To Be Continued in a hap hazard state.

My guitar was broken. The action seemed to be messed up, but really the neck had been split in the ugliest of ways. I remembered dear Forbes and wrote the unenunciating fool a note. I left it on the door he told me he lived in and it read:

Hello Forbes! My guitar is fucked up! Perhaps you could help me fix it.

Sincerely,

Janel in 2R.

Later that day came a knock at my door. I had already grown too impatient after an hour an decided that I needed to take it to a shop and get a quote on the price to repair it. So when he knocked, I had nothing to offer but myself.

"You can come upstairs to my place if you'd like. My roommate and I are just having a couple of drinks and then heading to a holiday pot luck. You should join us."

"I'll be up in a minute", I said.

And in a minute or two I was climbing the two flights up. I knocked at the door and was met with a ferocious bark. It was the dog.

A Story Can Be Told Many Different Ways (Working Title)

I'm a block away from my apartment as I reach into my pocket and pull out my keys. With my hands I feel around the ring to find which key I'm going to need to get into my building. Around me, sirens whale and malnourished babies scream. Two men are in a scuffle just ahead outside of a bodega. The strange thing about the culture of my neighborhood is that I can never tell if people are actually fighting or just joking around. It's as if every conversation requires a raised voice if it's going to be meaningful.

The steps to my building loom in the distance and the closer I get my pace quickens. I try to look calm but I know fear is radiating off of me so much that if a pack of wild dogs were to run by, I'd be as good as dead. I pretend I am comfortable walking home at this time of night so as not to attract unnecessary attention. Who am I kidding? I'm a 5'4", 108 lb redhead who lives in the ghetto. People notice me.

I climb the stairs and get into my lobby. I'm in the vestibule and see what I believe to be a man behind me. I let out something like a scream but then realize that what I thought was a reflection was actually a man standing on the other side of the glass door, only looking hazy because it hasn't been cleaned in years. He looks up.

"You scared me", I said.

The man just looks at me. He's got curly hair and a guitar on his back. His face is angular and strange looking. He stands tall but something about his body seems to cave inward.

"Have you ever been hitch hiking?", I ask.

Hitch hiking was just one of the many obsessions I have had this winter. I find myself hung up on a subject and then try to find out as much as I possibly can about it. I was in the phase where every stranger I met I would ask if he/she experienced it. Before he was even able to answer, I went into this diatribe about how this summer I planned to go hitch hiking across the country, staying in tents, random houses, and at organic farms through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (otherwise known as WWOOF) This made him perk up.

"I've done that! Hey, my name is Forbes."

I couldn't understand what he was saying to me.

"What?"

"Forbes."

It sounded like his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth because he had eaten too many sour candies.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Forbes."

"How do you spell it?"

He didn't spell it. Instead he said, "Forbes, like the magazine."

"Ooooooh.... FORBES," I over-enunciated.

"I'm Janel and I should go. See you around the building," I said as I spun on my heel and hurried up the stairs without giving him a chance to say anything more. I think I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to understand him.


-------------------

TO BE CONTINUED

The World According to Fuckity Fuck.

Richard Albrecht was a lone wolf. The few friends he had who did not understand him called him Rich, but those he was most fond of always referred to him as Richard, never Dick; though he could often be one without even trying. Richard was a man who would sit at his desk and watch the world go by through his bedroom window. What he did while sitting at his desk was a mystery to most, a fantasy to others. Only Richard himself really knew what went on - but from what I know of him, and I do know him well, this is what I can conclude from the bits of evidence that this elusive, solitary, and sometimes psychotic creature left for me to piece together. This is the story of Richard Albrecht.

With the air conditioner humming in the window, Richard would sit on the dingy carpeted floor of his one-room apartment, chain-smoking, and reading anything to help ease his mind from the constant flow of thoughts that rushed through his brain like a tsunami-inspired tidal wave crashing upon some brittle island shore. Currently, he was re-reading his favorite novel, which he had not touched since he first laid claim that it was his favorite five years earlier. So much had happened in his life then that half-way through the book he began to weep because of how much his own experiences in life, since his initial reading, related to what was happening in the story. He began to wonder if this novel shaped his life more than he previously thought or if the reason he loved the book so much was because the themes of lust, gender roles, art, and death were wholly related on such a basic human level and now that he'd had more time to live, these experiences which he had once only read about had now happened to him. Richard Albrecht did not have many friends. He imagined that those who did, did not sit on the floor of their apartments three nights a week sobbing into a ripped-up, old paperback. He put the book down on the floor next to the ashtray and went to his chair where the gentle hum of his computer started up at the push of a button. While he waited for things to load, he'd strain to hear the voices cat-calling down the street outside of his apartment and imagine the woman who was the object of their insult or compliment. He started to masturbate.

This was something he did almost nightly. While it was not uncommon for men his age to engage in such an act, most did not do so with the lurid fantasies that Richard played out in his mind. This is not a story about ejaculation though. It just needs to be said that Richard rarely had any sexual encounters of his own, so what he had to base his fantasies on was just how he thought other men behaved in the world outside his window.




To be continued.

Life is a freak show.

Living in New York City is hard. When you come alone, and the only thing you have to your name is a smile that can set the world ablaze, you find yourself in fascinating situations that leave you feeling empty afterward and wondering how you got there in the first place. I'm always trying to capture spontaneity in little bottles, so later, when I'm lonely and trying to feel how I felt the night before, I can drink a little bit of it in. The problem is, I drink too much.

How music infiltrates every part of my consciousness.

Dear Mystery Man,

Remember when we lay on my bed listening to a scratched up Bruce Springsteen record, drinking but not getting drunk, and talking about nothing? Somewhere between Born in the USA and Thunder Road (I had to flip the record) our mouths stopped moving and our fingers started wandering. The record bottomed out like a car scrapping a speed bump long before climax. Records should be longer.

Every time I'm with you, it feels like a honeymoon. Our lives are so compartmentalized. While I feel like I know you so well because you've wandered my house in the nude while I kept your underwear hostage in the bathroom while applying my make up, I know nothing of who you are outside of who you are with me. Are you charming with Sinatra crooning in the background? Do you really like "Foggy London Town" or do you just like it when I sing it while impersonating the WB frog? Are you awkward? Are you loud? Do you constantly crack jokes to appease your own self-consciousness or are you full of bravado and slamming your fist down upon a bar made entirely out of ceder and pleased with yourself for beating, yet again, your fellow barmates in American Bandstand Triva?


Who are you?


Do you wonder about me? When I sit locked in my bedroom listening to the local classic rock station, sneaking my roommates Miller High Life (they're nothing like champagne) and reading the same page of a Henry Miller book over and over and out loud, is this how you picture your lover? Do you know I wash my sheets a few days before you come over but sleep on a bare mattress during the in between period so as to preserve their fresh scent? Do you know that I chain smoke in my bedroom while I'm by myself? When you come over, I act like having a cigarette inside is a big deal, but I just burn a ton of incense so my room doesn't smell like Liza Minelli's dressing room.

I listen to Heart though I loathe them and I find radio commercials and hourly weather and traffic reports comforting background noise even though I scoff publicly about my roommates reality television binges. I love the 1-877-Kars-4-Kids jingle. Do you know that I wish I lived in a world without television at all? I wish we could go to the picture show and it still be a dime. We'd live large and splurge on popcorn and sneak in spirits.

As I write, a campy version of Puff the Magic Dragon just ended and the Village People just started up with their infamous hint. I'll let you guess which one. I don't have time to tell you. I must dance and reminisce upon the days of roller disco.

Love,

Your Mysterious Lover

Now and then @ 59 degrees.

I'm the girl who sits on her fire escape, alone, listening to YES and Jimmi Hendrix, chain smoking, and drinking wine, while watching her neighbors put on their finest backwards baseball hats, and throw a backyard party. They snap their overly-posed group photos which they'll post on their facebook later on the same evening, and this little thing called loneliness will try and eat away at me from somewhere deep inside of my gut.

I crawl back through the window I came out of and change the radio station. I wonder why all the stations play commercials at the same time. I change the music to the least offensive song, which happens to be "Fire" by the Ohio Players, and I dance around in my living room like I'm on stage with a full audience and a full band backing me up. My hair is flying around the way hair only flies around in a Pat Benetar video and the smile that appears on my face is the only real one that's seeped through this facetious mask I wear all day. In this moment, I feel happy, beautiful, and free. I don't remember, not even for a second, that just an hour earlier I was crying into my hands for reasons unbeknownst to me, thinking of jumping off that fire escape, but too afraid that the pain I was feeling would then be inflicted upon those I love. This is now. Where are the people I love?

The beginning

Dry spaghetti flew out of the box and all over the floor. It cracked and splintered and fell into the cracks and splinters of the badly finished wood floor beneath my feet. Cackles escaped the mouths of me and my best friend of the moment, Ashli Kanzler. My roommate came running into the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about and just scoffed when he saw the scene.

We were stoned and making pasta. Simple joys like this made up my entire life at the time. I was enrolled in college and making easy A's. I was living off student loans with a part-time job that Ashli got me as a waitress at a mediocre tex-mex restaurant. I was learning to play the guitar and living in a beautiful garden apartment with a bonfire pit, a comfortable front porch, and a host of friends that I almost always found myself laughing with. It was a time when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

The water was boiling and I can't remember much else except that I was getting tired. So after dinner I turned in to my little mother-in-law apartment behind the Florida-cracker style house that was my home. Ashli was going to be staying in my room that evening but wasn't quite ready to retire herself.

"Just leave your door unlocked for me", she said.

It was something we had done countless times before and I felt pretty comfortable with. Little did I know that just a couple hours later I would awaken to a big, hulking man beside me in my bed and Ashli would be no where to be found. I'll spare the gory details of the attack. The event is still as fresh in my mind as it was when it originally happened a year and a half ago. I was able to muster the strength to break free of my bed and get my phone which was on the table on the other side of the room. I spun around to flip on the light just in time to see the man struggling with my blankets which were wrapped around his ankles and slam into the french doors of my suite, leaving a nice, clean palm print on the inside of the glass. My newly acquired kitten escaped with the intruder and I ran after them both, clutching the cat in the darkness as my only protection. Like an idiot, the man ran right into a trap on the side of my apartment. Trying to escape through what looked like an alley way, he was blocked by brush and random garbage stored behind my apartment by the previous tenant. He had no other choice but to turn around and meet me, face to face, just before hopping over the fence in one swift motion. He landed on the other side with a thud. This was the second time splinters of something fell to the floor beneath my feet, but this time it was splinters from the wooden fence planks that broke underneath his weight.

I screamed. I screamed for God. I screamed for Ashli. I screamed into my cell phone as I placed a call to her trying to explain the events of what just occured. She was asleep on the couch in my living room, but in less than ten seconds, she was outside my backdoor with my roommate and his friend in tow. I screamed the name of the man whose face I saw for that split second. I screamed at the 911 operator I wouldn't have been smart enough to call in that state of panic had it not been for my fast-thinking roommate. And I screamed at the hospital, to which I was escorted in a police car, as half a dozen faces stood before my open legs and starred at my vagina.

This was the night my entire life changed and how I ended up sitting here at the window of my New York City apartment. A lot happened between now and then though. You will read my story here.