Oh J- you havnt even posted for 3 years.
even I could do better than that !!!!

feast your eyes - Lizard in SF playing bass with me, and a cranky lil girl at Coney Island!

My Airbnb is in the Occupy Wall Street Anthology!

Air and Breakfast - an awful feeling

It took 20 years of livin’ to rack up the $21,000 in credit card debt, but my back was finally against the wall. I was well and truly tapped out. $411 a month came out of my Disability payment of $659, and went straight to Greenpath Debt Management. On top of that, for 2 months in a row the Chinatown Y took $80 out of that same tiny checking accountm instead of $39. My Triple Play Time Warner package costs $176, and every time I call to talk them down they tell me what a great deal I have.

Many years ago I went to a Credit Counselor, and they told me that my continued existence was doubtful, at least on paper. This was when the horrible democratizer of the hustle came into play - no, I wouldn’t exist if I didn’t leave a so called swing club with a middle aged business of less uncertain means than  myself. Upon our exit I’d get an envelope not nearly full enough of cash, and go from there. From there to a restaurant with a decent back exit, if I was lucky.

Oh, those whirlwind college days! And I wouldn’t have been eating at the age of 19 without my creep tranny friend and her backstage entering wiles. Visiting bands so seldom wanted any of the food provided for them, chowing down is not part of live performance, so we often had access to untouched wheels of brie, crackers, even rice balls when a Japanese band called The Plastics came to the Bay Area.

 Plus one submarine sandwich a day, it turns out, more than supports the human body, and I loved the ones near my second apartment, on the corner of Bush and Powell, in San Francisco. So I existed for 30 more years, albeit not on paper,

I must take full responsibility for my tendency towards chronic destitution, since it is a spiritual axiom that no change is possible, silver or emotional, without manning up. One typically dumb thing I do is pay $86 a month so my mother and I have a spot at the Neptune Society Columbarium. The minute I have paid a total of $4500 for our little eternity displays at Anza and Arguella, in San Francisco, we can buy urns, decorate, and die. That’s a luxury many would let go but I am a finisher, especially when i comes to the funereal. We live a long time in my family, my mother’s turning 86 next month, my father’s a scrappy 85, and if not for the constant exposure to environmental toxins my dusty urban life entails, I’d be right up there with them. As it is, I’m figuring on 75 – 78, barring a terminal mishap.

         My activities have almost nothing to do with generating income, but a lot to do with a misplaced sense of obligation to frequently nonsensical tasks. I will show up to read my work in a leaky basement in Toronto, because I said I would, I’ll finish a useless  advanced degree because I started it, and I will finish off that mountain of debt, a daunting $21,600, before the world is finished with my dear self.

     Recently I turned to Air and Breakfast, a terrific site whereby city folk can rent out their spare rooms, or even their very own bedrooms, to complete strangers. I don’t have a spare room of course, or god knows a couch, but technically I have a bed and its good enough to sleep in, especially if my visitor is not the type of jet setter who is driven to the brink of madness by excessive clutter and the vivid artwork of some of those I’ve been fortunate enough to meet. I stuck the following profile on Air BnB, flattering picture included:

I'm a middle aged broke writer who does a lot of spoken word around the neighborhood, and often visits San Francisco as well. I have 4 pop type books published, but out of print, and hang out at the Bowery Poetry Club from time to time, as its 3 blocks away!

The rest is not important. Well, not to me, but an artist type teetering on the edge of spiritual and financial bankruptcy does not emit the same ‘keep away’ affect on foreigners that it does for other Americans. Its seems like an ok category there, in the rest of the world, and my price, $47 a night, is right.  I once listened to a set of cassette tapes on which theologian Huston Smith described every world religion, and for the Hindu one there is a hiearchy I fit in. The intellectuals get no money but they get respect, which I mentally calculate as meaning a couch to stay on and perhaps even a visit to a local diner while on a ridiculous penniless tour of some sort. This seems fine, more than enough, really, but Air and Breakfast is sort of just as good. These strangers need only a layman’s grasp of the internet and a small amount of funds, and they can be in my bedroom for a low low price. They need never publish or sit through an evening of performance art to enjoy a sound sleep in my manic den. I’m fully expecting a small art theft soon, I have high hopes for one Bec who’s coming from LA next week. She first said she was from Melbourne, but now her grasp of basic English has slipped exponentially in 1 week and a half, so though I am committed to being her host, something is not as it appears in this ad hoc hotel situation, and I believe that is Bec.

         Mostly though its been working out, though I’m discovering that $47 is a crazy low price to rent my room out for as I spent that tooling around not being at home. Sometimes I go to Queens, where I’m fixing up somebody’s apartment, and sleep there. Or being in between places when I can’t go home due to the woman from Brussels, Leona, who’s in my bedroom enjoying a week of walking tours. Or taking a taxi to my ex boyfriend’s because its easier than going to Queens. I just bumped my price up to $57, but its way too late for me to up the price Greta or whoever, Bec, Matteo, Lygia, and one in august I forget the name of, Robin maybe.

         The first guest, a Chinese or Korean student from Rutgers or UCLA, was shy but quietly snotty - “What do I get?” he murmured upon seeing my room.

         “Well, nothing” I replied, confused.

         “Usually they change the sheets,” he added the next day, talking to me from Google Voice Mail. “I am one of those lost souls without a phone” he texted, which is how I knew the method by which he was subtly putting down my general hygiene.

         “I changed the sheets! They’re Clean!” I insisted to Jun Ning Shao, my voice rising to a squeal. I’ve had two people cut me off, citing as evidence my failure to ‘strip the bed’ upon leaving another’s residence. Nobody EVER told me about this strip the bed thing. I know about ‘wash the dishes’, not that I always do it, and believe me Thank You and Excuse Me figure largely in my very speech pattern, they are that innate, but Folding and this Bed Stripping are 2 things that can send you hurtling into a social darkness just as surely as bad math.

    I’m just adding the math part because there’s a late nomadic mathematician, as in dead (though he probably was often late) who traveled the world visiting small groups of mathematicians and trying to solve insoluble problems. He was old and probably reeked, and a terrible guest, but he was a much sought after visitor none the less. There’s a documentary about him, I believe it’s called “N is a Number”, directed by George Paul Csciery, a Hungarian American acquaintance who’s debt load is so staggering he and his wife have a financial long plan involving insurance and the spouse who (i want to say ‘gets to’) dies first settling the credit cards.

         “It’s fine” my first Air and Breakfast consumer quickly self corrected. For 47 dollars, it better be fine! I screamed, silently. I did wash those sheets, I made sure to! Of course I did! Oh, this generation, Jun Ning’s, I’ll just never get them. I must appear as a weird apparition of crackling despair to him, in turn. Its not always your big day.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

Jennifer Waters's review 

Dec 05, 11  ·  edit

bookshelves: currently-reading 

what do i think? what do I think? oh please. Zsa Zsa's hack writer, and quite a one this so called Gerold Frank appears to be, reveals her early tendency towards mild paranoia. There's a horrific scene where she's on the Orient Express as it chugs her away from her first husband in Turkey, and Eastern Europeans are repelled from climbing onboard. She needed to get to Hollywood, Eva, the Germans were yahoos but one could sing a Turkish song and brood on the movie magazines of another universe. Oh, Zsa Zsa, we hardly knew ye.

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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.