Good Day. Mate.

Yesterday was a good day. Just like the Ice Cube song.

Maybe “good” isn’t quite the word. “Long” and “bizarre” may be more technically accurate. But I liked how everything went. It all made me happy.

The night before, I offered my Jetta to a homeless man to use as a motel. Since the starter is shot, I figured the car would be okay. Waking up and seeing that he’d come and gone and that my vehicle was in one piece felt like a blessing.

I’m weird with the homeless. For all the searing hatred I feel for humanity in general, I get all Mother Theresa when it comes to hobos. Sometimes I get burned, sometimes I don’t.

So as I was pondering this good fortune, I wandered past a table full of fat women at an outdoor cafe, stuffing their porky faces. I bummed a Marlboro Light (of course) from one of them, and as I was walking away, I heard her plump pal hiss in my direction (when she thought I was out of earshot): “Eat something!”

I wanted to turn around and tell them that the cigarette was my only meal for the day and then start crying. I wish I had.

It made me think about how fat people should not be allowed to eat, period, but they definitely should be banned from hogging it up in plain view of the public. Who wants to walk down a street and witness a parade of obese, middle-aged cunts gorging themselves? It’s like a car crash you don’t even want to watch.

Parading down Damen Avenue in the summer is like going to the zoo and watching the elephants eat each others shit.

After that, I realized I was broke. I called my friend Zed, who always provides me with a quick source of income. I burn him with cigarettes and he pays me.

Zed grew up in a bar in Yugoslavia, where drunk women routinely singed him with their smokes. Now he enjoys nothing so much as a lit ciggie to the foot while being degraded. In fact, he shells out $80 for a half-hour of this treatment.

This works out for me because it’s a great way to channel my aggressions and, even more so, I just plain enjoy it. The only problem is that it requires me to ingest about ten cigs in thirty minutes, and I tend to be a bit sick afterward. Still, eighty bucks is eighty bucks.

I’d almost perform this service for free, but I really needed the dough. It makes me laugh to see Zed wince in pain. He loves this reaction. I think that’s why he always asks me back. That, plus he has deemed me “pleasing to the eye.”

So even though this was my seventh session with Zed, this was the first time I made him cry. I think maybe he finally felt comfortable enough with me to really let loose. It was definitely some sort of breakthrough.

Still, the tears made things a bit awkward afterward. I felt like I was slogging through a sea of uncomfortable feelings on the way out. But seeing Zed sob made me realize that this was a profound experience for him. His pain was attached to real memories--and true horrors, at that. I was glad that he was dealing with this in such an inventive and mutually beneficial fashion. That made me happy.

With a few bucks now to tide me over till my next paycheck (if I could keep it away from my sticky-fingered roommate, who’s developed a repulsive taste for crack), I decided to catch a band. I found a club and came across a guy I regularly fornicate with named Beefo.

Beefo’s a bit crazy. It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly is wrong with him, but he claims to be nuts enough to make a living from Social Security payments. At first I was skeptical, but then I started experiencing his...obsessions.

The latest fixation for Beefo is online airline tickets. He looks for good deals on flights all the time. I mean, constantly. Since he has nothing to do all day, this is all he does.

And he almost never travels. Anywhere.

Beefo claims he has a roommate who is constantly in Costa Rica fucking hookers. I’ve never seen anyone else in Beefo’s apartment. We had to wait until exactly three A.M. because that’s when this roommate was next departing for Costa Rica.

So we waited until three, went to Beefo’s and had sex. Immediately upon popping off, Beefo shot out of the bed and glued his face to a nearby computer. I thought He can’t possibly be looking for airline tickets. Alas, I thought wrong.

“Look at this!” Beefo squealed. “Check this out! Three hundred dollars round trip to Prague! You should totally take advantage of this!”

It dawned on me that plane tickets brought infinitely more joy to Beefo than sex ever could. This, too, made me happy.

The sun was rising as I drove home. As I parked on my corner, I saw a white guy waving a piece of lumber and screaming. It was my roommate, Blockhead.

He was drunk out of his mind, greeting the denizens of my mostly minority neighborhood with wails about “spics” and “niggers”. He was on a self-righteous tear, yelling about the poor children who have no choice but to grow up to be drug dealers themselves.

It’s hard to argue with his point of view on this sad state of affairs, but one sloshed, skinny white asshole twirling a two-by-four and spewing racial slurs is not going to correct the many woes of the inner city and/or rescue its youth.

The funny thing is that Blockhead never seemed to be troubled by any of this strife before. That, and I swear he exhibits pedophilic tendencies.

I tried to shut Blockhead up, but he told me he’d been out doing this for the previous three nights. I told him to at least knock off the racial slurs, because the locals were highly likely to be offended by that kind of language, and many of them have guns, which his piece of wood probably wouldn’t be much good at fending off.

Desperate for quiet, I summoned my other roommate, Medici, to help. He was useless. Plus, his presence prompted Blockhead to threaten me with the two-by-four. I wished I had a taser. I would have used it and solved the problem.

Not wanting to call the police, I simply made it up to my room, turned on the air-conditioning, and waited for a gunshot.

The next day I arose to see Blockhead sitting in the living room, sans bullet holes. He must have gotten tired of fighting the one-man-fight he was fighting, or he sobered up, or both. He was fine. I was relieved. I just hope he stops. But he won’t. Or he’ll do something worse.

See, the insanity - it never stops. From the homeless freeloaders to the fat-asses to the fetishists, my world is a nonstop carousel of mania. And I think it’s great. It all makes me happy. I don’t know what I’d do without these people and their...peculiarities.

These nuts keep me going.

So even though I don’t live in South Central and I’m not Ice Cube, I was moved to declare: “Today was a good day.”