I made the mistake of dozing off last night while reading, fully dressed on my couch. I woke up at 2:00 a.m. after three hours of sleep. Unable to get back to sleep, I continued reading for awhile. Outside my window, the streets were very noisy--it sounded almost like New Year's Eve. Big SUVs playing loud music idled downstairs, guys and girls screamed and laughed at the top of their voices, car horns blared, the police made announcements for cars to move on...it was crazy, and went on from about 2 to 4:30 a.m. I had no idea what was going on...

The book I'm reading is Robert Bloch's The Scarf, his first novel from 1947. He's the author of the original novel on which Hitchcock's Psycho is based, and he had a long and successful career as a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.

The Scarf has aged well over the last sixty years. It tells the story of a bestselling author, his psyche twisted in his childhood by a sadistic, sexually hypocritical mother, and a repressed, suicidal spinster schoolteacher. His climb to literary success includes murdering three women who love and desire him to varying degrees. He's a charming rogue, but hates women. I'm two thirds of the way through this compulsively readable book. His crimes are catching up to him at last, even his first novel goes into multiple printings and his agent begs him to start another book.

One of the best scenes in the novel has nothing to do with murder. The Scarf was written during the heyday of psychoanalysis, and the cynical anti-hero, who is well-aware of his psychosexual problems, opines at a cocktail party that psychologists shouldn't train people to be successes, but rather to adjust to living as failures. He posits that most people in the world end up as failures, so it would be better for the shrinks to prepare them for that. His theory strikes everybody at the late 40s cocktail party as radical and contrary, but when a reader in 2007 thinks about it, it seems that this is exactly what a lot of therapy now does, except without using the word "failure." We're endlessly preached at by the media or self-help gurus to learn to have "gratitude" for what we have, rather than wishing for the greener grass on the other side of the road. Isn't this just a different way of saying, "Accept what you've got, and don't pine for the dreams that didn't come true"? In other words, you blew it, buddy, but don't dwell on it.

Or maybe I'm kinda cynical myself...

I guess this is depressing stuff for a sunny, beautiful Sunday afternoon in New York, but lately I've been fighting the blues. I feel that because the weather is so gorgeous, I should be happier, but I feel glum and I read grim books.

Still, I like genre fiction that can both deliver an exciting story and make solid observations about the lives we lead. Such a skillful combination is inspiring, and makes me feel less depressed. And Robert Bloch's fiction, besides being suspenseful and insightful, was also very funny; he makes the murderous anti-hero of The Scarf not only a master of getting away with murder, but also of making wry, humorous observations. But in the end The Scarf's killer protagonist reminds me of Dostoevsky's Underground Man too, hating and distrusting the world, but being destroyed by his cynicism. As I recall, the Underground Man finds redemption at the end of his book; I have a feeling that the killer in The Scarf will not. But I have about fifty pages left, so we'll see what happens. Maybe Robert Bloch has a surprise up his sleeve.

Women either have radar in their butts, or my eyes send out heat rays. The proof is that whenever I see and then watch a woman ahead of me on the street who has an attractively round and plump derriere in a dress or slacks, she inevitably pulls down her blouse or sweater down over her waist, or if it's a dress or skirt, pulls it further down over her thighs, as if such moves would downplay the contours so obviously being displayed. This happens even when they don't actually see me looking at them.

I don't want to sound like a creep, because I am very discreet and just look from a distance, but if a woman is going to show off her finer points, I am going to look and enjoy them, just as I would gaze at any work of art. And a beautiful woman is a natural work of art, with cosmetic and sartorial enhancement.

I'm making this observation because as I was coming home tonight after hanging out with my film buff buddies in Greenwich Village, watching an episode of the 1960s Outer Limits, I was walking up Broadway and I saw a woman in a snug plaid dress that hugged her very sexy bottom. She was walking with a guy, and I couldn't even see her face, and I know she didn't actually see me (at least not when I was looking at her), but soon enough she was tugging her dress down as if her posterior could feel and resent my appreciation of her well-exhibited shapeliness, and as if her last moment attempt at coverage made any difference to the triumphant prominence of her lovely backside as it stretched the red and green plaid fabric of the dress, colors which were nicely matched by her red patent stiletto pumps.

I'm telling you, somebody should do a study as to whether horny men's eyeballs--or just mine--emit heat rays. But overall, it's a pretty useless power. Nobody's going to do a comic book about Eyeball Man.

When I was on the subway this morning going up to the Port Authority bus station in Upper Manhattan, a lady was dozing on the next seat. It drove me crazy the way she kept swaying with the train, nodding and snapping half-awake and then dozing again, and I was sure she was going to topple over. Yet I didn't want to disturb her. Finally I couldn't take it, it made me so nervous I had to change my seat.

There used to be a deli/grocery in the bus station that had some very attractive counter girls. It closed about a month ago, and I miss seeing the pretty Spanish gals pouring me a cup of java. They had a lot of sex appeal as they hurried around in their tight jeans and white t-shirts, making egg sandwiches and coffees. I think they made the coffee seem better than it actually was.

While I was on the platform waiting for the commuter bus to New Jersey, I watched a flock of pigeons demolish a half-finished roll that was tossed to them by some fellow. It was really amazing to see how the thing vanished in only a few minutes. The birds were all over that roll, flapping their gray and black feathers and strutting around, pecking away for any last crumbs.

How much different are we human commuters, except that we get on buses to reach our individual pecking locations?

I watched the 1960 version of The Lost World over the weekend, which has just been released on DVD from Fox Home Video. I first saw this movie a year or two after it came out, when they showed it for some reason at an assembly in my grade school. It didn't make as powerful an impression on me as 1959's Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was a far cooler movie with all its incredible details of a subterranean journey, but The Lost World still lingered in my memory.

The Lost World takes place on a volcanic plateau on the Amazon River where dinosaurs still roam. A professor played by Claude Rains leads an expedition there. For the giant reptiles, producer Irwin Allen used real lizards in place of the stop-motion animated models that were the highlights of the original 1925 version, which had featured wonderful effects by Willis "King Kong" O'Brien. Still, Allen's version of The Lost World had some striking imagery, or maybe I'm just a sucker for shots that show tiny humans in the foreground while monsters battle in the background.

The most "special" of the special effects in the 1960 Lost World were courtesy of the then-twenty year old Jill St. John, who plays the lone female on the expedition to the Amazon along with Michael Rennie, Fernando Lamas, and David Hedison. Arrayed in a number of jungle-inappropriate outfits like a satiny blue Chinese cheongsam dress, she looks totally terrific, and best of all are her tight pink butt-hugging slacks and red ankle-boots as she runs from the giant monsters! Wow! I guess producer/director Irwin Allen knew that he'd also have to give the dads something to gawk at when they had to drag the kiddies to the matinee showings of The Lost World!

The two-disc DVD set of The Lost World also has the original 1925 version. I haven't watched that in its entirety yet, but included as an extra are outtakes of Willis O'Brien's unused footage of stop-motion dinosaurs. It's really incredible stuff. You look at it with amazement, because it looks like nature footage from the Animal Channel or whatever that cable network is...but they're purely animated models. You see them walking around munching plants, scratching themselves, protecting their baby dinosaurs. I have to admit that as impressed as I was by Jill's pink slacks in the 1960 version, they're well-matched by the stunning sights of O'Brien's 1925 grazing saurians.

The weathermen must have been smoking something today, because after their forecast of a sunny Saturday, it's been overcast and rainy since noon.

It's also Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement; but not being observant of the rituals, I just kind of lay low out of respect for those who do observe. I said the memorial prayer for my father here at home, which supposedly would not count with the more orthodox or conservative Jews since you're supposed to do it in the presence of a "minyan," or ten worshippers. A minyan usually was ten men specifically, but I'm sure, for the sake of enlightened gender politics, that it's been adjusted in some more liberal Judaic denominations to simply to ten humans of either sex.

Anyway, my father used to say his prayers the same way when he got to middle age--alone, in the backyard of our small house on the North Side of Chicago.

Praying to me is a kind of meditation. I use the words of a prayer or psalm as a springboard for whatever contemplations my scattershot mind can settle in with. Sometimes I can't do it, I feel too distracted; that was the case today. But I guess saying the words of the ancient prayer is at least something.

I have a Jewish memorial prayer (not the Kaddish, but something I got from the funeral home that buried my father) that says we should try to perpetuate in our own lives all that was "beautiful and lovely" in the lives of our deceased loved ones. I like that phrase because it implicitly and realistically admits there were also things that were not beautiful or lovely, and gently suggests that these flaws can now be overlooked as the better qualities are concentrated on. In this way, remembrance becomes an act of generosity, not just towards the dead, but to our imperfect selves...and perhaps even to our imperfect prayers.