Fuckin' NJTRANSIT:

If any of you have taken NJTransit for any reason then you really don’t have to read much further down. You already know the hell it is to have no other viable option to get to the city from certain parts of New Jersey. I’m not fuckin around here, its pretty bad. There are certain people who are always on this forsaken form of transportation. A few key people who you can bet your last dollar that they are there. They are the following.

Mr.Knees – You see him walking down the aisle towards you, he looks decent enough. He does not reek of urine, this is a bonus. Your average looking guy all the way around, until he sits behind you. Suddenly you are propelled forward in your seat at just below the speed of sound and strike the seat in front of you with enough force to cause a domino effect on all the passengers on your side of the train. People striking the seats in front of them with such force and velocity that the poor guy at the end of this lethal assault explodes into a bloody mist of vapor gore and bone and hair! The guy behind you… his knees are so far up into the back of your seat you can look down at your chest and make out the pattern of the cloth on his pants because its poking through your skin. Its like leaning back on a javelin the whole ride and he constantly moves his feet around to cause maximum discomfort. Maximum Discomfort is a priority in the njtransit system.

Mr.Cuddles – No matter how empty your bus or train is, no matter what time of day you travel. Mr. Cuddles will want to sit with you. You could have a pyramid of eggs, a landmine and three cases of Rattlesnakes in the seat beside you that you are transporting. You could even have a tattoo on your forehead that reads “Poor Impulse Control”. This guy wants you to move everything out of his way so he can sit down next to you. It does not matter that the seat in front of and behind you are completely empty. It does not matter how harsh a look you cast at him. It does not matter what you say or do, because this man is getting that seat if he has to stand the whole way home while you clear it off for him. Mr. Cuddles is incapeable of riding any form of transportation while sitting in a seat by him self. This guy is a relative of Mr. Knees too. He is not content now with having the seat next to you, no not quite content yet. He wants your seat too. And he is going to inch over ever so slowly closer to you the entire trip. His knees and elbows will seem to be slowly expanding and taking up more and more of your room until you are pressed so tightly against the window that you yourself are becoming transparent. This is his goal. The irony of this guy is astounding. He can not sit without you, yet he can not stand you sitting next to him. This guy I would love to kill. I would love to place my hand on his forehead for leverage, reach into his mouth and take hold of his bottom jaw and yank it off. And then I would like to punch him in the neck and face with his own jaw continually. But before I get to violently agitated telling you about this guy, let me move on to…

Mrs. Mom – Mrs. Mom is the lady who sits next to you, infallibly, with a child or two who is not quite bus/train broken yet. While the majority of the haggard, desperate people on this form of transportation are hoping to catch a few minutes of peaceful sleep, or get some last minute work done, or perhaps to relax and read a nice book, Mrs. Mom has other plans. Mrs. Mom is going to inevitably do something to piss her kid off so bad that it is going to scream bloody murder for a full hour. You’ll be moments from peaceful sleep, or about to get to the most exciting part of your book, or developing a new formula for a undiscovered cure for cancer on your laptop when suddenly it sounds like someone ran over a sack of vocally enhanced cats. They will continue to yell and scream for the entire trip. Mrs.Mom will do absolutely nothing to stop this and get an attitude with anyone who looks at her sideways about the yelling. God forbid you actually mention it, she’ll fuckin kill you.There are more characters I will share with you as time goes on. For now I want these people to sink in to your psyche. Invariably, one or two or all of them are always on my bus or train and sitting infront, behind or next to me the whole time. I shit you not. I'll revisit this for you later.

The Dichotomies of Temperature:

My towel in hand, I am a brave adventurer. I know it is time once again to use this device, this chamber of suck. The shower at my apartment. I often think that it is a living thing. A demon thing. Something with a vicious vengeful spirit who’s only purpose is to cause hate and discontent in my world. Yes, true it gets me clean, but then again so would a sand blaster or some brillo pads. As I reach past the miracle curtain (Ill explain why I call it that in a moment) and pull the water nozzle out, the flow of water starts. This is all seemingly very normal. I adjust the nozzle between hot and cold to find a pleasingly gentle temperature. I step in and let the water cascade over my head and down my back and close the miracle curtain. It is at this point that all reality becomes unhinged. Egon in Ghostbusters said it best: “Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light”

Without warning or possible explanation, completely outside the realm of probability, the temperature shoots up. Wayyyy up. Like dangerously close to achieving nuclear fission hot. Of course my skin registers this, all the normal and expected pain messages are being sent, the brain is getting them but its mistakenly filed under “Bullshit” because nothing can be this hot. Before the annoying pain messages stack up to the point where the brain can no longer ignore this alarm, like a photographic negative the temperature shoots down. Wayyyy down. Even Lord William Thomson Kelvin, who developed the idea of the "Second Law of Thermodynamics", would be surprised and intrigued by this absence of heat. How does water stay liquid at absolute zero? How does my skin stay attached to my flesh? How am I possibly still alive? I did mention that reality becomes unhinged, didn’t I? I was not kidding. Then the granddaddy of all suck appears, the miracle curtain. Yes, that cheap piece of shit plastic curtain that I originally thought was a good idea at first. The curtain that is supposed to keep the shower water in the shower and off my floor. Supposed to keep a stable temperature between the rest of the bathroom and the interior of the shower. (hahahahahahaha… sorry). But what it does best would have the guys at Elmer’s, Crazy Glue, and Velcro pissing themselves for joy. It becomes a self propelled, intelligent predator. With the ability to keep its surface from sticking to anything at all, however bonding to my skin at a level so deep I can taste and cry polyvinyl chloride. No wait, stop and picture this. No, really its amusing. Me. The Dichotomies of Temperature blasting out of my shower head. My miracle curtain bonding to me and wrapping itself all over my limbs and leaking water all over my floor. You’re laughing aren’t you? Please god, laugh for me .. laugh or Ill cry.

There is one more thing to share about my showering experience. One final blow to my sanity. The last kick to the teeth before the day is ready to progress. As I fiddle with the nozzle in an attempt to stabilize the temperature, all the while fighting the curtain, and withholding the desire to scream and punch everything around me the curtain is whisked away. Pulled away from me as if by angels and I am free. Or am I? No.. I am not.. it was pulled off of me by my girlfriend who pokes her head in and removes every last shred of dignity I had, looks me up and down and yells in the aforementioned sonic blast voice “Hurry the fuck up, you take longer showers that a woman!” Having just suffered the scathingly cold air and fought the sub Kelvin scale temperatures of the water, you can well imagine, if you are a man, what that does to your nether region. I don’t care if your John motherfucking Holmes or Tommy Lee. When your “cock and ball housing group” is exposed to dangerously low temperatures it shrinks. Yeah.. so there I was. Shivering, naked, wet, not even fully awake, being yelled at. Pathetic. But the shower has ended and its time to dress. Heh.. talk to ya soon..

A digression:

I am going to take a small break from my tale to talk to you about the simple pleasures in life. Keeping in mind these are very personal and you may have the same or completely different ones. Normally a day in the life just moves along, you are carried along by it because time will not stop for you and you don’t have much of a choice. Sometimes however, sporadically during your day, something will amuse you. Brighten your day. I had one such occurrence today and I thought I would share it with you. I am a smoker, yes I partake of the great white cylindrical death enhancer. The cancer stick. Thus far I will say the whole experience has been somewhat non-rewarding. It is a means of self destruction that takes entirely too long and leaves your clothes and fingers smelling poorly. I wish it would just hurry the fuck up and kill me already, but no such luck. Anyhow, I work in a building in Manhattan where there are several other smokers. One of them I see often and she smokes with me. Now normally we stand there and look at people walking by or stare into space. However today she decides to speak to me and she tells me a funny story. She says: “This guy starts talking to me in a bar last night, trying to pick me up and asking for my number. I asked him if he was married, he says ta me, ‘whats it maddah’ (she is a 4ft tall 50 something year old Italian woman, thus the phonetic spelling of some of her words.. for ambiance) so I sayz ta him, whaddaya mean whats it maddah? Where’s ya wife tonight?. He sayz ta me, ‘she’z at home with da kids’ I sayz ta him how do you know?” At this point I laugh outloud and award her several levels of respect. She told me that no more than 10 minutes after he gave up on her he was on his cell phone calling home. How funny is this? This pleases me. A simple pleasure but one that I felt the need to share. Ok, the story shall continue… back to my commute.

Lieing is bad:

It is at this time that I convince myself that I am in the process of getting up. Getting up out of bed and going to take my morning shower. But I just lied to my girlfriend, I am lieing to myself and its going to cost me. I can not help myself, my eyes just close and I am fast asleep once again, dreaming that wonderful dream. After all, why not catch a few more winks, right? I am partially deaf now so I should sleep even better. But what I do not expect, what I should not expect, but what is inevitable is… pain. Pain is coming. It is arriving on a galloping white mare, full plate mail armor and a sword of shining steel. Suddenly, without warning, the nerves in my big toe send an immediate SOS message to the brain stem.

“Holy shit, were taking heavy damage down here, I think were done for. Tendons are popping, the bone is creaking and I am pretty sure were being pulled completely off. Tell the other toes, Ill miss them, I never wanted it to end this way.. Good bye… good bye… aigggh”

This of course, no living being could sleep through and I spring immediately awake and check my surroundings. Confident that I am no longer in possession of my big toe and that it has been unceremoniously removed by violent means; I spot the face of my girlfriend. She is not smiling, this is good I suppose, I mean what kind of woman would be smiling while holding the recently severed big toe of her boyfriend, right? Don’t answer that… But I’m shocked to realize it is still attached and I know this because it is throbbing. This is the point where I realize that to remain in bed would probably result in further unpleasant abuse and I begin the attempt to move. First I roll over on my stomach. This way I can put my hands under my chest and give a half hearted push so I will slide down off the bed and onto the floor. Hopefully on my feet, but my knees will work if I get that far. I know, this sounds strange, but bear with me. Believe me, I am not a huge fat guy who can not get out of bed, I am amazingly spry when I am wide awake. But before my smoke and 2 cups of coffee, I am about as mobile as a cement truck with square wheels. This method is tried and true and seems to work for me. Try it sometime you might be surprised.. or not. So, here I am, hands under my chest and I am pushing. But ya know… it’s so comfortable like this. I mean.. the warmth of the blankets still covering me, the slight chill of the outside air dancing over the tips of my toes.. Well my one good toe and my nearly mutilated toe, that is. The throbbing is now a comfortable thud, singing in time with my heart beat. So… relaxing… and…

….. The Ears: “Ahem… wake up dude. I hear foot steps. No seriously she is coming back to check on you. Dear god, don’t let her see you fell back to sleep. Jesus, we saw what happened to the toe, we are just spongy cartilage, were your ears man... You need us!”

Fortunately I manage one last push and I feel the icy cold wooden floor make contact with my feet just as she pokes her head in and casts me a look that surely would have turned Medusa to stone and blasted her into tiny fragments of sand and blown her out the door and down the street. So off it is.. off to the shower. This is another adventure in itself.

“GET the FUCK out of BED!”:

Some people have an alarm clock. Some people have this internal alarm clock that magically wakes them up at the right time everyday. They are never late for work, they always catch the train or the bus and they are sitting at their desks at 9am smiling and ready to go. I am NOT one of these people. I will tell you why. I was stationed onboard one of our nation’s largest aircraft carriers during Desert Storm. A 5000 man floating city, with enough space to house several apartment buildings, a football field and a bowling alley or two. Hell, it had its own mini airport! Guess who slept directly under that airport? You guessed it. My bunk was directly under the main catapult. Some of you may have trouble understanding what this means. Your typical F-14 weighs roughly 76,000 pounds, how powerful would something have to be to propel this piece of machinery off the end of the flight deck at 125 knots (144 mph)? So powerful that when it did this the entire front end of this huge ship would shake like a bowl of Jell-O in a paint mixer. The BAM that the catapult made as it slammed into the front of the ship while launching these aircraft rivaled Emeril Lagassee with a ten thousand watt bull horn. The two together was like a mini nuclear explosion in my sleeping compartment every few minutes. Not normally conducive to favorable sleeping environments. I don’t imagine the people down at MIT studying REM and sleep patterns will often place mini-nukes under their patient’s beds. But I had to learn to sleep through this. And I had to learn to get a good nights rest and wake up feeling refreshed.

And guess what friends? I did. Much to my dismay, I retained the ability to sleep through even the most audibly assaulting, physically abusive situations you can imagine, many years after leaving the service. All forms of abuse save one… The Girlfriend.

Let me paint a picture for you. Let me lead you down the familiar path of peaceful sleep. You know the one I am talking about. The one where you are all stretched out, tucked in under the covers because it’s nice and cozy warm under there, and outside of that safe little environment it is about 40 degrees cooler. You are deep in the middle of one of your most pleasurable dreams of your life, hell, you’d be happy if you never woke up again. When suddenly… unexpectedly… you are absolutely certain that your ears were just impaled with rusty, electrified, barb tipped Ice Picks. Your heart actually stops beating for a minute just so it can ask the brain if everything is all right up there. All of the muscles in your body stiffen in a full on, cave man like, instinctual self-preservation mode. This causes you to rise up a few inches from the mattress, hands and arms outstretched to catch yourself, because now you’re in the air, and falling back to the mattress. You’re immediate concern is to check for blood coming from your ears, but the smiling, disarming face staring at you from the foot of the bed does not coincide with the twisted horror of a face that someone should have if they were staring at you and you looked as bad as you felt right that moment. That, my friends, is how loud I just heard the wonderful words “Get the fuck out of bed”. Allow me to pause for a moment… *deep breath*

You know how when you are going through your day and somewhere in some store, or on someone’s car radio you hear a part of a catchy song? And later on that day you find yourself humming it, or singing it and you can not get it out of your head no matter what you do? Yeah.. that song. Well mine is “Get the fuck out of bed.” How could it not be? I just heard that spoken to me at decibels that would shatter most glass and probably turn the heads of the deaf. Hey, they might not hear it but they could defiantly feel the massive air disturbance caused by her vocal cords. So the words are imprinted in my skull so I can replay them all day long. Isnt that lovely.

At this point the brain responds back to the heart “Yo, yeah its all good up here, sorry we just had quite a scare, all is well.” The heart responds back “Well do you think you could stop sending us all that adrenaline? We are working dangerously close to the death threshold down here and we haven’t even had our morning cigarette or cup of coffee.” …( a slight pause) .. “Oh! Right.. sorry bout that”. And the adrenaline stops. The heart slows back down and the brain, the blessed brain; it does something that is really not all that wise. It responds to the Girlfriend completely autonomous of any direction from “me”. Now when I say this I do not mean to say that my brain is separate from me. But there are times that I do things without thinking, without effort, and without any forethought or afterthought. No thought of consequence, coincidence or otherwise. Its called autopilot, you know you’ve been there. The brain responds to the girlfriend “Ok, I am up, getting up now.” This is a lie.

Lieing is bad...

Welcome to my hell! :)

Thanks for coming by and checking this out. You probably got here because you were doing a web search on something that interested you and this is what the search engine gave you. If that’s the case and you did not find what you are looking for, I am sorry in advance. If you were looking for this site, then I think it is safe to say either I know you personally or you have a penchant for self abuse. Maybe you can use the info you find here for self-discovery or maybe even a little chuckle at my pain. Make no mistake this site is about my pain. Why should you care? I don’t know. Maybe you will merely become quickly bored and make up your mind that I am in need of counseling... Deep, intensive counseling. Let me give you a little background on the author (that’s me) so maybe you can better appreciate what you will read.

I am a 34 year old Male. That alone speaks volumes for me I am sure. I am Eric Everybody, Christopher Common, Matthew Mundane. The most exciting thing I do everyday is to successfully get my deodorant on in the morning without getting any on the outside of my shirt. But I didn’t used to be a “nobody”. I used to have a pretty good life! But I’ll get more into that later. For now all you really need to know is that I live in New Jersey and I work in New York City. I am going to bring you up to speed on what my day is like soon enough, don’t you worry. But first we are going to have to cover some important facets of my day. Set the stage so to speak. It is important to me to get all this off my chest, share with you, the general public, my pain. You do of course remember that I told you this site is all about my pain, right? Well, if you’re still reading, this is the part you have been waiting for, the good stuff, the meat, the cream filling, all that and the bag of chips. Lets get started, shall we?