It's funny how when I have to do anything family-related, I suddenly have the urge to run out to a stripclub beforehand. I'm going to a bat mitzvah in New Jersey this weekend, but to "prepare" myself for the family crowd and all the attendant affirmation of domestic values (as if there is an inherent superiority in the life of suburbia and child-rearing), I want to go out tonight and spend a couple of hundred dollars on drinks and lapdances, getting sleazy and naughty with some hot chick in a g-string...

It's not really about the sexuality, but about the sense of freedom, of letting loose...

I bet people climb mountains for some of the same reasons I go to strip joints now, or massage parlors or whorehouses in the past...a yearning for freedom, for the breaking of restraints...

My growing-up experience of middle-class life and values left me with the bitterest of feelings...it's funny how, like an adolescent, I still feel an intense rejection of all that.

It's as if I associate family life not merely with the squelching of my independence and freedom, but almost like a kind of smothering of my very life essence and breath.

I really am a loner...a film noir kind of guy...and nothing reminds me of this as much as going to a family affair.

Oh god I have to go clothes-shopping today for that bat mitzvah I'm attending this weekend. It's gotten to the point where I don't even have a decent dress shirt anymore, and my old dress shoes...well, let's put it this way...I think they're covered in spider webs in the back of the closet...

My writer/bodybuilder friend Rexx suggested Filene's at Union Square and that sounds like a good bet. Couldn't find anything yesterday at the discount shop Daffy's.

At least I have a couple of sports jackets and black slacks to rely on. I just need shoes, a shirt, and a haircut.

Where did the old suave Sir Cranky disappear to?

I used to be more of a stylish chap, into retro dressing and all that. 50s fedoras and top coats...antique double-breasted jackets like you'd see in an old gangster movie...I would find some nice bargains back in the days when retro was a new fad.

Last night I was watching 1956's Hollywood or Bust, the last movie that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made together. I used to have a great 50s windbreaker type of jacket like Jerry's in the film, blue with a cool pattern. I wore it until it was threadbare...

That movie was actually kind of weird, not funny at all really, but just peculiar with Dean glowering at Jerry and Jerry acting like a nitwit. But I liked how it showed off the actresses as if they were walking and talking pinup models. The opening credits showcased Anita Ekberg in a variety of sexy outfits, and there was one scene where Dean and Jerry were driving through the countryside and they kept passing gals dressed like they'd walked off a calendar in a 1950s garage, like girls on a haystack or on a fence or fishing in a pond, all dressed in shorts to show off their lovely gams. Why isn't the world like this for real?

I take the A train uptown to the 175th St. bus station when I commute out to my freelance gig in New Jersey, and man, that subway line could use a little pinup action. There are some really dreary looking females on that train. I suppose I might qualify for the Dreary Looking Male Department, though...anyway, with the warmer weather, on yesterday's commute I saw a girl in a sleeveless black-and-white blouse. She was a brunette with a cute face and perky upturned nose, but it was those uncovered, bare, slender arms as she leaned against the orange seat holding her coffee cup and paperback that really picked up my spirits.

I think New York City should hire girls to be Municipal Pinups, and station them in the more visually depressing locations to give the eyeballs of gloomy males like moi a little hope that there is a purpose and meaning to this doggy urban life of ours.

Yes, Mayor Bloomberg, let's have a Municipal Pinup Squad roaming the asphalt and subways to cheer the souls of the citizenry!

I was reading about Margaret Seltzer, whose new and gritty "memoir" about her life in street gangland was just revealed as fiction. According to the media website Gawker, her book tour was canceled and her volumes were recalled by her publisher, but only after she managed to hoodwink, with the power of her made-up story, both a big-time New York editor and one of the top New York Times reviewers.

Since William Shakespeare said "all the world's a stage," I propose a new award: the Shakies. For Best Performance as a Memoirist, the first Shaky goes to Margaret Seltzer! Because it was a performance, wasn't it?

Still, if she were an actress, and were able to convince us through a performance in a film or play of her ability to portray a reality separate from her own, she would be applauded. Let's not forget this.

Maybe the real absurdity is I suspect that she had to present the book as a memoir for it to get any traction as a viable project. What if she wrote it as a novel? Wouldn't publishers have said, "What do you know about this kind of life? This book can't possibly be authentic."

As if "authenticity" is the only virtue in life. Hey, "give me a good strong lie to believe in!" I can't remember what actress said that in what movie, but it seems to apply here.

Obviously she has to be pretty talented to have pulled off this whopper of a literary fib.

People clearly have a need to believe in certain kinds of lies, and that's why hoaxes succeed for as long as they do. So why exactly are the spurious storytellers so reviled when they deliver the goods? I understand that nobody likes to be made a fool of, or manipulated or swindled...but at the very least these characters should be applauded for their skill as emotional magicians...which I guess is another word for confidence artists. Hey, didn't The Sting win Best Picture way back when? That was based on a very classic con game. People used to admire a good stunt like that. Still, that movie was what is known as a "romp." Perhaps to the victims, these literary con games feel more like the dark and destructive trickery in David Mamet films like House of Cards and The Spanish Prisoner.

Nonetheless, sometimes I wish I could lie skillfully too...but the only thing I seem to be able to puff up from time to time is just my prose...

I sure could use a little of the con artist in me this weekend, when I have leave the Isle of Manhattan to go to a big family function in southern New Jersey, a cousin's bat mitzvah. It's "put on a happy face" time for Sir Cranky, when in reality I'm struggling to make a buck, and my penis is shriveling into fishbait from lapdance deprivation...

I'm actually the poorest member of my entire family, financially speaking! (However, I know I have more books and magazines than my entire family combined.) So maybe I better learn how to lay it on thick. I know: I'll tell my relatives that I'm a "producer" now, and I've got several "projects" in the works. I won't be able to discuss these projects because...well, because they're so "hot" they're liable to be "swiped" if I reveal their "sensational potential" and I'm overheard.

Ah, maybe not. I think I'd have to buy myself a new suit to pull this off, and I was just going to wear a sports jacket and my black slacks from K-Mart!

I've seen a lot of unusual stuff in my time in New York, but Saturday night I observed something new: a woman in a coffee shop having dinner with an invisible boyfriend. She even referred to him as such. She was just an ordinary looking gal in her late twenties, maybe thirty. A little on the chubby side, perhaps, but she could have gotten plenty of visible men going for her.

Her situation would have seemed sad if she weren't so loud, chastising the waiters for not doing things precisely the way she wished. She sat in a booth, drinking the free glass of wine which came with her dinner entree--the free wine which was the very reason I myself had come to this diner. I couldn't see who she was talking to, and I was hoping that maybe it was a "little person" whose head just didn't come up over the top of the booth, but who was nonetheless sitting there, feet dangling and chin just inches from the table top, drinking the beer she'd ordered for him and which the waiter courteously served with patient befuddlement. But no, when I walked out of the restaurant I could see she was talking and confiding to the air...or rather, to her invisible man.

I did muse about whether the whole thing was a put-on, or some kind of thespian stunt. A lot of young actors and actresses live in my neighborhood (the theater district/Hell's Kitchen which borders Times Square) and I wondered if maybe the chick was doing some oddball acting exercise.

Then on Sunday night, in another diner further uptown, I heard a fortyish woman at the booth behind me attempting to render a man invisible with her endless chatter about the joy of having children and making babies. It seemed to me as if this couple were on a first date, judging by the stiffness of their initial comments about weather, and her quick segue into the topic of the creative joy of both making and raising children was almost as surreal as the gal chatting with an invisible guy.

This second lady had an educational, schoolmarmish tone, and her companion barely got a word in edge-wise. I started to imagine him becoming translucent, transparent, and then vanishing into thin air. She kept telling the poor schmuck how much "fun" it was to make the babies she'd already had (okay, I can buy that), at least two of which were pretty much grown up, and then she would say to the guy, "What are you smiling about? And what are you thinking?" Then she quizzed him about whether he'd ever had or wanted to have children himself. By his barely audible answer, I gathered his response was probably, and most shamefully from the lady's perspective, in the wretched negative...

Just like my response would have been...

I read in the newspaper over the weekend about a female author who says the current slang term "MILF" (meaning "Mom I'd Like to Fuck") is offensive. My interpretation of her reasoning is that she feels that "MILF," in recognizing the fuckability of mature women, therefore simultaneously and with great sexism implies that there are also MIRNFs (pronounced "murrrnffs") meaning "Moms I'd Rather Not Fuck." Jeez, I don't think it implies that at all, I think this lady is overreacting, but in any case, it's unreasonable to look at the world and say, "Yes, all moms are equal on the fuckability scale." (Of course, to be either a MILF or a MIRNF, a female just needs to be somewhat mature; actual momhood, or proof of progeny, is not necessary.) I mean, the Land of Desire is not a democracy, everybody knows that, especially bald and paunchy middle-aged guys like moi. On the other hand, it could be said that for every MIRNF, there are gents who consider her a MILF. Every type of woman has her fans.

Including those who prefer to date invisible men!

Rarely do I get something to write about in the mainstream media that hooks up with my personal concerns about exotic dancers, but I was able to get more than five hundred hits over the last three days to this blog by analyzing my feelings about the stripper-scripter Diablo Cody and her Oscar win, and by commenting on other people's blogs to get my nom de blog and my URL out there.

This may seem mercenary but I want as many people as possible to read my blog...and if you read the posts I've written like "Strippers Can Write?!!" and "Diablo Cody: the stripper as Godzilla," you'll see that the whole thing struck a real chord with me that goes back long before I even heard of this person. She has merely become an icon for feelings swirling around in my brain and heart as an admirer of what I like to think of as "commercial women"...ladies who use their sexual appeal to entertain. I guess "commercial women" would include a lot of mainstream actresses and singers too, not just strippers. For example, I saw a picture of the singer Rihanna this morning in the paper dressed in dominatrix gear during a recent show. She looked kind of hot (although not as sexy as her cover photo on the recent Cosmopolitan). But there was one sloppy detail that took off the edge of her allure for me--why didn't she have stockings for those garters, instead of just wearing thigh high boots? I don't get the appeal of dangling garters. But perhaps I'm a purist...

Yes, "commercial women"...I never heard that term before, or don't recall hearing it, although somebody else may have used it before...or did I just coin it? In the nineteenth century women who used their looks to make a living were known as "professional beauties"...I guess "commercial women" is kind of the same idea.

So Diablo is going to write another memoir following up her Candy Girl tome about her days as a stripper...this new one is going to be about going to Hollywood...well, good for her...she's gotta work her turf.

That's what it's all about, right? We're just trying to survive...