Journal Entry - January 2, 1978

Star-crossed day.

A drunk retching into the snow on 2nd Avenue, obviously in the throes of alcoholic poisoning.

Happy New Years.

Enough on him.

January 3, 1979 - Journal - East Village

Alice and I get drunk at CBGBs with Bill Yusk. At CBGBs. Where else? Alice was mad at me, because she had to wait at the door. Lisa Krystal wouldn't let her in for free without me. Kim wasn't waitressing either.

"I don't understand why they treat you like they do." Alice thinks I'm nothing. "It's not like you're a star. You just drink for free."

"It's a talent. If I drink for free, then you drink for free. I never ask why." I don't understand either. It's not like I do anything special other than play pinball.

I woke this morning feeling, as if I had sliced my right eye. The eye itself. Alice was asleep on the mattress, trembling in a nightmare, speaking in tongues. Comforting a terrified sleeper seemed dangerous and I muttered, "Shut up." I left the bedroom for the futon in the living room. Bright sunlight. The light burns my eye. I need to get curtains. I touch my eyeball and discover that I had left in my contact. I take it out. Relief. I rejoin Alice and hush her terror, then slip into dreamland.

In this building 256 East 10th Street, six floors of well-lived-in tenement apartments with the bathtub in the kitchen children's' voices are rarely heard. Ms. Adorno next door cackles madly at all hours and speaks to spirits. I figure her for a witch. Upstairs someone every morning turns on the bath and then occasionally makes love, loud love, for a half an hour with different women. I think it's the actor on the fourth floor. Outside hispanic kids from the pre-school scream every morning in the alley, freed from parental discipline. This neighborhood, the Lower East Side was depopulated during the early 70s by arson and crime and drugs. 160,000 inhabitants to 90,000. Several years ago Paul Ehrlich predicted the world population will be six billion in the year 2000.

That might be turn in the rest of the world, but in the East Village no one wants to live here, except for the punks, junkies, hippies, hispanics, and the old. Demographics shifted with white flight. The Jews and Italians fled to Brooklyn or Long Island. No one wanted to go to New Jersey. Maybe the numbers of whites are growing outside the city. My high school and college friends are fathers. Not me. Alice and I aren't using contraception and I haven't impregnated her at all. The Smith family are without a twelfth generation in this country. None of us siblings are married. This neighborhood is packed with white refugees from America. No children.

Later.

The Shah of Iran must be thinking of taking a vacation from Tehran. HIs White Revolution has failed. The students and mullahs are calling for his blood and his SS, SAVAK, are overwhelmed by the popular rising. What is the Shah to do with the decline of the white people in America.

The Oil Crisis of 1973 thanks to Israel hiked the oil prices to render families more and more expensive; no more twenty cent gallons of gas, races across the states at 110 mph, the end of American decadence, but not really. People are driving just as much as before. They live in the suburbs. No one walks there. There's nowhere to go and they drive cars there

LATER

Alice is worried about her destiny. She wants to be an actress. She is very talented, but New York is not a city in which actors can become famous. She needs to move to LA. I don't need to move to LA. I have bought into Mad Magazine's Alfred E Newman's quote, "What me worry?"

I'm broke, but have Alice, an apartment, and write shitty poetry and get free drinks at CBGBs, play pinball in Times Square, and basketball at West 4th Street. Not a success at any, but a damned good failure. I really don't understand how to proceed to success while content with not so much failure. I am very good at pinball, play outstanding defense at the Cage, and drink for free at CBGBs.

My Aunt Mary had a boyfriend. Peter Willin. He was a communist, smoke cigarettes, and was invited to our holiday dinners. After his departure from out home in the suburbs, my mother always said, "You don't want to end up like him."

He loved my Aunt Mary, but I feel cursed my my mother's words to be broke all my life, rotting teeth, rundown heels, and shiny trousers. I'm only 26 and just the other day, Alice said, "Great things are coming to us both. Somehow I see myself on a golf course, hitting the ball straight to the green, and sinking a hole-in-one. Perfect. Somehow I shall seize destiny.

One does not pursue fame, fame pursue one," I told Ralphie from Come On. He's from Deutschland and driven like Alice to be famous, but who wants fame like Peter Frampton, Cheryll Tiegs or John Travolta. I know no one famous. Only those that want to be. In a hundred years no one will remember them or me just as no one now remembers the toilet paper they used in the morning.

So you want to be famous
So you want to be known
Signing autographs
Posing for photos
Awaiting the flash.
The president knows who you are
So does the Pope
You know other famous people
By their first name
They kiss you on the cheeks
Twice.
Everyone know who you are
A VIP
No longer a regular person
Someone famous
Famous to the famous
Forever famous until you are forgotten
But always famous now.

This poem sucks. Why do I write such crap.

An abhorence of words. I wish my stutter prevented my fingers from writing and typing...I am no longer devoted to writing, but life. To experience life, the good, the bad, and the in-betweens. The pleasure of cumming on a young woman's leg, watching the semen melt on the warmth of her flesh, handing her a towel to wipe away my DNA semen, her not caring if the towel is clean, its use is all she needs from me.

AULD LANG SYNE Die Toten Hosen

1-1-2007 - PATTAYA

Having gone to sleep slightly after the stroke of 12am on New Year's Eve, I woke with the dawn the next morning. Champoo, my little dog, was dying for a walk and I tiptoed through the sprawled bodies of my wife's guests. They had had too much food and drink unlike me. I was nearly stone-sober.

My fingers were cold and so were my toes.

It wasn't a heart attack.

Only winter in Pattaya.

72 Farenheit.

I went back inside for a leather jacket and escorted Champoo through her AM routine of sniffing every urine stain on the soi. She is an epicurean of eau de chien pee-pee. The larger dogs on the soi kept their distance. The large stick in my hand was an old friend. Ten minutes later I returned to the hosue.

No one was awake.

I watched three episodes of Star Trek ENTERPRISE.

Champoo growled for food, as the Vulcans betrayed Star Fleet. We had bacon and eggs. My wife's sister came into the kitchen to cook rice, spare ribs and vegetables. She's a peasant rice farmer with two front teeth. One look at the farang concoction had her muttering something disrespectful about western cuisine. I've learned to deadened my hearing to Thais, otherwise my jai yen would be burning like an overloaded reactor 99% of the time.

New Year's Day.

Bright and sunny with a chill in the air.

My wife and daughter asleep in the bed.

Everyone in Pattaya nursing whiskey hang-overs.

And I'm feeling fine.

A friend of mine once said that your year will be determined by wahtever you do on the first day of the year.

Sober, full, and loving my daughter.

I will love my daughter for the rest of the year, but the sober will not last long.

Not in Pattaya or Bangkok or anywhere else in the world.

Happy 2008. enjoy it well, because supposedly the world ends Jan. 19, 2008.

Back From The Dead 2011

From 2011

My New Year's Eve for 2011 plans were simple and local. Watch the Celtics-New Orleans game at Mullane's followed up by an early beer at Frank's then home to my Fort Greene Penthouse to watch the final sunset of 2011 before getting attire in my evening suit. Nothing says New Year's Eve better than a tux. I polished off a bottle of Cote du Rhone and bid farewell to AP and his wife. They were expecting neighbors to see in 2011.

"Frank's?" AP asked knowing my answer.

"Until 11:30. I'll join you for the countdown. "Is Dick Clark still around?"

"They'll have to flash-defrost him to make it to Times Square." AP will be 50 this coming this month. Most of our new year's countdowns were with the eternal teenager, but not this year. "He's in retirement."

"Damn." Nothing stays the same. It was 10:15. "I'll see you in an hour."

Frank's is a five-minute walk from South Oxford. The bar is a Fort Greene fixture dating back to 1972. The owner was sitting at the first table. I greeted him with warmth.

"Thanks for having me this year." One of the regulars had recently named me 'the White Shaft' after I entered the bar in a long black-green leather coat. To misquote Frank Zappa, "I wasn't black, but sometimes at Frank's, I didn't feel white."

"Glad to have you."

I ordered a beer from Sandy, the bartender, and had a few more. My phone was silent. No one calling from Thailand, the Continent, or America. I was off the radar and commanded another beer. I tipped the bartender the change and drank the beer in the glow of another year of the new century sinking into the past. More than a half-century of last-minute preparation for the new year.

Larry and I toasted the Celtics and Lakers.

"Here's to another championship."

Both of us were predicting a rematch of 2009. My phone buzzed with a text message. Shannon was at his girlfriend's restaurant on DeKalb. I wrote that I'd see him after the countdown and bid good night to everyone at Franks'.

AP buzzed me into his house. We drank two bottles of champagne with his wife and two guests. My phone rang 10 minutes into 2011. My nephew was waiting at Oskars. Same rendezvous as Shannon. I tipped my hat to my landlord.

"See you in the afternoon."

"If not later." AP knew that I was hellbound for drink this evening.

Wine, whiskey, and song until 5am.

Yesterday was a blur in my bed. A burger at Mullane's for breakfast at 3pm and Chinese leftovers at home for dinner. No more booze. No drugs. Only water and it wasn't a cure for my ills. Sleep would help a little and I called Fenway's mother in Sriracha before crashing into my pillows.

"Mao?"

"Not mao." I had recovered from the staggering drunk. "Hang."

"Bad?"

"Bad enough. Love you and call you in the morning."

It was barely 9pm and I had had enough of 2010 to last a lifetime unless the clocks reverse their spin and I'll be ready to relive this New Year's Eve backwards. It's the only way to repair the holes in your soul.

Happy 2011

OLD POEM FROM THE UNKNOWN

From 2022

In the end
I saw myself
As others saw me.
A middle-aged man to turn older
An older man to become ancient
Since age eight
Refusing to obey the vow of Faith
Demanded by the Sisters of St. Mary__
Now
I never kneel before the altar
I never ask for forgiveness for my sins
Only saying to the Bible's God
I am a mere mortal.
Mo More
No less
Just a mere mortal____
Never a God___

No Music Day 11/21 Pattaya

From 2007

Last week on during my holiday stay in Thailand Jamie Parker said that he had never seen a group of people more allergic to silence than the Thais. The TV never gets a rest. Rice farmers wake to loudspeakers blaring crop prices. Dogs howl without an owner's restraining smack and karaoke bars punish neighbors with painful renditions of Isaan love songs way past dawn.

And I've never heard a Thai complain about this ceaseless din.

Quiet on the other hand scares the pisac or devil out of Thais, as if ghosts or phi are slinking through the night to eat their flesh.

This aversion to silence is not to say that they don't appreciate san-dti? so?ok or tranquility, which was yesterday's goal of No Music Day in the UK.

No music. None at all.

The website www.nomusicday.com belongs to KLF founder Bill Drummond, whose infamous counter-reaction to fame and fortune was to delete KLF's musical backlog and then burn a million pounds on the deserted Scottish island of Jura. The fiery destruction of 50-pound notes took less than an hour and gained the band members near-legend status for their disregard for money.

Now Bill Drummond has organized No Music Day on November 21.

"All music is shite." He said after a visit to HMV Oxford Street and he doesn't consider this attitude due to his age. "There was nothing So I went home and searched every corner of the web for something new, fresh, exciting. Something that would make me hear music in a different way. Something that would open a door to a room in my head which I had never been in before. But even in those furthest corners I could find nothing that did this. I decided I needed a day I could set aside to listen to no music whatsoever. Instead, I would be thinking about what I wanted and what I didn't want from music. Not to blindly - or should that be deafly - consume what was on offer. A day where I could develop ideas. This day I would call No Music Day. St Cecilia is the patron saint of music. I have no idea why and I am not interested in finding out. But her Saint's Day is on 22 November. This is the day we are supposed to celebrate music, thank God for its existence. I decided that No Music Day should be on the day before St Cecilia's Day, using the same principles as having Halloween the day before All Saints' Day or Mardi Gras on the day before Lent kicks in."

Nietzsche countered Bill Drummond by writing, "Life without music would be a mistake."

Maybe so, but I joined No Music Day and didn't play a single CD or watch TV.  

My house was a temple to No Music.

No Stones, no Beethoven, no Jam, no Ramones, no Loso.

But I must have been the only person observing the holiday in Pattaya, because as soon as I left my soi, music was coming from every direction. The 7/11, passing car stereos, a girl answering her telephone. Most of it meaningless background noise.

I did mention No Music day to Nick Rieter recently back from the UK. "KLF. That wanker. Says he burned a million pounds. Probably said it to keep from paying back his friends and I couldn't remember a single song of theirs anyway. Fucking sod off. You don't want to hear any music, then stick chopsticks into your ears."

I stopped mentioning No Music Day after that and broke my fast with Jeff Beck's Truth CD.

SHAPES OF THINGS

Nothing says old like pre-1969 music.