middled aged women are wilding

I noticed some odd decade or so ago that women in their, say, mid to upper 40s were quietly talking about suicide. It was sort of around the time in Manhattan when middle aged white women were getting randomly assaulted in the street - punched in the stomache, hit with objects, one day a stranger socked me in the mouth at the corner of Astor Place. When I mentioned it the other women had their brief shocked stories.

Now, if a bunch of teens went on a group assault spree, they media called it Wilding. Which sounds fun, except it plainly wasn't for at least one of the parties involved, the private citizen trying to get from point A to B in a peacetime society before getting whomped with a concrete block, raped by a chuckling posse, taunted and jostled. What a waste of a term, Wilding should be a dance and pop tune, like The Tantrum or the Hustle. 

Today on the news, as I lay in bed with my eyes a tiny bit shut, I heard three news items that sounded like women were reinventing the wilding. In the first story, a woman successfully combined the two trends of suicide and random violence when she jumped off the third tier of a mall and landed on a 17 year old boy. Whoa, what a way to go. I guess it was time to check out, but she was tired of just telling everybody she was fine. She was 52.

Another woman today committed a complex form of suicide by cop, i believe in Bayside. Nothing too good happens in Bayside, Queens, its like the movie the young couple rents out at the beginning of a horror film, except its our entire life. This 48 year old woman was banging on her landlord's door, and pumping up the gas in her flat. when the police came to her door, two of them, she charged out with a kitchen knife and stabbed one of the cops three times. They shot her to death. He'll be ok, more or less. 

Then a lady called 911 because she didn't get enough shrimp with her special order. It was supposed to be the humor relief part of the news, but they did play the phone call and she sounded really pissed, a lifetime of rage, a strategy to cope. It is possible to hop from moment to moment of a day using indignation rage and complaint. Her voice sounded, oh, i'd say from 46 - 57. Maybe I'm wrong here.

East Village Comix

I put out another EV Comix Zine with Sarah Perry Stout. Its the silliest least practical thing to do so of course being my naturally extremely guarded self its my main talking point. Last night Sarah Darryl and I went to PassOut Records and saw some punk bands, plus Mike Diana had an exhibit. I've heard his name a bit, turns out he's this comic book type artist who caught some court cases in Florida for obscenity. A couple of people were filming him but I was conversationally bellowing a couple of feet away so I hope they had a good recording system. Thank you, thank you all so much for supporting me with your tax dollars so I can go to shit like that and do a zine. And also watch a LOT of television - for so many years I missed out with no cable, and now I'm already  up on the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency on HBO - people from Boston are taking short bus trips to catch some of the relative psychic warmth in Brooklyn and NYC. I wish I had some stacked up incubators with cable piped in that they could all catch a nap in.

Hollywood California

I'm actually in Glendale, California. This is not my most successful trip to LA, though I've got another week and of course life can change on a dime. I'm staying with  my friend Jim Smith, a broke cartoonist. In the abstract, he's not as broke as me, because I owe about $16,000 to credit cards, and Jim doesn't have a credit card.  So he's really less in the hole than me. 

My friend  Burt drove me back to Glendale today after I enjoyed a blanketless night on his vinyl fold down couch, and he was playing 80s music in the car.  I missed the 80s and 90s music, well every music except what i find out about case by case. One song, he pointed out, was by Concrete Blonde. He said they had a song where the chorus was all about being Stuck in a Whole in Hollywood. That song and many other pop culture references made him want to move to LA. Burt may have the exterior of a more reasonable person than I appear to be, with my unkempt hair and current stress rash, but the fact is that songs and Bukowski books on how really horrible life in Los Angeles is compelled him to follow his dream and be right at the scene of the reference points. Yep, Burt is an artsy type,  one of what somebody recently referred to as my probable artsy friends. 

I saw Popcorn last night, she met us at a bar without a name I recall. I had two glasses of red wine. They played the Cramps because Lux Interior died yesterday. I got two forwarded emails to that effect. This did not increase or decrease the existence of my stress rash. I'm on a morid tip due to a writing job, so I checked to make sure that the LA Cornorer's Gift Shop is still open, and it is - I'm going on Monday! Then I'm going to camcorder Burt at the Ha Ha Cafe in Noho! Here's a picture of the terrific queen who used to man the helm at Backlot Movie Memorbilia, which was closed down on Hollywood Blvd to make way for a W Hotel. I bought about 55 $3 lobby cards from him over the years. "What do you collect?" he'd ask. "The Gabors" I'd answer. He promised to remember me. But of course though I meet hundreds of people a year and remeber nobody I remember him, not the other way.

Now I'm watching On Demand on Jim's tv, its an autopsy special - now up to the part of the Sid and Nancy story - the woman voice over artist has upper class lock jaw. Nancy's corpse looks great. Nicole Simpson's body looked good too. You bleach your hair and eat very sparingly, stick to simple black garmets, and yep you'll have be a helluva goodlooking homicide victim. Nancy, in the footage they showed, had a British accent and said she had an IQ of 172.

I notice a lot of career drinkers have genuis type IQs. They manage to drink down the brain cells until they're about the same as me, which is probably upper or mid 130s, except that they'll have more canniness towards matters like estimating spatial relations or home repair.So if Nancy lived I might have a few guesses as to what she'd be up to - hopefully home repair, not some stitch and bitch club, skull and crossbone booties make me want to hurl.

Its raining and there's no umbrella here. My arms are itching. A Thai delivery menu is behind e on the couch. Some people who write badly are not aware of that fact. Sid Vicious' mother bought him his fatal hot shot. See how you can put a petty fact together with a historical one, and get a bit of a noir sound? Class is over. Get the hell out of here and don't come back until you have some Thai food for me.