I lead a charmed fuckin’ life here.

My first day as an intern last summer I walked in…after getting horribly lost taking a freight elevator, I was completely green. Prior to that I got lost again looking for our damned offices, expecting to see our logo in lights above the door where Jagger-hot groupies oiled up and used each other like slip and slides…nope. Just another normal big-ass building.

Anyway, I made it in to our offices and within 15 minutes of being there I was handed a glass of shitty champagne. After that I was handed a glass of Dom. Nevermind WHY I got the spensive champagne, the point is that I did.

Because of my stressing and lack of food in stomach, I got drunk. I was drunk on Dom my first day working in the major music business.

I only think of champagne because since we will find any excuse to drink it on the job around here, we did yesterday. One of our guys got in to the NYU masters program, which is one hell of an achievement. So we drank. I caught a buzz a half hour before I was supposed to leave and go to dinner and drinks and a James Blunt concert with my future department.

–I wrote that last Wednesday and forgot to post it, or decided not to. I’m not sure but its up now, so yeah.

The day following that I went out drinking with a bunch of video promo people from all the major music networks…You know, the A-Team. I don’t know what it is, but those people know how to party. I had a great time, and at some point I think I offered a girl large sums of money to titty-fuck her. I’m a vile person I know, but a bunch of funny gay guys put me up to it. A good time was had by all.

Lets wrap this up with another wacky phone message.

This guy calls with a voice like a grinding clutch telling me about some show he saw at the Count Basie theatre in Jersey. It must have been a lounge act because this guy was LIVID (as livid as a 900 year old man can be) about how disrespectful this show was to Dean, Sam and Frank. Somehow this was my fault… that this guy saw some cheap imitation of the Rat Pack on a nursing home outing. He said he was a friend of the group, and for all I knew he was part of their crew. Or he was just crazy as hell, and given my answering machine’s sordid past, I’m going with door number 2.

And now, a picture of my cousin after drinking the worst bloody mary ever.

I worked at this radio station in college, Wolf 108. The guy who ran it was a complete fucking lunatic.

His name was Wolf, legally, and he was batshit crazy. He told some bullshit legend about how he got his name.

Supposedly a man in black approached him in a bar and gave him a vial of white liquid. The man in black told Francis (I don’t know his real name so I made one up) that if he drank the liquid he would become a werewolf. Now and forever. What a bunch of shit. Obviously he drank it.

After this he went completely off the deep end. He started to refer to his hands and feet as his paws, his nose as his snout, hair was fur, you get the idea. The really obnoxious part about this is that while most people don’t usually find ways to work their nose into casual conversation, this guy would go out of his way to refer to his “snout” just so you would get the whole “I’m a wolf” thing. Fucking jackass.

He also received warnings from his doctor to stop eating raw read meat, and his neighbors were often pissed because of his late night howling at the moon. He also stopped drinking because he got in a bar fight, bit some guy in the neck, almost ripped out his larynx, and then howled over the guys sputtering, bleeding body. Dude almost died.

We were talking once about Lycanthropy. Talking to him was like talking to a microwave filled with scrap metal, he was always snapping on people or shutting down. The most socially inept fucker alive. He liked talking about wolf stuff though, obviously, so we got to talking about Lycanthropy, which he explained is a condition where someone thinks they are a wolf. I responded with, “So you are kind of a lycanthrope then?” He said “No, there’s a difference, they THINK they are wolves, I AM a wolf”. Fuckhead.

Ok, enough about how nuts this fucker was. I could go on forever. It should be obvious that he was completely unfit to run a radio station. Radio stations are fairly democratic places, or should be, but Wolf was a fucking DICTATOR. I almost got fired twice, once for using my cellphone inside (dipshit thought it would interfere with the signal, not true) and another time for spilling a teaspoon’s worth of pizza sauce in the lobby. Both times he screamed so loud and got so pissed I thought he was going to hit me.

His dictator shit went even further. He billed himself as a “community” radio station. However, within the first month he alienated one of the only TWO rock music venues in town because they promised a deal and didn’t deliver. So from that day forward, he would not even SPEAK of anything going on there. There was also another community radio station just starting to get their shit together. They weren’t even on the air yet, but Wolf went ahead and fucking blacklisted anyone who even mentioned them. Serious, you were fired and out of the office.

I ran the industrial show. I like some industrial, I know a lot about it, but I’m not necessarily “into” it because of the high amount of dickheads who listen to it. These people suck, especially the ones who listen to EBM, an offshoot of industrial that sounds like gay German trance with different vocals. Bullshit. The people who like it are even worse. Horrible human beings. Anyway, I did it because I liked the idea of playing Ministry at high volumes and talking shit.

It should be obvious by now that this place was headed for the bargain bin.

I eventually got fired. Wolf and I had a bit of a “falling out” over someone playing an mp3 on the air. He had a legitimate right to be pissed since the thing sounded like shit, and it happened on my show, so he was pissed at me. Again, rightfully so. He told me I might be getting cancelled, but he didn’t know and would let me know by Monday, my show was on Wednesday. Monday came around, no info, so I called him, emailed him, nothing. By Wednesday, I was under the impression that I will still on the air. So I got ready to do my show, got REALLY high with my roommates (which I rarely do) and as I was heading out, I checked the website to see a big “TBA” in the timeslot where my name should be. Fucking prick didn’t have the balls to fire me personally.

I went in anyway, to pretend like I hadn’t seen the site and there he was, getting his shoulders rubbed by his Bear (read: hairy gay man) tech guy…I think they were dating. Anyway, he told me to turn in my badge I was fired blah blah blah. I knew I was fucked so I took this as an opportunity to rail on him for a good 15 minutes straight, dusted out of my mind. I think I might have called him fat at one point. I broke down why he is a dumb fuck and why his station will fail.

It was the only time I’ve ever even made an attempt to “tell someone off”. It was also one of the rare times I’ve willingly burned a bridge. I pissed on the ashes. Fuck that guy and every failed business he decides to start.

Wolf 108 went under like 2 months after I was “dismissed”.

Why tell this story? Shit, I don’t know. I thought about that nutbar on the train today and I decided I would write it down so I never forget it.

Here is a story about the station on the website of one of the Wolf 108 shows that actually survived on another station, complete with a picture of the man himself.

This is definitely as good as you think it is.

We all love it, walking around watching our dicks grow. Women, maintenance, even the mailroom guys feel ten feet tall around here if you get them at the right moments. Huge swinging dicks and egos in the breeze.

We are in the nerve center, no matter what level or impulse you find yourself straddling, you are part of one of the major institutions in this country, on this planet, in this universe. Source of so much pain, murder, love, fucking, and dancing. To name a chosen few. We create vice, make you spend money, inspire vice, glorify spending money. Each day I walk around here, I see an email being sent that will end a career, turn a life around, move millions of dollars, or millions of people.

This email might even have the word “cunt” in it. That’s something you cant avoid, a bunch of crazy motherfuckers working in this business. Jerry Heller, co-founder of Ruthless Records with Eazy-E (also one of the most hated men in rap history) talks about this. The idea that we are all here because we are too damn nuts to be anywhere else. The guy who trained me, an ex-hippy-phish-following-acid-head acid head acid head, said the same thing. This is the only place a guy like him can be successful…and happy.

This might sound extremely fucking cocky, but this pride is rooted in satisfaction, many people you hear talk about working in this corridor will speak with similar grandeur, name-dropping all to hell while continuously checking to see if their balls are still there. They are. They always are. This is because they are happy with their job, and satisfied with their station in life.

Now we the American working population
Hate the fact that eight hours a day
Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us
And we may not hate our jobs
But we hate jobs in general
That don’t have to do with fighting our own causes
We the American working population
Hate the nine-to-five day-in day-out
When we’d rather be supporting ourselves
By being paid to perfect the pasttimes
That we have harbored based solely on the fact
That it makes us smile if it sounds dope
-Aesop Rock

Based solely on the fact that it makes us smile if it sounds dope. This is why we smile.

Sometimes I even feel guilty for liking my job so much. It really really gets to me, to the point that I feel like I am bragging to people on accident simply by telling them what I do. That is why I am writing this right now, to communicate the utter pride I am immersed in daily.

Also keep in mind that this is a persona, one facet of myself, as we are all multi-faceted and never given to being pinned down by the wings into one definition or the other. This voice that I write in has been chosen to amplify one identity of mine that I am particularly proud of, and I am not sorry for that.

I am changing though. What you see and hear a lot lately out of me is some pretty self absorbed shit. This attitude is a direct result of a relationship I was in about a year ago, one that took me away from my friends and caused me to forego my own wants and needs in the name of someone else. My friend Ant called it “my fulltime job”, and it was. I sucked for that part of my life.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. My reaction was to end my relationship, and launch myself into a pit of pussy, drinking, high-fiving, and a complete NEED to only look out for myself. It was plum necessary, “following my dick and my ego around” I believe Ant described it.

This was important because I realized that I had been a bit of a doormat for a long time in my life. Some times more than others, and that needed to change. So my reactionary…um…actions got me to this point, where I can say I am happy. The cool thing is that I didn’t hurt TOO many people. I might have said some offensive shit in a bar or seduced a woman, but I always made sure to buy a beer to ice the balls I broke, and I always made sure to hold the pretty girls afterwards, and keep them as great friends. I’m not a terminal dickhead, I’m just dabbling. I will never be able to do this fulltime.

So its time to cool it a little I think. Air out some of the bitterness, embrace more positivity, and let the cool air do it’s thing. After all, winter is a shitty time to be a hedonist. That’s why we have Tourist Jamaica.

My dick and my ego led me here, to the fulfillment of my dream, and to happiness with my station in life. Now that I am here, I can dust off the ol’ heart/brain combo for some playing time, sit back, and drink beer on top of it all.

Thanks for reading this shite. For whatever it is worth.

A pretty girl has her desk right next to the Men’s bathroom on our floor. By now, she knows everyone’s poop schedules.