The rain woke me at 4:15 this morning, after only four and a half hours of sleep, and I couldn't go back to dreamland. By five or so the lightning and thunder began, and I lay in my cluttered apartment listening to the whoosh of traffic below and the ceaseless patter of the rain and I knew the day was off to a dreary start.

I closed the window and turned on the air conditioning, but it's so humid out today that the stickiness still seems to seep into the apartment.

Originally I had planned to go out to my freelance gig today in New Jersey but when I heard the weather forecast I decided to put it off until tomorrow. That's one of the reasons why I am a freelancer--so I don't have to commute in weather like this if it's not absolutely necessary.

I feel so tired today and in fact as I'm typing this my eyes are closed and my breathing is steady as if I'm going to fall asleep at the keyboard.

On the movie screen of my closed eyes is the image of a girl I saw on the street yesterday. She was Asian or Latin or perhaps Filipina, I couldn't quite tell; about 4'11"; but what makes her stick out in my memory were her incredibly shaped legs which were fully displayed in extremely tight short-shorts that hugged her butt with a white-pinstriped fabric. She wore black patent slingback heels with little black patent bows on the front, like something out of a shoe fetish daydream, and her straight black hair literally came down to her ass. I only glimpsed her from the front for a moment, then turned to see her walk away, and it was an extraordinary image that filled me with longing. Another example of the relentless "walking pornography" on New York City streets. The liberation of women has allowed many females to willingly turn themselves into sex objects of the most potent prurience. What a spectacle. It is so hard, so difficult, and so depressing, to be an ordinary-looking middle-aged bachelor without fame or money in New York today, and without a whisper of chance of ever savoring these beauties...they don't even seem like human beings, but walking candy.

They're not females, but fudge.

In spite of the fact that the central air-conditioning unit in my apartment flooded over yesterday, precipitating almost three hours of stress until it was fixed and my floor dried, I was able to sit down and finish the revision of my novel manuscript. I ended up writing between four and five thousand additional words, and I must have deleted a couple of thousand as well that didn't work.

Now I have to print it out and put it aside for a couple of weeks before reading it again and doing the final polish before looking for prospective publishers.

The reason for my haste in writing it is simple. I believe I work better when I work fast, which forces me to draw on the churning undercurrents of my subconscious. Written in white heat, perhaps the book will be white hot. Or not. Whatever; I'm giving it a good shot.

Anyway, it's been fun so far, and I've been so absorbed in writing that I haven't missed going to stripclubs, which on my current constrained budget strike me as a little pricey. But then again, everything in New York is more pricey now.

It's been a beautiful Sunday, and I went out for a couple of nice walks, and had a crisp cool glass of white wine with bread and cheese for lunch, and enjoyed a raspberry mocha frappucino from Starbucks as a late afternoon treat; but the waning of the sunlight is coming and my least favorite night is about to descend upon me. I don't like Sunday nights much because they mean the end of the leisure and back to work on Monday. The ironic thing is, I didn't have pure leisure because I worked over the weekend, putting in two to three hours each day on the revision of my novel manuscript, but that's the kind of work that I consider a form of play...

When the sun finally goes down, maybe I'll go for a walk around Times Square and mingle in the crowds. There's always something frisky to see, like on 42nd Street, where I recently watched two cute but "street" looking Latina lesbians making out on the corner. Most edifying. I mean, they were dressed, but their lip-locked lust was as bright and shiny and clear as the two thousand or so lightbulbs in the marquee on the front of the McDonald's further up the block. So if I go down to 42nd tonight, maybe I'll catch another free show.

Between the stifling heat and the eye strain of staring at the computer screen as I revise my novel manuscript, I am beat right now...even with air-conditioning, I'm sweating...I wish I could write more than four hours a day on the book, but that seems to be my physical and mental limit...makes me feel like a wuss compared to Balzac, who did eighteen hour stretches...or Georges Simenon, who wrote his novels in seven or eight days...and we're not talking crap, but world-class psychological thrillers.

I hope my suspense/noir opus is not going to be a total piece of crap. Yesterday I was ready to toss it in the garbage after a night of destructive introspection, but after a character did something surprising as I gamely typed my way through a troublesome scene, my enthusiasm reawakened and I became curious to see what would develop next.

It's helpful to share my anxieties here in the blog about this project, just to vent about my doubts as well as my moments of hope. I have no illusions; the book may not be very good, but at least I plan to finish it.

I didn't go out to my freelance client in New Jersey this week, but just stayed in the city to work on this novel. I'm more than halfway through the second draft, and I've written probably another five or six thousand words over the last four days. I'm just trying to answer all the questions a reader would have when encountering the characters.

At the same time that I've been working on my own project in the noir vein, I've been watching film noir this week. Saw two excellent old flicks, Act of Violence from 1948 with Van Heflin and Robert Ryan, and Illegal from 1955 with Edward G. Robinson, Nina Foch, Albert Dekker and Jayne Mansfield. Both available now from Warner Home Video in their new box set of film noir classics. I'd like to write more about Act of Violence in particular, but it'll have to wait for a few days. My mind seems to be more in a novelistic mode than an analytical one at the moment.

Combined with the heat I've been encountering the usual summer surrealism of the city. Last night, as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep at 2 a.m., a bus was idling outside my window. It seemed to be idling for an hour. I can understand why the driver would want to keep his a.c. on, but after awhile the monotonous drone starts to make you feel a little batty...

New York can be very noir on hot summer nights. I spent the evening hanging out with movie buff pals in Greenwich Village, and on the way home, as I was getting out of the subway and nearing my apartment not far from Times Square, this character looked at me in a way that looked like pure trouble. He was a dark, slender guy with bug eyes and a too-friendly smile on his face. I had the feeling he was going to say something to me as he kept pace with my walking, so I abruptly stopped at the corner to let him walk on. About forty feet ahead, he banged into two guys, one of whom was very drunk and fell down onto the sidewalk against the bus stop. I don't know what this character's problem was, but I was obviously right that he was troublesome in some way. I hurried into my building while he and the drunk guy were trying to sort things out. Weird.

Sometimes the streets seem more unsettling now around Times Square, particularly because the area is supposed to be so "family-friendly." You still have to keep your eye out for the creeps, though. And there are more homeless guys lying on the streets this summer than I've seen in a long time. It looked like one guy was about to take off all his clothes in the middle of the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue about two o'clock in the afternoon today! The city has a real edge of bleakness for me...rain or shine, day or night...or maybe I'm just living too much in my lurid, noir-filled imagination lately?

A month or two ago, after years of drinking bottled waters like Poland Spring, it occurred to me one blustery rainy night that I didn't have to run out to buy a fresh bottle of water but could instead fill up my old bottle with H2O from the kitchen tap. After all, I reasoned, I drink tap water all the time when I go to restaurants, so why am I avoiding it at home? I filled up my Poland Spring "sport" bottle (the squirty kind which satisfies the never-quite dormant infant in me who likes to suck liquids out) and I was off to the Tap Water Races.

Since then, I've been saving money on bottled water. The New York City tap water tastes good and is rated as healthy. And get this--am I ahead of the curve or what?--today in the New York Times I read an editorial entitled "In Praise of Tap Water" recommending that people fill up from their faucets for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that less bottles to dispose mean a cleaner environment. Yes, Sir Cranky's on the green side today! But the most important reason from my point of view is that, according to the Times, whereas a year's worth of tap water will cost me approximately 49 cents (in taxes, I presume), a year's worth of bottled water will end up costing me approximately FOURTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS ($1400!!!), which can be translated into:

A) one solid monthly payment to my credit line to pay back the money I borrowed to pay my self-employment taxes, or, more delightfully,

B) seventy (70, or LXX) lapdances at $20 per song! (Yes, thanks to my mastery of third grade math, which I have retained unlike high school algebra, I can readily ascertain that 20 goes into 1400 seventy times. No calculator necessary.) So instead of continuing to swell the coffers of Poland Spring, I could establish an entire new relationship as a regular customer with a comely stripper over the course of a year with the same money!!

My course of action is clear.

I choose pulchritude over Poland Spring.