Friday Tyrant - Alex Balk Freaks Out

_Remember when Gawker was really good? When Balk was writing there? Amid all the morally ambiguous snark, Balk's heartbeat, under all of that, was the most human thing on there that you could _almost_ kind of hear. Like if you had to tell someone at Gawker a secret, or had to ask someone there to hold your stash, he would be your go-to guy. Dude is also the best writer the Gawker Empire has ever had, IMHBCO, and, for some reason, Gawker Media appears to shed any stand-out great writers from their sites like moose shaking off black flies._

_So, because Balk was the best writer, he got fired left [Sorry!--ed]. And then he went to Radar and then something weird happened and now he's doing the Awl with Choire (also from Gawker, also human) and he seems a little more, dare I say, _happy? During Balk's downtime (or between-time) I started following his tumblr and found these great little vignettes he must cough up between drags. I asked him if I could put them in the Tyrant and he agreed to it. We did two of them. I asked him the other day if he had been writing anymore of these and he said no. That sucks. I like these things he does. Maybe Balk needs to be unemployed and scrambling to do art. Hope not. I want more. Look how big and black his heart is.

I Got Nowhere Else to Go! I Got Nowhere Else to Go.

I was walking down Second Avenue yesterday when I saw a woman retrieving something from the trunk of a cab. She was attractive, mid-twenties, in great shape, and she was pulling out what, on closer inspection, turned out to be a baby stroller. I looked for a baby, and there it was, sitting on the curb in a carrier. This was all taking place in front of a nail salon, and a woman was sitting in the front window while her nails dried. This woman appeared to be in her mid-to-late-thirties and was well put together, but wearing a denim jacket in a failing attempt to somehow give the illusion of youth. She was staring at the baby and the look in her eyes was one of anguish and desperation. You could almost HEAR her thinking, “This is never going to happen for me. What choices did I make in my life that brought me to this place where it’s never going to happen for me?”

It smacked me like a wave, and it was one of those New York feelings that you only let yourself feel every three or four years where you’re just overwhelmed by how everything is too close, there’s too much anguish, it’s all too much in your face. The ragged homeless schizophrenic who mutters “I should call my mom, let her know I’m still alive.” The old man sitting alone in the diner ordering one more cup of coffee so that at least he has another few minutes before he has to return to the empty room where he’s the only one who knows or cares that he exists. The exhausted nurse smoking outside the hospital whose voice cracks on the cellphone as she tells her child that there’s something you can warm up in the oven, be sure to do your homework,

I have to work a double shift tonight, I won’t be able to walk with you to school in the morning, before she hangs up the phone and lets the tears just roll. It’s all of it, all around you, and it never stops.

Then the next wave smacked me: The aging fat man, unshaven, shirttail hanging out, hunched demeanor, stopped short on the sidewalk staring at a woman in a nail salon. What’s his story? What sadness is he carrying around with him? Why the fuck won’t he keep walking?

So I kept walking. I mean, what else are you gonna do?

It's So Magic.

I’m in a cab heading down 7th Avenue and all of a sudden, no warning, I’m weeping like a fucking fountain and fiddling around with the Taxi TV so that the driver doesn’t notice the goddamn torrent of tears flooding down my cheeks and it’s like, Jesus Christ, who the fuck thought this was a good idea, this fucking nonstop carnival of misery and sorrow and boredom and banality where the best odds you can hope for are a lousy one percent of the time when you feel like things are actually worthwhile and now we’re at my stop and I’m trying to furiously wipe away the giant fucking lake of saline that has pooled around my eyes while muttering “Keep it together, keep it together” over and over in my head and I’m realizing that, sweet mother of God, every hugely repetitive moment of your life that you’ve gone through about ten thousand times is simply a part of the plan to get you acclimated to this kind of constant misery or, worse, numbness, and you know what? I want my goddamn money back.