GOD - DO I DESPISE COMMERCIALS!!

Commercials. I was just recently reminded how much I detest them!! As I have not had a TV for at least 15 years (with good reason!), the only time I do get to watch a little television is when I am at my mother’s place down the Jersey Shore, where I spent the Christmas holiday. Staying there for one week, no less!!

Granted, there are a few pretty decent shows (mostly on ‘cable?’) but, by and large, everything is besieged by these mind-numbing, atrocious waves of repugnant commercials! Mostly, the nauseatingly vapid blitzkrieg of car commercials - followed by the no less repulsive pharmaceutical horrors! I mean, I’m just trying to enjoy Seinfeld reruns, for god sake, when I am aggressively smashed over the head by these putrid nightmares. Maybe the automobile industry should spend less money on their manipulative, thoroughly non-creative advertising budgets, and, instead concentrate on delivering products that don’t have to be recalled for basic violations - and not having to lay off thousands of workers while closing their plants!

When ‘Christmas season’ comes around - that’s their cue to mercilessly pound us with an endless string of these masterpieces of horrific nonsense - five of them in a row. Often, they use Santa Claus (isn’t that so cute?) as a selling point, for some reason, as if that has ANYTHING at all to do with Christmas! Really. As if watching a bunch of entitled Yuppies and spoiled trust fund kids ( are these commercials shot in Hoboken, NJ?) buying Land Rovers, or whatever, for their wives and girlfriends is supposed to fill me with the ‘Christmas spirit?!’ Completely disgusting! And these are the completely mentally incapacitated writers who are making all the money in the business? If you would really like to spread holiday cheer, somebody please lease an imagination to these bumbling fools - that would truly fill us with joy!

CAN I THROW UP NOW?

Ugh! Thank God the bulk of this thoroughly annoying commercial money grab known as ‘Christmas season’ is almost over! Don’t get me wrong - it’s not the actual Christmas Day that I spend with my family that sickens me - I love that - no, it’s everything else that leads up to it! Especially trying to get to a job from where I live, on the outskirts of the ghetto in Jersey City, to the equally mad city of New York. I travel by PATH train, which normally takes 15-20 minutes to get to there…but not in the most annoying time of the year - oh no!

These are my top 5 Christmas season grievances:

• First, I have to get to the PATH train - which is about a 20 minute walk from my house; but I must initially try to force myself through what I like to refer to as - ‘The 99 cent Shopping Center’ - conveniently located near the Journal Square PATH stop - for all your shopping needs! There, throngs of obese knuckleheads fill the streets, stampeding to the 99 cent stores for those absurdly large, fake aluminum, fake painted gold hoop earrings, and $5 curly blond wigs - that are all the rage for Christmas presents!

• So, finally I reach the PATH train, somehow manage to squirm unto a seat, and - it’s SHOWTIME! These annoying kids blast some ancient Michael Jackson jam like ‘Billie Jean’, from the 80s - and proceed to somersault and pole dance all over the train - usually kicking somebody in the face in the process. Seen it at least 237 times this year already - NEXT!

• Happy face tourists who pack the New York subway trains. They are very happy and smiling, believing they are having ‘a REAL New York experience!’ Listen, happy faces - a packed train is NOT fun, ok?! I just want to get to work!

• Here’s something under the ‘get an imagination’ banner - which I believe Macys is having a BIG Christmas sale on! The senseless blobs who feel compelled to take a cell shot of every tall building, Holiday window display, and Christmas lights in New York City, interminably clogging up the sidewalks for those of us who have to get to work. Second most irritating to the selfie takers - “Oh boy - look gang - I’m here in New York City!'“

• My pet peeve - which actually verges on the disgusting. The simpletons who stand in endlessly long and hopeless lines in frigid, sub-freezing temperatures, just so they might possibly get a cell shot of themselves smiling in front of Carlos Bakery in Hoboken, NJ. Or of course, the one right in the Port Authority complex. I mean, what can I even say about this?! It’s beyond any type of human verbal expression.

• Ok everybody - Happy Holidays! I’m looking for a nice quiet place to vomit!

THE KNIFE

“Nestor! Nestor! Ayudame! Joe quiero mi matar!! El tiene uno cuchillo en su mochila! Ayudame!”

Which, roughly translated from Spanish, means:

“Nestor! Nestor! Help me! Joe wants to kill me!! He has a knife in his backpack!! Help me!”

Ah yes - that is La Senora crying out…this is taking place in the same decrepit apartment building in the Jersey City Heights described in my last blog. The reason it is in Spanish is because La Senora doesn’t speak a word of English. Now, I know I’ve had a somewhat contentious relationship with La Senora in the two years that I have been here, but by no means do I want to kill her! Even though she permits me in the kitchen for only 5 minutes to make my shake (and grudgingly at that!), while she spends 16 hours a day there, and even though she once thought my rather expensive piece of oatmeal soap, which I had left on the bathtub, was a cake - and tried to bake it…still, I have no reason to want to kill her!

Well, apparently, she walks through my bedroom again, as usual, and in this instance, she spies a knife that I use for peeling mangoes in the webbed front pocket of my backpack. Somehow, she contorts this into some kind of diabolical plot to asassinate her!

When I arrive home later that night, her son, Nestor, confronts me.

“Joe - why are you trying to kill my mother?!”

I mean, what do you say to that?

Places I Have Lived

THEY’RE they were. The two of them. Nestor, and his mother, La Senora (they’re from Peru) standing on top of the decrepit apartment building steps, arms folded, a collective sneer of disgust creasing their faces. I trudge reluctantly up those decaying steps, trepidation filling my entire being, as I sweat profusely on this boiling July day.

“Oh shit - NOW what?”

They lead me to the ancient sink counter in the kitchen, on which stands an empty plastic gallon jug. MY jug.

“Why?! Why?!” asks Nestor, since La Senora doesn’t speak a word of English, a tone of utter exasperation clearly evident in his voice.

First, let me give you a bit of background information, so I won’t appear COMPLETELY insane. Nestor is a catering co-worker; upon my return from my fourth trip to Ecuador, totally penniless, I DESPERATELY needed a place to stay, and took his offer of a room - sight unseen. Uh oh. The building is located in the derelict-ridden section of Jersey City known as The Heights. It is a railroad flat. For those of you who don’t know what a railroad flat is - it’s basically a long hall with rooms to the side. Bad enough. I am in the middle room - between La Senora in the front room, and Nestor in the back. Or vice versa, depending on the way you look at it. In any case, I’m in the middle. They often argue with each other, yelling between the rooms like an old married couple.

My room is a crumbling disaster. NO windows, paint peeling from the walls, the bedposts tied together by rope - and VERY narrow. Depressing, to say the least. Now, La Senora has to walk THROUGH my room to get to the kitchen, where she spends 16 hours a day. In order for me to get from my room to the bathroom in the kitchen (especially at night), you have to pass through a veritable gauntlet full of murderous obstacles, including various mousetraps placed strategically around the floor. There are the glue traps and the snapping traps. In the winter, when I wear socks to bed, the glue traps stick to them, as I blindly move forward, while the snapping traps snap my toes. This causes me great agony as I attempt to muffle my screams of horror in order not to wake up the sleeping Nestor, whose room I am walking through. Or, to be more exact, clumping through, with the glue traps stuck to my socks. When I FINALLY do reach the bathroom, the ceiling collapses on to my head. Finally, I’ve had ENOUGH!

I pee into my gallon jug at night and empty it into the toilet in the morning. When La Senora isn’t looking, of course. I sleep much better. This one time, however, I leave for my parent’s house down the Jersey Shore for three days, somehow forgetting the erstwhile gallon jug in my decrepit closet. This has been a particularly humid July, and the mysterious smell is driving them mad - until they detect the source of the offending odor.

Agghhhh….here we go…