Monthly Archive for October, 2005

October 23, 2005

Published on 10/23/2005 in Dear Diarrhea. 0 Comments

I can’t say that I like those new cell phone ear pieces that look like what a hearing aid would look like back in the 1800′s: super-small for what they do, but still big enough to stick out like a sore thumb. I don’t even know if they had hearing aids back in the 1800′s, but if they did, I’d imagine they would stick out of the ear about two to three inches and look something like those space-aged, flashing pieces of equipment that are now called cell phones. I guess if you have something stuck in your ear, it falls under the category of the “hearing aid”. That’s even true with an earplug I guess, because it’s “aiding” in helping you not hear. Look at me, getting all wound up and shit. I need to get a hold of myself before I open fire on someone. (I’m reading Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” right now and all I can think about is just killing someone for the hell of it. Well, not really because of the book. I’m thinking about a cold-blooded murder because of the cell phone earpiece thing. So there’s “just cause” here after all. But to put everyone at ease, I’m never going to pull the trigger. I have a decent career ahead of me.)

Speaking of sore thumbs, how much does a sore thumb stick out anyway? When I think of a sore thumb, I’m thinking along the lines of an arthritic condition or something like a sprain, which, unless you wrap it up in a bandage, really doesn’t stick out that much at all. Just hurts a lot. They should say stuff like, “That something something sticks out like a damaged thumb” or “Look at that person’s missing arm that sticks out like an amputated thumb.”

I don’t know what I’m talking about right now. I have to remind myself why I write these Dear Diarrheas in the first place: to speak my mind as quickly and freely as possible. This is also the cause of 95% of all of my misspelled words and horrific grammatical mistakes that pop up from time to time. For those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed, you will notice occasionally receiving what appears to be the same Diarrhea entry, when in fact it is actually an edited version. Whenever I catch those minor spelling errors, I like to go ahead and correct them so they don’t stay that way. So, I just wanted to apologize for possibly wasting your time because you think it’s a new one and so you start to read it again and then you say to yourself, “Hey, this sounds familiar” and then “Wait a second! I’m having deja vu. What’s going on, here?!?!” Thanks for understanding, I just wanted to clear things up a bit.

I’ve done this before and I should do it again now…time to go back to some of my old entries that were just TOO stupid and nonsensical to put out for you guys to read. Let me go back to some oldies and see if I can’t cut and paste my point for you. I’ll be back in a few…

May 4th 2002

…North Fork Bank, now that’s a bank that when you’re about to leave and are finished with your transaction you can say to the teller, “Put a North Fork in it, I’m done here!”

Here’s a good example right here. First of all, no one knows anything about the very local North Fork Bank and even if they did, my joke is, at best, a very weak play on words. I would expect better out of me, but you know what, at the time I wrote it I was probably having an off day. Which I personally think makes me look beautiful. Anyway, right after I wrote that I looked at it and said, “No, I’ll get back to this one later, just save it for another time,” which is now I guess, so it’s a good that I didn’t delete it.

See if I can find another couple of examples for you…

July 24th 2004

…We are all familiar with rodeo clowns, am I right or am I right? I wonder if there are any rodeo MIMES out there? Oh, I don’t know… I seriously doubt it! I’d imagine a rodeo mime would have an awfully hard time convincing a charging bull that he’s protected by an invisible barrel! That bull would be all like, “Bring in the clowns, this is bullshit!”

This silly observation slash joke came pretty close to making the Diarrhea cut. Looking at it now, I see something in the makings with this little idea here. Maybe take out the bull saying “bullshit” and then, in general, making it a lot funnier next time… Okay, one more deleted Diarrhea thought before I go…

December 20th 2003

…I just don’t get why Santa Claus has to be so out of shape and overweight. I just don’t think that sets a good example to the kids nowadays, especially with all the trans fats and junk food that are brain and stomachwashing the children of today. Sure, back in the day before McDonalds and corporate-fed…

I think I know what happened in this case. I either didn’t know what else to say because I forgot to hire a fact checker, or I got bored at hearing myself type and just gave up on the thought altogether. It’s probably the latter, which is a shame because I was onto something there.

Anyway, that’s about it for today. I look at it like an extra bonus into my mind. Much like the infamous “deleted scenes” on a DVD, these are my deleted thoughts and quips, and a surefire way to add filler to an otherwise dull and random Dear Diarrhea entry. I DID IT!

October 18, 2005

Published on 10/18/2005 in Dear Diarrhea. 1 Comment

Walking around Brooklyn Heights yesterday with my girlfriend and I couldn’t help but fantasize about living out there. Starting a family, have a couple dogs, and a gardener to cook all of my meals for me and a lovely house girl to clean up after me and my family. Good stuff like that.

I would never have a house girl really; I kinda like cleaning for some random reason, probably because that was the way I made a living for my first four years in NYC. Not many people know that I cleaned apartments and art galleries between 1995 and 1998ish… I was lucky enough to be self employed and it wasn’t that hard to pay my rent and bills at that time because I lived in an incredibly cheap apartment that if I told you how much the rent was you would want to kill me. Let’s put it this way, I only had to come up with 270 dollars a month to cover my half of rent- SHIT!, I just told you! Damnit, someone out there is gonna want to KILL me now!!! Why didn’t I just keep my medium mouth shut! Arrrgh!

Anyway, I had it pretty easy to say the least and with my three art gallery cleaning accounts and the few apartments that I kept in ship shape, (which equaled about ten to twelve hours of work a week) I had plenty of time to think about living the American dream of being a successful actor slash writer and living in Brooklyn Heights or the West Village and hiring someone like myself to clean up all my messes and whatnot. And I WOULD hire someone like myself because people like me don’t come around that often, especially to clean your toilet and litter boxes. No, people like me are a commodity and I would just love to pick the brain of my eccentric house cleaner and ask him or her stuff like, “What makes you tick?” and things like, “Whoa whoa whoa, take it easy on that back of yours, pal! Here, give me that shovel and sit on my antique rocking chair and rest for a second. No need working that hard tilling my garden and planting those silly 10 foot fig trees that my wife asked you to plant. No…you just sit down and drink this freshly brewed tea that the gardener just whipped up and sit here and talk to me about your dreams and aspirations.”

That’s what I’d do because no one really got to know me that much when I was pushing a mop or play-dusting for my employers. (Play-dusting is when you carry around a duster and act like you’re dusting everything in sight when in actuality, you’re just killing time because you finished your cleaning a long time ago. At least you’re finished with all you wanted to clean that day). Only a handful of the guys at the art galleries really gave a rat’s butt hole about what made me tick or why I was such a talented sketch writer and performer. Didn’t get a lot of that “one on one” when I was picking their pubic hair out of the bathroom sink. (Don’t ask me how the hair got there but it did. Pubic hair is shaped like a spring so in my professional opinion, I think that they hit the ground and spring all over the place like a rubber ball. Something to that nature. Don’t even get me started with the random places I’ve spotted a pube! Those things are like dandelion seeds that blow around in the wind and can travel up to five miles from the plant. Same thing with the human pubic hair… Am I really cleaning these things off the top of the fridge? Are you kidding me?)

Anyway, I’d get conversations like, “How’s your sketch thing going? And oh, by the way… could you clean the scuff marks off the floors, we had an opening last night and there’s a bunch of them that look pretty bad… And, what else? Hummmm, I know there was something I was gonna ask you…”

“Something about my show coming up? The one that I’ve been begging you guys to come to for the last two weeks?” (I was always trying to get people in the seats.)

“No, that wasn’t it. I’ll think about it soon. Just knock those scuffs out and I’ll let ya know when it comes to me… Oh! I know. How’s Zach doing? I saw him on that show called something like, Apartment something something F? One of those Comedy Central shows… Whatever, he was really funny on it. How’s he doing?”

Ya see, Zach Galifianakis and I cleaned the same art gallery together for a while before he moved to LA on a full comedy scholarship with NBCLA (The University of NBC at Los Angeles) and left me high and dry to keep up with all the cleaning duties. I had the luxury of giving all the guys that we cleaned for weekly updates on his career, and to me, that was just an added bonus in the communication department, anything to get the conversation flowing. Loved to talk about his career and clean their toilets all in the same hour. Kept things real for me and grounded me in ways that I will cherish forever.

Now that I’m thinking of depressing times in my life, one of the most depressing and most embarrassing things happened to me at that art gallery that I will one day put into a scene in a movie. It was straight out of a movie and I couldn’t have been involved in a more retarded situation… Zach and I had just finished cleaning the gallery and we decided to walk over to Battery Park (which is on the west side highway near the trade center) and lounge around in the hot summer sun after a semi-hard quarter day of work. Before we went to the park, we stopped by a deli and Zach got a water or something smart and hydrating like that and I had the wonderful idea of chugging a chocolate milk before the super hot and humid walk to the park. Sooooo, right after I chugged the chocolaty flavored milk, it hit me that I’m lactose intolerant to say the least and a diarrhea attack was in the very near future and I needed to take care of it before I got to the park. I told Zach what I was going through and of course he laughed and wanted to hear the fireworks wherever I chose to shoot off the display, but I told him that I would meet him at the park after I ran to the gallery to play a quick game of “splatter-gories’.

And that’s what I did. I ran as fast as my diarrhea legs could go and right when I got to the gallery, it hit me that the girl at the front desk, which is all of ten feet from the bathroom, the one that I had a huge crush on was there and she said to me, “What are you doing here again? I thought you left?”

“I forgot something!” I said in a red-faced, hold my diarrhea for just two more seconds way so she would not think I was only here to explode in the whisper-quiet art gallery bathroom.

” I think I left my notebook somewhere. Maybe it’s in the bathroom”

She just smiled and you could hear it; the smile, that is. An art gallery is a lot like a library except it is much quieter and you can actually hear people’s facial expressions. I was mopping the floor one day and I’m not kidding, but I actually heard the owner of the gallery squinting his eyes to look at something. What was he trying to look at? I wouldn’t know because I was about thirty yards away in the other room, that’s how quiet that gallery was.

Anyway, I had to take care of this problem and there’s nothing I could do about it but to do it as quietly as possible. That means to cough and sneeze at precisely the same time that I released the hounds. (Don’t ya love the euphemisms? Splatter-gories and now, “release the hounds”. I’m sure I’ll come up with another one or two before it’s all over)

So, I’m going to town and it’s loud as hell in there and now the smell was starting to become a concern so I lit a couple of matches, which of course is what you do when you’re looking for a notebook for fifteen minutes in the bathroom. To make a long story shorter, I began to panic when I smelled a little more smoke than a match would normally produce. Wow, it’s really smoky in here- FUCK! The trashcan’s on fire! Shit!

Now the whole bathroom was filled with smoke as I stomped out the burning plastic and paper towels that I stupidly lit by mistake. I guess the good thing was that you couldn’t smell my movement anymore because if you ever want to mask a diarrhea bomb, all you need to do is burn plastic. It’s like rock beats scissors, and in this case, molten plastic beats methane…. every time! Anyway, I had to open up the window and try to shoo the smoke out of the bathroom before it got loose inside the gallery. The unfortunate thing about that window is that it faces the busy corner of Broom and Wooster Street in Soho and everyone was watching me wave smoke out of the bathroom with this shear panicked look on my face. I thought for sure that someone was gonna call the fire department and all hell would break loose. That’s when I gave the old “good neighborly wave” to the passersby like, “Everything’s fine, ha haaa. Just getting some of this stubborn plastic smoke out of the bathroom like I do everyday. Nothing to see here of much importance, got it covered, thanks though… Ha ha. Please don’t call the fire department. Okay then, ha ha…”

Finally, after I got what I thought was all the smoke out and I strategically camouflaged the melted trashcan with paper towels and toilet paper, I opened the door as quickly and quietly as I could, hoping, just HOPING that the girl was taking a break and I could get the hell out of there without having to explain myself. Not the case. The first thing she said was, “Are you okay?” With the look on her face that said, “I heard and smelled everything, you don’t have to explain yourself because I know good and well that you had explosive diarrhea and you’re super embarrassed about it and I’m not gonna make you feel like shit because we’ve all gone through it before in a public place. Maybe not like you just did, but at any rate, it’s okay and you can leave without having to explain yourself now.”

And I did just that. I just wiped my sweaty brow and said, “I’m fine, thanks” and walked out as quickly as I could. And on the way down the street I looked back at the window, which I had left open, and had one more reminder of what had just happened to me. Then I laughed all the way to the park and was thinking to myself… Man oh man, do I have a story for Zach! Yay!!!

So here I am on a beautiful fall day in 2005. I’m walking around in the nicest neighborhood in Brooklyn, girl in hand and over FOUR-HUNDRED DOLLARS in my bank account! I’m thinking to myself, you know what? I’m one step closer to my American dream. I think it might actually happen one day. YAY!!!

Pretty soon it’ll be time to look for flyers posted around the city saying stuff like, “Compulsive Cleaners. Partners in Grime!… Cheap rates and satisfaction guaranteed!”

Oh, the memories…

October 9, 2005

Published on 10/9/2005 in Dear Diarrhea. 0 Comments

I’m about as broke as it gets right now. Seriously thinking about selling my mind for money. I have a good piece of mind to do so and I bet I could get some sweet cash for a few percentages of my brain. I had this weird fantasy yesterday as I was looking at my finances. I was watching an old lady in a walker crossing the street and I dreamt that I helped her get across and she gave me 30 thousand dollars. Not only that, but she gave me some information that was pretty cool to say the least… Shit, I’ll just put it in movie scene for ya….

Open up on a beautiful fall day near Central Park.

Old lady with a walker is crossing Central Park West at the block of 79th street. One of the tennis balls comes off her walker legs and is slowly being left behind in the middle of the road as she scurries unknowingly across the street.

Bobby, played by me, notices this from the corner of his eye, puts down his bank statement and heads into the oncoming traffic to grab her tennis ball.

Cars screech and come to a stop as Bobby barely grabs the ball before it’s run over by a car. He runs up to the old lady all out of breath and stuff of that nature; you know, for being a hero and whatnot…

BOBBY: (out of breath) Excuse me, ma’am? Excuse me?

The lady is startled and in one swift and surprisingly agile movement, she swings her walker and knocks Bobby in the head, knocking him out cold.

LADY: (spitting on Bobby) Pervert!

The lady slowly walks away.

Cut to a few minutes later.

Bobby is woken up by a stream of urine coming from the matted penis of a toothless elderly poodle-mix. It is walking leashless in the city, which is a hefty fine by the way, and Bobby takes this rude awakening personally and thumps the ugly dog’s penis with his finger to stop the animal from pissing on him… The dog yelps.

Bobby slowly finds his way to a sitting position. He is horrified as he notices the shadow of a walker coming his way.

LADY: Did you hit my dog’s cock!? Answer me!

Yep, she’s back and pissed off even more than before.

Bobby holds his hands over his head to protect himself.

BOBBY: No no no noooo! Please no!

Still holding her walker in attack mode over her head.

LADY: What did Raskles do to deserve that shit!? Huh!? Answer me!

BOBBY: He pissed on me! Look at me? He peed all over me!

LADY: Ohhhh!!! You’re the fella that I hit with my walker a few minutes ago…

BOBBY: Yes! I know, I was only trying to give you your tennis ball back.

Bobby looks around for the tennis ball and unknowingly, the lady places her walker on it and it sticks right back onto the walker leg again.

BOBBY: Right there! You just put it on your walker… you- (to himself) How did you just do that?

LADY: My tennis balls? What are you talking about, pervert!

BOBBY: (standing up) I’m not a pervert, ma’am… I was only trying to give you- screw it, never mind, I better go now and get this dog piss off of me. This has been a pretty crappy day so far to say the least.

Bobby turns around and starts to walk off.

LADY: Sonny?!

BOBBY: Yes?

LADY: I’m sorry that I hit you with my walker. You startled me and I was an old dirt wrestler back in the day and my instinct is to attack when someone gets too close to me. It happens all the time so don’t take it personally.

BOBBY: No problem… It’s fine. I shouldn’t have run up to ya like that- did you just say dirt wrestler?

LADY: That’s right, dirt wrestler. I was a dirt wrestler back in the fifties and a damn good one too. That’s how I paid for my schooling. I think I can still handle some of the youngin’s to this day. Handled you pretty good…

BOBBY: What’s dirt wrestling?

LADY: Here, let’s sit down on the stoop for a second and I’ll tell you about it. My legs are killing me.

They go to the stoop of a beautiful brownstone. Her old piece of shit dog sits between Bobby’s legs like nothing happened before. As she sits, all of her bones creek and pop really loud like a chiropractic ghost gave her a slow and deliberate adjustment.

BOBBY: Wow. Are you all right?

LADY: Oh that’s nothing.

She then begins to pull back all of her fingers on her right hand, bending and popping them all the way back and touching them to her wrinkly arm. Her hand sticks that way, completely stuck in the cocked position like freak in a freak show. Bobby looks at her in amazement slash disgust. She holds her contorted and gross looking arm in front of Bobby’s face.

BOBBY: Geez-us! Holy shit! How in the hell do you do that?

LADY: This was one of my patented moves. See how you’re reacting to my hand? Not paying attention and whatnot?

BOBBY: Um… YEAH-

Just then she snaps her wrist and like a catapult, her hand springs forward and slaps Bobby so hard in the chest that it knocks him up the stairs. Bobby loses his breath and the Lady begins to laugh. She then stands over him and pins his shoulder to the hard concrete.

LADY: One! Two! Three! Ha haaaa! Works every time!

Bobby finally catches his breath.

BOBBY: Please stop now… Please… That hurt like crazy…

LADY: Look, I can do it with this hand too-

BOBBY: No!… I mean, I believe you… That’s fine, I get it…

LADY: Yep… I was something back in the day. Used to call me “Dirty Martini’ back then because I would down a dirty martini before each match and after I’d pin them bitches, I’d spit the olive pit right in their faces when I was done… Yep, Dirty Martini… Right here in the flesh.

Bobby pulls up his shirt and is amazed with the perfect handprint on his chest.

BOBBY: Oh, man…. Look what you did.

LADY: That’ll leave a bruise probably but nothing that you can’t handle. Lucky I didn’t hit ya in the face. Liable to break that pretty face of yours if I did.

BOBBY: You already did that with your walker… so…, you know.

LADY: Yep… Don’t do much wrestling anymore now a days, getting’ little too old to kick ass anymore. I’ll slap and pin somebody down at the Y in my swim class from time to time but other than that, I haven’t been in a professional dirt wrestling fight in over fifty years… I packed it all up when they added water… Those fuckers.

BOBBY: Can you please tell me about dirt wrestling? Is that like mud wrestling or something?

LADY: Ooooh! I hate that word! Mud wrestling should’ve NEVER happened! It was all because of a completely FREAK accident that ruined the much respected dirt wrestling sport forever. Ugh!

BOBBY: What do you mean?

LADY: Dirt wrestling was a sport like any other professional contact sport in the day. It was just like wrestling that you might see in the Olympics except instead of a canvas mat, the ring was made of dirt. Just a different surface, that’s all. Like a clay court in tennis or a dirt track in stock car racing… Same with dirt wrestling. It wasn’t at all about being half naked and sexy and all the shit that mud wrestling is… That all happened because of a stupid idiot that didn’t plunge his toilet… Ya see, it was back in 1956 at the national’s in Houston… I was getting ready for the semifinals waiting for the other semifinals match between Lighting Rod Jefferson and Joan “Three Kidneys” MaGee.

BOBBY: (with a little sarcastic chuckle) What, did she have three kidneys?

LADY: (pulling back her hand) You want to let me finish the story or do ya want some of this?

BOBBY: The story! Sorry… Keep going.

LADY: Anyway, the ladies were in a heated match and Joan pulls this amazing move on Jefferson, just about to pin her when out of the blue, a steady stream of shit water comes pouring out of the ceiling and all over the girls and turning the ring into a super muddy mess. Jefferson then slips out of Joan’s grip and has new life again. They should’ve called it shit wrestling! God, if some dumbass had just plunged his toilet! Damnit it makes me mad just to talk about it!

BOBBY: No way. That’s how mud wrestling was invented?

LADY: That was the start. It only became a sexual thing when “Three Kidneys” got so muddy that she slipped right out of her leotard, exposing herself in just her bloomers. Then the boys started to really get into it and the rest is history.

Bobby begins to pet her dog and the dog walks away and into her lap. Her bones creek and crackle as she pets the dog.

BOBBY: That was a really cool story. So what happened with your match? Did ya win?

LADY: You’re goddamn right I won! But I didn’t win any fans like Joan did. After their match and when everything was dry and dirty like normal, I was in the process of kicking Saundra Duncan’s ass when the fans started chanting for Joan. Screaming out shit like, “Add water! Add Water!” and “We want mud! We want mud!” … Shit pissed me off and I forfeited the championship match with Joan after the judges and the owners of the venue asked us to have the finals in mud.

BOBBY: Wow, what a bunch of assholes.

LADY: Well the craziest part about it is that if you ever see the official mud wrestling logo, it is a picture of my silhouette pinning Saundra Duncan to the dirt floor that night. They added this fake mud splashing all around us… Anyway, I ended up suing them for a bunch of money and retired soon after that.

BOBBY: I can’t believe that’s you on the logo?

LADY: Oh, so you watch mud wrestling too?.. I guess all men are alike.

BOBBY: No, I was just making that up. Never seen it in my life. I guess I got caught up in the story, that’s all.

LADY: Well, there ya go. Now ya know how it all got started. Well, this is my building so I better let Raskles back in the house before he pees on you again.

The lady folds up her walker, easily picks up her dog and gracefully walks up to her front door.

BOBBY: You don’t really need that thing do ya?

LADY: Nope, not at all. Just for people like you to think that I’m some elderly lady that needs help. Gives me a reason to stay in fighting shape. The police will never arrest an old lady with a walker attacking a stranger like you. That’s what makes it fun.

BOOBY: Good to hear. I’ll know better next time… Well, it was nice to meet you and for all it’s worth, your tennis ball really did fall off in the street. I wasn’t making that up or anything.

LADY: I know it did. I did it on purpose… Ya know, wait a second would ya? I want to give you something…

She walks inside her door. You can hear her whistling the Rocky tune as she walks down her corridor. She returns after a minute or so.

LADY: Let me see your chest again.

Bobby doesn’t know what to think about this request. Is she gonna attack him again with another secret move? What’s the deal?

LADY: Come on now, I just want to see what kinda damage I can still do to someone… Go ahead and show me.

Bobby reluctantly pulls up his shirt revealing a nasty raised hand shaped welt much redder than before.

BOBBY: Wow, this looks nasty. You really got me pretty good here.

The lady pulls out a check from her pocket and hands it over to Bobby.

LADY: Here, go have it looked at if ya want. Nothing you can really do with a bruise, but if you want to go to a doctor, this should cover it with plenty to spare.

Bobby looks at the check and shakes his head.

BOBBY: There’s no way in hell I can take this. This is way too much… This is ridiculous.

The lady cocks back her hand again.

LADY: I want you to have it or else.

She smiles and motions to her cocked and loaded hand.

BOBBY: Fine! I’ll take it and go to the doctor right now! Thanks again for the story and for beating me up like that!

Bobby walks to the bottom of the steps.

LADY: Thanks for letting me vent to you. It was nice of you to be there for me… Say hello to me next time you’re in the neighborhood.

BOBBY: Will do! I ‘ll talk to ya later. Bye, Dirty Martini!

Bobby walks off.

LADY: (To herself) You got that right.

She walks into her apartment and unleashes her wrist on the door, slamming it shut extremely hard and loud, echoing down the street.

Bobby hears this, smiles and then pulls out the 30 thousand dollar check and heads straight to the bank.

THE END

Man, I can always dream…. See ya next time.