I’ve just returned from work and a quick trip to the supermarket for arugula and beers (awesome combo, you don’t have to tell me). As I was walking home from the store in my neighborhood (Prospect Heights, Brooklyn), I noticed by a woman walking her poodle down the street in the opposite direction from me.

As I came closer, I saw some small, stick-like thing hanging out of the dog’s mouth. From a distance, my first thought was, “That’s a cigarette!”, but I have shit vision, even with contacts. But, sure enough, as the dog came closer I distinctly saw an unlit cigarette poking out of it’s mouth. The death-stick was whole, slightly damp in some parts, but complete and smokable.

The owner, who was walking slightly ahead of the poodle, seemed wholly oblivious as I can only assume she wouldn’t condone her pet’s addictive habit. My guess is the dog picked it up off the street, managing by coincidence to get it oriented correctly, filter-first and at the perfect smoking angle. The poodle really looked like he was just trying to get a light for it’s smoke. I would have obliged, had I been packing matches.

This morning, I left my Apartment of Doom and hit the street, heading for the subway. As I exited my building, I noticed this sketchy guy hanging out near the trash bins. he wasn’t homeless looking but kind of shabby and shady. He had a ten speed propped against the side of the building and was in the process of putting on a mismatched pair of dirty, old latex rubber gloves. I’m thinking that maybe the guy’s diving for cans to redeem, but I notice he doesn’t have any bags or anything to haul bottles and cans in. What I do notice is that the guy had a black nylon file case tucked under his arm.

I walked to the mailbox to drop off a Netflix DVD and stopped. Something just wasn’t right. So, I turned back and watched the guy from a few feet away. Sure enough, after the gloves were on, he started going through the building’s trash bins, looking through discarded mail and other papers he could find. The fuckwad was looking to boost someone’s identity, maybe get a credit card in their name or some other bullshit. I wish I had my camera with me so I could have grabbed a photo of the shithead. I figured there was no point in calling the cops, since going through trash left street-side is not illegal and if I’d said anything to the guy, he’d have either tripped on me or just biked off to some other building.

I’m really glad there’s a paper shredder at home. I destroy all my mail, except for the junk shit, along with anything else that might have any sensitive information in it. If you don’t have a shredder…get one.

Yesterday morning, I got on the subway to go to work, leaned against the door and started reading a book as I normally do every weekday. After a few minutes, I noticed that several woman looking at me like I had just crapped on the floor in front of them. Dirty looks just for being the beautiful creature I am is not an unusual occurrence in my life, but as they persisted in staring me, I kind of snuck a look around and at myself to see if there was something really wrong that I was missing, like maybe I was standing in a homeless-puddle or something gross and offensive.

To my horror, I saw that my fly was down. Not just unzipped, but the flag was fully lowered, open and exposing my dorky-ass blue boxers with the stupid golf ball pattern. There I was, advertising to the the subway car what was going on in my pants. In their eyes, I was rank and file alongside the perverts, mad subway masturbators, crazies and other such dirty and undesirable gutter-scum. How I made it two blocks to the station and onto a train without noticing the homemade wind-tunnel for my testicles—I cannot fathom other than to guess that I was a bit groggy and scattered that morning.

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I’m at my office, sitting in the dark. Earlier today, we were told that our neighborhood was being evacuated (with the added bonus of a police escort, should we refuse), I guess so that the electric company can shut down our area in Manhattan, thus taking some stress of the power consumption. Within a minute or so, that order was rescinded, but we were asked to turn off all unnecessary electricity usage. So, here I am, typing in the dark. I just finished reading an email from a coworker’s friend whose father works for ConEd. Here’s what I have to look forward too:

From: [redacted]
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2006 2:05 PM
To: Music - New York
Subject: FYI TO ALL

THOUGHT YOU ALL MIGHT WANT TO KNOW THIS INFO…

All-
My friend’s dad works for ConEd - he just called and told her not to ride the subways any more today, as we will likely have a blackout. ConEd is sending all non-essential employees home right now so they can shut down power to their building. From yesterday’s heat, Manhattan has 4 feeders out, putting a big strain on the system. He said in his 30 years working there, he’s never seen ConEd act like this, especially at 10:30 in the morning. He said not to panic, but not to take a chance if it can be helped - avoid riding the subway if at all possible.

Now I’ve lived through enough bullshit in New York to take all these emails with more than a grain of salt, no matter how many people say they know the person who knows the deal and whatnot. I’ve had a slew of imminent terrorist bombing/blackout/dirty nuke “get the fuck out now” emails come across my desk since I’ve been working in Manhattan and not one of them has ever amounted to anything other than wasted stress.

So here I am. Typing in the dark and waiting to go home, be it by train or by foot.

After years and years of mild toe and ear frost-bite, below freezing temperatures, snow up to my ass and an omnipresent state of moist, damp socks, I thought I would never reach a state where I would long for winter. Well, fuck it. Give me snow. Bury me in permafrost. New York City in the summer is twisted form of Hell and I’ve fucking reached my boiling point. I’m ready to go rabid shih-tzu on something.

I’ve dealt with 100+ degree days many times before in Vermont, but there you have the benefit of clean air as well as much less congestion and grime. Here in New York, stepping out into the street feels almost like slipping into a hot bath. Hitting a major street is like having wool blankets thrown over your head, while is this same bathtub. The heat coming from all the cars more than noticeably jacks up the discomfort. It’s nasty, but not half as bad as going underground to take the subway.

Subway platforms are the single worst place to be in New York during a heat wave. Above-ground is hot, dirty and disgusting. Beneath the streets is worse—concentrated heat and grime, coupled with screeching train noise and crowds of moist assholes. I’ve always heard that violent crimes jump during heat waves and I’ve never doubted it.

Standing in the dead heat, with my clothes sticking to me as a dirty ceiling fan blows oven-hot air about, I want to kill everyone. Luckily the reality of exerting myself to commit mass homicide is too much to bear. It’s too hot to go postal and I’m far too pretty for prison. Those people that are responsible for the crime rate jump on these hot days must have balls of ice, because for me, just walking from point A to B is hard enough.

I’ve said it many times before—I hate flying. It fucking terrifies me and not in a distant, abstract way. Currently, I am aloft at 21,711 feet, somewhere over New York, partially through the initial ascent of a fourty-eight minute flight to Burlington, Vermont. Pure, gut-churning terror. No, I don’t want a bag of airline peanuts, thanks.

I find it ironic that in my life, whenever I take a vacation, usually in a state of just past bug-crazy, fully sick of New York City and all the human vermin that turn it’s wheels (myself included), that in order for to get away, to relax and do the things stupid people do when frolicking with the natives, it requires my ass to be hovering many thousands of feet in the air, traveling at 540 miles per hour as a preamble or perhaps as a penance for being such a horrid little man. Say five Hail Marys and then you can go play—something like that..

At heights and speeds such as these, I question the point of it. Five days ass-out, drunk and stoned out of my gizzard, surrounded by plants and barbecued meats for the price of slightly less than one hour of stomach-twisting terror at high altitudes, spiced with the chance of ending my life screaming incoherantly before being enveloped in a giant flaming ball of death. It kind of makes me want to stay home on the couch, safely fused with my PlayStation.

But no. Here I am, trying not to bleat like a baby goat getting castrated as the turbulence kicks the plane about. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why didn’t I take the train? Smart people who live long lives take trains. Personally, I prefer to live a long time and the closest I’d like to get to death by plunging fireball is watching it happen on television, laughing at the misfortunes of others.

Last week, I bought a new laptop. It’s a great machine and I was able to get Kubuntu running on it with nearly zero hitches in the time it took me to ride the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I may be the first person ever to install Linux on a subway train—I’m not sure. I figured that since this new machine was fully pumped and equipped with a graphics card, I’d keep a small windows partition for the occasional video game quickie.

It’s been about a week and yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I decided to futz with Windows, which is something I usually loath doing. I booted into that nasty soup of unneeded and bloated programs and started uninstalling all the stupid free shit that came with my default install. It’s amazing to see the first boot difference between a fresh Kubuntu install and my fresh from the factory Windows install. Kubuntu is blazing while XP, on a dual processor with a gig of RAM and a 128 meg Nvidia card is slow as fuck, bogged down by a ridiculous mess of programs all set to run automatically. Nearly all of these programs are crap to me. You’d think they’d want to show off how fast their machines are by not crippling them at boot. I just don’t get it.

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In the past two years, I’ve gone from having a freak religious cult for neighbors to having a chicken waving, chanting, hooting and hollering idiot living next to me. Is it a case of “like attracts like”? Who knows? It just seems that my luck with neighbors in Brooklyn kind of blows hairy donkey balls.

I live on the third floor of my building and outside my bedroom window is a kind of a pit-like opening, made up of several of the surrounding buildings meeting up. It’s one long shaft straight down and all there is to see are the windows of other apartments in the surrounding buildings. The whole space is only about 12×12 feet and this shaft manages to act as a natural amplifier, bringing all kinds of interesting noises into my bedroom and blissful beauty rest at any odd hour of the day or night.

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George is my cat. He’s about a year old (which would put him at about fifteen in cat years, so in reality he’s at the whiny, pimply-faced teenager chapter of his life) and has lived with me for about six months now, having come from an animal shelter in East New York aka ghetto central. He very much prefers his new home here in Prospect Heights and is a very good cat—very affectionate, playful, entertaining and stupid looking at all the right moments and overall I am very glad to have him. However, over the course of our time living together, I have developed a few concerns about the little bugger:

1. He’s become a fat-assed little fucker.
2. He acts like he’s the Liberace of felines.

I recall his first day home, poking his head out off the cardboard box, all groggy from getting his nuts chopped off. He was small and skinny. Today, he’s still pint-sized, but his ass takes up several parking spaces. I can actually grab on to folds of lard that hang off his gut. When he parks himself on the floor his butt just seems to flop out, all blubbery and shit. I’ve tried putting him on a diet, but his ass seems to want to expand like Walmart. A big, gay Walmart.

Why do I think my cat is gay? Is it the way he prances about like Carson from Queer Eye? Is it the way he wears his fur like like Dolce couture? Is it his curious interest in shows like Project Runway? I’m not sure what ties it all together and leads me to this assumption, but I am certain George is a definite shade of lavender, a friend of Dorothy always ready to go Brokeback on a bowl of wet food or a pile of catnip. He’s a fat, gay, eunuch, but he’s mine.

To see George is all his fat, gay glory, you can view my rather huge (and growing) gallery on Flickr. Scratch that fat, gay feline itch.

A few days ago, after spending a wretched day renewing my ID at the hell that is the Brooklyn DMV, I picked up a copy of “Shadow of the Colossus” for the PS2 to brighten my day. I had no idea what it was about, but chose it because somewhere at some point I’d glanced at a review that raved about it. This is basically how I buy all games as I’ve a decided lack of patience to read gamer sites and magazines. I usually will subscribe to an RSS feed and scan the photos and titles. Games that get a bunch of posts, stick in my memory and usually end up getting purchased in moments of consumer weakness, which is often.

The format of your run-of-the-mill action game is: fight, fight, fight…boss scene. Fight the boss and then it’s back to fight, fight, fight til the next boss scene and the game eventually ends. Nothing wrong with it, I suppose but the boss fights have historically always been my least favorite parts. Give me a room with twenty little baddies that I have to kill á la God of War and I am one happy fucking camper. Games that are boss-heavy usually begin to collect dust shortly after purchase.

SotC is all bosses. There’s nothing else to the game, unless you count running from point A to B. There’s not baddies in between to slay. You go from one boss monster to another and while normally this would have me hating this game, I find myself hooked. SotC doesn’t have just any old bosses. These bastards are HUGE, gorgeously rendered behemoths that combine action, puzzle-solving and strategy to beat. The graphics, scenery and feel are hot shit. Strange, mysterious and moody. There’s little or no dialog in the game so the huge dream-like world sprawled out before you, unoccupied but for the mountainous beasts reminiscent of something out of HP Lovecraft is simply there to wonder about.

The hero of the game is this dinky little fucker, armed with only a sword and bow and a horse to ride. Pitted against giants literally fifty times larger, the little dude has to expose and attack the monster’s weak points. This is accomplished by figuring out how and managing to climb the boss, get to his weak spots and stab the fuck out of them before you lose your grip and fall. Tense shit.

There’s something to be said about a game revolving around my least enjoyed facet of the action genre that manages to completely entertain me. SotC is a great game on so many levels, from the concept to the anime-like look. It’s a short game, there being only sixteen bosses to battle, which sucks since this is a game that keeps you wanting to see more. More bosses, more areas, more everything.