I'm going to steal your Big Wheel.

Dear Male Crotch Cricket Who Lives Down the Street:

I'm sure your parents think you're adorable. I'll bet your grandparents think you're the cutest thing EVER. I, however, think you're an annoying rug-ape, and you're not doing anything to endear yourself to me. Little Robbie of "pretty gatos" fame is cute. You are not.

I eagerly await winter's first snow, not because I'm particularly fond of snow, but because it means that you will not be able to ride your Big Wheel up and down the sidewalk anymore. It's not even that I think you shouldn't be allowed to ride your Big Wheel on the sidewalk. I accept that this is New York and I therefore have neighbors in close proximity. Neighbors who do stupid things like let their four-year-old bratlet ride his hard-plastic-tired Big Wheel up and down the sidewalk with no adult supervision. There are lots of little pockets of "safe neighborhoods" here in this city, and this is apparently one of them, because there are more screaming kids on this block than I've ever seen. And I've lived in Suburbia before, so that says a lot.

No, it's not the fact that you ride a Big Wheel that makes roaring plastic-on-grit sound all day. It's not the fact that you're a screaming brat who seems to spend eighty percent of his time wailing in that fake "Moooooomy! Billy's TOUCHING ME!" manner (okay, actually, that's a big part of why I don't like you) .

The real reason that I don't like you, however, is this: as sidewalks go, the one on this street is fairly wide. There's plenty of space when you're tearing down the street on that garish monstrosity of a pre-bike for you to NOT run over pedestrians. If I have to dive into a tree one more time because you refuse to steer that Big Wheel of yours so that it doesn't hit me in the shins when all I'm trying to do is get the fuck away from you, I am going to grab the handlebars on that little piece of shit, tip you off of it and then run like hell, taking your Big Wheel with me. I will throw it into the first dumpster I can find. And then I will come back and smile in your whiny little face. Please don't make me do this, Male Crotch Cricket. I really don't want to start a fight with your overindulgent yuppie parents. I want to be the quiet lady who lives down the block and doesn't bother anybody. But really, you're trying my patience, and I have precious little of it to begin with.

That is all.

Attack of the Gotti-bes

Okay, it was bad enough when these Jersey(whoops, Long Island) guidos got a television show so that they could show the world what uncouth, disrespectful, "my grandpa was a mob boss so I'm SPEshul" jackasses they are. Okay, fine. To each his own. Nobody makes me watch their show.

But they're spreading. Now I see Gotti-bes all over the place. Some guy in a Caddy blew out a tire on my street and hit a parked car. What gets out of the passenger side? A Gotti-be. I walked to the store to get some half & half for my coffee. What's walking down the sidewalk in front of me? A Gotti-be. Every time I get on the subway, I see clusters of Gotti-bes.

Okay, so you wanna be fake thugs. Fine. But seriously, boys, haven't you ever seen the Christmas special with Mr. Snow Miser and Mr. Heat Miser? Do you not notice the resemblance? Yeah, in my day (I'm so fucking old), we had mohawks and Flock of Seagulls hair. We looked stupid, too. But at least we didn't get our hairstyles from holiday specials targeted at eight-year-old kids. This is Mr. Heat Miser. He likes things to be hot. His hair is supposed to look like flames sprouting from his head, albeit rather cottony flames. He only has three fingers and a nose that looks like it was stolen off of W.C. Fields' corpse. Is this really a stylistic paradigm?

Then again, your mother bears a startling resemblance to Donatella Versace as portrayed on Saturday Night Live, and your house looks like it was furnished entirely by one of those Staten Island "Italian lacquer" furniture stores, so maybe that explains your complete lack of taste. I saw a blurb recently that read that one of you (I have no idea which of you is which) just opened a tanning salon on Lahn Guyland, so at least you can keep that lovely orange glow at a low, low bargain price!

The house across the street has grown a tentacle

The world's largest clothes dryer vent tube appears to have sprouted from the roof of one of the brownstones across the street. I don't know what it is. Perhaps it is an escape shaft for attic gnomes. Maybe my neighbors are opening a laundry. Maybe it's a transmitter to an alien mothership and is sending signals that it's time to attack Staten Island because it just doesn't really "fit" with the other boroughs, you know?

If it's still there tomorrow and I can find one of my cameras, I'll take a picture of it.

I do my best work in alt.

Put your little mousie (no, the computer one, you doofus) over the pictures in these posts. I love alt text.

"Hi, I wrote and directed my own movie and it sucked so badly that now I'm directing porn."

As I mentioned, I watched The Smokers this weekend. As I discovered later when perusing reviews on IMDB, I, like many others, found this movie in the bargain bin at a Wal-Mart (don't ask what I was doing in a Wal-Mart; it was the middle of Pennsyltucky and there was nothing else from which to choose). Also like many others, I thought that the cover art looked kind of intriguing and thought that perhaps this was a sleeper that might turn out to be good. Besides, it was only five bucks.

I'd like my five bucks back.

This movie sucked more than Armageddon, and in my book, that's bottom of the barrel.

Crap, time to clean this keyboard again; my space bar is getting flaky. I knew bruschetta in front of the laptop was a bad idea.

Okay, back to Shit Movie. People, I cannot emphasize this enough- don't waste your time watching this movie. I don't care if it's free. I don't care if you've been locked up in a basement for ten years and this is the only thing you're allowed to watch. Okay, I feel kinda badly for you if you've been locked in a basement for a decade, but still, don't watch this movie.

This movie was written and directed by a woman named Christina (AKA "Kat") Peters. Every movie she has done since this one has been a porno. Frankly, I'm betting even her pornos suck. The movie was also "produced" (read: financed) by Nicholas M. Loeb, who has one of the larger roles in the movie. His father has a bit part. I'm not sure which of them is the lousier actor. The lead actresses (it's an "ensemble" movie of sorts, I guess) are Dominque Swain, Busy Phillips and Keri Lynn Pratt. I dunno if you like any of them, but trust me when I say that they probably wish this flick wasn't on their resumes. Oh, and Thora Birch is in it, too. Almost everybody in Hollywood has a shit flick somewhere in his/her history, I guess...but really, this one is baaad.

Lemme give you the plot (and I use that term very loosely) as I recall it.

Three girls at a Wisconsin prep school (yeah, Wisconsin, no shit; we're not talking Choate here) sit around saying stupid things that are supposed to sound feminist and erudite. I think. It's hard to tell because the dialogue and acting are so awful that I kinda tuned out.

One girl is a slut (Busy Phillips). Clearly, we are supposed to think that she has been damaged by her terrible upbringing, and she's on a scholarship, which must mean she's trouble.

Girl 2 (Keri Lynn Pratt)is uptight. Literally. She can't put in a tampon, but she does manage to lose her virginity in an unimaginative fashion that night. She says "ow". We'll call her "Prude", since I don't remember any of the characters' names.

Girl 3 (Dominique Swain) loves opera and is the Voice of Reason for the group. She also narrates, because this movie is just soooo deep that it's impossible to figure that out just by watching it. Let's call her "Opera Girl".

We learn these things via various poorly acted, hackneyed scenes:
1. Slut is really slutty and has big hats.
2. Slut wears "artistic" makeup and likes to lie on the ground with her legs spread and her panties showing after a particularly tough game of field hockey.
3. Slut is Very Angry At Men.
4. Prude's boyfriend has no personality.
5. Prude's boyfriend comes after two thrusts.
6. Prude is therefore also Very Angry At Men.
7. Opera Girl is the objet du désir of the incredibly bad actor who financed this movie. Gee, you can't see where this is going, right? I mean, it's not like it's gonna turn out that Opera Girl is the lone virgin in the group and one traumatic night, she'll suddenly realize that she LOOOOVES bad actor guy. Oops, did I spoil the movie?
8. Slut, Prude and Opera Girl trade clothes a lot. A huge black cowboy hat that appears to have been made from the hide of slaughtered plushies makes its appearance throughout the movie.


The girls go to Opera Girl's house for spring break, where we are made to understand that Opera Girl's mom is Very Important, Very Busy and Never Home. Opera Girl's sister, Thora Birch (henceforth known as Freaky Sister), is smoking pot from a three-foot-long bong, drinking bad gin and playing with loaded weapons. Naughty girl, Freaky Sister is. Oh, our disaffected youth!

Freaky Sister plays reverse Russian Roulette with Slut. Reverse RR, because there's only one empty chamber in the gun and Freaky Sister points it at Slut and pulls the trigger, then challenges Slut to do the same to her. Slut chickens out and we discover that there were bullets in all of the other chambers and Slut would have killed Freaky Sister. Maybe we should have called Freaky Sister "Nihilistic Sister" instead.

Girls go back to school after playing with gun while doing their nails. Slut decides that the best way to exact vengeance upon all Bad Men (which, apparently, is also All Men) by raping them at gunpoint.

This never actually succeeds. I guess it's difficult to get a boner at gunpoint if you are:

A. Really in love with your Prude girlfriend
B. A dork and a terrible actor
C. Gay

So, more boring crap happens.

Slut gets raped by Older Man in Limo despite pulling The Gun on him (actually, she gets raped ON the limo because she apparently forgets how to run away when she jumps out of the limo and as a result, Older Man in Limo is able to catch her and "do it" to her over the car hood while the limo driver watches, expressionless. Oh, the humanity!).

Prude accidentally shoots Campus Stud (heretofore unmentioned because seriously, I've gone on too long about this shit movie already) in the head while he's pounding her during prom. Before he gets his brains blown out, he's really (really) thrilled to be porking "Rape Girl". Then she shoots him and he's not so happy about it anymore.

[Boyfriend, Campus Stud and Gay Dude pretending not to be embarrassed about having been in this crap movie.]

Opera Girl holds a lighter up to a smoke detector to set off the fire alarm so that Prude and Slut can escape so they can get their stories straight. Opera Girl slips and falls, catching a shower curtain on fire. In one of the most muddled, most stupid, most completely unintelligible and low-budget fire scenes of all time, Slut ends up burning up in the shower. Conveniently, she has brought the gun with her.

Slut ends up getting blamed for everything. Freaky Sister is valedictorian of her class.

The end.

You know what? This movie actually sounds about a thousand times better on paper than it actually was.

Please, if you value even a single firing synapse in your brain, do not watch this movie.

I ate so much food today that my boobs are gonna be bigger tomorrow.

So I forgot to eat yesterday (that happens sometimes). Apparently my body was pretty pissed off about it, because I think I ate the equivalent of several small children today. Holy shit, I'm in pain, I ate so much.

The upside is, my boobs will get bigger. Yay boobs!

My neighbor is tunneling to China through my dining room

For the past week or so, I've been using a laptop in my dining room. The reason for this is both boring and irrelevant. Basically, I had it in there for a reason one day and I'm a lazy sot (okay, so I'm not really a sot, but I dig that word), so I just hadn't moved it back out again.

Have you ever used a rasp?

Well, it sounds like my neighbor is using a rasp in the wall of my dining room. About forty or fifty times a day, I hear this:

VRRRP-VRRRP. VRRRP-VRRRP-VRRRRP-VRRRRRRP-VRRRP-VRRRP-VRRP-VRRP-VRRP-VRRP. VRRP. THUNK. VRRRP-VRRRP. VRRRP-VRRRP-VRRRP-VRRRP-VRRRP-VRRRP-THUD.

Then I hear people cooing and making vaguely intelligible "ooh, GOOD [baby/dog/prisoner-chained-to-the-wall/whatever]" sounds.

VRRP-VRRP-COO. COOOOOOOOO-VRRRRRP-VRRRRRRP. GOOOOD [MUFFLED THING].

There was a book that I read when I was about twelve- The Funhouse, I think it was called. (I was big into horror movies and scary books when I was a kid.) I don't remember much about the book except that there was this freaky little reptilian-circus-freak baby at the beginning of the book.

[Well, whaddya know- it was a book written by Dean Koontz under the pseudonym "Owen West". Must be why it was a stupid book.]

I remember that the reptile-freak-baby-thing had long claws and scales and pointy teefs and green snake eyes (or other equally scarynasty stuff) and that it tried to disembowel its mother when she got creeped out by it and tried to smother it with a pillow. Or maybe, come to think of it, it actually did kill her. Whatever. It was a scary baby-monster. Scarier than the regular ones, even.

Well, I think that's what is living next door to me. I think there's a pretty, white, lacy crib up against the wall, and in that crib there is a fanged, clawed, lizardy thing digging its way over to my apartment. I think it's actually on its way to China, but 'cause it's a lizard and all, it doesn't have a very good sense of direction. Then again, it is heading east, now that I think about it.

If I'm found disemboweled in my dining room, I'm telling you, it was the lizard next door.

This cracks me up. Yes, I'm twisted.

Please, think of the kittens.

Who Put Hash in My Coffee?

I've decided that FreshDirect has gotten fed up with me complaining when they send me dirt-soaked Boston lettuce or can't tell the difference between shiitake and crimini mushrooms and send me the wrong ones. I think that they're putting hash in my nummy (yet reasonably priced) Brazilian Santos Bourbon coffee to shut me up.

Why, you ask, would I think that FD is hashing my coffee? Simple. Because I've spent this entire weekend feeling like a high-on, and I ain't been smokin' nuffin' illicit. Aside from doing a half-assed cleaning job on my kitchen, I've done almost nothing for the past two days, and I've apparently worn myself out so much in doing so that I've needed several compensation naps.

Last night, I watched one of the worst movies ever made (The Smokers). I forced myself to watch it all the way to the end because I just kept hoping it would have at least one redeeming quality (it didn't) and because I'm just stubborn sometimes. At least I surfed the 'net while I was watching it, or else I'd have had to throw the TV out the window. By the end of that crap movie, I felt, just, well, weird. Not physically weird, just kinda mentally detached or something. It was sort of like when I was a disaffected adolescent full of hormones and seething rage. Wow, that movie wasn't just bad, it was toxic.

Today, I don't feel like I'm actually inhabiting my body. You know how, right as you're falling asleep, your body feels kind of tingly and just "not there", like your mind has disconnected from it? Okay, maybe you don't, but I do, and I'm the one yapping here, so just go along with it, okay? Anyway, that's how my body has felt all day.

Or maybe it was just the painkillers I took for my headache.

Never mind.