Tuesday... I forced myself out early on the way to work or else I'd not get out and about at all. I recently finished a DVD about a guy who was agoraphobic (afraid of crowds), ate a whole lot of canned tuna fish, didn't have a television set, kept his cleaning supplies perfectly lined up and was divorced. As I searched my apartment for a hidden camera, I repeated to myself, "Of course that was only a character in a movie. Only a character in a movie. Only a movie."

Sometimes I feel like a character in a movie.

There is really nothing going on. I phoned my actress friend, Sofia, in Burbank, Labor Day night and again she wasn't home. She's probably found yet another man-friend to treat her like garbage. Men are pigs, and woman are too often their trough.

The young couple next to me are sporting colorful shoulder-down tattoos. They'll look really attractive after another forty years of wear and tear. The boy is deciphering what exactly the final colors on the girl's arm will be when her bruised and bloodied appendage finally heals.

That's one thing I never had even the thought of having done--tattoos. "When I was their age" (said in a wheezy, old-man voice) "the only females who had tattoos were prostitutes, and the only men who displayed them were either ex-Navy or ex-Cons."

Four of the Starbucks' employees just came back into the store after emptying the single can of garbage, one of them coughing as he held his fist to his mouth, gave away what they were actually doing. Someday, we'll have to go outside to have a cup of coffee too.

Now I'm being bombarded from all sides with caffeine-fueled jabber. I'm not used to this. I'm hearing three conversations at once.

A full-figured, attractive farm girl walked by and after I checked out her quite ample udders and then scanned down to her legs...you guessed it, another tattoo. I don't get it.

My gay barrista, since he was out of fresh coffee, had his helper fill my travel mug with multiple shots of expresso. The charge? Zero. In any case, I dropped my normal dollar bill into the already very verde tip cube.

Sporting my recently discovered cataracts, driving to work for the midnight shift has become much more visual. It's a lot like the newly re-mastered DVD of Blade Runner.

The 21st Century LCD billboards appear brilliant and color saturated while the oncoming vehicles sport headlight beams that look like bursting stars and lightning flashes--which now last twice as long as they bounce along the cracks in my eye's lenses--appear as sky borne acts of art.

Someone put half a grand in my checking account a couple of days ago. It was still there this morning, and after talking to the on-line division at my bank, I wasn't any the wiser where it came from.

The other day I had an e-mail that promised, no, guaranteed good things would happen to me if I forwarded it to twelve friends. Not having even half a dozen friends I deleted the e-mail. But maybe it worked anyhow, eh? Or, more likely, God is giving me a chance, (and the funds) to stay in this apartment so close to my dreams rather than move far away.      www.doctormalamud.com Friday...I slept another weekend away. It's pretty sad when a person's dream life is more exciting than his awake life. Although I am  having some really cool dreams--only thing is, since I'm actually sleeping during them, I can't remember much when I awaken.

I am attempting to train my subconscious to be able to tell the difference between a dream sequence and a flesh and blood, real-world action scene. If I should ever perfect the technique (doubtful) I'll be able to engineer some pretty wild things in my dreams. Kind of like in the movie The Matrix. I kind of sound like a teenager, eh?

I remember telling a likeable coworker, barely more than one-third my age, of the whispery thoughts that fog my mind the instant before the body gives itself up to the dream world ruled by Morbius.

He had not the slightest glimmer of what I was talking about, because like most humans, he is either asleep, or awake, with no in-between. Or, it could be that he's not experienced this feather duster of thoughts often enough to recognize it.

Maybe that's why I enjoy my sleep so much, because it's actually more fulfilling than my physical life. So sad, eh? Ah, but how many philosophers have argued that dreams are real?

The other morning, at work no less, I was again experiencing the very odd thoughts that visit me prior to my chin hitting my chest and the drool dribbling out of the corner of my mouth. Not a pretty scene, especially when driving an automobile.

No wonder my young friend had not experienced it--for I realized I was struggling against the avalanche of weariness that only decades of unfulfilled, frustrated and futile living can be buried in.

I'm at my far north-Phoenix Starbucks and it seems the drive-thru has all  the customers on this 95F degree and humid Friday evening. For I sit alone.

I hear the young barristas talking about appearing in stage plays with their as-young customers...something that will be long forgotten by the time they are my age, smothered under worries about work, mortgage payments, taxes, insurance and doctor and tuition and utility bills being the price of adulthood and parenthood.

With only myself to look after, I am free to pursue my acting. Acting, drama, stage and movie work that is as much as part of me as Hanna-Marie was. So why don't I? Why don't do a damned thing except sitting around pondering the taste of machine oil?      www.doctormalamud.com Wednesday...I drove the dozen or so miles to my old hangout at the Barnes & Noble Café on Shea Boulevard and the 101. I was hoping to free myself of the presence of so many Illegals, but that's silly since they never visit bookstores.

From this morning at 6am until just a few minutes ago, I had scads of things to write about. And now I'm blank. A tabula rasa (Latin for 'blank slate'.)

Unless I'm mistaken, the once attractive middle-aged tutoress who I was accustomed to seeing here in the cafe has packed on so much lard that it has even managed to push her face into an unnatural shape, kind of like the denizens of Bizzaro World.

Doesn't she realize I am the only one allowed to become a tub of lard?

I know she probably grosses, tax-free, more in ten or so hours of tutoring the children of the wealthy North Scottsdale residents than I earn in a week. But look, she doesn't have health and dental benefits and a $250 bonus to be gotten on her sixth year of employment that celebrates her fifth year with the company. She doesn't have one boss who can ruin her financial life, or co-workers who can slander and backstab her, or a time-clock that only favors the employer, et cetera.

My moods are swinging from mediocre to suicidal. It is so stupid that I sit around and do nothing to increase my income while the majority of my challenges are simply financial. All  of my challenges are financial. Hell, with adequate income, say $50,000 a month, life would be just peachy.

Hoping to entice me to re-sign, my former dating service is sending me e-mails with proposed matches. One did not include a photo, which automatically means that for this 'match', her entire body was too large to fit into a single 100 by 100 pixel thumbnail.

I'm not even really thinking that much about a woman anymore. I'm thinking more along the lines of a harem. A harem that would be quite feasible with an income of $50k a month, eh?

This is one of the Barnes & Noble Café's where I rendezvoused with my stage-actress friend Sanna-Leena as she was still working through the unexpected passing of her father (her heart, like an icebreaker attempting to push through the hard, deep and dingy bergs left in the wake of her daddy's death), while I myself, was in the midst of my own ten-year plan dislodge the divorce-dagger set by Hanna-Marie from my chest.

In any case Sanna-Leena's e-mail address 'went away' (as we say in the computer biz) and the last time I saw her husband's name in a play announcement, the female name paired with it was certainly not Sanna-Leena, and since they rarely appear separately ... Gawd I hope nothing's happened.

A new-found friend of mine, from the mining country of West Virginia, (well we really won't be friends until we murder and butcher a large mammal together), who works for the city park department, (many of those parks are actually huge, mountainous, desert preserves), told me that in a single month they found twelve suicides.

I used to exit this parking lot by driving south past the Fry's, the OfficeMax, the Home Depot and then turn right on Mountain View and drive to our tony Town of Paradise Valley apartment.

Now, instead, after cutting through the back of a Circle K, I go west on Shea Boulevard, past my former P.V. apartment, past our house of a quarter century, and drive many miles to the compartments where, Mainio in his, me in mine, live as English speaking citizens and minorities.

My it is a beautiful monsoon-season evening.      www.doctormalamud.com Monday...Someone lied to me. I'm at my Moon Valley Starbucks and someone lied to me last night.

I just loaded-up my travel mug with the Pikes Place coffee and it is its horrible-tasting best. Last night it tasted good. And like strawberries. I had approached the barrista and asked about the taste and was met with a 'well I never look' and told to sit back down or she'd spank my bare fanny. That's what I remember anyway.

(Being that "a" in barrista refers to the female gender, I've wondered if the males working at Starbucks should be called barristos, with the "o" making reference to the male gender. However, after visiting many Starbucks around town, I believe it is entirely suitable to call most of their male-appearing employees 'barristas'.)

Flooding unasked into my heart, creating a pang of regret and longing, a child's memory of absolute joy (evidenced by a smile far larger than my 10-year old face) as I, for the first time shouted "fire missiles!" into the the remote control connected by a cable to my Robot Commando Christmas present.

Which got me to pondering about an English documentary I saw that had followed twelve 7-year olds until they were seasoned and wise adults. With the seeming result being, that we are pretty much as an adult, what we said we would like to be at age seven. That must be why there are so many firemen, eh?

(Although I didn't realize it) I was so very much troubled at age seven: pretty much blind before seeing my first eye-doctor, suffering from severe asthma, pigeon-toed and speaking with a lisp. No wonder, as an adult, I continue to struggle over such everyday challenges in life such as finding a decent job, writing a million-selling book or marrying Morgan Fairchild.

Almost every table tonight is full and there are plenty of Hollywood-beautiful customers strolling around. The noise level is much greater than I'm a accustomed to, but, being I don't get out much, I'm bathing in the rarely witnessed verbal avalanche.

My 40-year high school reunion, here in the same city I was born in, in the same city I've lived in all my life, is coming in 2009. I missed the 20-year and 30-year extravaganzas, although for the 20th, I did cruise the parking lot and spotted some familiar, although wizened, faces tottering about outside.

Tonight, the same female barrista seems to have gotten another customer's order wrong and is waging her 4th, 5th or 12th argument over the armpit-high delivery counter.

At work, I put in a request to be moved to an office closer to my hovel. My manager, who used to be my underling, a man who has worked with and beside me for seven years, simply advised me he had gotten 'the notice' from corporate and told me what my last day would be at his office.

No begging, no "Thank you's", no "We're going to miss you", no "You'll be hard to replace", no nothing.

So much for feeling I've been anything but a four digit employee code for that toothless, cowboy boot wearing, half-lunged, kitchen-witch-faced bastard, to shakely scribble on his handwritten employee schedule every week.

I'm gazing at a mature lady at the counter, thinking she's quite attractive. While the melancholy voice in my head is reminding me, "She's probably ten years younger than you." And in case that wasn't enough to depress me, "What woman would be interested in a man whose net worth is held inside his Starbucks card?"

Women my own age are so old and whithered looking. And so money hungry.      www.doctormalamud.com Thursday... I'm at my Moon Valley Starbucks again. Odd how, from where I live basically in poverty, here is this place two miles away mostly populated by the semi-or-soon-to-be affluent.

For being such a good old geezer while being in line, and not complaining while the barrista yapped with a regular ahead of me, my coffee was "On us" aka: free. I really didn't mind, because any more a retail clerk who actually has a friendship with a consumer is something I delight in. An added delight was that the coffee didn't cause the normal 'bitter-beer' face.

The café is packed with students of all generations bent over reading or clicking away on their laptops, usually with the white wires of a hidden iPod crawling up to their ears. The young man opposite me book binding reads "Matthew". Hard to guess what he's studying. (He's probably reading the annotated history of my body-double Matthew McConaughy.)

The young girls, judging from their t-shirts, are on the high school swim team, and, further sculpted by their exercise, are looking like God meant His girls to look like.

Old people like me, we need to get around the youngers, the kids, the pre-teens, the teens, if only to see on display the optimism, joy, energy and supple joints that the Buck knife of time has whittled away during our own life experience.

I catch the long black-haired, exotic student staring and I imagine its at me and I give her my best grandfatherly I-wish-I-was-back-in-high-school smile, as I realize she's trying to read and make sense of the "2600 Hacker" t-shirt I've stretched over my ballooning body. Thank God it's black and slimming.

I came here to read a conspiracy book about the JFK assassination and the 20th Century epidemic (never thought they could tie those two together, eh?) and instead, I'm immediately seated and writing on the backside of a "MEMO" from work like Willard Fluke spoke of in

Spoon River Anthology: "And I began to write, write, write, reams on reams..."