ham fisted theatrics

Outside the Chelsea Hotel on my way to UCB, I wanted to say to the woman stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk having difficulty pulling a lime-green sweater onto her chihuahua: "It's probably time to re-evaluate."

Then the second I thought that I saw a guy standing in the doorway of a deli yelling "Fuck YOU! No, fuck YOU!" at a kid in an apron. He was wearing a velvety purple blazer, fifty-ish, sunglasses, tie, fedora. When I was a kid, I used to imagine we were hollow inside and any food we ate would drop down to the lowest point in this hollow body vessel and once our body was filled up, all the way to the top of our hollow head, we died. I imagined that for this guy, only instead of food, he was filled up with prescription drugs. Pills all the way up to maybe three inches at the crown of his head, where the fedora was. He was pointing his finger like lightning was shooting out of the tip of it.

If you are yelling at a kid in a deli with a mop at 10:30 on a Thursday night on the first nice day of a year, and you are fifty and very likely richer than God, it is probably time to re-evaluate.


An actual half of a cellphone conversation I heard in the park yesterday:

"No, Miriam's not coming. I dunno. She's been in like this depressed thing ever since she came back from Bermuda. She hates it here. Like, so much that she's thinking about going to law school in Bermuda. I know! There are no law schools in Bermuda!"


I am reading Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis and like any Ellis book it has me in a wow-everyone-is-a-shallow-android mode. New York is a very easy place to look at the world like that. It's scary. But it's also maybe spring so nothing is, in actuality, all that bad.

Back to writing my Simpsons spec. Pages are due in an hour. I have coffee from Dunkin' Donuts, and I get to do two shows tonight. Like I said, nothing is all that bad.

My brother was named after the pope, I think (John Paul) but he is taller, funnier, and better at hockey.

If purple smoke comes out the chimney, that means they have elected a pope who does amazing guitar solos and scratches a little, too, at parties, on weekends.

Here's hoping.

Posted by DC at April 1, 2005 03:01 PM