start to think about how high school was over forever, your friends were going to start leaving for school and you were never going to be 17 again.

Once you turn 21, your birthday becomes a series of going out to bars with your friends and whatever. Maybe you can pick out the year some stupid shit happend. Take for example, my 22nd birthday. We went to Bar None and drank pints of Bud Ice like someone was holding a gun to our collective head. After 5 hours of that, we walked across the street to the Spaceship Burrito place or whatever it was called and ate burritos the size of car batteries. I also stole three green plates from the place (which my mother still uses.) Well, I got home and released holy hell in the form burrito filling and still cold beer into our toilet. Happy birthday, asshole.

Anyway, 28 is your late 20’s. At 27, you can convince yourself you are somewhere in your mid 20’s. There is no such convincing to be done at 28. If you haven’t gotten your shit together yet, now is the time. It’s not cute to be flighty and indecisive anymore…it’s sad.

On the bus ride home from Queens Borough Community College last week, I was sitting behind this girl with purple hair as she was telling her friend the she had to take Comp and Lit 1 for third time in a row (which means she will be in my class) this semester. She was telling her dopey friend that she was hanging out on St. Marks the other day and was complaining about how much it had changed. She said that St. Marks was full of “house punks” now, which she expalined to her friend meant that they punks that went home to their parents at night and slept in beds. She went on to trash these so called “house punks” even though she herself was a “house punk.” I mean, someone is paying for her to take Comp and Lit for the third time in a row, you know? Also, by the time this girl started “hanging out on St. Marks” the party had been over for quite some time.

The worm started to turn when Coney Island High closed down (I think that was 1997). That is when all those new apartments and stores started to show up. These are the things that bothered the people hanging out at Grassroots, eating popcorn  while they watch that three-legged dog hop around.

But I’m not here to preach that bullshit to the likes of you, I wanted to say that I was on St. Marks today and it was a pretty hairy scene. I went down to McSorley’s for lunch to try their burger (which sucked) and walked up St. Marks to get to the train. There was a dude lying on the floor in front of one of the buildings with blood pouring out of his right cheek. He was surrounded by a group of “street punks” that were trying to help him up and give him diet Pepsi. One of the dirty young men was sitting on a garbage bag rolling a joint. About twenty feet up from that a man was pissing behind on of those stands that sell glasses and hats singing “You’re in my eyes, you’re in my head” or whatever that song is. Across from him was an old fridge that someone had written “Shit piss cunt”…I shit you not.

Punk is not dead…it is alive and retarded.