i took down the comments yesterday

and in came a bunch of fan mail. i took them down because the service i was using was having problems and that, in turn led to my page loading very slow.

thanks for hanging in there with me.

and thanks for writing all the nice letters.

lately i have been receiving a lot of love from the college girl demographic.

one young lady likes to write me erotic emails. you know who you are, and i love you.

thank you.

thank you so much.

thank you from the bottom of my heart.

if i was the wind i would find you and kiss you.

but i am ten times your age so i will just thank you in my blog.

another 18 yr old from usc wrote me to tell me that if i got the job from the la times that she would be my intern.

i told her that the la times would never hire me and even if they did she should intern for a real writer.

she replied with a photo of a girl, who, if it is her, is a knockout, and a message telling me “i don’t want to be an intern for someone else. i want to be an intern for you.”

oddly, i could use an intern. she could fact check my ass. copy edit. go through the email. give me story ideas that i could riff from. and find me pictures of our president trying to use binoculars, which are tricky devices.

and all the old posts in the archives are missing pictures. i would love an intern to put those pictures on my server so that they’d stay up forever. or in the meantime put new pictures up in their place.

ah, luxury.

but what would an intern want from me?

my knowledge?

i interned at mtv a long time ago. i worked for chris connelly’s movie show. he was super nice. i drove him somewhere because he didnt have a drivers liscense. i still dont think he does. i did learn a lot at mtv. i learned that you work your ass off over there.

the bush picture that is above was sent to me by a young girl who’s going to OU. is that oklahoma? i think so. who knows? i cant find that picture anywhere on Reuters. i suppose thats the liberal media again, suppressing a picture of our president being a dumbass. thank you kristin.

all reuters has of that day is the picture on the left.

busblog coming through for your asses, thanks to readers like you.

i also got an email from my former editor amy.

now some people think that i cannot be edited. that is so not true. if i respect someone i actually love being edited. im not 21 any more. i appreciate a second pair of eyes. a different point of view. an educated collaborator. i enjoy the editing process. im not attatched to anything that i write.

amy has mucho experience in the newspaper biz and even worked for abcnews.com. she says that i have what it takes and she said that i shoulda linked to the times yesterday so they could see how much traffic i get.

times, i get about 600-1,000 readers a day.

dont be impressed or not impressed by traffic. if i wrote about the middle east all day i’d have twice as many readers. if i put porn on here i’d get 6 times the readers. the first photo essay that i did of anna kournikova got more hits than all of my photo essays put together because it was a discussion of anna’s alleged nude pictures in penthouse magazine.

it was a good photo essay, as good as any of the others. but it had naked pics. so guess what. all of the horny guys from around the world linked to it on their sites and on their message boards, and blogs, and sent emails to each other linking to it.

i got 2 million hits in 2 days. 3 million in 4 days. in fact if you type in “anna kournikova nude” into google my sixth month old photo essay is currently holding steady at number four on the list.

those hits don’t mean that i was a good writer. it means that everyone wanted to see if penthouse really had nude pics of tennis’s sexiest female player.

be impressed that a blog of a guy with no money no car no girlfriend and a thankless job can get a thousand people a day to his blog despite the fact that he interviews escalators and kisses no one’s ass on the blogosphere.

im impressed by that thousand. im impressed that people will read something that isnt xrated or news-related, or scandelous, and probably not even true.

i want the times or whoever wants me to be their blogger to hire me because i write well and i have an imagination and the ability to bust a rhyme or tell a good joke in the middle of a narritive. i want them to hire me because i’m not like everyone else and because i can see this city in a different way, a positive way.

perhaps i still have a bit of the 21 year idealism in me. sue me.

amy also sent me a book yesterday called It’s Not Carpal Syndrome. i know what i have is repetitive stress. and not from writing this blog but from doing the job that i will soon be transfered away.

but whatever it is is killing me right now.

so thanks for all your cards and letters and books.

thanks for saying that you’d be part of a letter-writing campaign on my behalf.

thanks for telling me all your secrets and telling me that you’d work for me for free.

right now i just want you to be happy in your lives and keep reading my page.

i dont want to convince anyone of anything. i would prefer them to make their decisions on their own.

happy halloween,

tony

hbo3

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