I couldn’t sleep last night because of the pain, and was elated to finally fall into slumber at the crack of dawn. Only to be awoken by annoying song birds, a woodpecker drilling another useless hole, a squirrel trying scrape his way through my thru-the-wall air conditioning unit, and little fucking boy hitting a concrete wall with a sledge hammer.

Please free me from my prison.

I played basketball today and realized I was extremely hungry. I dipped into Gourmet Garage to buy something to eat. I didn’t know what I wanted, so I roamed aimlessly around until I found something.

Luckily, The cheese department had five platters of cheese cubes with a cup of toothpicks.

Famished, I plucked out a cube and bit it off the end of the toothpick. I sucked off the lingering smokey flavor that seemed infused into the wood. Still starving, I went to the next tray, then the next, then the next and finally hit the last tray and felt a pang of guilt for eating so much cheese for free. Then out of nowhere, some Botoxed Upper Eastsider bitch felt she needed to teach me some manners.

Another woman pushed her cart directly in between the Upper Eastsider Bitch and me. She was shocked by my expletive statement. I told her the dialogue I had exchanged with the crazy lady. Fortunately, she agreed with me (but I suspect she wanted an easy out of the situation) Then I proceeded to talk to each person and stated my case. Oddly, everyone agreed with me. I realize now that I probably scared everyone I encountered.

The paradox of calling someone a “fucking lunatic” to everyone who walks by because that particular person didn’t like how you ate cheese makes you look like a “fucking lunatic”.

Whenever, I surface from the subways, and confidently head in one direction on an avenue. Inevitably, someone walking beside will notice my keen navigational skill and will ask me, “Are we going up or down?”

I have two responses:

1. “Actually we are going horizontal. Our vertical displacement is zero. What are you stupid?” Then I glare at the person angrily, shake my head, and storm off.

2. “I don’t know—I’m agnostic, I guess it depends how you’ve lived your life and what you believe in.” Then I slowly look up and stare at the sky until it gets awkward. Unless she’s really hot, then I cut the corny shenanigans.

I overheard a conversation:

Name-throwing? What the fuck is that? I’ve heard of name-dropping, but I’ve never heard of a name-throwing. A name-thrower sounds like a weapon used in Viet Nam.

I overheard a conversation in Spanish on the subway about a well-groomed metrosexual:

“Si no es un pato, esta cerca del lago.”

“If he’s not a duck, he’s close to the lake.”

While waiting in the customs line to enter Grand Cayman, I decided to act differently since I was on vacation and decided to make some small talk with my fellow Americans in queue to be processed. I say “act differently” because as a New Yorker, I am forced daily to stand face-to-face with anyone in a subway car and never acknowledge their existence. Since the single file line came to a standstill because the custom agents were native Caymanians and they were operating at the same speed of a person swinging in a hammock underneath two coconut trees, I tried to “mingle” with the crowd and sparked up a light conversation with an older couple.

This is why I ignore people.