This man doesn't deserve a kitchen.

Peanut butter sandwich and a glass of wine.

Leftover tri-color pasta with cold jar sauce, followed by Ben and Jerry's.

Two peanut butter sandwiches and a beer.

Yes, these are all things I've dared to call dinner during my adult life. My adult life is everything from college up to 10:45 today.

I think that if I were to describe my lifelong consistent eating habits to a dietitian over the phone, he or she would render into a sketch pad a portrait of me that would include the following qualities:

Fat.
Bad skin.
Thinning hair.
Poor gums.
Bowel irregularity.(though I'm not sure how this would be drawn in a portrait)
Dodgy breath.(again, hard to sketch realistically, but may be indicated as necessary with stink lines.)
Subpar eyesight.
Poor muscle tone.
Scoliosis.
Bulging ankles.
Under-eye puffiness.
Premature deafness.
Some skull shrinkage.
Receding penis.

Lord knows how I've gotten away with looking as polite as I currently do. I give it a year, tops, before all - not just some - of the above conditions come to light upon this vessel God made out of healthy Semitic sex cells, fertilized in love, not anger, only a few decades ago.

Soon I won't be able to make it up a flight of stairs without pausing to collect one or more teeth on the lino.

I will breathe like a hippo. I will buy Cuban shirts by the crate.

I will transform. It's coming.

It's coming.

For, this I vowed long ago: that I will learn how to play Major 7th chords and how to do a Liverpool accent and how to get in touch with long suppressed memories for the benefit of a paying audience - but I will never, ever learn to take care of myself.

How I go.

I sit at the big table now.

Doesn't it look serious.

Yes, well, that's how it feels too.

It doesn't belong to me, of course.

This is the banquet table in the dining room of the four room room apartment in which I'm staying for the next few weeks. This is the dining room table at which I learn the lines for my script and enjoy the odd beer I've nicked from the fridge.

This is where my employer is storing me temporarily while I work on this new play. The new play I'm in called "Maria/Stuart."

And I thought it might be interesting to capture myself on film in this location. It's only night number two of my stay, but already it's starting to feel a bit creepy. Like an old stately home in the English countryside occupied by a single youth, knocking about among the cobwebs and kicking cans along its endless staircases.

Of course there are no cobwebs in this apartment. But its size and its comparatively unfinished state (it's two flats recently knocked into two, with a second bathroom still being built) make me feel a bit David Copperfield-ish. Or is it a bit Jack from "The Shining"-ish? Something about size and singlehood combined, even though this is far from the middle of nowhere, and it isn't even a house.

I must have someone over for dinner. Preferably a family of eight.

And preferably a family of eight who are not my family. Like, the family from The Godfather or something. Like, the key eight from One or Two.

Brooklyn Botanical Heartache

After being single for a long time, people start to pick on you. They begin to look at you in disbelief. Either that - or after being single for a long time you start to think people are picking on you or looking at you in disbelief.

I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens today for the first time, just because I thought I should. 52 acres of meticulously landscaped floral heaven smack dab in the center of a sooty New York borough. I am unemployed, and have been living practically next door to the damn thing for three years. I figured I just shouldn't delay any longer. Telling people I've never been to the BBG was getting embarrassing.

It was nice, I suppose. I mean, I think eight dollars is a bit much to ask, but I guess it was... nice. But it's funny how they treat you like a criminal in some places when you're single. Like, when I walked through the garden entrance after paying admission, I set upon one of the two diverging paths. Right away, a security guard, who was standing near a golf cart chatting with two groundsworkers, called out, "Um, excuse me!"
I stopped where I was, already indignant. "Yeah?"
"Can I help you?" I stared at him blankly, then shrugged.
"You have your receipt?"
I waved the Garden map and pamphlet I had just been given at the gate, thinking that was proof enough that I was a fully paid customer. It wasn't.
"You have a receipt you can show me? Would you permit me to look at it?"
I pulled out my wallet and dug out the tiny bit of paper that was my receipt. The black-clad guard took out his pen and poked a hole in it. "Okay, my friend, I'm just checking to make sure they didn't overcharge you. So I'm on your side, okay? You have a great day."
"Thanks, you too."

My first thought was, "fucking Brooklyn." But my second thought immediately after was, "Jesus Christ, when you walk into a place like this on your own, a single young guy, they think you're in the wrong place, or that you're up to something. If you don't walk in holding hands with your wife, or surrounded by 18 kids in matching yellow t-shirts, then you are a fucking weirdo. Your natural aroma of desperation is not good for this historic garden and its ancient trees. You are tainted. Seriously, what the fuck are you doing here?"

Honestly, I don't know what I was doing there. I just wanted to see it.

There were fourteen school groups there, all in different colors of matching T-shirts.

As a certain Mancunian songwriter once crooned in the middle-1980's, shortly after declaring that a certain female monarch was no more: "Life is very long when you're lonely."

Goodbye (for now) party for me on July 9th. Please come!

This photo of me in a roadside motel in Fort Klamath, Oregon has little or nothing to do with my leaving town for the next two months. I just dig it. I look like a guy who enjoys a good cup of joe on a cold night by a roaring electric fire in the Pacific Northwest - a.k.a., a murderer or some kind of sexual deviant. (There was wine in that coffee mug, 'nuff said?)

Anyway, I am leaving town for two months starting in July. I am hosting a little music party to say goodbye. Some might call it a "gig" or a "show." I'm calling it a party that happens to have a stage and microphones!

I've got a brand new shiny guitar! Please come hear it. I will also have brand new shiny songs! Please talk to your neighbor and say rude things during them.

When: Wed July 9th, 7:30pm.
Where: Parkside Lounge. 317 E. Houston Street (corner of Attorney St.), New York's Lower East Side.
Where, visually: MAP
Why: Because sex is fun. (Wait, that didn't make any sense. But, you never know how these things turn out.)

I think it would be fantastic to have a mother of a blowout at this thing. Those of you who know, well, you know my songs are guaranteed to entertain. And those of you who don't... What I wouldn't give to be you, hearing them for the first time.

Plus, it's early enough that you can go do other things afterward. Like have sex.

Eli's Music: CLICK

All the best,
Eli

Camembert, perhaps.

I don't write in this stupid thing enough. I can't even call myself a blogger, which is a title of dubious distinction to begin with, but at least it means you've been writing consistently and faithfully in the same spot, long enough to earn readership, or at least a degree of derision in the greater media world.

Consistently and faithfully are not the adverbs I would use to modify any of the verbs I attach to myself.

That last sentence could use a rewrite. But that would require faith and consistency. This is why no one's deriding me anywhere. Except maybe at the Ben Sherman store in SoHo, where I returned a shirt today.

But now my fingers are moving across the keyboard at lightning speed. Look at this. I am indeed "typing" if not writing.

I believe that New York coffee shops are designed as places to bring coffee shop employees together to have a good time. It is not geared toward patrons and their enjoyment. Patrons get to enjoy saying to their friends, "I'm at the coffee shop at 5th Ave and 13th," or "I was at the coffee shop all day, working on my screenplay." There's a romance about it in the big city. I fall sucker to it consistently. (look at that!) However, I never get any work done. And no one ever comes to the coffee shop to meet me. That's because the music is too loud, the coffee tastes like my ass, there is more often than not NOTHING to eat except almond biscotti, and the staff act like hipster monkeys grooming each other, going "Eek eek aaa! aaa!" while they paw at each other's butts and bump up the volume on Vampire Weekend.

And to add insult, they've all gotten rid of their Wi-Fi. They won't even let you pay for it. Sorry, we don't have it. That's when I conclude that they don't really want me there. You have no reverence for my ass in your seat. You have no desire to be the Paris to my Ernest Hemingway. You want me out as quickly as possible so you can go back to your conversation on scuba diving. That is when your ten-coffee punch card becomes useless to me.