Here’s another thing you don’t know about me: I’m a frickin’ psychic. But I don’t deal with all that after-life shit. It creeps me out. Instead, I channel the spirits of the living. I just close my eyes and let my fingers type whatever the spirit dictates to me. I call these bursts of thoughts Letters From The Living.â„¢ Oh, I’m feeling a vibration coming on. I better not resist it. .Ah. . .Ah. . .Nnnnnn. . .

Hey there, baby. Yeah, you. Is that a new dress? Oh, I get it. I’m not a lawyer or a doctor, so there’s no reason to talk to me. Whatever, you stuck up bitch. Is it the overcoat that’s turning you off? It’s fucking cold outside. It’s not like I’m hanging around naked under here. Well, not completely naked. Heh heh heh. Come on, don’t you wanna rest that sweet ass of yours? I’ve got a seat saved for you righhhhht here. Okay, look, maybe I haven’t “brushed my teeth” in “two weeks” or “showered” since the “Clinton administration,” but is that any reason to give me the cold shoulder? I’m a fucking human being, damn it! I have feelings! Have you seen the latest issue of Esquire? Greasy, stringy hair is all the rage in Europe. Turns out, I’m a goddamn trendsetter. Look, I’m sorry. How ’bout we just go get a coffee? We could have a nice chat and then afterwards, you could sit on my face. Yeah? Well, bite me. You’re not my type anyway!

Sincerely,

The Creepy Guy On The Bus

Whew. That took a lot out of me. Now, why do I suddenly have a craving for Ripple wine and generic cigarettes?

Because I have such a long commute from work, I often find myself fantasizing while driving. I thought I’d share one of them with you today:

It’s 5:30 p.m. I’m on the road and I look around and I see. . . nothing. Not a fucking car in sight. Do I get scared? No. I chuckle to myself and hit the gas. As my car accelerates towards the intersection, the light turns red. But I don’t even slow down. I fly right through it without a care in the world.

I glance over and I see Nicole Kidman riding shotgun. She’s dressed in some lacy Victoria’s Secret number and I appreciate it. She places her hand on my thigh and leans over and whispers in my ear, “Faster,” in that Aussie accent of hers. So I punch the gas, but it’s already all the way down. “Faster!” she demands, this time in her Russian accent from Birthday Girl. I push my foot down as far as it will go, but the car is already going 115 MPH. “Faster!” Suddenly, she’s goddamn Irish.

“I heard you the first time, you stupid bitch! Look, the goddamn pedal is all the way down! It’s not going to go down any farther unless I punch my foot through the fucking firewall!”

“Faster!” she yells, in what sounds like a Southern accent. Where the fuck is that from? When did she play a Southern woman? She’s just showing off now.

I turn to her and see the scenery whizzing by. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you a goddamn moron? I told you, I can’t go any goddamn faster! And pick a fucking accent and stick with it already! Jeeze! You’ve proven yourself. You’re a fucking amazing actress. I’m impressed, okay? Fuck!”

She just looks at me for a moment and then, yeah, she says it again, “Faster.” I swear it sounded Pakistani. That’s when I slam on the brakes and kick her ass to the curb. Fucking bitch. No wonder Tom Cruise dumped her.

10. Live just a hop, skip and a jump from West Hollywood

9. Use the phrase “a hop skip and a jump”

8. Like to shop at Williams-Somoma

7. The fact that I like to shop. Period.

6. Watch Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, but learn very little.

5. Own a scented candle

4. Always cry at the end of Sleepless In Seattle

3. Like to get facials (not that kind, sicko)

2. Thin, neat and single

1. Like to have sex with men… nah, I’m just kiddin’. And the number one Incredibly Gay Thing About Me is…

1. Richard Simmons once came up to me and told me to take it down a notch.

Those of you ladies who’ve had the pleasure of knowing me intimately are quite aware of my expertise in the art of lip lovin’. I don’t want to toot my own horn, or use any tired cliches, but many of you have said (after regaining consciousness) that I should write a book and share my technique with the rest of the world. And that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do.

But then I realized something: Writing a book is just way too fucking hard. So instead, I present to you The Unforgettable Kiss.™ A kiss she will remember for the rest of her life. A kiss she will tell her grandchildren about, despite how disturbing it may be for the grandchildren to listen to. Come to think of it, maybe she should just forget about telling the grandchildren, or at least wait until they’re over 18.

Okay, without further delay, I give to you, The Unforgettable Kiss.™

Before you begin The Unforgettable Kiss,™ you first need to find yourself a lady. Preferably, one with lips. Not that I’m discriminating here. It’s just that, well, kissing is much easier when your lady has lips. Trust me, I know this from experience. I wish I didn’t. But I do.

Once you’ve found a lady with lips, you need make sure you have the right setting. You can pretty much use anyplace, aside from maybe the Holocaust Museum or a Catholic Monastery. I suggest either her doorstep or the inside of your car. But not while you’re driving. Sure, it may seem exciting at first. But next thing you know, you’ve hit a parked car and your date is being rushed to the operating room to have your tongue removed from her lower intestine. And while they can easily sew your tongue back on, nothing will ever quite taste the same, and you won’t be able to make it into that taco shape anymore. I really miss making the tongue taco.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. The Unforgettable Kiss.™ So now that you’ve got yourself a lady and the right setting, it’s time to make your move. Turn to her and tell her what a great time you had and that you should really get together again soon. Then, just be silent and stare at her.

Eventually, she’ll become uncomfortable and try to say something. At this exact moment, grab her face, and look deeply into her eyes, past the cornea, through the pupil and beyond the vitreous. Then slowly lower your lips to her cheek and release a burst of air to create a loud “raspberry” sound. This will stun her into submission and cause her lips to part. She is yours.

Remember that motorboat noise you used to make with your lips when you were a kid? Do it now, then glide your vibrating lips over hers, massaging away all the tension in her mouth. By this time, she will start breathing heavily and attempt to pull you closer. Don’t let her.

Extend your tongue and lick all the way up from her chin, across her lips, over her nostrils and up the bridge of her nose and through her hair. Remove her hair from your mouth and then lower your lips to her left eye and gently suck. Careful, now. I don’t have to tell you what could happen if you suck too hard, especially if your lover wears contact lenses or has a glass eye.

Now it’s time for the best part. Take a deep breath, tilt her head back, pinch her nose and then place your lips over hers. Wait a minute, that’s CPR. Forget the head tilting, nose pinching part. Just place your lips over hers and then very subtly begin humming The Star Spangled Banner, getting louder and louder as you go. There is something about the vibrations created in her mouth by this tune that causes a woman to become putty in your hands, letting you shape her into whatever you desire, as well as press her against your favorite newspaper comic strip and have the mirror image appear on her skin. Cool.

By the time you’ve finished humming The Start Spangled Banner, your date will have lost consciousness. Now, a less polite man might try to take advantage of a situation like this. Do not give in to temptation. Carefully, carry her out to her doorstep (if she isn’t there already) and lay her down on the doormat. On second thought, you might want to leave her somewhere less conspicuous, such as behind a shubbery, or on a wooden bench swing, like in Back To The Future. Before you go, place a gentle kiss on her forehead and slip a rose behind her ear. Just remember to remove the thorns first.

If you do find that you simply cannot resist temptation and decide to go for a boob squeeze before you leave, be polite and leave a note to let her know exactly which breast you fondled and for how long. To save time, it’s best to have some pre-typed notes signed and ready in your glove box.

Of course, not all women will have a positive reaction to The Unforgettable Kiss.™ Some might slap you in the face, kick you in the teeth, or spray you with mace. They could even refuse to go out with you again. Or file a restraining order. Don’t take it personally. The Unforgettable Kiss™ is not for everyone. In fact, it’s really not for most. But when you do find that special girl who’s willing to let you lick her face, suck her eyeball and sing into her mouth, well, let me tell ya, fellas, it’s just magic. Pure magic.

As many of you know, I actually get paid to write. But one thing I don’t get paid to due is proofread. That’s why the ad agency hires professionals to nitpick every word on the page, to catch spelling mistakes and points out grammatical errors. Unfortunately, they don’t always do a very good job.

An email I wrote for a very prominent automobile company went out today and I was pretty proud of it. That is, until I forwarded it to a friend of mine. She found some spelling errors. Apparently, fois gras isn’t spelled that way. It’s spelled like this: foie gras. Who knew? I certainly didn’t. I didn’t take French in high school. I took Spanish. And I flunked it. But then again, its not my job to find the the mistakes. It’s the proofreader’s. I mean, they must’ve looked at that copy five seperate times. And they still managed to miss those mistakes.

Needless to say, I made sure the oversight was brought to the attention of the proofreaders, All they could do was apologize and say they would be more fastidious in the future. “Damn right,” I said, and angrily stormed back to my office, sat down at my desk and quickly looked up the word “fastidious.’ Fucking proofers. Why can’t they just say precise?

So, I’m driving home after a long day (thus the crappiness of this blog entry) and I get behind this huge truck in the left turn lane. And I mean, this was a fucking huge truck. Not one of those pussy SUVs. This was one of those giant flatbed motherfuckers. From the back, it looked like it was hauling cars to a dealership or something.

So the truck slowllyyyy turns left and I’m right behind it, and then all of the sudden it just stops in the lane and turns on it’s left turn signal. So, I’m wondering to myself (as opposed to wondering to the driver in the car ahead of me), ‘Where the fuck does this guy think he’s going?’ That’s when I look over and see his destination: an impound yard. Ahhh it’s a tow truck!

But wait. What the fuck is he impounding that requires such a humongous truck? I had to find out. So I drive around and take a look at his cargo, and you’ll never guess what I saw (and if you do, well, fuck you). Right there, on the flatbed truck was… a tow truck. That’s right. It was a tow-truck tow truck.

Then I started wondering (to myself again) what would the truck look like that had to tow the tow-truck tow truck? And what if that truck broke down? What would they use to tow a monstrosity like that? And at what point would they just say “fuck it” and leave the goddamn thing there to be stripped for parts?

Smivey was doing so well keeping his readers entertained for over a year. Then with one crappy entry, he lost about 20 of them, never to return again. Tow-truck tow truck? What the fuck was he thinking?

Well, I spent the day working from home. Not because I have a really cool job that lets me do that kind of thing every once in a while. Because I had no choice. I wanted HDTV and I had to wait for the cable guy to get it.

Now, we’re all familiar with waiting for the cable guy. The joke is that you have to wait around all day and you never know when he’s gonna show up. At least I thought it was a joke. Turns out, it’s not as much a joke as it is a horrible reality.

Stupid me. I thought my cable company was different. I mean, they gave me a choice of two appointment windows, either 8-10AM or 1-3PM. I chose 8-10AM, because I didn’t want to have to spend the day at home waiting for the fucking cable guy.

At around 9:30, I called to make sure the cable guy wasn’t running late. Do you know what they told me? My appointment was actually scheduled from 1-3PM! Figures. I sent an email out to everyone at work, letting them know they would not be seeing my shining face until tomorrow. And then I continued to wait.

At around 2:30, I started getting a little impatient. If I called again, would they tell me my appointment was actually scheduled from 3-4? No, when I called they said that there was no cause for alarm. The cable guy should be at my place on time. He was not running late. Well, that was good news. Or so I thought.

At 3:15, I started to think that the operator might’ve been full of shit and the cable guy could actually be running late. Either that, or every time piece in my home suddenly stopped functioning at the exact same moment. Just to be safe, I called the time lady. Yeah, he was definitely running late.

That’s when a very dear lady I know (we’ll call her VDL) offered to call the cable company for me and handle the matter herself. She did, and then told me that the cable guy was indeed running a half hour late (shocker), but that my bill would be credited $20 to make up for it. I really appreciated everything VDL did for me. But at that point, I just wanted my goddamn HDTV.

4:00 rolls around and the cable guy finally decides to show up. He assure me that it’s a simple matter of switching out boxes, and “it shouldn’t take that long.”

Well, friends, it did take that long. In fact, it took longer than that long. It took for fucking ever. After about a half hour, the cable guy decided the problem was with the cable box itself. So he went down to the truck to get some new “components.” Well, he was gone an awfully long time to just be grabbing some new components. I think he went down there to cry.

Twenty minutes later, the cable guy walks back in and starts messing around with all the cables, playing with the settings on my TV, and doing everything else a cable technician might do when he’s trying to hide the fact that he has no idea what he’s doing. Finally, he calls headquarters and asks for their help. They tell him to try everything that he’s tried before. And so he does, again and again.

Of course, it was impossible for me to get any work done with all that commotion going on. But it was well worth it. Because an hour later, I had the most amazing cable reception I’ve ever seen in my life. At least that’s what I was hoping I’d say. In reality, the reception wasn’t all that great. In fact, it sucked. The people on the screen were fucking purple! Wow, it’s so goddamn lifelike! Basically, the cable guy gave up. And at that point, I was glad to see him leave. I had a lot of headlines to write. Not to mention a blog entry to type up. HDTV, my ass. Motherfuckers.

Today, I’ve sunk to a new level of laziness. I used up all of the dishes and silverware and now they’re all stuffed into the dishwasher. The only problem: I just don’t have the energy to turn the stupid machine on. Good thing I’ve got a good set of chopsticks.

Yes, that’s right, chopsticks. I think a lot of people underestimate the versatility of these two wooden sticks. Sure, when you’re having sushi or kung pao whatever, it’s the first thing you think about: “Chopsticks! Chopsticks! Where are the chopsticks? Did you get the chopsticks? Gotta have the chopsticks.”

But chopsticks aren’t just for eating steamed fish with ginger scallion sauce. In fact, if you’ve got mad chopsticks skills like me, you can use them for just about anything: a four-cheese omelette with a side of veggie sausage, a quarter pound of dairy-free potato salad, two spinach latkes, Lean Cuisine Broccoli & Cheese Potatoes, penne pasta with vodka sauce, Tofurky Beer Brats with sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, spumoni ice cream, peaches in light syru… okay, okay. I’m starting up the fucking dishwasher. Jeeze, I thought you might be able to appreciate a little creativity.

Look at the statistics. Chances are, someone you know is doing it. It could be that bookish woman in Accounts Payable. Or maybe that guy in the mailroom with the lazy eye. Of course, I’m talking about the Atkins Diet.

Low carbs. High protein. That’s pretty much the concept. See, if you consume fewer carbs, you can apparently eat everything you want and not gain an ounce. No wonder it’s one of the most popular diets in history.

Subway even has a low-carb sandwich now. It’s stuffed full of chicken, bacon and melted cheese. But it’s wrapped in a tortilla instead of a roll, so that makes it okay. What’s more, the Chicken Bacon Ranch Wrap has only 19 carbs and 27 grams of fat! That’s fucking amazing! For a bacon sandwich slathered in ranch dressing, I mean.

Carl’s Jr., a West Coast favorite, goes one step further. Their Low-Carb Six Dollar Burger boasts a mere 6 grams of carbs and a measly 37 grams of fat. Well, fuck me, that’s a damn wholesome burger. The secret? By eliminating the bun and wrapping the meat up in lettuce, the burger takes on magical properties and dissolves into an odorless vapor seconds before it hits your stomach. This, of course, is all based on my own research, which I basically made up while I was rubbing the dead skin off my ankles in the shower.

So why hasn’t Smivey hopped on the high-protein bandwagon? And why is he suddenly referring to himself in the third person? Well, I’m not sure about the latter question, but I can give you an answer to the first:

Simply put, I love bread, from Wonder white to San Francisco sourdough. Rosemary garlic, multigrain, rye, even challah (pronounced like you’re hocking up a loogie: Kha-la), if it’s got the name “bread” in it, I’m all over it. And that includes banana bread, which technically isn’t bread at all. Sure, it’s shaped like bread. But who the fuck are you trying to kid? Face it, buddy, it’s cake and you know it.

These days, people react to bread like it’s the food of the devil: “Oh, no roll for me, thanks. Too many carbs. Can I get some more blue cheese dressing for my chicken wings?”

Yeah, I wish I could be that health conscious. But I just can’t. So while you’re all out at lunch, scarfing down your fried-beef lettuce-wiches, I’ll be at my favorite bakery, doing what I love most: enjoying a nice bowl of soup with a hot, crusty, demi baguette. Mmmm best damn carbs I ever tasted.

What can Brown do for you? I’ll tell you what Brown can do for you. They can make you stay at home all fucking day waiting for a goddamn package to arrive because the shipper was too fucking cheap to use FedEx. Better yet, their Web site will claim that a delivery attempt was made, despite the fact that there was no notice left on your door and there is no evidence that anyone tried to call from the intercom.

But the benefits don’t stop there, my friends. Call Brown’s toll-free number and an automated voice tells you to speak the tracking number. Read it too fast, and the voice interrupts you and tells you to repeat the number again. And so you do. Very. Very. Slowly. (In between curse words muttered under your breath.)

Finally, after about ten minutes of frustration, you end up pushing “0,” where you’re quickly connected with Steve, a friendly Brown employee who has become quite skilled in the art of apologizing. He informs you that they can redirect your package to another address, but that it’s too late to make the change for tomorrow’s delivery. However, after they fail to deliver it once again, they will gladly see to it that it gets to your desired destination on Monday. Oh, thank you, Steve. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Thanks to you, I still have one clump of hair left on my head that will remain there until the next time I deal with your stupid fucking outdated delivery service. And that, my friends, is what Brown can do for you.