May 15, 2020 Diary entry: Paulie would like to relate his qualifications to those of you who have been questioning his authority to write as he does, Paulie was a trained professional, he is a Doctor of BS, not that BS, Paulie is a Doctor of Beautician Services, he graduated with honors and began a lucrative career out in Hollywood during the early years when many of the well-known stars were first coming up, Paulie provided beautician service to all the top money makers of the biggest production companies of the time, I went to all the parties that were held on the Strip, I attended the award shows, and many Hollywood celebrities claimed that I was the life of the Hollywood Hills, I had begun to fly high when I was no older than a new-born hair dresser who didn’t know the difference between a rinse and a full-on dye job, I was in demand, I had to turn down job offers because there weren’t enough hours in the day to do curls, perms, and the new platinum bleach jobs that all the biggest stars desired, I practically owned Hollywood, I had a good used car, a little studio apartment, and access to the major film studios where I plied my trade like a drunken sailor plies the bartender for one more drink before closing time, I was a hot property, I was burning like a hot comet burns through the sky on a hot summer night, the world was mine, and I was devouring it like it was free popcorn shrimp on All The Beer You Can Drink Night, my world was good, all my needs were met, and then some, and then, an unfortunate thing happened, I had invented a new type of conditioner and I was eager to use it without the proper testing procedures, I was over confident in my new product and when I used it on several big stars who were starring in block buster movies, their hair all fell out and I was black balled from ever working in Tinseltown again, I packed up my beautician supplies and I caught a bus to Topeka Kansas where I opened up a beauty shop and gave discount Cut-and-Curls to the local farmer’s wives who wanted a Set-and-Perm from a once-well-known Hollywood perm provider whose fingers had run through the hair of the rich and famous, anyway, that’s how I became the general advisor and writer that I am today, these farmer’s wives do a lot of talking while sitting under the dryer and I heard tales that you would never believe, these ladies spoke of the things that go on after dark in the Midwest, and let me tell you, farmers and their wives are not the innocent aw shucks kind of square dancing squares you think they are, when the sun goes down, Old McDonald comes up with some stuff that would blow your minds, it’s still like the free-wheeling sixties out there in the Plains States, free drugs, free music, and free love, granted, the music is polka stuff, the drugs are more like cod liver oil and foot powder, but the other is basically the same wherever you go, well, it’s very late in the evening and it’s past time that I hit the hayloft, I gotta rise at the crack of dawn to milk the sows and do all the rest of the chores before breakfast, then I will sit down and relate how I once taught Fidel Castro how to style his beard so that people would remember him as more than a simple revolutionary who looked like he had just crawled out of the jungle, and instead be known as a man with a flair for stylish good looks, well, this is Paulie, saying good evening and shalom everybody…

May 11, 2020 Diary entry: One quick thing before we close up The Diary for good, Paulie has made many references to drinking alcohol-type beverages, his margaritas that were made with pickle juice and tequila, extra salt on the rim of the pickle jar, his most special Skunk In The Hole cocktails that old Mrs. Henderson found quite intoxicating, his early morning cocoas with gin and a candy cane stirrer, his vodka straight from the empty bean can, etc, anyway, the truth of the matter is, Paulie has a sensitivity to alcohol and he mustn’t drink, he has a reaction to alcoholic drinks and when he indulges, he begins to swear at people and he tells jokes that “insult a decent person’s sensibilities”, when Paulie drinks, he becomes a teacher by default, because deep down, Paulie is a teacher, but Paulie’s students are a mixed bunch of idiots who still think George Washington never lied, Abe Lincoln was honest, and that the gin-soaked Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, maybe Buzz isn’t so much a liar, but more of a drunken fool who actually thought he went to the moon one night after free beer and tacos at the Conqueso Mexidad Bar and Grill where the tequila is billed as the finest in Juarez County, who knows what idiocy lurks in the minds of men, anyway, a little heads up about the new late night lady bartender down at Joe’s Uptown Bar and Grill, she’s not really a devout Mormon like she says she is, one of our Hindustani writers found that out the hard way, she’s more like a slow-witted Irish Catholic with a Belfast attitude, her revolutionary attitude towards the customers is quite pronounced, she’s a little heavy on the brogue if you know what I mean, well, it’s time to close the office door for the night one more time, Paulie has no more lead in his pencil, the inkwell has dried up, and rumor has it that writing will soon be a thing of the past anyway, the government is gonna just start beaming what we need to know directly into our brains so we won’t even have to think, we will be simple receiving antennae anxiously awaiting our daily feed, you know, like dogs wait on their master to toss a half-chewed piece of gristle on the floor from the table, and they are so grateful that they do a cute little trick to try to please their benevolent owner, oh how far the human race has sunk, can people sink any farther, maybe the story of the sinking Titanic was meant as a symbol of what was to become of us because we trusted and loved our government, who knows, well, I see that the World Countdown Clock on the wall says two seconds ’til midnight, so I will get out of here and let the people of the world observe a moment of silence for whatever reason they may have, this has been Paulie, shalom…

May 14, 2020 Diary entry: Hi, this is Paulie, the man with the big word can, I want you all to sit down and listen up or I’ll open up my big can of words and lay some of my biggest and best ones on you like Mickey Mantle laid down that bunt in the big game that made fools of the whole San Francisco infield, I’ll pull out my best long sqiggley, tail-wagging words, and I’ll slap them on you like you were a warm water trout who took the wrong turn from the cold fast running brook and ended up migrating down the stagnant sewers of Paris, I got no time for daydreaming fools today, there is much to do in these last days, and time is quickly running out, first off, we will be drawing the grand prize winners of our last and final raffle, our three big winners will be honored during the usual Spring Banquet which is held the last week of May, if you still haven’t got your tickets, don’t wait any longer, we are almost sold out and we won’t be printing any more; after we oversold last year’s banquet and people complained about their seating arrangements in the parking lot, we decided it was best to count how many inside seats we would have available, and link tickets sales to available seats; “Hello?”, “Yes, this is Paulie”, I’m sorry, I have to take this call, it’s from my accountant, listen Fenster, I’m not in the mood for any more of your excuses, I’ll reach down your throat and unzip your spleen and pull out the first nickel you ever made, I’ll empty your change purse like it was chicken-gutting day on the farm, go get on your little pink bicycle and pedal down here to my office like a big girl, and bring my file along with you, we’re gonna talk; I’m sorry, I’m having a bit of a problem with my accountant, he’s my wife’s brother, what can I do, he needed help so I took him in, now where were we, I believe I was just in the middle of telling you about a kid I knew back in the neighborhood, it was during a most distressing time, the neighborhood was in an uproar over some perceived problem about mud balls on houses, sheds, and garages; we had gone down by the river confluence to consult with the only man who could help us, the old Hindu guy who had a pet snake he kept in a picnic basket, he lived down by the confluence in a modest dwelling, and he was always available to help kids who were about to go on the run because of unfounded accusations, innuendo, and just plain orneriness on behalf of half-crazed residents who couldn’t just hose off their houses and move on, well, this meeting has gone beyond it’s scheduled time, I’ll leave you all with a quote from my old Hindu friend, “Beware the fire that burns hot and has a bottom that is far off”, words to live by, okay, this is Paulie, wishing you a good rest of your day, shalom…

May 14, 2020 Diary entry: As we continue to close down this little endeavor of ours that fizzled out recently, some of our employees thought it would be nice to put together a little memory booklet to remember the days we spent working side by side, I just read a bit of it, I didn’t know they were so unhappy, well, it’s too late to mend fences now I guess, when the goats get out and head to town, fence mending seems a moot point; one of my employees just left the office, he came in to pick up his recommendation form letter for a new job, he said that since he was moving on, he would get a job driving, I remember a man who lived back in the neighborhood who lived with his elderly mother, he was a salesman who was on the road constantly with his mother, I don’t know what he sold, but he was really successful, he said one of his secrets to success was to never be without a briefcase and always take along an old bag, hang on, I gotta get rid of this guy who just came in, “Get out!”, “Quit jazzin’ your shit!”, “You can’t even make a decent fart sound!”, “Unless you can make your fart heard over the sound of the wind, shut up, we don’t need soft-seated couch-denting people who eat their boogers because some one took the last cookie, we need men, real men!”, “Get out and take your form recommendation letter with you!”, sorry about that, that guy has been a pain in the neck ever since he became my brother-in-law, anyway, as I sit here at my desk trying to get loose ends tied up, the sound of a television show is coming through from the outer office, from what I have made out so far, there is a little girl who stole a rabbit out of her uncle’s laboratory that was being used for experiments, the little girl wanted it as a friend, anyway, her parents picked her up and they were going to drive to the beach or something, and as it turns out, this particular laboratory rabbit was being used to study Parasitosis or some such thing, the laboratory was growing a multitude of various parasites in this rabbit, and the little girl was in the back seat trying to come up with a name for her friend, anyway, her mother said to not let the rabbit make a mess in the back seat of the car, well, you know how rabbits just crap and crap, and this rabbit started crapping out all kinds of different squiggely creatures on the Naugahyde, I think the mother named the rabbit “Oh holy shit, throw that damn animal out the window!”, I was only half paying attention to the show because I was checking Web MD for a little problem I’ve been having, well, a couple people just came down from the pod room for our usual end-of-day smoke and martini, so I’ll cut this short and say shalom my people, wherever you are, shalom…

May 13, 2020 Diary entry: Boy, there is more to closing down an internationally recognized diary company than I ever thought possible, I didn’t know we had so many employees, I’ve been cutting severance checks all morning and trying to compose some sort of form letter that contains a hazy type of gibberish that can be construed as a recommendation for future employment, you know, a reference letter that says you are lucky to have my ex employee as a job applicant, and know this, he was my beloved, and we were best friends at my company, but an unfortunate occurrence caused us to split, please take a chance on_____, you won’t regret it, anyway, there is one particular guy I’ll be glad to never see again, he was the authorized representative of Horticulture City, the guy who came by every few weeks to spray the yard, shrubs, and flowers on the grounds of Paulie Gee’s Realtime Diary, he was a drunken ex Russian revolutionary who claimed he had once worked for the Czar’s nephew, Sir Nicholas Nickelby, caring for the grounds and planting the seeds of revolution that he was sure would someday grow and take hold, he also claimed his eldest son was a Cosmonaut who had once spent six years in outer space and never once called his wife to explain why he left, anyway, the nitwit told the same joke every time he visited, about an elderly lady on his route, and how he “sprayed her bush”, god, how do I ever get mixed up with such moronic dip shits, it’s bad enough I had to work with so many of them these past years, I guess it’s true what they say, “If you want to bring home the bacon, you gotta wallow with the hogs”, well, I hear some people upstairs hollering out the windows, I better go up and try to calm some jittery nerves, this whole thing is a new paradigm that we have never known, our horizon is definitely bleak-looking, but we will carry on as usual, we shall carry the lantern of truth, we shall illuminate the dark corners of stupidity wherever it exists, and we shall never stop the march that we march, we are no longer a solid cohesive group, we are now individuals, sent out into the world to convey what Paulie Gee’s Realtime Diary has always conveyed, a good sense of propriety, a good sense of who we are, and jokes that can light up the dark horizon we face, this is Paulie, heading down to his office to pour out a large martini into the lid of his Thermos, light one up, and gaze into the smoke, and as his imagination dissolves into tears, instead of recollections, he sends much love to his people, shalom…

May 13, 2020 Diary entry: Some lady on You Tube says she came back to life and she has a message, I didn’t watch her video so I don’t know what her message is, I hope it’s not important, anyway, Paulie would like to share an experience that happened to him recently, he was standing out on the patio when a large hanging flower pot came loose and landed on his head, knocking him dead unconscious, Paulie remembers dying and being told he must go to hell for some reason, well, I ended up in one part of hell that looked like the office, you know, where the boss probably spent his day, anyway, I knocked on the door and a well-dressed gentleman asked me in and he offered me a cigar and he lit it for me, then he handed me a short brandy, he reminded me of a kindly old man I knew as a kid, except this guy had horns on his head, well, he sat down behind a huge desk that was filled with stacks and stacks of records of some kind, anyway, he told me the reason he had asked me here was to take a message back to the people of the earth, that’s all he wanted, he gave me another short brandy and he bid me adieu, so here I am, all back to life and I gotta deliver this message from the devil, let’s see, I wrote it down here somewhere, oh yeah, here it is, the devil wanted me to tell the inhabitant’s of the earth “Fuck you”, well, I guess that’s it, my job is done, I’m gonna go outside and sit in the fresh air a spell, I think that devil’s brandy put a hex on my usual sober self, well, this is Paulie, shalom… Oh, one thing, the devil told me the most hilarious jokes I’ve ever heard, really funny stuff, I think he was a little drunk and he wanted me to hear his best jokes, I better not repeat them here because some of them may be a little too much for you who have delicate sensibilities, I’ll see if I can edit a few of them down and substitute some words, I’ll get back to you, well, shalom again…

May 13, 2020 Diary entry: Shalom everybody, it’s Paulie, I’m here drinking a few beers with the pizza delivery guy, he says he’s fed up with the world and all it’s crap, and he’s selling his TV and buying a tent and moving to an isolated place in the country where he can breath free while the dumbasses restrict their breathing with masking devices and six foot social distances, he says six feet is not nearly enough and he is done being social with fools, I told him that his decision seemed wise, and I offered him another beer, I explained that sometimes a man just needs to move on and I related a story from out of my past, it was during the height of social unrest, people were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, the world was in social upheaval, kinda like what we are beginning to see today, anyway, I had a job that was boo, it was boo as all get out, I had money, clothes, a car, I was on top of the world, unfortunately, the world was changing, and I lost all my friends who were turning on the system and turning on and turning out to protest anything anyone could think of, I felt as if the whole world was driving around in shiny red sports cars and I was still riding my little sister’s pink bicycle with glitter handlebar streamers, I felt left behind like that one movie where Jesus comes and all the cool kids go with him somewhere, and I’m one of the left-behind losers who have to continue on with my stupid life while the fortunate ones are flying around somewhere above the clouds, probably getting drunk and listening to fabulous tales and awesome jokes that Jesus tells when he lets his hair down and tosses back tequila like Santa Anna after he stormed the Alamo and kicked some serious gringo butt, yeah, the days are changing my friend, the times are stepping up and going forward, I think we all must reevaluate our position in this great creation and decide whether we want to continue to cow tow to our herd masters, or do we want to stand up as the men and women we were meant to be, and cut and run from the herd of mindless animals that can only follow their mind-controlled path laid out for them by their programmers, we must live and die as men and women, not cattle, the day of compromise is over, so get up off your lazy butt, remove that stupid mask, stop washing your stupid hands, and get outside and try to find a person who isn’t a mind-controlled zombie, and give them a big hug and say thank you for being a part of the human race, there aren’t many of us left, shalom…

May 11, 2020 Diary entry: It’s true, Paulie’s life has only been in his head, his life is all only in his head, Paulie’s world only exists within his distorted mind, Paulie was forced to make up fantastic tales to tell people so they would love him, what is so wrong with a worm dreaming he has wings, and he can fly and hunt down great wide birds who ate his friends, Paulie only wanted to know what it was like to fly, if only for a brief time; the thing is, whether Paulie crawls upon the ground, or he flies over it, he is still Paulie, and Paulie is no more than the sum of his own mind, and Paulie’s mind is a deceptive thing, Paulie’s mind had set out to deceive people, but it ended up deceiving Paulie, Paulie was caught in his own net, actually, Paulie’s net is fake, fake like everything else, all Paulie’s stories are fake, Paulie never dated a medium who could talk to the dead, he never took her on a dream date to Kim Eel Dung’s Floating Fish Bar and Grill where we feasted on a glorious seafood meal that people of the mainland could never understand, it was all a lie, Paulie is not a real murder investigator, and he never had his chopsticks broken in the alley behind Panda Express, he never saw a beautiful tall dark haired Oriental lady wearing a dress that waved like the sea enter Panda Express on a hot rainy summer night with her umbrella dripping, it was all a lie, Paulie made the whole thing up because he thought people would love him more if he said he had been on the trail of a hideous-looking One Eared Man who wore a jade ear and one regular ear, the Man With The Jade Ear was the distant cousin of Mr. Kim, Mr. Kim was the most feared and powerful man in Shing Dong Prefecture, Kim had killed a man once and everyone knew it, but no one ever spoke of it in anything but a whisper, I wished I had never known Kim, I wished I had never worked for him, I wished I had never taken his dirty money, well, that’s all lies too, I’ve never even been to Shing Dong Prefecture before, and I never tracked a guy who wore a jade ear; lies, all lies, Paulie is fake, and all his exploits are fake, Paulie’s real life has no substance at all, he is merely a breath of air that stirs for a moment in time, time will never run out, but Paulie’s short breath of life will, even Paulie’s dreams are fake, he never got chased by a bull that had a face like Jackie Gleason who came out at the end of the show drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, saying “Take it away Sammy!”, the dream about the orb-carrying mice following me, and I ended up playing five card stud at my kitchen table with my cat who wore a formal tam on his head and squinted from the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and the tall dark haired beautiful cigarette lady who softly wafted among the crowd, and gently handed me a pack of Galloise’s and I tipped her a brand new hundred, and I lit one up and told the cat to deal, I was gonna own this casino before I woke up or the loan sharks would be calling me in the morning, that dream never happened, the cigarette lady never told me she needed a ride back to her beach house because she only wanted to see what I looked like under the moonlight, Paulie is simply a liar, Paulie is a lie, and his life is a lie, well, it’s getting very late, almost 2:00 AM, and the dogs are acting very oddly, a report just reached me about an escaped mental patient who was last seen in my neighborhood, he was wearing hospital pajamas and he was carrying a bloody head, anyway, some one is at the door so I’ll cut this short and wish my loved ones love, and the rest of you, well…

May 10, 2020 Diary entry: This is Paulie, returned from his undisclosed location, one of my most trusted employees at Paulie Gee’s Realtime Diary has summoned me after he found some discrepancies in several of our past diary entries, we have come to the realization that we have been passing false information on to our readers for quite some time, we are truly sorry and repentant for our behavior, and we are going to take the only corrective action available to relieve this most bitter condition we find ourselves in, we have decided to shut down production, this whole thing is nothing but a fake puppet show, our fate has fallen upon us as we struggle hopelessly with tangled and knotted strings, we can no longer dance on the world puppet stage; as we look back, we see clearly that nothing here has been real, we truly believed we had made it to that great mountain in the distance, we wrongly believed we could dance upon the mountain, and we convinced others that we were something we weren’t, Paulie is nothing but a sham, Paulie is all lies and deception, and he perpetrated his deceptions on a loving and trusting world, Paulie is nothing but a fake cog on the fake gear that turns this fake world, all Paulie’s diary entries have been nothing but bold lies, Paulie never got lost in the high desert country of Oregon where a small hunting party found him on the verge of death and they fed him roasted ravens off their campfire, Paulie never pee’d off the roof of the old Grand Hotel downtown on passersby on the sidewalk below in the rain because when it was raining they didn’t look up, that was a blatant lie, Paulie would never be on the roof of the Grand Hotel because he is afraid of heights, Paulie gets dizzy when he stands on a chair to change a light bulb, when Paulie was little, he never met a cute little Ukrainian girl, and he never took her to a small chateau down the railroad track by an abandoned trestle that was a burnt out railway maintenance shed, and there never was any phone call to her father who was high up in Ukrainian politics, no deals, no quid pro quo’s, no nothing; Paulie’s brother never taught him that keeping a dead snake in his bed would protect him from the Dream Snatcher, Paulie’s parents never hid his Easter eggs on the railroad track, in fact, Paulie grew up in a family of Amish missionaries who left the lush fields of Western Pennsylvania, to travel to the inner city of Detroit Michigan to teach people the joys of country life, no, that’s not true either, that’s another lie, also, Paulie never spent Halloween night locked in a house with starving mad dogs after their owner died, the old man with the mad dogs and the frozen scowl on his face that lived in the last house on the block was just another made-up story that never happened, an elderly widow lived in that house, and she never did anything interesting to write about, Paulie takes full responsibility for his deceitful actions; those here at Diary Headquarters who were unfortunately dragged in to this fiasco are not to be held responsible, it was I, Paulie, who conjured up this whole deviant scheme that has caused delusion and lies to influence innocent people, Paulie is a nothing who wanted to be a something, Paulie isn’t even a Jenny Craig fart during typhoon season, Paulie imagined himself to be the thundering fart from the great grizzly bear after he had devoured an entire rotten antelope carcass in one sitting, and so, this whole worthless facade must be torn down and tossed onto the scrapheap of history and burnt with fire until nothing remains and it is no longer brought to mind, forgotten like all things and all people that ever were, are forgotten, and lie buried under the sands of time; the world and it’s lifespan is so much larger than I had thought it was, which makes me smaller than I thought I was, no, that great shining mountain in the distance is unreachable, I know that now, Paulie will never dance on it’s peaks, Puppet Paulie will never dance again, Paulie and his small but tenacious band of troops will never march on this massive world and conquer it, we know that now, the earth is too big, and time travels too long, we were fireflies who thought that the heavens were lit by our pitiful dull glow, the stars in the heavens look down upon us and they shake their heads at our weaknesses which we believed were strengths, what was this whole thing for anyway, it seems like a big cruel cosmic joke played on us because we were such fools, well, the writers are all up in the pod room packing up their little crap to get out of here, I hear a few religious zealots arguing down in the break room, I’m heading down to Personnel to see if our employee’s records have all been destroyed yet, then it’s back to the office for the usual five o’clock smoke and martini, where I recollected fake memories in the smoke-filled office, like the fake memory of lying in the sweet-smelling springtime grass while a pretty girl picked dandelions and put them in my hair, that never happened, the only thing a pretty girl ever put in my hair was bubblegum, and the time I saved a baby from the speeding bus, and the young mother was so thankful that she invited me back to her mansion and treated me to a gourmet meal prepared by her private chef, that never happened, well, as I sit in my dark desolate office, I gaze into the smoke, and I see a young Paulie, he’s riding a blood-stained white horse, and he’s carrying the head of the man who had been terrorizing a beautiful young princess who declared her unflinching love to Paulie, the bravest soul she had ever known, well there I go again, I’m gonna cut this off and say simply, shalom world…

May 9,2020 Diary entry: Hello you sick freak, I am pleased to admit you today to Paulie’s Hospital for the Hopelessly Insane, you have been reportedly seen going around town wearing a silly mask and you are manifesting a phobia of being too close to those around you, you are very sick indeed, but your all-white-attired attendant, Paulie, will lead you to your soft comfy room that has nice pillows on the walls so you don’t hurt yourself, and we will dress you in your lounging pajamas, we want you to be comfortable during your stay, don’t worry that your canvas smock doesn’t have arms in it, sleeves in garments are so passe, don’t you think, and who needs two pants legs these days, people overcompensate too much, austerity can be a good thing, now I am pleased to announce that Paulie gives medical treatment the old fashioned way, and yes, that means you will have your temperature taken QID in the only reliable way, why is your mouth open, that’s not where the thermometer is going, oh well, you’ll learn the routine, don’t worry about that; well now look, take that disappointed and worrisome look off your face, you never should have started wearing those masks and become scared of human contact, you brought this all on yourself, you are experiencing what we medical professionals call “Following the dumb ass crowd”, you follow dumb asses, you become a dumb ass, simple as that, and you begin doing crazy-ass stuff, and you end up here, under your supervisory attendant Paulie, who will patiently and lovingly bring you into some semblance of a semi-right mind, or he will slap a little bit of sense into you like your face is ablaze and he’s trying to put it out without water, now let’s get you settled in and I’ll bring you a special medicine that will have you feeling better next Wednesday when you finally wake up, well, this is Attendant Paulie, behind the nursing station on Psych Ward Two, toasting all his loved ones in the world, wherever you are, with two Librium’s and a large decaf Sanka, shalom..