Attention all Douchebags: St. Patty's Day is Here!!

Imagine what would happen if you took every single douchebag guy and fat needy girl from Manhattan, New Jersey, Staten Island, and the periphery… made them each drink 32 beers, and let them loose on the streets.  What would happen?

It is called St. Patrick’s Day, and it is the one day of the year that I will not go out for the evening under any circumstances.  I carry a switchblade, I don’t take my sunglasses off, I spit on people.

I’m about to let some people have it right now, so be warned.

Sure the holiday can be somewhat kitchy for those middle-aged women who get their kicks from pulling out that NAUGHTY green scarf that their cubicle office would normally prohibit… you know, the scarf they bought online last year after having one Zima too many, and now they finally have an excuse to wear itttt!! Or an excuse for a fat girl with a bad spray tan to go craaaaazy and get a craaaazy green hat and wear some green heeeels because everyone loves an Irish girl, right??

No, they don’t.

And they especially won’t love you when they take your loose ass home and you keep burping because you acted like a caveman and had 75 Miller High Life’s and then got too tanked to put out.  Sure, you showed your nipples in the bar and got some attention for a jukebox second, but it is not going to be enough to carry you through the rest of the evening.  And even if you do make it to someone’s place for some slutty nom noms, you will vomit in their apartment.  I’m sorry, but you were only good for a lay in the first place, so if you can’t do that and THEN you somehow manage to vomit your three Sbarro slices all over the place, you may as well kiss your sex life goodbye until you finally lose that last ounce of self respect and become a stripper. Good money.  Good hours.  Free drugs. 

And these guys with their green sweatshirts and baggy Docker’s cargo jeans that feel the need to congregate on every street corner and yell about every single thought that comes into their heads.  They heckle you and read you because even though they are drunk and it is inappropriate, there comes a level of invincibility when you are surrounded by six of your friends and three fat girls who you will impress by making fun of the dude with “elvis hair.”  Well let me gently remind you that YOUR head looks like the tip of a penis because you went completely bald years ago and you are only 24. And no, you don’t just shave your head because “you like it.” You shave it because you don’t think anyone realizes that you are balding, but trust me.  They do.  And I’m sure those fat girls that you are screwing later will be super turned on by that bald, ruddy head thrusting into their face. And you’ll already smell like BO and cheap beer, and we all know that’s a definite turn on for anyone.

By 8 o’clock all of the aforementioned are falling in front of traffic, bumming Newports from homeless people and then taking pictures of them, and quoting episodes of Family Guy that were funny the first time 10 years ago. 

Now… I’m sure that everyone I am blatantly bashing here could have a million and one nasty things to say about me or the people that I choose to hang out with – shit, I hang out with self absorbed pricks, prostitutes, fame-hungry backstabbers, and people with severe psychological damage and daddy issues (no, I wouldn’t change a thing)… but the difference is that when I talk shit and act like an idiot, it is in the privacy of my own home or a booth in a club or bar… not on the corner of 55^th street and 8^th avenue at noon on a Thursday. 

But it is a good excuse for me to sharpen my switch blade every year, so I guess there’s always that.

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pass the hash

No topic is off limits here, as far as I'm concerned.


So let's talk about the ganja.


I am not in the mood to discuss anything hard, or any instances that involved me ever waking up in a gutter on the Bowery with a needle sticking out of my arm. We are also not here to talk about my drug pushing days in a tiny bar on the Lower East Side where all I wanted was some free snow or green so I thought trafficking mainline narcotics and riding around the block in a windowless van a couple times a week was a fantastic life decision.


I'm talking the playpen here - less of a drug, more of an herbal supplement, a muscle relaxer, a bit of creative caffeine.


Last night my friend texted me while I was collecting pushpins from under my bed and asked if I was doing anything and I said no and I asked if he had pot and he said no and I said lame and he said yeah, sucks, he had hash though and I said yikes, come over I guess.


We acted like our 6 year old selves again discovering illegal drugs for the first time and Wikipedia'd how to properly smoke it, because even though I have had it many times I always end up pole dancing on a lamp post in BedStuy at 5 am or waking up in Strawberry Fields in Central Park at 10 am on a Monday morning by myself and wearing a pair of Diesel Jeans I found in the sidewalk trash the night before. (This was 6 years ago, before the age of bedbugs where if you take a shit in a public place you will get gonorrhea, herp 1 & 2, and wake up to a bedbug three ring circus in your house the next day. So relax. I will be the one to tell you how gross I am. Not you.)


Needless to say, Wikipedia was not really the place to find hash smoking instructions, even though we did become briefly enlightened on the making of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Natalie Imbruglia's sparkling career, and a couple DSM-IV personality disorders.


We just put a tiny chunk into a one hitter and then the world changed, but not in a bad way, more like the way it's supposed to be for most people when they smoke regular ole pot. But I'm not like that unfortunately. My brain is wired in a way where marijuana takes my natural sense of situation control, enhanced social skills, and common sense and cripples them all to the point where my brain becomes just like a pontoon boat floating in the universe. Or not. That was a stoner thing to say.


In this hash situation I conversed regularly, listened to some music, had some rational discussion, and discovered the joy of putting wildberry frozen yogurt on top of a Sea Salt Kettle chip and then it being the most sensational flavor on earth.


Normally, with regular pot, no matter how good the grade, I more often than not become a maniac. I don't know if this happens to you, but instead of escaping the trenches of my mind and floating seamlessly in the shallow world of family guy and cool ranch doritos, I find that the things I latently worry about and fear in my life move from the back of my mind to the front, and I'm all of sudden staring at the ceiling wondering if I'm calling my dad enough, if I'm getting an eye infection, if I paid a certain bill, what will happen to me one day in life. I cannot not talk on the phone if my very life depended on it, texting becomes an epic Sanskrit decoding workshop, and I feel like even my most nominal conversation skills are not only butchered, but noticed as being poor by everyone present. This is why when people suggest that we take a couple hits before we go to a crowded bar I think they are crazy - the last thing I'm able to do when I'm high is talk to strangers, feel like people are looking at me, and drink excessively. I'm excellent at each of those in every day life, but when I'm stoned out of my gourd I become a worthless little rag doll who seriously wonders if he is going to have a legit heart attack for watching Paranormal Activity.


Does this happen to anyone else? Is it a drug to only be experienced when your life is on such an even keel that you avoid the paranoia? Is it my mental construction that makes me confront rather than escape? And if I know this happens to me then why do I continually sniff out pot like a drug dog everywhere I go??


Thoughts?


That said, my room smells like antique hash and I haven't gotten out of bed yet. I need to be prettyish by five o clock.

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a g o o d o l e d e a r j o h n

March 13, 2011

Dear Winter,

There is no need to beat around the bush here.  I know that it is over between us.  I realize it more and more every day as I wake up and notice that you are slowly slipping away and we are growing apart.  You always find a way to make it back into my life just when things are going well, I take you back, try to re-embrace you and hope that this time is the one that will be great… but you always prove me wrong.  And it is not my fault.  It is yours.  And I’m just here, I guess, to say goodbye again.

I wish you well on your way, yes, because I do not like to go forward in my life with negativity, and my soul has rotted as a result of this too many times. But there are some things I have to get off my chest before I finally push you out to sea.

Fuck you for giving me a treacherous head cold and disgusting, coughing congestion because I decided to touch the dirty subway bars, not wear a coat the couple times I decided to go outside, or allow my landlord to go 150 years before properly replacing my windows.  You brainwashed me, said it would be okay, I trusted you, fuck you.

Fuck you for allowing the body I spent all summer trying to achieve just become average, convincing me that you would like me anyways, even if your cloudy, deceiving visage told me I didn’t have to work out 4-5 days a week anymore. I hate you for sucking the tan right out of my skin and reminding me in the paleness all of my physical imperfections.  I trusted you and it is only now that I know I can get everything back that I want… the perfect revenge body to really make you sick when we run into each other again. Don’t like that?  Maybe you should have thought of that before you manipulated me and crippled my self esteem. It is not my fault.  It is yours.  Fuck you.

You physically abused me… you sprained my ankle and hindered my ability to walk for almost 24 hours. 

You were cold, dismissive, and didn’t ever know when to stop. 

But you know what? While it is reasonable for me to highlight all the negativity you have forced into my life this infinite, icy season…

I will remember all of the good you brought to me as well. 

You allowed me to one day wake up and realize that I was going to be able to let a lot of pain go, and allowed me to recognize it that very instant so I could always remember from that point forward things would get better, and that everything was going to be okay.  Thank you for opening up a new underbelly of this city to me, allowing me to splash my creativity across the walls, taking it away against my will, (but in my best interest), and then allowing me to do it even better in the near future.  Thank you for giving me so many nights where I felt cared for, important, necessary, essential to someone else other than just myself.  Thank you for movies, dinners, cards, parties.  Thank you for whispers.  Thank you for long hugs. Thank you for making me feel poor enough to hate you, but hopeful enough to know that things are getting better.

And thank you for leaving me kindly, as I am trying to do with this letter.  Everything can happen, is happening, will happen.  It all can happen soon. And I know that spring will do that better for me than you can. I know that hurts, it hurts me too, but know that you were right for me in many ways when you were there, and I have no regrets. 

The point is, winter, that I woke up this morning, stretched, thought about the things in my life that are going in good directions.  Spring is reminding me that all the work I have done and all the waiting I have endured really can and will pay off.  Spring reminds me of all the special people I have in my life, what they each mean to me individually, and how I am welcome to bring them and enjoy them in a new season.

I’m sorry winter, but it is over.  My sense of nostalgia, even during the terrors, makes this harder than you know.  But it is for the best.

I hope we can someday become friends.

But right now, I need you to not contact me at all.

It is the only way that I can survive.

Take care of yourself.

Sincerely,

Joshua

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The Sociopathic Little Toaster

Listen.

We watched The Brave Little Toaster last night.

And I am just not really certain how that movie was ever able to be marketed as a film geared toward children. Granted, one of the latent charms of animated media is that it can appeal to adults on subtle levels that children have not been corrupted enough to pick up on. But… The Brave Little Toaster… I’m not really sure how a decent parent can watch this and decide that it is okay for their children to see. Granted, my parents would just put it on for me to occupy me and then they would leave the room. And people wonder why I have a fascination for dismembering prostitutes, making suicide jokes, and faking seizures in elevators. It is clearly because of this film.

The film is heavily coated with severe traces of psychological issues - primarily abandonment, mortality, and corruption. The saccharine language stays relatively on a surface level by the androgynous, lesbian toaster who talks and acts like she just finished giving her dog a sensible walk through Park Slope after downing an Ambien with her Activia. The vacuum? Angry black man whose aura suspiciously reflects that of an individual who will hold up a convenience store because he has run out of life options and feels like the world owes him something.

The lamp… closet case. Looking to out someone the second he can to justify his own twisted unacceptance of himself. Talks too much. Becomes disturbingly jealous of the toaster’s growing affection of the blanket. Wobbling eyes indicate heavy horse tranquilizer use. When he gets electrocuted and his bulb breaks, I would have been a lot more comfortable if he had just died right then.

But I think more disturbing than any of them… the Blanket. His unhealthy obsession with his “master” verges on that of an individual who dwells in the maximum security basement levels of a psychiatric ward located safely away from society. He carries the picture around yearning after the day he can wrap the entirety of his body around the small child once again. His issues of abandonment and being unable to let go are so deeply etched into his psyche that as they all get pulled down into the swamp and are faced with their final moments, the blanket utters in a haunting voice: “I’m not scared.” Suicidal, much?

We will not even get into the junkyard scene. I just don't have the strength right now.

Either way, if children can be blind to the sorts of mind-warping imagery and overpowering themes of hopelessness, death, and destruction, then I suppose it can stand by itself as a children's classic. But take it from me... it is more disturbing for adults than for children. By far. Do NOT do any drugs before watching this movie... you will end up curled up crying in your bed like the last time you decided to smoke a blunt and then watch "Requiem for a Dream" because you didn't realize at the time that doing so would be a very bad life choice.

And I will probably never be watching that again until the next time I am jonesing for a leap out of a 30th story window. So stand by, better yet.

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i'll have one more

The sound of the alarm and the feeling of sunlight make your skull shatter. You would give your left nut for just five drops of water in that empty glass on your bedside table. You’re hungover, it’s a Thursday morning, you have work in a little over an hour. You’ve gone and done it again, and you wonder how much older you have to get before you realize that there is virtually no good that can come out of allowing yourself to go out, get completely tanked, piss on the bathroom floor of a pizzeria in Chelsea, and then pass out… at least as far as your aging body is concerned.

Don’t get me wrong… when I was 20 years old I could get out of class, binge drink for ten hours, then go to Taco Bell at 4 am and get a five course high calorie meal, inhale my food, have sex, then pass out seamlessly and still be awake for a sensible early lunch the following day. Now… all of that would send me to the emergency room.

I love going out and having a silly, dysfunctional, psychosexually twisted evening out on the town. I live in the best city for it, I have great friends who, like me, say yes to almost everything when going out. But am I the only one who just cannot do it every single night?

I know people that go out absolutely every single night without fail. While this may also be potentially hurtful to your wallet, I’m more concerned right now with just the question of how people have the physical and mental fortitude to make it out night after night. It is nothing short of miraculous to me. Maybe this is because my body has a tendency to punish me for excessive depravity… and I think that this is just a product of getting a little bit older.

My hangovers work like this.

I wake repeatedly throughout the early morning hours, most likely because my body is so dehydrated not from the alcohol, but probably from the regrettably salty food I ate right before I passed out and then woke up with a piece of pizza under my pillow, in my bed, or even sometimes in my mouth. Water, sleep. Nightmare - usually about an Ex or a worldwide Apocalyptic Meltdown or being chased by a jackal. Rub my tummy a lot. Then I get up, take an Advil, drink more water. As the day goes on, the hangover gets worse rather than better… I end up feeling like I’m two steps from hell by that night… everything seems depressing and pointless, I look terrible, feel worse… meanwhile the people I was out with the night before are checking in on Facebook at Vynl with the caption “slamming back margaritas!” I wonder why I can’t bounce back like they can, or even if I want to, for that matter. On top of all of this, you do not want to eat healthy, or work out… so you have lost an entire day… back-peddling in your mission to starve for perfection and become a specimen of envy and supremacy in order to fill the empty bullet hole otherwise known as your soul.

And alas, your looks! Your poor, innocent face. We are not getting any younger, and at some point in your twenties I am learning that you have to ACTUALLY scrub and exfoliate your face and ACTUALLY consider moisturizer every night as the years drag on. It’s not about vanity, its about not having a face that will look like a fucking cornflake in the morning simply because you and your friend were supposed to only get “one drink” after work (and then somehow ended up stumbling down Sixth Avenue as the sun is coming up, trying to remember where you just came from, lighting a cigarette backwards and smoking it for three minutes before realizing that the filter is on fire and your mouth is full of tobacco.) Hypothetical.

And boozing and smoking every night… not so great for your skin and your body. When you reach a certain place in your twenties, you realize that you have the power to either look 22-24 on a good day with proper diet, hydration, sleep, and mediated stress levels. Unfortunately, you also have the option to drive your age number up by not taking care of yourself, when you end up looking closer to 52. Then you can’t go anywhere because you think everyone is talking about how old and busted you look, when really they are only talking about where they can get the next bump of snow up their nose.

So then you wake up and you look like hell and you don’t want to go out anymore because no doubt someone from fucking LensJockey.com will decide that they actually want your picture the night you have a dehydration pimple on your forehead and one of your eyes is bigger than the other and bloodshot.

The moral?

That it does not matter how much it hurts you when you are hungover, or how much it affects your looks… once you have taken the 3 days off from being out and committed yourself to green tea, sleep, tons of water, exercise, and a good book, you are ready to go out and wreck yourself again and you don’t. give. a. fuck. And it is not because you are an alcoholic and you don’t care about yourself… it is because you are still in an age bracket where the prospect of being spontaneous and having a memorable evening outweighs the memory of waking up with your tongue on your toilet seat.

My wise friend Jessica Sardashti once told me this:

The only thing stable in your twenties is alcohol. Whether you are happy, or sad, alcohol is the only thing that you know will be present.

And I’m beginning to believe her.

Cheers.

Salt.
Lick.
Shoot.
Lime.
Yum.

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OMG I'M GONNA BE A JOURRRRNALISSSST!

Let's talk about something very annoying for a moment.

I have been having this conversation a good bit recently, and now I seem to notice it everywhere I go. Nothing is more annoying to me than a girl who moves to the city in hopes that she can be a journalist like in the movies, get the big break, the man, the great apartment, and then live happily ever after.

Let me be the first to tell you, if no one has yet, it doesn't work this way.

You have the culprits here... Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker sitting at her antique desk on her brand new Macbook in her perfect STUDIO apartment smoking a cigarette in her yoga pants and asking if "we wear men like hats" or "why can't men be like a good pair of shoes" or some shit like that... and the nation gets swept with the notion of being exaaaactly like this. The glamorous Manhattan life becomes instantly attainable with the right outfit and the right credit card.

It's easy for Sarah Jessica Parker to look so happy when she is getting paid 34 million dollars per episode in a plush soundstage with her personal driver feet away.

Let me explain something... if you move here and get a "freelance writing job" then you will not be living on 72nd street. Nor will you have the brand new Macbook. Nor will you have the man, because what you don't realize is that the kind of man you probably want, if you are one of these women, is a douchebag who wears Penny Loafers and thinks that drinking a Brooklyn Lager makes him edgy. He has the same haircut as when he started his freshman year of highschool, he talks a lot of shit that he can't back up, and will probably ignore you. Sure, he may pay for you to get your vagina waxed once a week and your spiritual advisor and pottery classes, but you'll probably drag a shard of glass across your throat by the time you are 35. Just as a vague scenario.

Anne Hathaway, the Devil Wears Prada. The terrible Shopaholic movie. The re-processed, overglamorized "Morning Glory." These girls in Kansas unfortunately are told inadvertently that if they move to New York to pursue their dreams that it will be complete with panoramic city shots, the tightened, seamless flow of a 120 page screenplay, complete with a 17 dollar cosmopolitan from a suffocating bar, and the tired, vapid stares from the almond shaped eyes of Whitney Port.

What ends up happening?

These girls end up trudging through the snow in their 15 year old Ugg boots with ripping Gristedes grocery bags on the very last stop of the R train in some very back, nameless area of Queens, sniffling, wondering, brimming with remorse, and wondering why the rich, hot dude who banged her last night and then kicked her out so he could sleep has not called her back yet.

NOW.

Before you decide that I am just destroying everyone's dreams, be mindful of the fact that success and happiness is possible in a place like this, but expectations must be real, time has to be committed, and you can sit on Craigslist until your cunt dries out, but that is probably the worst way to go about it. Its about patience and meeting the right people. It is about having a plan, and then changing it. It is about learning how to be smart with your money, look over your shoulder, and stab someone before they stab you.

I am a huge fan of having dreams and pursuing them. But I am also a fan of reality. I've been hit with it too many times.

Happy Tuesday.

i t a l l c o m e s t o l i g h t

I found where you keep your secrets after all these years.



It was an accident by me, the undeniable intention of the universe.

I have wondered and wondered and cried and prayed and begged to know them, all your secrets, and thought and written the most awful, scary things to make it all okay. I fictionalized you and created you from my mind and made up all that I didn’t know and condensed you into a single stack, a file, black, white. I even dragged you, postmortem, into someone new, and you bled so deeply right through me and into them that they choked on you and gradually, slowly, died as well.

I will be dead before I will lose someone else to your blood again.

The sickness eventually took over my entire brain. I began to see things, imagined things that weren’t real and shit was cartoonish and freakish - examining only darknesses every single moment for days and then months and then years. Yeah, years.

And now I realize. You are worse off than I ever was. And I truly hate that.

You feared me? Feared for your life? I scare you?

You scare me. To death. What happened to you?

An inner dark that finally made its way out? Were you always in your cocoon? Or are you a butterfly that rotted?

It didn’t have to be like this doesn’t have to be this way still.

You choose to embrace only the horror rather than all of the good that you have forgotten, I don't understand why, and so goodbye. I will preserve the good memories, because I don't want to remember you poorly, and I am sorry I cannot say the same for you. It was youth and it was discovery, and people cannot do everything right the first time around, I've learned.

I deserve more credit, for I was only a boy. Inquiries, update checks, and a few phone calls so soon after The End should not equate a level of utter fear in you, especially for one’s life. They should show simply that detachment after years of symbiosis is just a little bit difficult for someone. Not that they are murderers or psychos that need to be harnessed by the authorities.

Abuse is a word used for puppies that are locked in cages waiting for injection, or for women that get beaten in the face or emotionally battered by drunken spouses. Not a boy who doesn’t know any better, but still had a lot to learn.

And remember Him? Je ne regret tien, you say. But remorse, all I asked. Not your fuck fantasies where you come and come and forget and forget.

Listen. It’s simple. I will miss the you I knew and loved, and never say never, and because you are punctuated in my life's timeline I will never forsake you and I will always wonder about you. These are just some words, but all words count. I’m pretty sure you know that.

Please don’t hurt yourself.

Everything will be okay one day. I promise.

I know you will never see this.

But that’s more than okay. I did it for me.


Goodbye, my lover.

Goodbye, my friend.