Wait For It

Some stuff about me:

• If you're a skateboarder over the age of 30 and you don't have a video game or a show on MTV, I'm judging you, and you've got a big hole to dig yourself out of for me to like you.  

 

• I want to start a website called etsy-wetsy.com. It will be the result of me and my rabbit going to craft fairs and peeing on kitchy, handmade items.

• If you're a girl walking into my bedroom and you see one side of the bed is piled with clothes, magazines, drawings, pamphlets, empty shopping bags and newspapers, I didn't expect you to be here.

• My life's Catch-22 is that I am good at everything but monotonous work, and monotonous work seems to be an essential part of the American Dream. Of course, this is what the American Dream looks like, so screw it:

redeemed by the cardiologist

• I am seriously considering getting an online personal assistant from India or Bangladesh or whatever's cheapest because I become paralyzed by the most mundane, simple, routine tasks. This includes mailing a letter and writing a check. Or "paying rent."

• I've said it before and I'll say it again: I really think it sucks that every time someone returns a pair of Tom's to the shoe store, they take a pair back from a needy child.

• That being said, what a dream job.

• I made this drawing. I call it "Jack Hannah-bal Lechter Goes To Australia." I probably need to color it in to show Jack's khaki shirt and koala blood.

• They say cell phones cause brain cancer, but I feel like I'm safe since I pretty much text only. But then I realized I'm walking around with a $90-per-month asbestos cannon sitting in my pocket just two inches from my scrotum.

• I overheard the following statement recently: "That's what sucks about autotune — it takes no talent."

• I recently saw the best license plate I've ever seen in person, and risked death to get this photo:

the search continues

• I think the term "runner's high" is nonsense, but I like to think of a "walker's high" as old people pushing their carts around stoned on pain meds.

• I think abstinence is stupid. Who wants to sit around hearing someone brag about being an experienced virgin?

• I not-so-secretly think it's okay to be pretentious (or at least educated) about almost everything — clothes, food, architecture, design, music, art, literature — but you should also understand that I wear my underwear and t-shirts until they literally disintegrate.

• In my two years in New York, I have witnessed some weird stuff: two people getting urinated upon by bums, two fat old people make out — like, seriously go after it — in a thunderstorm, getting drenched all the way down to the control briefs and massive bra, heard countless stories of masturbating hobos on the subway flashing their crusty weiners at girls I know, but nothing could have prepared me for watching a woman hike her skirt and diarrhea in the street in broad daylight. Actually, that isn't true. I was prepared — I had my camera phone ready:

you see, the socks are protecting the sandals from splashback

I think this is all I have for today. I've been sort of manic-depressive lately over the completion of tasks and looking toward the next one, and to completing one thing before moving on to the next. I need to believe that I am, indeed, doing what I should be, even when sometimes it's very stressful and seems to be leading nowhere. And sometimes I just need to relax, and not be some damn high strung.

My good friend sent a text yesterday (that likely blasted my balls chock-full of cell phone radiation) telling me I'd been slacking on this blog, which gave me a little motivation to write a few things down that have been stuck in my head. Sorry they're all crazy...

Does A.C. Slater Sit Backwards On The Toilet?

spare a square, Mr. B?

Test results are inconclusive. But Mario Lopez has aerobics instructor levels of spandex photos floating around on the internets, just waitin' to be downloaded by some retro, '80s-loving pervert/blogger with perpetual boredom/no social skills/insomnia/indigestion. I hate myself.

just another reason for self-loathing

The McDonald's in my neighborhood is open 24 hours on Friday and Saturday nights, which means two things: One, I have an even unhealthier option for late-night drunk snacks than going to the bodega for a bag of kettle chips, a beef patty (pictured above, except sliced open and stuffed with pepperjack cheese before being microwaved) and a large VitaCoco; and two, they must have some sort of policy in that vagrants are allowed to loiter overnight. Both of these scenarios — eating late-night QPCs and photographing hobos — are near and dear to my heart, but one is going to cause my heart to explode from joy, the other explode from cholesterol...

Behold number three, "Dream Team", in my ongoing series of Homeless People Trading Cards (and another), in which I capture the unsheltered citizens in my neighborhood in their natural environment, like a National Geographic special created by a mental patient with photoshop.

this was the happiest meal i've had in weeks...

For some reason, looking at this photo has me thinking about that song "Holidae Inn" by Chingy. (whatever happened to him? Is he working the front desk night shift at a Cleveland area Radisson?) I got to wondering just what his street cred was really like. What if Chingy was homeless when he wrote that song and it was sad and depressing, talking about trying to bathe at the McDonald's or like a (hot) Carl's Jr. or something on Friday and Saturday nights and dreaming of a hotel room, but then Snoop and Bishop Don "Magic" Juan wandered in for a McFlurry and Chingy recognized Snoop and spit a few rhymes for him, Bishop Don trying to preach to him about turning his life around but Snoop — ever the savvy businessman — knew that even though the current version was depressing and totally unmarketable, especially since homeless Chingy was using a window washer's squirt bottle as a "mic", he saw some real talent in that kid, thinking almost out loud "If this shizzle wasn't about some homeless nizzle, it'd be off the hizzle" (or something like that, I think his mouth was full of Butterfinger McFlurry at the time). I scoured the internet and found the "Lost Lyrics" to the original song, when his name was Squeegie, due to his famously streak-free skills washing car windows on Sunset.

But out of those humble beginnings, this star was born, so we must appreciate his unfortunate roots and poor penmanship/grammar/spelling and love Chingy for the man who produced this:

I need to go to bed, but before I do, single solitary reader-prisoner, I will announce that I am going straight up Nick Denton and expanding my publishing empire to two horrible blogs, the second of which I am hoping to launch maybe tomorrow but realistically more like later this week. It is called "Tuesdays With Maury", and the idea is to take the choicest screenshots from the two daily episodes of the Maury Povich Show and post them on a tumblr blog, and maybe even try to teach a life lesson or two in the process like Mitch Albom does in that book, allegedly. I have not, nor do I ever envision myself reading it. Here's another little teaser, a PR shot from the play that was made from the made-for-TV movie that was made from the book. Enjoy, or whathaveyooz.

there's so much maury can teach me if i just plug my nose and keep an open mind about the elderly

Fat And Bloated, Mainly Around The Chin + Homeless V-Day Card

The other night's observance of a "holiday" was just an excuse to cram unhealthy food down my throat like Chris Farley before he chose the ultimate diet: drug overdose. (I'm lookin' at you, Al Roker; you're still fat and Farley's like a skeleton these days.) I took my love of dairy products to a previously unseen level and bought an embarrassing amount of cheese for myself and 4 other lonelyhearts. I made steaks. I drank red wine. Vegetables were present as a healthy option. I stayed up too late discussing sluttiness, intelligence and drinking. I ate far too much and got a gut-bubbling five hours of "sleep," which basically meant closing my eyes, clenching my cheeks and praying I wouldn't shit the bed. That being said, it was fun; but I didn't get what I asked for from any lady suitors, which was this:

thanks for all your support

Since I don't feel like I've got much to say, I thought I'd unload some pictures from my phone that have a lot of relevance when it comes to love, and by that I mean hanging out at bars and pet shopping.

klonapins are red, xanax is white, help me fill in the blanks, what happened last night?

SO TRUE!

my cat can't feel anything when i wear them

The one thing this week has provided is nice weather, which is conducive to photographing the homeless. I've got card number two in my ongoing series of Homeless Trading Cards (TM), and he is the ever elusive "Schlumpy". It's rare to capture him in his natural habitat, leaning against a payphone by the subway and covertly eating a sleeve of Mentos.

he's either an infant or 80, i have no idea

So enjoy this heartthrob above as a late Valentine's Day present to all (one) of you.

The Solution to Homelessness: A Study of Fame and Celebrity in America

In the quickly approaching two years that I have lived in Greenpoint, I've become enamored with the homeless, vagrant, drunk or — in the case of one very grumpy lady who wears vibrant, ornate hats, carries several stuffed grocery bags, wheels around a Samsonite suitcase and lives at the McDonald's — the strange fixtures of my neighborhood. They're as much my neighbors as anybody else around here, and their varying levels of public intoxication, odor and migration patterns make them that much more noticeable to me. Whereas I can go weeks without seeing friends who live mere blocks away, they're always on parade. Maybe it's because I'm more apt to notice a person who passed out on the street while eating a tin of Vienna sausages with a toothpick than my friend at the fruit stand buying bananas, but I don't think that makes me a bad person.

Anyway, it has me feeling somewhat friendly toward them. Like, I feel like saying "hi" when I pass them on the street. I haven't done it. (Actually, not true: I sorta mumbled "hey, okay" as the Herman Munster lookalike with PTSD recognized me from the coffee shop and said, "NO COFFEE, NO ICE CREAM, ONLY JELLO!", but I'm not sure that counts. Then he tucked his umbrella under his arm and searched through a garbage can.) But as I approach certain "stars" of the local transient street life, I can't help but feeling like I know them — and, even weirder, I get the feeling that they recognize me as one of the only people in the world who notices them. I know I'm not the only one who feels like this, because my favorite person and I have tossed around ideas about how to keep tabs on these real-life rock stars. Because that's what they are in a way: Rock stars. They rarely shower, drink copious amounts of cheap booze regardless of time or day, hang out wherever, do whatever they want, disregard the law, piss on the man, and generally don't give a damn about anything ... these old men make Keith Richards look like a choir boy. Okay, maybe that's just hyperbole, but the middle finger they give society is pretty damn "Exile on Main Street" sessions Rolling Stones, when they partied in that house in the south of France (while evading tax evasion charges in England) and wrote maybe the greatest album of all time.

One idea is an iPhone app called "BumTracker 2.0", basically a GPS-based system where app users could "tag" spots where they spotted a street-life star and note any fun activities/laws broken, so you could find your favorite urban urchin and track his (or her) movements. This idea is temporarily on the shelf due to lack of round one angel-investor backing and a lack of kickstarter donations.

But the idea that I really like is neighborhood-specific homeless people trading cards. Just like baseball cards, only better, and more relevant to daily life. Think about it: US Weekly, that celebrity-driven rag of a magazine prevalent in check-out aisles, has a national circulation of roughly 1.9 million copies per week so that people can compare their mundane, nose-picking and grocery-shopping boring lives with those of their celebrity counterparts. The section "Stars, They're Just Like Us", does exactly that.

Who the hell is Shanna Moakler? Oh, the ex-wife of a guy from Blink 182? Tell me more.

Look, I find it mildly entertaining to see a picture of anyone, let alone Russell Crowe, picking his nose, but I'd rather see action shots of a guy drooling on a bench than the Asian woman from Sideways wheeling her groceries out of a Ralph's Whole Foods. Plus it isn't like these celebrities are getting any money from these photos; instead, a bunch of acne-ridden masturbators with cameras make their living in LA from stalking. I want to make a few people laugh and "give the homeless the kind of change they can really use" (NYC PSA, you're welcome). So check it out: my prototype for "un-sheltered persons trading cards", in all its glory.

Believe it or not, they were jackhammering the pavement mere feet from this man who sleeps on the bench outside the coffee shop almost every day. Sometimes he is joined by his friend with bad posture, "Schlumpy."

Notice the tasteful thickness of the card stock. High-quality photo, name, team affiliation, primary position on the "field of life", right there on the front, just like a baseball card. I would like to transform the back of the cards to involve statistics, similar to those that would be on a baseball card. Stat categories could include: beers consumed, cans collected, average daily change collected, favorite places, etc. I don't know. Can you laugh at someone and help them at the same time? Can you sneeze and pee at the same time? Yes, but it hurts. Maybe that's the same as with these cards.