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...