It's been more than three weeks, almost four, since my last post, because I've been preoccupied with a massive new project: cleaning up the clutter in my apartment. Over the last two weeks I've taken twenty-five boxes of books and magazines over to my storage space, which had more than twenty boxes of stuff there already. My good buddies Rexx the writer/bodybuilder and ZP the writer/artist who looks like a tall Kafka have been helping me schlep the stuff over there...and then we go out and enjoy a good breakfast.

Now I see how my brief foray into reading ancient military history last fall, about the campaigns of Hannibal versus the Romans, is coming in handy: because I have to take the approach that cleaning and organizing the stuff in a dusty studio apartment is like fighting a kind of war against several fronts of massive hordes of books and magazines and videos...I concentrate on one battle in one area, cleaning and boxing the stuff up there, but make small skirmishes in other areas to weaken my opponents (piles of books and mags) in anticipation of coming major offensives in those regions...

Anyway, enough of the Hannibal analogy. You get the idea: I'm basically spring-cleaning like many other folks in town. But I guess I have to turn it into a gladiator movie.

It's nice to see the books and movies again that I know I had, but couldn't access because of the stuff on top of them...

Like my videos of the memorable noir Angel Face, with Jean Simmons and Robert Mitchum...or the historical melodrama Black Magic, with Orson Welles in the role of the charismatic 18th century magician Cagliostro...

Of course, a lot has happened in the celebrity world since my last post. Legends Richard Widmark and Charlton Heston died...as well as the stripper Sherry Britton, who was a famous World War 2 pinup as well as a peeler, and who was made an honorary Brigadier General by FDR for her efforts to help morale! After stripping, she became a stage actress and achieved some solid success. I recall reading somewhere that she performed with John Garfield in the play Peer Gynt when it was revived in the late 40s or early 50s. She was also married for many years and lived in Manhattan...

Speaking of strippers, last weekend I ran into my old dancer fave Lily after almost a year. I hadn't been out at the club in months, but after a long day of packing and cleaning, felt I had earned a little fun...I was surprised to see her, as I thought she'd left the city, but there she was, sexy as ever--maybe more so. We had a drink together and a few dances, and I realized how nice it was not only to see her again in particular, but just to be out in general and having a little fun with a pretty and personable dancer. As corny as it sounds, I felt renewed...and horny. You see, lately I've been worried that my libido, which sometimes has seemed like the very engine of my consciousness, has been starting to flag. But apparently not, when Lily's on my lap...

Yes, I guess your cranky blogger needs his strippers as much as his DVDs. I've been definitely concentrating more on the DVDs in these financially tighter times...but I'll try to fit in some more visits to Lily and try to make it work budget-wise.

Someday I'd like to open the AARP magazine and read an article about how aging baby boomers fit "quality stripper time" into their constrained budgets...maybe I'LL write it? I'm certainly qualified...

Wow, it's been eight days since my last entry. First I got preoccupied with yet one more revision of my novel, which took four days (when I say "revision" I mean mostly touching up, not too much complete rewriting); and then I got a bad cold with a touch of the flu, which basically laid me up.

I hope the book is basically done now. It's the ending which has given me the most problems, but I hope I've licked it.

I still don't feel so good--can't seem to get my temperature down to normal--and don't have much of an appetite. I drank my fill of tea and soup this weekend...with a little Jameson to sweat out the fever, too.

Highlight of the weekend was watching the old movie "The Scarlet Pimpernel" with Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon. I had never seen it before--the 1935 chestnut about the British aristocrat rescuing French aristocrats from the guillotine during the French revolution. It's a Zorro-type story, with Howard pretending to be a near-effeminate fop to cover up his derring-do from the villains. The best scenes were when he was pretending to be totally vapid and only concerned with men's fashions. Howard was quite funny as a kind of 1792 "metrosexual." And Merle Oberon as his bewildered wife was gorgeous. A friend of mine really likes her, and now I understand why. Beautiful face, good actress, and a lot of sexy low-cut gowns in this movie! A most fetching bosom...in fact, it was interesting to see a 1935 movie that gave such prominent display to cleavage. I can't get her cleavage out of my mind...I guess I must be back on the road to health, after all!

In the wake of the Spitzer scandal, all weekend there have been articles in the papers about high-class hookers and the fast and expensive sex-and-champagne lifestyles of the financial wizards, many of them guys in my age bracket, who get to party with the young and beautiful chicks. It really makes me envious, because I can't afford that kind of excitement and adventure...but with my heightened imagination, I can well picture what it would be like...falling asleep after a rambunctious night with a busty blonde cuddled under my right arm, and a sparkling Japanese under my left...or the blonde under my left, and the Japanese under my right...

Ah, why do I complain? I've had my share of thrills. Just not lately...

Not that I would want to spend $4300 on a call girl like Spitzer is alleged to have done. No wonder hooker slang for the wad of cash is "the Brick" at that lofty level of the sleaze world. Oh, did I call it sleazy? It is at EVERY level. That's part of the appeal, the tingle, and any john who denies that is deluding himself...anyway, a smart shopper like yours truly could have a great time for $200. I used to in the past, and I could tomorrow...if I had $200 to blow.

Alas, I brought my tax figures to the accountant last Tuesday, and I have to prepare to borrow on credit to pay my tab to the government as a self-employed freelance worker...

It just irks me to hear about how much money is floating around out there...these rich idiots spending hundreds of dollars for "bottle service" in the hot clubs...and Sir Cranky resents spending $6.50 for a glass of house wine at the Italian joint the other night! It tasted like the whole bottle cost $6.50 retail...or less, wholesale...

Money! Money! Money! Dough! Dough! Dough! The hooker involved in the Spitzer affair is going to make mountains of it, mountains! Just for being in the right wrong place at the right wrong time! And you just sense she's going to get the book deal that every struggling scribe I know is lusting after, waiting for their agents to get back to them with a crumb of good news...but all this girl had to do was spread her thighs and wham! The dough rolls in...true, she's into her music, and it's supposedly not bad, and so she was indeed ready for her moment in the sun...or is it a flashing neon hotel sign that I see in my film noir-loving brain? In any case, her story is still an envy stirrer-upper...

Oh, to have one good solid opportunity to whore myself and make a couple of million!!!

This whole Eliot Spitzer affair has gotten me thinking about my own past adventures with hookers...

Thirty years ago, my father died at forty-nine of an illness you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.

After the funeral in the Midwest, I came back to NYC--back to my small room in a residential hotel, a few friends, little money, and a struggling career.

Life felt pretty bleak.

I started to visit a small apartment brothel on the East Side. I got the phone number out of a sex tabloid. It wasn't the first time I'd gone to a hooker--it was a pleasant adventure, usually, and so I got into it again. I met a friendly girl named Katie at this apartment and went to visit her for about six months. It was cheap, so I could afford to go back frequently without breaking the bank.

She was a pretty girl, Jewish, from Brooklyn, nice sense of humor, a petite blonde who wore Candies slides--those backless high heels first popular in the late 70s--I remember them well on her pretty feet--and I enjoyed hanging out with her. I treated her with the same respect I would treat any person--I may be cranky, but I have good manners--and knowing her got me through a bad time.

Eventually it played itself out, because I liked her and it began to feel weird paying for her time. Yeah, I fell for a hooker. I told her I wasn't going to be coming back because of this, and she understood. The way she looked at it, our relationship was born in, and belonged in, that apartment. I guess she didn't like me enough to want to see me in any other way, on the outside. That was the way it was.

To allay my anxiety that I would "catch' something, like a cosmic punishment for having sexual fun, I took my share of VD tests. Not fun...but gave me peace of mind.

It made me sad that it came to an end with Katie, but I accepted it. Eventually I went on to having "normal" "non-commercial" long-term relationships which irrevocably scarred me because the women I chose were critical, self-centered, uncompromising, and manipulative in the worst way. Unfortunately I most frequently found myself attracted to that type of narcissistic female. I've told you how I like the dominatrix type...do I have to give a reason for this? It's Oedipal, baby--nine years of therapy taught me that--blame it on my early conditioning while growing up with an ultra-narcissistic mother. Anyway, by the time I met a girl who wasn't selfish or narcissistic but a good person, I was too damaged to appreciate her--or maybe my true desire by that time, or my fate, was to be alone. Or to be free. In the late 1980s, I shifted my focus instead to the world of stripclubs and fantasy.

As far as I personally am concerned, when it comes to sex, women are best taken in small doses, and I relate to them best erotically when I pay for their company, whether it's a lapdance or something more. And a lot of men feel the same way without necessarily saying it aloud or, in my case, blogging about it.

See, in the clubs, I can be with the narcissistic women who turn me on, and after I stop paying them, they go away. Which--surprise!--sometimes is a relief.

Nothing in life is perfect. But sometimes things are pleasant, compromised though they may be.

Thanks to the Spitzer scandal, there's so much bushwah about men and hookers out there right now, especially on the editorial pages of the New York Times--so I thought I would put in my two honest cents.

Ah, so New York's Governor Eliot Spitzer is alleged to have been a customer of prostitutes...

At least "Kristen," the call girl who is alleged to have serviced him, has a positive, professional attitude toward her profession. "I'm here for a purpose," she's quoted in an affidavit, "I know what my purpose is. I am not a...moron..."

She sounds like a worthwhile courtesan, and not one with the more typical attitude of sex workers, i.e., "What is MY money doing in YOUR wallet?" Meaning, ladies who resent their work, look down on their customers, and can't wait to get the dough and vamoose...

Although I don't think spending thousands of dollars on a single prostitute is financially prudent--you can certainly get enough of a beauty for two hundred bucks an hour if you're a wise shopper--I myself do wish I had thousands of dollars to spend on LOTS of prostitutes...or strippers and prostitutes...and maybe some massage parlor girls too.

I like the sleaze life, and I miss it now that my money situation is so tight and I basically have to live like a monk...well, a Jewish monk...

I didn't go to a stripclub before going out to the bat mitzvah last weekend. I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm, despite what I wrote in my previous post about "sleaze life" as an antidote to "family values"...

The bat mitzvah was okay, big party afterward, lots of food, hanging out with the relatives...I got a chance to eat some good bagels and lox at a brunch the next day too...

Anyway, I guess there are individuals out there who are sleazing out enough for all of us, hmm? Grabbing way more than their share of the ole sleaze pie...

As for yours truly, Sir Cranky, a bachelor who ever yearns to be footloose and fancy-free? He is virtuous now, but only by default.