–Short story I’m writing online. Broken in little parts. –

B-A-N-G. That wasn’t a gun, no. Worse then a bullet or I imagine so. The column on 323 Madison walks off without a dent, the marble green shows hints of red. My hand reaches back interfering with the vibrations the skull emitted. Somewhere on the ground Loren continues her rambling while my eyes feel like the Hoover dam.
My blurred vision stares at my hand, some parts of the brain are working overtime, the hamster that spins in his wheel spins faster calling on the heart to speed up his production. In the distance a mumbled “Hey! Are you there.” Forced me to grab the lost metallic artifact from the sidewalk.
“Yeah, Just hit my head.” I explained. Rather then giving any sign of compassion Loren continued her banter. This time about her job, the one that she hates, regrets ever accepting and has been quitting for the past five years. There are only six banters and on her banter scale the job is only a level five out of ten. My hand retrieved more red warm liquid from my cracked skull as her voice spiked to volumes that only dogs hear.
“Loren I have to call you back, I …” I spat out, a little cracked, as she interrupted with her normal plea.
“Fine.” She screeched, then the call droped as my wrist followed that motion of snapping shut the cancerist object that my life depends on. I contemplate of calling someone about the bump growing above possibly damaged brain cells or just enter the building and find a bathroom. After all, the show must go on.

Tags: My Head, New York City, Short Story, Writing
| Posted by Terry | 3 Comments »

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It is not the concept of loosing that has me down lately but more of the failure to realize that I might be on a loosing streak. Besides not keeping up with this and my other blogs, my apartment (how long till people realize the nicer I dress means I haven’t done a laundry in a while), ordering fast food is too easy in NYC since even McDonald’s Delivers, and of course the self inflicting curiosity of the fall tv season, what will suck and what will I tivo but still stay up and watch at the same time. All that might not look too bad but when adding the feeling of isolation, a good friend leaving town another on a verge of leaving and lonely old me writing a book for a year without settling on how the first chapter is going to start, or how dark or witty the character should be. It seems when your trying to aim for a bulls-eye the best way to get it is to take a whole bunch of darts walk up to the board and stab them hard into the red.

Cheating?

Maybe but it looks good, as long as everyone’s heads were too busy drinking or looking for a mate. What is the point of trying so hard with out a round of cheating, fudging, bluffing, blaming someone else or just not recalling your mistakes. After all that works for our current administration, but its kind of hard for a writer to cheat. Its hard to cheat on creativity, or to charge yourself back in for another round, another rewrite, another chapter where the hero reveals his inner self or just sits around playing spin the bottle with a three hundred year old female ghost.

It seems to me while I write it gets harder and hard to rewrite since once I change a small part back on page 1 it disturbs something that was written on page 62, and then that reflects another opinion on other pages which ultimately makes me think of the butterfly effect and then to those butterfly art pieces that freak me out since they look so real that I want to grab a net but there glued to some glass casing (only happened once.) Is a year to long not to be done with your first draft of your first novel? That isn’t a clear or interesting question since I’ve heard some people take decades, and others only months, I’ve never been called fast and use to have a nickname Turtle but thought it was because I was a little timid, well maybe thick headed.

As we throw our ideas out onto the dartboard of hell, and wish for a bulls-eye, it seems cheating might not be the only way but its also a great inspiration. Looking back at our placement of the darts, we can describe them, how they sit, how they puncture into the red crisp of our creative mind drawing the blood to the surface again and we can forget that we didn’t follow the rules getting them there, that when everyone turned there backs or kissed there girls I was alone for those ten seconds to use my creative genius sparking the inner pressure to impress. Yet most of the people around will never believe me, for proper reasoning, again be left by myself to come up with another original piece without bending the rules and need to make the time between work, eating (cooking instead of Chinese), cleaning, classes, working out and other things that distract you while living in New York like the riding on the subway. Have you noticed the increase number of young girls dying there hair riding the subway lately? Maybe that’s for another post… Maybe I’ll leave the darts on the red dot for a little while longer and gloat.

Tags: Blogging, New York City, Rant, Writing
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Okay. Someone broke the water cooler in the sky on this hot Tuesday in NYC. Ever wonder about the sky being blue. I mean blue is seen as a depressing color. When your blue, your either choking or depressed. So if the sky is blue then does that mean God is choking or depressed. I mean it’s so lovely outside, well besides the 99 degrees plus humidity factor, that it would be amazing God wasn’t in his bathing suite soaking up the sun with all those angels. But then why is Blue such depressing color, it’s a cold color even if its hot outside.So on a blue day look towards the sky and let the warmth of the heavens above melt those feelings away. Because there is no reason to feel down when the sun is burning a hole in your head.

Anyway, that’s just a random thought for this hot Tuesday.

Tags: Just Me, New York City, Rant
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$198.95 for a pair of jeans,
the number echoed inside.
My ears heard before the eyes.
Sitting across with a bag
orange and green by her feet.
A voice next to me questioned
she asked about the brand
about the jeans, about the fit.
The answer struck me
hurt my insides.
The jeans were no more,
fell out of the bag days ago
left on a seat of a bus
one like this.
$198.95 for a pair of jeans
ones that she never wore.
She smiled and said
I still have the bag!

Tags: New York City, Poetry, Writing
| Posted by Terry | 5 Comments »

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Wow… The blogging world got the short end of the stick for a couple of weeks there.  I have now started a new job and getting back onto a Mac is like riding a bike, but you still fall down a couple of times.  Now that the world seems to be slowing down, well for NYC standards, I will be back to the board… or the blog.

This morning the subway was packed, the sun being out and everyone trying to rush to work before the humidity sweats the morning coffee out of us, i couldn’t't get a seat. Standing rocking with the harsh sounds of the breaks I could only wonder when was the last time they squirted W-40 on them.  Is it me or when you hear metal on metal that should be a warning??  I realized this morning as I got out of the station there is nothing surreal then after the rain washes everything away.  You come out to a blue-sky day after the rain and you might not even need coffee…  Well it was a thought.  I grabbed my coffee and went back into the shadows of a Tuesday workday.

So I’m back and my front too, as my mind jumps back into the creative highway trying not to crash, or get caught like Lindsay Lohan with a DWI (Drinking while on the Internet).   Its time for some creative writing and creative writing tips, along with a daily subway ride…

Tags: Just Me, New York City, Rant
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It seems that many people enjoyed my last subway story… I have many many more to write. Living in New York its part of you, traveling close to strangers, each day another unfamiliar face. In a way it is almost art, a sad truth of how truly lonely one can feel when so many people pass you within a couple of minutes. So here are my favorite posts inspired by the New York City Subway, I hope you enjoy them:

1. The Fallen Sandal
2. Will commute for caffeine
3. The Subway Guy…

Tags: New York City, Poetry, Subway, Writing
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The subway was a wild ride this morning. If you’ve ever been on the NYC subway you will understand that its better then any reality tv show ever!!! This morning on the daily ride it was kind of weird. A guy sat across from me with a big brown bag, he had a suit and tie on and big bulky half balled earphones black with red lines before the cushy part. Nothing out of the ordaniry till he changed his CD. Opened the bag, pulled out a case of CD mixes, blank CD’s with read writing on them – I could only see one of them that said Terrorism Mix.

The expression of the girl next to him was priceless as she contuied to listen to her iPod. I don’t know if it was the fact that he was flipping through that old technology called a CD case or the strange and awkward labels the man had on the CD’s. While this was going on another man handed that guy a piece of paper. The older man who handed him the paper was in my right-side blind spot since we were sitting on the same side of the train. He was an artist, with a clip board and a pencil. The paper was a sketch of the CD-Player guy. I peeped my head out and looked over at the artist and watched as he sketched a young girl who was rocking with the motion as her hand slide on the bar with every jump the train made. (more…)

Tags: iPod, New York City, Subway, Writing
| Posted by Terry | 7 Comments »

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My caffeine fix was no where in site. The bright orange subway seats had little effect on me as Foo Fighters DOA blasted from my iPod. Not your ordinary iPod, the five year old music player that can still give me a couple of hours of OBE(Out of Body Experience) a day. Across from me three girls with British, maybe Australian accents chatted as the vibrating bulbs flickered. I could hear them over “No ones getting out of here alive,” which engulfed me in my worse nightmare. Imagine being stuck on an eternal subway car with orange seats, three loud foreigners and that generic voice from above stating “We are being held momentarily…”. Yes that would be hell, but I had my heaven blasting through the inner ear, working its way into my drum but I felt bad for the old Chinese lady sitting next to me who was iPod-less. Would it have been modern edict to offer an earphone to help the lady drown out the down-unders who were passing one cup of coffee back and forth, sipping it and discussing how bad it tasted? The train squeezed through, pulsating like the way a snake digests its food, managing somehow to increase the volume of the three down-unders. The song now changed over to JEM’s ‘They’ which made me wonder if there was more to this simple situation. It seems where ever I go the music from my iPod enhances my situations.

This was just another morning commute which I felt “DOA” while ‘They’ turned my surroundings into a complex paranoia complex. Maybe ‘They’ (the three loud Australian girls) where watching me, following me, distracting me. Maybe this was the beginning of something new, random bunch of foreign girls piling onto the 1 train at 8am sipping each others coffee and rambling on about life… hmmm. Would be an interesting sitcom – Subway Foreigners – Hmmm maybe it’s just enough to publish as a blog post!

Rushing out of the sliding doors I raced for the corner coffee stand. He is a god in the city that never sleeps, a little guy in a silver box who brews cheap good coffee. Sipping away the paranoia slipped by as the iPod shuffled onward towards Gwen Stefani ‘hollaback Girl’ and I spotted the three lost foreigners turning and twisting a map, happily no longer could hear there cries as Gwen cursed them away. Once again the morning caffeine fix calmed the remaining nerves as I made my way to sit in front of a computer and watch my life whiz by me in binary.

Tags: Humor, iPod, New York City, Subway, Writing
| Posted by Terry | 1 Comment »

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The bus stop at Lincoln Center is always crowded. The construction from The Juilliard school makes things messy and it doesn’t help that a coffee shop is right in-front of the stop. Waiting makes you feel like buying a Cafe Latte and cheese croissant. Of course worst things can be done like yesterday’s Cellphone Borrower. A lady in her late thirties or early forties, who really knows these days, was moving her mouth as she stared at me. Of course I had no idea what she was saying and stupidly paused my iPod.

“Can I borrow your cellphone.” she asked.

“What?” I replied a little confused since moments ago “Garbage” was blasting “Paranoid” in my head.

“I need to make an urgent phone call, Its local.” She insisted and was only a foot from me. A true New Yorker who seemed to go over her caffeine intact for the day. The confusion out weighed my paranoia and my cellphone was in the hands of a complete stranger. The bus pulled up, unusually quick and the droves of patient people hogged the entryway.

I made sure she walked in front of me, since my head was thinking of a story about Kevin Spacey who lent a kid in London his cellphone and after the kid started dialing numbers he ran off with it. She entered and sat down in the handicap/elderly area as I slide my metro card in the slot and stood above her. She yapped along for a good five minutes, as I heard her converse with someone about their day. As we got to the next stop, she finally handed me my phone back since I was hanging over her like a trained monkey. By time I got a seat she had already borrowed the cellphone from a young guy sitting across from her.

Her white, rather large, hat and loud voice as she yelled on the phone to the poor soul at the other end made her the center of bus-attention. The old blind man sitting next to her laughed at loud as the Cellphone Borrower snipped at another lady who told the young guy he should get his phone back before she runs off with it.

On the other side of the park she returned the guys phone and raced off the bus. As we passed her barely moving cross town I watched as she stopped yet another man random man on the street. He took out his phone and she started dialing again. I call her the Cellphone Borrower but it was more like Tarzan swinging from branch to another. The bus turned up Madison and I sat back in my seat smiling. The city that never sleeps, never stops surprising me neither.

Tags: Humor, Just Me, New York City
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After a long day at the office all one wants to do on a Monday night is go home, grab a beer and watch lasts nights tivo’d desperate House wives. That would of been a nice Monday night in the city, instead, I opened the apartment door and noticed something on the rug. Turning on the light, yellow dust filmed the green carpet in my hallway and didn’t stop there. The dust was everywhere, the floor, desk, inside the kitchen over the counters, inside the cabinets pasted to the pots, forks knifes and spoons. Walking through it, my shoes left little treads around the apartment.

It seems your never safe from your neighbors renovation. The nice young lady next door had torn her kitchen completely out that day, well not her but the construction people she hired. I of course would rather picture the blond with a sledge hammer pounding away the wall as her Maltese barks after every loud crash. Everyone in the building waiting for the dogs Last Bark! Instead three Spanish speaking guys with ripped jeans, thick accent and plastered smiles broke down the wall and the next morning vacuumed and wiped up the mess. The microfibers of the concrete they were smashing made its way through tiny little holes inside my kitchen wall that is opposing her kitchen wall but never touches, touching kitchen walls would be in violation as would be some sort of insulate.

Since the place was already a mess and I was in no mood to see which Desperate house wife was getting, slapped, dumped or shot at this week I decided to exit the situation in New York fashion. Calling around I ended up getting an early dinner (8pm) with a friend at Jekyll and Hyde Club since she had out of towner’s who needed a place to snap some pictures and ask “why on earth would someone actually eat here?” After an evening of live entertainment, theater students acting as crazy scientists and talking shark heads, I did return home, opened a beer and watched the show. After a hard day and unexpected events its good to watch a show that people actually suffer more then you. Long live Desperate House Wives.

Tags: Humor, Just Me, New York City, TV, Writing
| Posted by Terry | No Comments »

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