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Note: This post may not be safe for worktime viewing.

* * *

An example of the difference between writing-writing and blog-writing…

When I’m writing something real, I do everything that I can think of (within reason) to back-up my work.

I save constantly and in many places (hard drive, flash drive, email-copy) at once. I print hard copies and I file them and I never throw them away. The loss of even a single, potentially brilliant phrase, can and will unman me. Whenever I lose something that I feel is even somewhat important (the essential reason why I would be writing it down in the first place) I either descend into a deep blue depression or fly into a day-long rage. This is how important my work is to me. This is how deeply paranoia, egotism, and insecurity can affect a person.

Hank Moody would be proud. Actually, he probably wouldn’t. He’d probably lash me with his tongue, probably would call me a weakling of a writer, a man dependent more on the paper (or the screen) than on just the identity itself…someone who, in place of being an actual writer, merely writes. Fuck you Hank Moody. You’re fictitious!

Anyway - that’s what happens when I write something real and then lose it. Read more

TV screens in elevators provide several important services to the average American. These include:

• Distracting men and women from the awkwardness of close physical proximity with strangers. Elevator TV screens give you something inhuman to look at when only humans are otherwise around. They provide you with a fixed point for focusing your attention and a passable excuse for avoiding eye-contact with other human beings. Yeaaaaaa elevator TVs!
• Providing men and women with up-to-the-minute news updates, weather updates, random sport statistics, random fun facts, celebrity birthday updates, and, of course, advertisements…in case any of these were missed when watching TV at home, listening to the radio on the way to work, or while surfing the web at home, at the office, on an iPhone or DingleBerry, or in a Starbucks. Bust up that Starbucks!
• Establishing camaraderie between coworkers. For instance…

I got into a TV’d elevator today with a random strange man. The doors closed and the elevator started moving and we both read the news item that was currently on the elevator TV. This was the news item that we saw, a report that two women had been arrested for fist-fighting in a Chuck E. Cheese when one of their sons wouldn’t stop “hogging” a video game that the other’s son wanted to play. This wasn’t included in the elevator TV update, but anyone who follows the previous link can access additional information on the brawl, including one police officer’s on-the-scene statement that he “doesn’t even know if they finished their pizza.”

Anyway, the elevator stopped just as the strange man had finished reading the screen. He scoffed, the doors began to open, and before leaving he turned slightly towards me and said: “Amazing, huh?”

I replied (with sarcasm!): “Actually, no, it isn’t.”

He laughed uproariously at that. Yeah. We were “buds.” Then the door closed.

Thanks, TV!

Excuse the melodramatic headline for this post, but I just spent way too much time writing it, and am too tired and depressed to come up with an original catchy title. Thus, the lazy man’s catchy title. Consider your curiosity exploited. Now, read.

* * *

I was going to let this one go - so as not to lower myself too much - but I think this particular example of cultural starvation/degeneration is too big and ugly to ignore. Cheap and dirty I have promised, so cheap and dirty I will deliver.

Except that this, a recent photo spread in New York Magazine featuring Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe in “The Last Sitting,” also known as the last photo shoot Monroe did before her death, actually represents more of an opposite to the sort of “cheap and dirty stuff” that I wrote about in my grand old furious introduction. Before I go on, I should relay a fact that New York Magazine takes some minor pains to point out with its pink-lettered parenthetical reminder within the caption link for the photo spread on its main fashion page, that the original photo shoot, as well as the desperate and awful reproduction, features nudity. So if you somehow ended up here as part of a search for Lohan boobie, and Lohan boobie only, follow this link and be gone.

Look, I’m sure that I don’t have to go into too much detail about why the very existence of these photos represent a big ugly cultural step backwards, but for the sake of catharsis, and also because I’m currently holding onto what some might consider to be a surprising sub-opinion in regards to the topic, let’s do it… Read more

About six weeks ago, I decided once and for all to start my own blog. This was no small thing, because until recently I didn’t even like the word “blog.” I thought it sounded cheap, and more than a little dirty. And indeed it does. So be it. I myself am cheap and dirty.

Why am I cheap and dirty? Because I need to be cheap and dirty. Why do I need to be cheap and dirty? Ah, well…that’s an important question, and one that is going to take some time to answer.

The overall answer will come, in bits and pieces, from my posts to this blog. I hope that, upon reading this introduction, that you will either:

• Join me for the entirety of this (cheap and dirty!) endeavor,
• Check in on occasion to see how this (cheap and dirty!) endeavor is going, or
• Die, unhappy and alone, with your pants around your ankles (in the case that you do not choose option one or two).

For the sake of clarity, as well as in an effort to gain your continued attention, I will now briefly explain why I am making such a big deal out of the words “cheap” and “dirty,” before then finishing up with some information on what you can expect to find upon visiting this site as time marches on. And on. And over and through your body and face.

The short of it: only recently, after many years of finding every reason and excuse not to do so, have I begun to really live my life. And I’m not even doing that much. Except that I am.

Read more