June 2, 2020 Diary entry: Hey everybody, this is Paulie, your telephone psychic, thanks for calling, tell me about yourself, oh never mind, I already know you, you are a deeply sad individual who is confused and perplexed about your little world, Fantasy Land has pests that are eating and crapping on your counter as you sleep, hang on a second, some people have just entered my office with a box of smokes, some bottles, and a big sack of my favorite sandwiches, they are signaling to me to get off the phone, I’m going to have to postpone your psychic reading for a while as I have other more important things to do, my secretary will give you a call back time and we will delve into your deep seated problems at that time, in the meantime, don’t drink any sleeping pill cocktails with vodka in them, make sure your thirty second floor apartment windows are all closed and locked, and for heaven’s sake, turn off your television set, that is where you are getting all your crazy ideas from; Paulie really wants to help you but he must prioritize, and right now the most important and highest priority is to try and figure out how to smoke, eat, and drink in the proper order, well, as the office fills with a great cloud and people begin to share their unique smoke visions with the group, we all would like to tell the people of the world to chill out, you are much too serious about your false reality, you need to lean back and remove that mask and take a deep breath, let the oxygen into your lungs, exhale all your bad thoughts, and sip on some kind of strong drink as you ask yourself why it is you have become so stupid and trusting of every bullshit story they tell you on your screen of choice, well, as I gaze into the smoke I see a young Paulie, he is returning from battle covered in the blood of the man who had been terrorizing the beautiful princess Almadah who had just proclaimed her undying love to Paulie, Paulie is riding his white steed who can barely walk from his injuries and leaves a trail of his life blood on the cold frozen ground which was sacrificed for the sweet Almadah, the woman of women, Almadah has hair that comes down like a summer rainstorm, her voice is like a thousand hungry whipporwills who call out across the land, her lips are like the first wine of the season, her eyes take the dreary night away and cast a warm glow into a cold soul, well, it’s someone else’s turn to take a shot at a vision, Gweneeshah always comes up with the best ones, anyway, this is Paulie and the gang here in the office, wishing you shalom…

May 23, 2020 Diary entry: I just got off the phone with my psychic reader, I had questions and concerns about my future that I needed help with; I told her all about myself and she listened intently to my story and she told me my future, she said it was highly probable that some stranger would try to strangle me in the grocery store line, or one of my neighbors might leave a bag of dog crap on my doorstep that would be wired with dynamite, but most likely, she herself would hop on a plane and fly to my home to see what kind of a charmed life I lead that I am still alive because if life was indeed fair, I would be in the middle of the ocean paddling a lead inner tube, I think everyone should consult with a fully qualified psychic every now and then, just to stay connected to what it is that makes you tick, you can also get dating advice if you are willing to open up for love, the love advice I was given was to buy flowers and a box of candy and go kiss a charging buffalo, well, I think I’ve learned enough about my future and my love prospects to last me for quite some time, I’ll just wing it from here and take what comes without seeing it coming first, this is Paulie, staying clueless about his future, shalom…

May 31,2020 Diary entry: Shalom everybody, Paulie is here with a message to the young children of the earth, no matter what your age happens to be; your receiver is off the hook, if you don’t know what that means, your Pac Man guy has gone “Bloop bloop bloop”, if you don’t know what that means, your transistor radio just fell in the tub, if you don’t know what that means, you just farted propane gas like a Saudi deep well high pressure derrick while a guy was lighting his cigarette, if you don’t know what that means, your Call Of Duty video game got hacked by Russian-backed operatives and you are now playing Give The Retard A Brain Vasectomy Before He Gives Birth To Another Stupid Idea, if you don’t know what that means, you just cleaned your Madonna wig with the washing machine on the wrong cycle and now it looks like the dead cat in your garbage can, if you don’t know what that means, you drove your car down the road to a heavy metal concert and you took a wrong turn and you are now dosey do’in in some barn somewhere with a woman who looks like one of your dead aunts, if you don’t know what that means, you swiped an old lady’s purse and it only had the head of her murdered husband in it, if you don’t know what that means, your favorite Hollywood actress that you’ve loved since childhood just revealed that she is a guy, if you don’t know what that means, you just dropped LSD and your wife told you that tonight is Bridge night with the stupid couple next door who don’t smoke or drink because it harms the planet, well, what I am so politely trying to say is you all gotta stop believing all the fairy tales people tell you on your screen of choice, it’s all bullshit, get your nose out of this cartoon world and into the air, keep your nose to the air like the noble antlered deer who continually scrutinizes every foreign scent and reacts accordingly, he doesn’t run every time he smells bullshit and neither should you, well, that’s it for this episode, be sure to tune in when we will present part two, this is your intrepid life guide Paulie saying “Follow our path or follow nothing”, shalom…

May 29, 2020 Diary entry: Please forgive Paulie’s somewhat dejected demeanor this morning, my ego and self-worth took a hard hit today, the nicest little mouse hopped up on my table and asked me in the sweetest mouse voice I ever heard, if he could have a small corner from my morning toast and jam, he wanted to take it back to his brother who was starving and didn’t have the strength to accompany him to make a communal request for a simple bite of dry bread, well, I feel horribly responsible for the lack of necessities around here, I never had any beggars at the house, let alone beggar mice who are wearing old worn out and ragged clothes, and they are wearing on their hands those old wool gloves with no finger tips on them, I can hardly sleep at night for the continual muffled mouse coughs and little sneezes and the occasional soft mouse voice that says “Thank you god, for our little home, even though we have no food”, “And bless the man who lives here”; it’s bad enough when you can’t provide for yourself, but when the mice suffer, it’s a plain old fashioned crushing blow, well, I’m gonna go try to make a tiny sweater pattern so I can sew up some sweaters out of an old sock for my wonderful little house guests; this is Paulie, saying shalom, oh, hang on, my little mice want to say shalom to all the mice in the world, wherever it is you have been scattered to, shalom…

May 27, 2020 Diary entry: Well it was bound to happen, revolution is in the air, the mice were all drunk from their dance party and they built a campfire out back, they were burning all my mousetraps and roasting those tiny little sausages on spits made from the mainsprings, they were chanting incantations to the stars as they danced around the fire like the Indians used to do before they attacked the wagon train, I heard a combination of otherworldly conjurations, spells, swear words, and my name being mentioned repeatedly in between; when I say my house has been taken over by mice, I mean my house has been taken over by mice, ever since one of them figured out how to order online from the Cheesecake Factory and get cheese pizzas delivered directly to the house, my economic life has suffered the same as my personal life, I have been a man without a country and I may soon be a man without a house too, well. I would like to continue on describing my life situation but I have to go make tiny s’mores and call the neighbor lady about her cat, this is Paulie, out at the big mouse party on the edge of town that you are probably hearing in the city, shouting above the noise, shalom…

May 27, 2020 Diary entry: What, you want to offer me a free roof inspection and climb around on my roof, let me tell you something before I chase you off my property, Santa Claus climbed his butt onto my roof back in oh two, and I filled his sandbag ass with number four copper plated shot, and he didn’t need his goddamn reindeer to make him fly, the weatherman said he was spotted by radar somewhere over Siberia, headed back to his North Pole cabin to soak his Christmassy red rear end in a snowbank, so go back to your roof inspection supervisor and tell him he can inspect my roof if I can inspect his hemorroidal rear stoop roof with my wood carving tools, well, thanks for stopping by, have a good rest of your day; why are door to door salesmen always trying to sell you stuff you don’t want, why can’t people come to my door selling liquor, or hamburgers, or mouse traps, the stuff you’re always running out of, or maybe once in a while some type of sleep aid because you are as jacked up as a schizophrenic Adderral-pumped Starbuck’s addict at noontime break because you watch television nine hours a day and you sleep at night like you’re staring into the sun while the prison warden keeps repeating to your guards “Turn on the electricity and fry him”, “I got a golf game”; well, I guess it’s a blessing that I can catch four to five hours of sleep during the day or I would get no sleep at all; geez, a mouse just turned the stereo on quite loud, he wants to have a dance party with his friends and he needs a human to open the tequila bottle and get ice from the freezer, so I’ll have to cut this short to go bake, they all want those little cheese things you bake with the tube dough, so as the party starts one more time at the house out on Deerfield Avenue, make that Mousefield Avenue, Paulie says shalom…

May 27, 2020 Diary entry: Now I have spoken previously about knowing and talking to famous and semi famous people, but I have not revealed the grittier side of some of your more favorite individuals, take Aunt Jemima for example, did you know she was a West Hollywood hooker before she was discovered by a well-known pancake mix scout who worked for one of the bigger pancake mix firms, they wanted a model who would embody the vision they had for their product, a woman who had a face that said “Stack me up”, “Butter me”, and “Pour thick rich syrup on me”, a woman who would look good wearing a bandanna scarf on her head, a woman who looked like she could handle a spatula like a back alley hood handles a stiletto, a woman who could flip pancakes and flip an entire nation’s preference for what would become the number one pancake in America; Aunt Jemima began flying high as the nation’s premiere pancake mix model and no other pancake company would dare compete, the quintessential pancake model became queen of the industry and no talking horse or cute dog or harried housewife-type actor would dethrone her, she was ensconced, she was at the top of the mountain, she was the perfect top pancake of the entire stack, every little girl in America dreamed of becoming the next Aunt Jemima, every little boy dreamed of growing up and marrying a girl just like Aunt Jemima, times were good, the future was rosy, and the past was forgotten, well, I think it was back in the late fifties when a small bug was discovered in a pancake field down in Mississippi, it was the Pancake Weevil, the newly discovered Pancake Weevil devastated the entire pancake crop that year, and it came back worse than ever the next year, and the next, needless to say, the pancake industry took a hard hit, and so did Aunt Jemima, she lost her lucrative position and she began to drink and drift from town to town, no one wanted to hire an out-of-work ex pancake queen, she had difficulty supporting herself and her drinking habit at the same time, she took on odd jobs no one else wanted to do, she ended up gutting fish down in Mobile Alabama for a small cannery that didn’t need a face on their product, they just needed the fish gutted, well, there are a lot of military bases around Mobile, and after many years of gutting fish, Aunt Jemima returned to her old profession, the profession she indulged herself in before her amazing rise to stardom, she found herself back on the bottom with military men who were on weekend passes, well, they say that life is a journey and we always end up at our beginning, how true that was for Aunt Jemima, the bird will fly, but he must alight; the rocket will blast off, but it must land; stock will rise, but it must fall; I think maybe we should all look at our place in life and know that our position here is only temporary, and live accordingly, this is Paulie, shalom…

May 26, 2020 Diary entry: The two swinging kitchen doors opened up like a great ocean oyster opens up it’s loins to proudly give birth to a pearl never before seen by men, out of the thick cloud of seafood steam emerged a woman unlike any other, this subdued Panda Express kitchen has produced the one and only wonder of the modern world, she was tall, dark-haired, beautiful beyond description, her dress waved, waved like the typhoon-ravaged sea waves goodbye to all that we call serene or sane, I ordered another Saki and I wondered, I wondered deep, I wondered how I could gaze on such a woman and still live, her eyes carried the entire universe within them and I wanted to become Captain Kirk, I wanted to fly my star ship through her starry expanse like I was chasing the parallel world of my soul, my other soul that never aches because I catch all that I lay my eyes upon, and my star ship never fails, I screamed through to Scottie to pile on the coal, we were gonna break through to the other side or die trying, double up on the warp speed, to hell with this world, I don’t want to live in it anymore, I want to live in a world where sanity be damned, sometimes a man just has to empty his pockets and put all his money on the table for that one big score that will set him up for life, bet it all, take it all, or take nothing, I would either ride this speeding comet or it would burn me up, I would either reach the great mountain peak or I’d end up like all the other climbers whose sun-bleached bones litter the frozen slopes below, can Paulie be the furnace that burns hot like the core of the earth, or will he forever be a babe and a fool, a silly dreamer who may never awaken to the fact that the world is just too big, and time travels much too far for him to ever leave any lasting footprint on what is forever shifting and moving, anyway, I feel like I went to sleep in 2020 and woke up in 1984; now I’ve been kicked out of bars before for a myriad of reasons, but last night was the first time I was ejected for sitting too close to an elderly couple who looked like they were in town for the World’s Fair Of The Most Wrinkles, Human Face Division, they said I broke some kind of ordinance, that’s the story of my life, I can’t walk down the street without someone saying “You can’t do that”, “You can’t do this”, and “You better not ever do that around here”, god, is everyone a cop of some kind, I think people have been watching too many cop shows on television, their lives are so empty and devoid of life that they have to involve themselves in someone else’s life to justify a twisted and meager existence, like a slug has to justify his slime trail, anyway, as the sun nears it’s western gate, and Paulie nears the point of no-return insanity, he wishes his best love to those he loves, wherever you find yourself on this stationary earth plane, Paulie says shalom…

May 24, 2020 Diary entry: I actually talked to the ghost of Aunt Jemima quite frequently back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, did you know she could solve complicated math problems in her head without a pencil or anything, she invented several household kitchen items and she won some amateur beauty contests in her youth, that was before she got the pancake mix job, there was a clause written in her contract that said she could have all the pancakes she could eat free, and she began putting on weight which ended her modeling career, anyway, she told me about her friend Uncle Ben; back when the government was looking for some one to put on their “I Want You” poster, it came down to two choices, Uncle Sam and Uncle Ben, when the government picked the old white guy, Uncle Ben said “Screw you honkeys, I got a rice gig anyway”; after that bitter event, Uncle Ben became a ricist, he would no longer associate with the white rice, he preferred staying close to the brown rice he knew and loved, Uncle Ben was accused of ricism several times and he never fought the charges, well, after career successes and failures, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben began to drink a lot down by the docks together; Otis Redding came along and wrote a biographical song about the two, called “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay”, “Feelin’ Fine”, I miss the world as it was so long ago, I met many wonderful people who were either famous or semi famous, usually about the time when the psilocybin mushroom was just kicking in, the world and it’s people seem so sterile and stale these days, people’s idea of fun anymore is eating from two different corn chip bags while they watch a rigged game on TV, and after two beers they start telling the same tired jokes you’ve heard a thousand times over the last fifty years, I liked it better when you looked around the room and your friends’ heads began looking like dead presidents and the ladies turned into those weird donkey-headed beasts with giant red lips and white tornado clouds coming out of their ears, and they made donkey sounds when you lit their cigarettes, god, where has the excitement gone, how did I ever wind up in such a dead crowd of people; if people were batteries, I’m afraid our collective flashlight would be worthless, if people were air freshener, we’d all have clothespins clipped to our noses, if people were the water of the sea, I’m afraid we’d all be crawling through dry sand, maybe this is what they mean when they talk about the “winter of your life”, if it is, then I’m freezing my ass off, this is Paulie, shalom…

May 23, 2020 Diary entry: Well sweet rock candy Jesus, I got mice like crazy here, I got drunk and stoned Mexican mice, I got bald white Krishnan mice, I got black Mooslim dude mice wearing cool shades, shiny shirts, wearing mirror-polished Italian shoes, and flashing big gold wristwatches while their black-hooded mouse wives follow along six feet behind them, I got mean French mice who wear dark glasses and formal tams, and they run the black market down on the docks and they leave their expensive French cigarette butts on my best china, I got one mouse who says he’s the “exterminator”, and he wants a list of my mouse occupants because some of them may have a disease, and he wants to test them, what the hell am I, the hotel concierge, I can’t control what’s going on around here, I’m just a worn out cog in the rusty wheel that is about to drop because my whole brain is rotted and drippy from all the Cheetos, MSG, plant proteins, flouride, mercury, and Schedule One drugs I ingested over the last fifty years, what do I know about mice who appear to be on the run for some kind of nefarious reason, they should follow through with that mouse wall they promised to build, I am not my brother mouse’s keeper, I am simply a plain and simple man who is trying to keep his head above water as his Little Princess floatie tube deflates because of dry rot and I don’t have the breath to blow it back up, nobody has a problem with these mice more than me, I don’t need some low-level local government clerk coming around feigning interest in my personal business when he should be back at the office kissing all the government ass he can because they got robots coming in on line to replace him, but before he goes, the robots are gonna bend him over a government file cabinet and show him why robot love will never leave you wanting, god, these low-level turds just won’t go down the drain, these gas-filled orangatang-droppings of government agents need dropped off a high cliff in the Andes somewhere, I’m sorry Peruvians, I mean no bad JuJu to you, I just want these freaks far away from me, but the thing is, as long as these fugitive mice are under my roof, they will be free from government intrusion, they will live free, they will breathe free, and they will eat free, anyway, where was I headed with this, I think I was headed to the liquor cabinet to see if there is anything left to calm my frazzled nerves, well, this is Paulie, hoping all your mice are good mice, and you are all content and happy, shalom my loved ones, shalom…