Tick tick tick: Marc Spitz hat ein bisschen Stress

I'm thinking a lot about time this week. Work and time. Or how there's really not enough time in the weird, self-regulated work week of a semi-successful writer... these days. I know it don't thrill you, I hope it don't kill you, Elvis Costello once sang. First song, first album. Aim true. Elvis was right. I had a pleasantly idle summer. Or end of summer. Or last few weeks after finishing a massively researched biography on a hugely successful punk rock trio... put it that way. After that I stopped shaving and started watching a lot of television and told my girlfriend that I would soon stop bathing too and maybe wear that purple bathrobe she once bought me... all day, every day.

New York is a city where you kind of have to look sharp. It's implicit. The garbage men look sharp here. The bar backs look sharp. My shrink looks sharp and he's an older gentleman who I've never seen at Motherfucker (the rock club that the Cramps are playing on Sunday night, which we are all very excited about, us smartly attired and well groomed hipsters). Lux interior. The mad mad daddy. I wonder if lux interior is every late for a meeting, unshaven, with the bath running and the laundry drying and a hell hound climbing up his skinny, pvc sealed left leg. It's labor day weekend here in America and I am thinking about work. I am busy again. Very busy. However this column is a column that I want to write. And so I am making time. I want to shave. Part of me does anyway. Beards are itchy. I will have to make some time. I want to shut the bath off so I don't flood the flat. I will make some time. I will make some time. I started writing about rock again this week. For a british music magazine. A very good one. And I interviewed a concepto-folkie Brooklyn visionary named Sufjan Stevens (a very good one) and I'm on deadline and up to my earlobes in lukewarm water and the recipe I have for time (with a light provecal sauce) is getting wet. The ink is running. Robert smith is looking quite long at a picture of a girl standing quietly in the rain. Somewhere anyway. He has time to. Not me. All this to say that what I am making is new stuff. New books (I have two hopefully coming soon, like before 2008 or something. before I turn 40. A third novel and a third rock book). Then it will be about feeling good. With a body of work like Judy Blume or some shit. Now it's about the whole building, making, laboring after the summer vacation thing. That's what it's about here in NYC this weekend anyway. That and the cramps, y'know. A wise man named Robin Hitchcock once said "gotta let this hen out." I never knew what that meant and I still don't but part of my nerves do, I suspect. And they're ruling the henhouse these days. And they all got big clocks around their chicken breasts, like Flava Flav. Tick tick tick tick tick. Pulling the plug from the drain with my teethly yours