"I had a dream I was working at a place where everyone was having sex," Deborah said as she got dressed this morning. She was up early for her first day of work as a bookkeeper for a West Village bar.

She used to make me sing that song when we were drunk. When we were up late, I'd pull out the guitar and sing it for her. When we were up late and drunk was the only time I would do it—the only time I could do it.

I've asked this question before, but why is it that independent movies are so well respected — in some ways, even more respected than Hollywood movies — and independent music, when recorded by untrained musicians on shitty equipment in someone's basement is so often cherished more than what a slick label cranks out? But when a writer takes it upon themselves to release a self-published book, they are generally regarded as a talentless, self-involved buffoon? Who knows, but thanks in part to the tireless efforts of POD-dy Mouth, all that may be changing.

Deborah didn't last very long tending bar at the dive. Her heart wasn't in it, and the owner could tell. "You know the game," he told her. "You gotta make dem guys tink dey got a chance witchoo." Flirt, in other words, which is something Deborah is finding harder and harder to fake, especially by the twelfth hour of a double shift. "This isn't working out," they agreed, and that was that. A free agent, omnce again.

Nearly all my life, relatives have asked me to play the guitar at family gatherings. My father's birthday party was no different. I rarely do, but that doesn't keep everyone from asking. "Aren't you going to play something, James?" my uncle asked. (My uncle has always refused to call me Jamie and will only call me either Jim or James.)

In an attempt to fill Deborah's bar with friendly faces, I invited Katrina and TRUE to meet me there for a drink. What I didn't realize was that Williamsburg's main vein subway train was going to stop running at midnight for another one of its famed "no service because of ongoing repairs" weekends. In other words, at the stroke of midnight, our options for getting home would suddenly go from quick and easy to annoying and expensive. MsThingk was lucky enough to live just a few blocks away, so a hop skip and a jump would get her home easy enough — not counting the sexual overtures made by the local boys hanging out in front of every bodega along the way.

When Signe and I were making plans to hang out, Signe asked if I wanted to see some gay cowboys.

Before Christmas, it was clear that Deborah and I wouldn't have the time or money to buy each other proper gifts, and we agreed that we’d try to make up for it after the holiday. Unfortunately, "after the holiday" found us in the same predicament. Presents, we told ourselves, aren't that important anyway. But yesterday, we had a day off, and we decided to stroll around the city to see if anything caught our eye. We took the R train from Deborah's apartment in Park Slope to Prince Street in the heart of SoHo.

Deborah invited me to spend New Year's Eve at the French restaurant where she bartends, but it didn't sound like much fun, so I didn't go. It didn't sound like fun to her, either, and she nearly didn't go herself. She's convinced that the manager — who's been relentlessly making passes at her since she started — is going to fire her. She even thought he might do it before her New Year's Eve shift just to screw her out of a big payday.

We spent Christmas Eve at Deborah's apartment, sleeping under the tiny, flickering, red lights she'd hung from a houseplant earlier in the afternoon. The poor plant's spindly chutes and wide tropical leaves struggled valiantly to play the part of a Christmas tree, and might've done a convincing job if we'd managed to place a present or two underneath it. But, with no parents around telling us to wait, our presents were open long before morning. Still, the lights were pretty, and despite the misty, fifty-degree weather, it somehow managed to feel like Christmas when we woke up.

It was a month ago, or thereabouts, when Deborah asked to be banned from my blog. We had decided to stop seeing each other, and she knew that, unless I made it impossible for her to visit, she'd be tempted to torture herself with pictures and stories about what her ex-boyfriend was up to.

Bicyclemark is home from Amsterdam for the holidays, and he took the train from New Jersey to have dinner in the East Village with MsThingk and me.

Brian tells me that the people in his advanced yoga teacher training class are surprised to learn that he's never had any previous yoga instruction.

A solid mahogany body, plus the added weight of a Bigsby vibrato, and a hardshell case, adds up to over twelve pounds. In other words, my Les Paul Custom is a heavy motherfucking guitar. I lifted it onto the countertop as carefully as I could, flipped the latches, and opened the case.

Do pale girls with dyed black hair and oversized mugs of coffee really read Nietzsche in coffee shops? Yup, they sure do, and I met one earlier tonight.

I was given a mission to find the perfect pumpkin.

The famed Daniel Boud, keeper of the bloggie award-winning website boudist.com , is currently bopping around the world on some sort of touring vacation. When I read on his site that he was coming to New York and needed a place to stay, I offered to let him crash at my place for the week. He just called from Barcelona to let me know there was a problem with his connecting flight, so who knows when he'll get here, but when he does, the first thing I plan to do is make fun of his accent.

I hadn't been to the local bar in ages, but last night found me home alone and restless on a Saturday night, so I strolled through the beautiful fall night and plopped myself down on a stool. The place was empty, and so dark that I almost didn't see the bartender.

Yes, it's true, New Jersey has farms, but what it has even more of is traffic. After creeping along for a few miles in a discouraging bumper-to-bumper line-up on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel, Deborah and I started to have second thoughts about our relaxing little getaway. Seeing the aggressive silver pickup that we'd cursed out a minute earlier get a ticket for driving on the shoulder was mildly entertaining, but it wasn't the kind of fun we were after. I spent the "stop" half of the "stop-and-go traffic" watching the couple in an SUV behind me argue over which CD to play in their car stereo.

There's a fly following me around everywhere I go. He was buzzing around my head yesterday morning as I drank coffee, landing briefly on my shoulder, then taking a few laps around my apartment and landing on my head. I tried to shoo him away, but to him, my hand was only a game. I didn't see him follow me as I left home and took the subway into Manhattan, but as soon as I sat down to do some work, there he was, buzzing close enough to feel the breath of his wings and hear them whining like a tiny motor. It continued all day long, though he took breaks to explore the rest of the office now and then.