Sugar in My Bowl

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

2:29am. Nina Simone echoed through the apartment. She was included on a mix that BTreotch had assembled and shared with our group of friends (and the internets as a whole when he wrote about it over at Coventry). I think about BTreotch often because he's in Antarctica. The notion that I have a friend living and working on that continent baffles me. I mean, how many people are in Antarctica on a daily basis? 1,000? 10,000? 420,000?

If I had one of those virtual assistants in Banglore, I'd ping him right now and get him to pull up population stats for Antarctica. I could do it myself, but I'm too lazy, but more importantly, it would disrupt the flow of writing. These days, it's hard to get a good flow going, because as soon as I do, there's other work to be done and my allotted time has expired to write for myself, the free writes, and to just let 'er rip and ramble on and on.

2:35am. Nicky is hard at work. She's still working on an assignment. A half dozen of my friends are also on the same project. Sometimes they are up until 6am. Sometimes until noon. I guess that we're lucky that we're on the left coast and it's not as hard adjusting to the bizarre hours. All I know is that Nicky was brewing up a pot of coffee at the start of Saturday Night Live. I got a flashback to friends from Brooklyn who used to cut up lines and let 'em rip during the cold open of SNL. That was in the 90s when Chris Farley and Phil Hartman were gods among men. Both artists are no longer with us, which makes the world a lot less funny and I fucking miss Lionel Hutz cameos on The Simpsons. Phil Hartman absolutely nailed the heart and soul of the slithery alkie ambulance chaser. And he did that wit just his voice. He was a true artist.

I got shitfaced once my assignment was complete. I had too. It's the only way I can sleep these days. I'm having trouble sleeping. It's all stress induced. I should probably eliminate the stress in order to get better sleep, but if I had no stress, then I would have nothing keeping me up in the middle of the night worrying about the world imploding and getting flushed down the toilet like a grumpy turd.

I watched Citizen Kane the other afternoon. I had a couple hours of down time, part of one of the benefits/drawbacks of this project, because at times I can be sitting around for a couple of hours waiting and waiting to spring into action and write the story -- but sometimes the story doesn't unfold until much later than I'd like -- but such is the nature of news. We can anticipate it happening, but it's not until it happens before we can actually document it. And then, depending on who is signing our paychecks -- either whitewash it, spin it, applaud it, bury it, stroke it, walk all over it, investigate further, or throw a Molotov cocktail at it add watch it explode.

A good story to me is something that has an element of surprise.... Hell's Angel saves grandma from choking in diner. Shit like that. Paraplegics climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro could be inspiring, but sometime I think it's not news, they are just showing off, or rather it's the Man trying to remind us that we're lazy fucktards because if we had any ambition for exercise or athletics, we'd be training for a triathlon, or climbing our own mountains instead of eating cold pizza, ripping bong hits, and flipping through the channels.

2:48am. The music has switched to Lack of Afro, sort of a postmodern funk band from the U.K. that my buddy Homer introduced me to. It's perfect writing music, driving back beats, and lots of funk riffs.

So anyway, I started talking about Orson Wells and I got side track. I first saw Citizen Kane in a film class in high school. I had to view it again for two different film studies classes in college. During certain scenes, I got flashbacks of sitting in darkened classroom in high school with the projector flashing (our teacher was a Luddite and refused to show the classic film to us on a TV using a VCR). I remember that I used to get stoned in the bushed behind White Hall before film class. That's where all the stoners puffed down prior to screenings, well, come to think of it, it's where they got high all the time.

2:54am. Time for me to finish off a slice of cold pizza that has been whispering my name the last three hours. I'm at the part of the night when I make a decision to rage it up until dawn and stumbled into the diner to beat the church rush, or ease off the pedal a bit and wind down for the rest of the night, get a good night's rest, so I'll be fresh and rest for another assignment tomorrow. I should, but I know better. The 3am hour is when things really get cooking. It's when vagrants and drunks into the most trouble and when some of world's problems are solved by late night brain storming sessions, or from just folks worrying about their biggest fears -- and coming to grips with a method on how to solve it. Yeah, 3am only comes around once a day. How many times are you up for it? When the alley dogs bark in a frenzied reaction to the lunatics roaming the slums of Beverly Hills and howling at the moon. Beware of the cougars suffering from Botox poisoning. Once that shit seeps into your brain, you suffer from zombie-like effects, walking around with the undead trying to bite off the heads of small pets, rodents, and municipal workers.