I rape sentences as I read them. By the time I'm through reading a sentence it's gone through the mill and in most cases it is left without several of the words it started out with. Depends on the length of the sentence and how much of a shit I give about it.

Take the sentence on this byzantine page. ALL THE TOOLS YOU'LL EVER NEED TO EXPERIENCE THE SHOCK CORRIDOR.

By the time I got to the end of it all that's left is ALL YOU'LL NEED FOR THE CORRIDOR.

Maybe it's not such a great example. Maybe I should quoth Woody Allen or Charles M. Schulz. Or nobody. Maybe I could just shutup.

I admire many things about Charles M. Schulz, but above all his decision to use his middle initial as part of his name throughout his long and placid life. To me, the use of one's middle initial is a genuine, if pithy sign of rectitude and dignity, and the fact that I use my own middle initial depending on the mood into which I happen to have lurched has suddenly as I typed this revealed itself to me as a SIGNAL from which much wisdom shall be gleaned.

 
I live in New York City, make that Atlanta, Georgia, and this website is called "The Place of General Happiness." I've never been entirely satisfied with that name for this site, but it will be OK for now. Some people find this site while searching the internet for HAPPINESS, or GENERAL GODDAM HAPPINESS. Like me, they never find what they're looking for. But at least they find this place, and sometimes we meet in gaudy hotels in San Francisco or noisy bars in Manhattan, and sometimes we have sex and never see each other again, and sometimes we play headgames for months and months and then decide never to meet, and sometimes we skip all that nonsense and remain friends for years now.

I am a concert classical pianist. If you have a java-enabled browser and a lot of RAM, you are invited to see my streaming audio page, at which URL I've posted a few audio files of me playing the piano. Unfortunately, this new streaming audio format does not always work on the Macintosh and/or on older computers, but such is the price one pays for experimenting.

Few things make me happy in life. I've never been happy, and not so deep in my belly lies a lot of repressed anger and sarcastic piss and bile. But it does not get in my way. I don't lash out at people or send off hostile e-mail to perfect strangers. In fact, I am embarrassed about the things in life that make me angry.

My anger manifests itself passively. I don't answer your phonecalls unless I love you. I don't even answer the phone in the first place unless I really love you. I don't listen to or even look at you when you talk to me, and I fucking hate it when you touch me.

I rush outside in the shittiest weather, and walk around in it for hours until the storm clears up. Then I come back here. I like shitting, drinking beer, eating chicken, writing expansive e-mail messages to strangers who will never write back, throwing away perfectly good roast beef, showering for several consecutive hours, and riding trains.

I panic whenever riding a New York City bus. Tonight, while riding home, I was sure the bus would tip over, and a few blocks later I was certain we'd go skidding off of York Avenue and over into the East River. My palms sweat and my pulse-rate rises, but no one else appears concerned.

I would never show any anger in your presence. I would never patronize those around me nor embarrass myself by presuming to bore you with my reaction the things that really hurt me. I know for certain that no person on this planet has ever seen me get angry.

I probably do not know you. I don't know anything about you. I don't remember much about my childhood. Like yesterday and the day before, its memory quivers in my brain like a big, congested snot.

Not being able to find my bank card the other day made me livid, and I threw this chair I'm sitting on across the apartment. This is a small apartment. The bank card was sitting here in the pocket of my shirt during the whole 45 minutes I turned this apartment upside down trying to find it. God, I was mad, thinking about the times this tsunami of anger has shown itself and not been quelled by the presence of another person. I would never lower myself like that in the company of any other person.

 
Sometimes I long for Annie Oakley.

I'm bobbing my head back and forth just now typing these words which seem like nonsense, like stupidity flapping off the wings of asininity rattling itself all over this apartment.

Annie Oakley is a person who I assume to be a woman who I met on a BBS several years ago. She first recommended the music of Dr. John, and for some reason I took this stranger up on the advice. No matter how long these CDs sit on my protectively coated CD shelves, these Dr. John CDs are the prize of my collection (forgetting about Vladimir Horowitz for a few seconds while I type fanatically).

She and I had paranoid, guarded, revealing conversations. I could talk all day about her, but I will not.

Annie Oakley is gone. Bitterly relaxing somewhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I see her sprawled out disconsolate and 47 on her couch in her huge apartment in her giant neighborhood making sense of the galactical town that surrounds her.

One way to reach me is by ntalk, or ytalk, or whatevertalk. "talk [email protected]" is worth a try if you've exhausted most other options. I think that one of the conditions of my pre-nuptial agreement (like I'm ever gonna get married when I don't even wanna grow up) will be that my wife must agree to have a talk window open 24 hours a day. And that part of the honeymoon occurs in a rented train car with a waterfall and a balcony.

You can send me e-mail here: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. CompuServe sucks.

I have a telephone and an answering machine (which is currently not working), so have fun dialing 404-876-9500; I am either not there very much at all, or I am just saying that so there can always be an excuse for me to not answer when you call, and maybe when you call and leave a message I'm sitting right here on this spot looking at the phone with disdain, cracking open a can of beer, wishing you would hang up and end your silly phone message.

Fax number is 404-588-2100 if you're feeling cowardly. If you're really feeling cowardly, use the Internet Fax Server in the most creative way you can manage. I've always wanted to fax someone a roll of toilet paper. Or a ball of yarn.

And there is always U.S. Mail, which I used recently in a fit of nostalgia. Cut-'n'-pasted ransom notes and perfume-soaked loveletters from webmistresses of love may be sent to me at this address (stuff is getting forwarded from there to here):

Mark Thomas
Post Office Box 181
New York, NY 10185-0002

I was a cute kid. Where, oh where did it go wrong?

Absent all these possibilities, if for some reason you need to reach me and find it impossible, just pick up the phone and start dialing. Any number, anywhere, it doesn't matter. Here, choose from this list. Just dial, and if someone answers, ask for me, and maybe that is who it will be.