Oh Lord, oh Lord, why do you send me these calamities. The car died. I broke my hand. I rolled my ankle. Grasping objects and walking upright are out. The two things that define a human being. Might as well be an invertebrate. I work twelve hours a day and it’s an hour there hour back and I can’t even get home and have a god damn drink. Gotta go to an AA meeting. Or my sponsor will yell at me. Gotta have a long phone call with my sponsor, tell him yeah: look at all the AA shit I did. I went to this meeting, I read this chapter of Bill Motherfucking W, I took a commitment. It’s a good one at least. I hand out the chips at Cafe Tropical. Someone doesn’t drink for sixty days, I give them a keychain. People clap. The person says “Name, Alcoholic” and I hug them. Some day it will be a hot chick. I will feel big warm titties on my chest. The other commitments are shit like picking up trash. Oh Lord, thank you for that one.

I work but I haven’t been paid yet. I have seventeen bucks in the bank and the bills are past due. Health insurance. Car insurance. I’m owed money from unemployment but I work twelve hours a day and I can’t fill out the fucking form. The replacement form– there was a smudge on the original. That one I sent in six weeks ago. For money from December. If I had carved out ten minutes I could have done it but there is never even one second of time now. Work work work.

The blog is dying off. Haven’t posted in two weeks. Page views are in the toilet. I wrote half a million words and the only ones anyone gives a fuck about are what gets them internet pussy. Good luck fellas. But you’re fucked. Pussy is a full time job. It’s not some shit you can google and plug in. Go read books, fuck my stupid shit. Go read books and sit at a keyboard and make your fingers move for a few years and you can have 44 OKCupid spams of your own. Don’t share them. I can’t use my own material anymore.

I can’t drink. I can’t fuck. That’s what happens, if you were wondering. You’re able to have a woman in your house for four hours without weeping from boredom because you’re drunk. Booze woke up the Altered States caveman to overrule your brain. This no longer happens. I’d need a woman to engage me now. Tell me a fact about the California almond crop or Calvin Coolidge or the number of stars in the known universe or SOMETHING, SOMETHING, anything… you guys out there dating, I can hear you laughing from here.

But I’m still just as horny. I work in Venice now and it’s just hot young yoga pants ass everywhere like gnats. Rush to the office brushing past 19 year old yoginis with rippling panther buttocks in the street. Rolled mats in hand, earbuds in, walking slow– I see hot 19 year old pussy on the sidewalk and I’m like GOD DAMMIT GET OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY I’M LATE. But that flash of ass sticks with you. Your cruel stubborn balls still need to fuck when you can’t. Like pain from a phantom limb. You see those girls built like Michael Vick pit bulls, lean but with thighs and what Tennyson called a “weapons grade turdcutter”… you need that pussy. You can’t jerk it out of you. God is evil.

Horny as a chimp but I can’t talk to a girl. Thirsty like Bukowski on a hangover but I can’t drink. Work hard but I have no money… there is no mercy. Your creditors and your brain and your cruel dick don’t take a day off. Motherfucker I don’t care that you worked twelve hours, drove two. Sat for an hour listening to brainwashed chumps burble about the program this the twelve steps that I’m codependent my disease the power of alcohol is cunning and baffling blah blah blah– you gotta pay. Give us money, give us pussy. Pain is like the weather. Nothing you can do. But even when you know that the hailstones hurt.

On the plus side: my fish had a baby. Only noticed last night. It’s already an inch long. They must have had hundreds. If I’d known I’d have done something. Got an incubator tank, dropped in some baby brine shrimp. Hundreds died. But one lived. Jet Li ass motherfucker. And me, I spawned Julidochromis Regani from fuckin Zimbabwe in Los Angeles tap water. You hear that, fucksticks? Suck my dick.

What other good news. The cat’s alive. My family loves me. If I keep this job, the money problem vanishes. A year of working part time, a decade of shit pay and being stupid. Gone like it never happened. Congress may approve the federal unemployment extension. Make it retroactive. That’s two grand. The new job pays overtime and brother, do I work overtime. Eight months, I’m out of debt. Four more I’m making twice what I need to live. If I don’t get fired I’ll turn 39 with a true net worth of zero. The world runs on credit. Zero is the new millionaire.

What else, what else. I’m alive and not ugly and the sun is shining and the baby fish is a god damn miracle. I am doing my best with what I can. The rest, I’ve been told to put in God’s hands. What could possibly go wrong.