Not All Are Marbles

It's morning.

I yawn. It feels as if I just got into bed. I knew my day would be like this. Fucked up from the starting gate. I rise, I'm not hungry, I'm not cold. I'm not doing all that good either. There's a storm cloud over my head. I don't know what's put it there. I know one thing...I need to get out of this room before I go stir crazy. The problem with going completely stir crazy is that you lose your mind and want to stay in the very same confines that are making you nuts.

Take it from a man that doesn't have all of his marbles, you want to loose your mind if you stay in the same place for long, but this is the same place that you want to be. Get it? Madness is that way. It feeds on itself as well as it feeds itself. When you find yourself in this cyclic behavior, you're losing your comportment. Trust me. You're fraying at the ends.

I hate the commute downtown with TWO backpacks to Otto's. It's one of the most distressing commutes that I can describe. But then I hate commuting from 96th Street ANYWHERE. I just hate 96st Station. I hate the 1,2,3 lines because they are always so cramped. For a Brooklyn Boy already used to the luxuriant space of the F line, these other lines seem like torture. I don't know how people do it day in and day out to get to work. I'm surprised that there aren't more acts of violence of the subways. And I'm doing it all with two bags in my hands.

Which brings me to my showers again. Today, I wanted a hot shower, a comfortably hot shower, so I skipped Northwestern bathroom and took the Southwest. Here is where I felt there was some heat to the water. I grab towel and soap and head in. I lay my shit out, undress and then pull the lever. It's one of those circular valves. I pull it up a one quarter turn. The water comes out cold. I pull it towards one half turn. It gets colder, so I pull it back to the quarter turn spot and hop in. Its cold causing my balls to rise up into my body. THAT's when you know when something is cold! I hop about under the stream, rubbing my arms, trying to warm them up, lathering up good with the bar of soap. Then, something in my mind tells me that maybe I shouldn't have pulled the leaver all the way up to a quarter turn. Maybe less than that would give me some heat? Eureka!! I move the lever back down, and guess what? HEAT. Yes, that's right, righteous heat. My balls start to lower, the goosebumps leave my arms, my teeth stop chattering. Fuck, all this time. I amaze myself. What took me so long for THAT revelation??

It's crazy! It's just crazy!

Today is the SHOUT OUT. I meet DJ Bensonhurst at a nearby Starbucks. I'm so hyper about the SHOUT OUT that I'm an entire half an hour early to meet up with DJ. When he arrives I calm down a notch, because he's my co-host for today. He drives us out to OTTO's where we sit in the warm car and wait for Cyndi Lauper to arrive to open up. Poets are already waiting out in the bitter cold to go in. Thank God Cyndi got there on time. She's getting bette with the time thing.

We set up quickly and start at 4:30PM. DJ hosts the entire first half and does well. He seems comfortable up on the stage, cracking jokes and returning wisecracks from the audience. Something that I couldn't do, that's for certain. I check the names. WE HAVE A FULL HOUSE already down on the list of readers. That's the first that I've ever saw that happen before. Because of this, I pack in as many readers as I can in the first half hour before the feature. During the break I go and ask DJ if he would like me to take over the second half. He says no, he has it. Shit. What am I to do, argue?? I appreciate the break from the stage. We roar right into the second half, with Bob Heman getting up to do his feature, reading from his published/unpublished works and bringing the house down.

From there we have a row of comedians and poets and then it is all over, wrapping up only five minutes late. I break down the stage and put everything away, packing away the rest in my bags and we all head out into the night. I hop into DJ's car and we head over to a polish diner for dinner.

POLISH FOOD. This was a first for me ever. So I do what every red blooded American would do, and got a combo platter of stuffed cabbage, kielbasy, prerogis and something else. This way, if I fucked up my choice, I had something else to fall back on. It came back piled high on the plate and steaming. When I say, piled high, I mean in the form of a mountain on your plate, steaming like a live volcano. Shit. Covered with gravy, fried, swollen. I said go to Hell to my diet and dove right in. I had never tasted so many down to Earth flavors before. Everything was familiar and yet wildly different. I pounded down the food, grateful that I was hungry, and saddened when I grew full. I had never eaten polish before. It was mind boggling.

We left swollen, like a pair of circus balloons, moving slowly through the cold of the night to the car and then uptown to my place. DJ came upstairs and we hung around for awhile. Upon entering he stopped and noticed my piss bottles lined neatly against the trash pail. I had yet to discard them, like I normally would have. He noticed the pile of neatly stacked dirty clothes in the corner of the room, commenting on the size of the room. Then he returned his attention to the piss bottles once more. He could not wrap his mind around the piss bottles.

Well, when I don't feel like putting clothes on at two in the morning when I wake up, and taking my key and walking down the hall to take a piss, so I go in a bottle. "Jesus, nobody is questioning that," he replies. "But why do you have them lined up?? Five bottles of them?" I notice that there are five bottles. Was I THAT lazy this week? DJ relates the story of another 'sick fuck' who collected his urine. "I'm not meaning you," he says, laughing. I have to laugh too. There is something sick about saving your own waste. But I'm not saving them for crissakes! It's with the trash! I aim to throw them out when I toss the trash again. I get up and put them in a bag. Besides, they have to get out of here before I have my housing inspection on Tuesday. DJ still can't wrap his head around the bottles.

Whatever.

We chill until he gets tired and splits. I am too exhausted to do much online although I try. I strip down, crawl in and find sleep. It was a long day.

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