FireVaney's

August 2, 1999   Honest to God (although I’m an atheist) this all happens:  I’m not hungry but I tag along with Jorge and Clayton to that greasy spoon on Clark and order an omelet anyway.  Lemme back up. It’s way past midnight and we’re walking along Clark, near where that greasy spoon is. You can tell by the unlit lampposts and un-signaling traffic signals that most of Clark is still powerless. * Maybe my AC, Jorge’s AC, Clayton’s AC, or all three of our ACs together , blew the neighborhood transformer. That greasy spoon’s lights are on, though; so we go in and grab a booth by a window. And like I said before, I ordered an omelet I didn’t need. On the jukebox in the corner, pop classics by the likes of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor are followed by modern classics by the likes of Prince and Mariah Carey. Clayton orders the most cheese chocked-filled omelet I’ve ever seen. He spends more time forking gobs of melted cheese away from the rest of the omelet’s eggy-ness than he does actually

10/24/2001 : Would you believe I was standing beneath the lit marquee of the Music Box Theater this evening, reading an Emily Dickinson chapbook? I was, but I was doing a poor job of it. And, no, I wasn’t there specifically to read poetry. But I might’ve been the first dude to read Dickinson at that particular location. And, no, I wasn’t reading it aloud. * In fairness (to me), I hadn’t thought to read it aloud. I bring a book or a magazine along wherever I go, just in case it rains. Gotta have something to hold open over my head. Can’t have a sudden shower muck up my carefully sculpted helmet of hair. And if I want something to read, I’ll take an umbrella. But seriously, it’s all about the waiting. If city life doesn’t cultivate patience, then it definitely cultivates insanity. If I find myself waiting (anywhere) beyond the walls of my apartment without something to read, I’ll end up gazing at the passersby, instead. They might gaze back. They won’t smile, though. Never mind if

I chew a lot of gum at night when the rain pours down the chimney and the tomatoes don’t sing their happy little song to me. This credit card will not eat my juice because it is not liquid Jell-O that I have not served in a Tupperware container from 1982. I must pause now to pick my nose. The noise sounds shaper this week to my right ear. All noise sounds shaper. The noise shows daller in my left ear this week. All noise to the left sounds daller. Or duller. And sharper. No. It’s either or. It’s either daller or shaper. The dogs won’t drink the water that is set out for them at night. Why does everything have to happen during the day when the sky isn’t blue and my car won’t start eating pooh? The sound of the sound isn’t the sound at all. Instead, it’s the sound of noise. You know the sound of noise. If you don’t, tune your TV to a cableless, station-less broadcast station, if you can. You want good, ole fashion broadcast “ snow .” Dat there’s noise, pure and simple. Or, or, or, visit

A laugh from hell woke me up at four o’clock this morning. It emanated, or so it seemed, from the same semi-distant place where I often hear the laughing woman. * But this new laugh, the laugh from hell, it was definitely male in nature, if not in origin. Call it incontinent, this laugh. This laugher laughed so hard it must have hurt. What sort of bloody sod laughs harder than is nearly humanly possible at four in the morning, and again thirty minutes later, and once more at five o’clock? You’d have thought the cackles were forced out of him the same way a small child squeezes a rubber ducky to death. I tell you, this laugh, it was a laugh of agony. The way you’d puke and shit out some serious food poisoning — like lose ten pounds overnight to the toilet kind of food poisoning — that’s how hard this loon laughed. Mayhap he could not sob. Say some psychological or biological impairment stifled his tears. So, instead, he laughed — laughed at it all and all of a sudden. It certainly see