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Saturday Morning Deterioration...
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Life always falls apart quickly. I wonder if its planned this way... You always hear religious people talking about the plan. It makes sense to believe it all. I wish I were like them... I wish I could believe it. Everything is easier when you know that somehow its okay, even when its not. There is some good reason shit sucks and when you get through it you'll know that reason as if you always knew it. Wisdom is something that cannot be transferred quite as easily as knowledge. It comes only from experience...

Every morning I wake up with this feeling... Things are not okay out there and my plan is crumbling. Maybe its not quite in line with the big plan. I wish I had their faith.

I roll over, place one foot on the floor and begin to push myself up from this old creaky mattress. A light mist dissipates in the air as I exhale the cool air. Its like I've awoken from a long coma. I re-realize each morning, as if it were the first time I'd considered it... I'm lonely and perpetually discontent, and disappointed...

Sara left. She's probably a thousand miles from a thousand miles from here by now and its probably my fault like everything else. I guess I should have said something... I did say something, but I should have said more...

My life is just a long string of these counter productive decisions. Constantly awaiting the right time to say something that should have been said a long time ago. Constantly afraid to say the wrong things. Its left me alone, blowing the dust off of old memories that rest quietly, where her head used to... I can still smell the back of her neck on the wind as she walked off like she was willing to forget me forever. And she did, subsequently.


She got in her car and drove off from Young Ones record store in Kutztown, where we would usually meet if I were in town. I watched her drive away for the last time until I could no longer see her little black hatchback. I just sat there crippled for a moment, knowing she wouldn't be back. I thought about driving after her… Doing something heroic, but I’m not really anybody’s hero…

"Here let me save you from your comfortable life and bring you into my miserable world of abject poverty, because…
well… I think I’m in love with you…"

That should probably go over famously. Anyway, she seemed happy enough to be leaving.


It always turns out the same way... It doesn't really matter why, but they get tired of something or they find something better or maybe its the combination of the two occurring simultaneously that nurtures the idea... One day, when they've had enough, they leave... Why shouldn't they? Sometimes I beat them to it, most of the time they win anyway. I'm not sure what I mean by win, but you definitely know it when you lose. I'm not really sure what it feels like to win any more. Sometimes winning feels a lot like loosing.

I've gotten to a point where I understand competition. I used to be very competitive. I just realized that in order to win, you must be willing to hurt everybody. It hurts me to hurt the people I care about. My brother will never talk to me again because we damaged each other too much as kids and he cannot forgive me. We were relentlessly brutal to each other and all there is at the end of what started out a competitive game is a long winded pain that will never be extinguished. When you can see the pain caused by the damage you've done, its impossible not to be affected... I know that the only person I've dramatically impacted on this planet, I impacted negatively. Unfortunately I think most people could easily say the same.

After she moved, I seldom came back to Allentown. I moved to Brooklyn for a while. I moved there right before the hipster thing officially had a name. There were hipsters in Williamsburg, but they hadn't been coined that yet as far as I had heard. Living in Brooklyn still had a New York style toughness too it. McCarren Park was still being run by scammers and drunks. Gentrification was just beginning in that area and rich kids in wolves clothing began to encroach on the park and throw dance parties in warehouse art-spaces. I thought they were an easy target as did a lot of the scammers in the park. They were easy targets. They came with lots of daddy's money and few scruples about what best way to spend it. Many people ripped them off for drugs. I ripped them off for drugs. I found a few ways to get really creative ripping them off as did others. I used to buy pain pills and sell the cheap ones to hipsters to cover the costs of my more expensive ones. I would also pour crappy liquor into more expensive bottles and sell it to under age kids again at a price that covered my habits as well.

I moved into an semi-abandoned warehouse space further north on Bedford ave with a guy named Joe that I knew from Allentown. Joe was one of the early hipsters. His father had enough money to rent the space and Joe arbitrarily let people he knew stay there. The place was huge and we had free run of the entire thing for a good while. Nobody occupied the top two floors and we were the only tenants in the building renting a small portion of the bottom floor. Eventually the abandoned floors become home to squatters escaping the increasing rent prices in other parts of the city. I got on better with the squatters than I did with Joe most of the time and slowly migrated to the top floor of the building, which was a large open space separated mostly by blankets hung by other squatters. I ended up dragging a bed from somebody's trash in Greenpoint, back to the warehouse and hung a few dark tapestries around it so I could sleep.

There were three other people up there with me. All had met each other hopping trains from the midwest. There was a couple from somewhere in the middle of nowhere Ohio, their dog, and the other was a crust punk, with a greasy knotted up mohawk, that looked like it had been dyed every color imaginable at some point. His name was Aaron and he was from Lansing Michigan. He taught me a lot about turning the electrical main back on in abandoned buildings. His father had worked for a utilities company until he was laid off a few years back. They lived in an abandoned motel for a while and they dealt mostly with analogue meters that could be tampered with physically, quite easily. We were unfortunately dealing with newer digital meters in New York and we lived without electricity for a while, until I found a loophole in Con Edison's business logic.

I had spent a lot of time at the library on Bushwick, when I had observed somebody on the computer next to me signing up for utilities online. I decided to take a look at the process myself. First I realized that they had run the payment form through a javascript validation function. So I rewrote the form, but replaced the javascript function in the onsubmit attribute with the number 1 and I was able to supply the form unvalidated credit card information. Obviously that would be found out, so I wasn't quite satisfied with that approach. I then found a cross site request forgery vulnerability that allowed me to add new properties to the account of anybody that had an open session on the ConEd account page. I had to come up with a way I could use this to our advantage and I decided the best way would be to hook up the electricity ourselves and then send the link over craigslist to people who were looking to rent out a room. This gave us a high likelihood that they would have a session open on ConEd's web page that we could exploit. I was able to check that the address had utilities hooked up by calling their customer support line and pretending to be interested in purchasing the building. This worked for a few months at a time and we made it through an entire winter in that manner.

Aaron and I started making potato vodka and selling it to under age kids in Williamsburg... It seemed logical at the time. I hadn't envisioned any kind of future... I hadn't had a plan in a long time and I got tired of day dreaming about life goals and ideals I'd never attain. Goals are just a p repackaged list of regrets if your not independently wealthy. I gave up on all that crap. It was a comfortable, sedentary existence. I hadn't much ambition and I wasn't going anywhere, so it suited me at least temporarily.

It was time to get realistic about life, things didn't work out like they had in storybooks. The people I've cared about fucked me over... The people I didn't care about dragged me down with them... Nobody was ever precise or honest.

New York is Grey and it covers everything in this shadow of discontent.
Brooklyn Emanates this malodorous stench from stagnant sewer water evaporating and moving through the city like an angel of death... It's no wonder that New Yorkers are such a miserable lot. Born into this toxic, roach infested, swamp thats been filled in with concrete and steel, now rotting away slowly and nothing is ever maintained... Yet they walk around with their crooked scornful faces hardly noticing anything. I guess you have to shut everything off just to get by here. Nobody is really born in New York, they start as bacteria festering in the sewers until they bud off into an independent organism and slowly evolve into these fetid suit wearing bastards...

Everyday is exactly the same. The scornful faces walk past you and they look through you like you don't exist and maybe you don't. A million people in cars drive past, going where ever people in cars go and the low life's gather in the park trying to find some low hanging fruit to pick pocket. The devil stands on the corner reading passages from the bible, while his minions scurry around him. We're all somehow doing his bidding. From the empty eyed prostitutes that walked a few blocks from the park to the hipsters getting loaded at some dance party, doing lines of blow like tomorrow will never come.

And then... You wake up again and roll out of bed again...
Check the still to see if there was any vodka left in there that I could try to sell at the park today. Sell a bottle, drink a bottle, shoot up and go back to sleep. One has to have some ambition lest life become too boring. Its not really a reason so much as a ruitine...

The sun shines in through the cobweb covered, old, opaque, warehouse windows, burning the skin on my face to ash and forming dark sut encrusted circles around my eyes like the rotting tar boiling in my veins. I'm always tired... and sick... I feel old.

I can't recall how many times I vomited last night while I rested my head, leering like some old desolate ruins over this shitty, backed up toilet. The pipes probably let out somewhere on bedford ave.
The old forgotten factory sat silently, alone... like its contents... A dozen or so dejected loosers, fallen from their respective social networks into the weary sleep of a degenerate squatter, invariably comfortable in the remote seclusion of some Brooklyn warehouse, long erased from memory in a sea of rusting steel that seems as if it were thrown ashore by the old tired Atlantic the way a prune eating codger might shit out a 3 month old turkey dinner.
Everything was so silent, you could hear the old floors creaking as if they themselves had come alive and the cold Atlantic wind whistled through some small crack in the window pane. I guess I just woke up out of another meandering stupor... Its not suprising that I've awoken in this mess of a life, as I've done for years now. Its just disappointing.

Every morning is the slow, methodical process of weathering a hang-over. Most days I sit in bed far too long looking up at the tall ceiling, precariously deteriorating away, wondering how its managed to stand this long, how we've all managed to stand this long.
Then I'm forced to ask myself why I bother to hold myself up any longer. I'm not trying that hard. I'm not working. I barely do anything all day. I've become the heroin coursing through my veins. The only thing that gets me out of bed is the frantic search for something I didn't boot last night...

My stomach churned away as I rose and when I stood I could hear the bile swishing about, waiting to become projectile... I'd nothing left to vomit save that mess of stomach acid sloshing back and forth as I staggered about, trying to find my sea legs, but even that shit came up... Hair dangling down over the shit stained toilet that hasn't seen a cleaning supply in at least 10 years... brown liquid shot out in all directions... Covering the whole place in yet another layer of scum.

My morning seemed to follow a fairly strict ruitine at the time. The first item on the list was to find some dope... I tried to be pretty good about making sure I had some first thing in the morning, but there is no such thing as a fail safe plan. I begin to sweat a little bit, but its best to hold on as long as possible. After about an hour I couldn't concentrate, my body would shake... So I'd shoot up, you don't want to wait so long the shakes come on, then your liable to miss...
After that, I'd empty the still into some old liquor bottles, empty fermented potato mash into the still and start a new potato fermentation in the Container I'd just emptied into the still so that I'd have staggered batches through the week.... You couldn't do much selling anything until around six or so when I'd make my rounds to a few little williamsburg cafes and then to the park and back through. In the mean I'd try to score some more dope for the evening. If anything in the ruitine failed it would throw everything off for a couple of days.