I think the last time I dressed up in costume on Halloween was about ten years ago, back in my youth when I was only 46. My favorite stripclub had a Halloween party, of sorts; meaning, the dancers could wear sexy costumes like those of nurses and witches and vampires and superheroines instead of just their gowns and g-strings. Patrons were invited to dress up too, so I got a costume as a medieval executioner, of all things, complete with a black hood and little plastic axe! I think I always wanted to lumber around like Boris Karloff's character of Mord from the old flick Tower of London. Ironically, I've only seen stills from that 1939 movie--but never the flick itself! Just one of the many I've missed. Even film buffs have their gaps. I'll catch up to it one day...

Anyway, that Halloween I was friendly with a dancer named Peaches, a gorgeous girl who, during our yearlong acquaintanceship, had unfortunately felt the need to "improve" her already perfect body (slender yet curvaceous) with an unnecessary boob job that indeed took her from a perky B-cup to a bulging D-cup--but also robbed her of the all-natural quality that had been one of her greatest assets. Nonetheless she still had a great figure overall, movie star face, and she looked great in a Daisy Mae outfit that Halloween.

I remember, though, when I saw her boob job the first time some months before. I almost felt like I wanted to cry. She stood over me with those unmovable melons and said, "Don't they just look great?" All I could do was nod and fake a smile, not wanting to hurt her feelings. After she did a couple of dances and moved off, another customer who had caught my look of total despair turned to me and said, "Yeah, her elevator doesn't exactly reach the top floor."

Anyway, I sat ringside at the stage that Halloween, only my eyes showing in the medieval hood, and she was dancing in front of me without recognizing who I was. I was tipping her and talking to her but she didn't have a clue, until I finally whipped off the hood, to her surprise and laughter. And then I put the hood back on. What a match we made later over at the lapdance couch--it was like Dogpatch meets Tower of London, with her shiny hard new boobs almost knocking me unconscious through the hood! But her butt still felt soft in those tattered Daisy Mae cutoffs!

I had a pleasant birthday weekend. Met my writer friends Mr. Stetson and his wife Juno yesterday for a Mexican dinner at a large and lively place near Union Square; they came down to the city from the suburbs. They gave me two cool books, a hard-to-find paperback by Robert "Psycho" Bloch and a classic early Elmore Leonard novel, and then we clinked our margarita glasses and settled down for a fine meal and fun conversation.

Today I felt pretty lazy, read the papers, took a walk in the nice autumn afternoon. I've been thinking about an idea for another novel, and I kind of sketched it out in my head during my walk. Unfortunately, my ideas seemed to go in circles, so I put them out of my head for awhile. I came home and read some more and then met my writer/artist friend ZP, who looks like a tall Kafka, for a BBQ dinner. He gave me an intriguing book about the world of erotica collectors, and then we dug into our chicken and ribs and discussed politics for awhile.

I had contemplated going to a stripclub over this celebratory weekend, to "treat" myself to its various enticements as it's been quite awhile since I last sampled the sights there, but lately I've gotten too good at tallying up the potential expenses in my head beforehand and talking myself out of it, so I didn't make the visit. Or maybe I just want to save the visit and the money for a day when I really need the distraction. I do need it sometimes when I get back to the city after commuting to my freelance gig in New Jersey. Nothing reaffirms my presence on the terra firma of Manhattan again like paying ten dollars for a beer and blowing forty bucks on six minutes of lapdancing.

I have to say that my abstinence from the stripclub scene has not been a good thing except from the financial angle. I feel crankier, more testy and impatient, and a little disconnected sometimes, and I attribute that to the absence in my life of young women sinking their pretty hooks into my psyche and encouraging the Jacksons to migrate from my wallet into their garters. Okay, I admit I'm exaggerating for effect, trying to get a laugh here, because the truth is, I miss their company most of all, of which their dancing is only one part. I like my women to be "dames" and "broads" and strippers are the last remaining examples of those particular feminine sub-sets.

So, while I can applaud myself for being at least somewhat financially responsible as I try to live on a necessarily tighter budget since the shrinking of my freelance income, I am also aware that without the soothing presence of my stripteasers I am becoming a little more pinched emotionally too.

Acting responsibly has its downside.

It seems like it was just a few minutes ago that I was writing here in this blog about turning 55...and now I'm 56 today.

No I'm not. I'm somewhere between 21 and 28.

Because, with apologies to Groucho Marx (I believe), let me slightly amend his classic quip to: "You're only as young as the girls you want to feel."

Dirty old man? No. To quote an old burlesque joke, "Young blood, old container."

What's the secret of eternal youth? Creativity. Indeed, when I am writing (or reading, or watching a movie, both of which are not passive experiences for me, but interactive ones) I feel as young as I ever did.

I watched, for the first time last night, Sam Peckinpah's first film, 1961's The Deadly Companions. An interesting movie that brought a quirky perspective to the Western genre, from the way the characters were portrayed more realistically than in most earlier oaters, to the odd framing of the shots, to the strange situations of the story. A ex-Yankee soldier with a bad shooting arm accidentally kills the young son of a dance hall girl, when the kid is caught in the crossfire of a street battle during a bank robbery. The cowboy (well-played by the underrated Brian Keith) offers to escort the dance hall girl (Maureen O'Hara) through Apache country so she can bury her son next to his father in a town twenty miles away. They are accompanied on the journey by the cowboy's companions on the trail, two ex-Confederates played to the scuzzy max by Steve Cochran and Chill Wills. It turns out that Wills is a man that Keith has been hunting so he can take revenge for an outrage during the Civil War. In the end, Keith's bitterness and rage are tempered by the mercy that he develops when he finds love and understanding from the combative but ultimately forgiving O'Hara, even though it was Keith who killed her son.

A complex story, beautifully portrayed. It makes me happy to see good movies like this, it makes me feel hopeful, it makes me want to sit down at my computer and CREATE! And to write another novel in the wake of the manuscript I just finished and am trying to sell.

So I guess I'm 56 today, but 21 or 28 too. I'm as old as my dreams, I guess, which are still the dreams of a much younger man.

I hope I can attain some of those dreams this year.

I've been feeling like I'm in limbo these last couple of days. Although I got some work done here at home, I've been listless and distracted. Symptoms of burnout? Since I haven't really had a vacation in...what, two years?--burnout is possible.

At least I had a nice meal last night with some friends. A business associate, Doris, came over from England with her twelve-year old son Ray, for a combination of work and shopping, and we went out to dinner with my writer friends Moe and Betty down in Greenwich Village. Because of the unseasonably warm night, we were able to eat outdoors at an open-air Italian restaurant across the street from a beautiful old church. Moe reflected that it almost felt as if we weren't in New York but in Europe.

Moe used to have business dealing with Doris, too, which is how he knows her. She's a lively and generous gal who always treats us to an excellent dinner when she hits town. She also brought us gifts--bottles of the spicy English mustard, Colman's. She promised it would clear out our sinuses just as powerfully as the spicy Japanese mustard, wasabi!

The weather is still warm today but gloomy and rainy. Maybe that added to my distracted feeling...

Perhaps I'll go over to the Metropolitan Museum in the next couple of days, and restore myself with some great art. I know they have a show of Dutch painters like Rembrandt and his ilk, who have always been some of my favorites. When I first lived in New York in the 70s, I used to go to the Met quite a lot, and I found it easy to start conversations with girls in front of the Dutch paintings, which are so down-to-earth and humanistic that they invite easy banter. Then again, I still had most of my hair back then...

I remember I picked up a German au pair girl whom I saw for a few weeks. She'd come over to the States to work for a family in the New York suburbs for the summer. She was a cutie. She liked the actor Gregory Peck, but of course she never heard his real voice when she saw his movies over in Germany. It was always dubbed with someone else's, she said, the same voice for Greg every time.

I've always enjoyed going to museums on dates. You can really learn a lot about a woman from the way she reacts to art. (You know, I just had deja vu; I think I wrote about this subject here once before; if so, forgive me. Maybe I'll write it better this time?) Once I took a girl to a museum and she reached out and touched a priceless tapestry that impressed her. The guards nearly threw the two of us in chains. This gal was nice enough, but a little uninhibited. Or maybe she just wasn't thinking when she touched the tapestry. She was a pretty and plump Italian girl from Brooklyn. Funny, that was probably thirty years ago, and other than the fact that I picked her up in a bar on First Avenue called the Adam's Apple, her touching the tapestry is about all I can remember about her, other than that she was rather broad in the beam. We only went out that one time, because we just didn't really hit it off...

One time I saw a famous movie star making out with her boyfriend in the deserted gallery of a museum I happened to wander into. It was weird, because she looked right at me as if she were expecting me to say something. She didn't stop making out. All I thought was, "Why doesn't she do that in private?" If I'm not getting it, I really don't want to see it in person.

I stood at Columbus Circle yesterday afternoon, taking a break from the computer to enjoy the unseasonably balmy weather. But with so much on my mind lately of a stressful nature--finances in particular--when I was leaning against a stanchion in front of the Time-Warner Center, I simply zoned out and stared into space, feeling every bit of my fifty-five years. Suddenly I raised up my head and saw a young Japanese-looking gal with long blond hair walking by within a few inches, looking at me--probably because I must have had a rather existential, melancholy expression on my face. Funny; I wonder how many girls look at me when I'm not busy looking at them, and daydreaming this or that? Maybe this was the only one? She moved by too quickly for me to gather my senses and return her half-smile, but as she saucily sauntered into the distance I saw that she wore a colorful sweater tied across her hips, a sweater which plastered the logo "Juicy" across her trim blue-jean butt. I wondered what her story was...and what she looked like under those clothes.