Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.

Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”:

You can see the whole billboard and a gold-bikini Princess Leia mixed with Iron Man after the jump …

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So I told him that I had cheated on him while he was out of town. And you know what? He turned around and tried to use it against me!

Last weekend I saw a haircut ugly and evil enough to impregnate a nun just so it could kick her down a set of steep stairs. I’ve seen some stupid haircuts in my day, rocked more than a few regrettable ‘dos my damn self. My own hair in high school was shaven on the sides and back and semi-sorta-not-really-at-all long on the top in a ‘do that would have looked like a brain handle had I been able to pull it into a ponytail. I used to wonder why girls didn’t take me seriously.

I used to pour concrete with a man whose braided mullet hung low enough to tickle the tanned top third of his ever-exposed ass. I’ve seen cuts on the subway here in New York that I found personally offensive, hairdos whose cheeky chunkiness screamed of disposable income, willful ignorance and a powerfully asexual aesthetic retardation.

I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where ironic commentary on the fashion choices of the American working class has collapsed in on itself warping into a white dwarf shaped like a Mobius strip: a one-sided form that slows down light and the passage of time so aggressively that silver tights underneath ’70s running shorts seem like a good idea.

But I have never seen any shit like this.

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My friend Eric called me up late the other night from somewhere outside of Barcade, panting breathlessly in the cold. “Dude, don’t go to bed yet,” he said. “I’m bringing something over for you.”

And what a something it was! In its heyday, he looked like this, functioning as an expensive karaoke toy.

More photos after the jump …

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I’m settled in now, mostly. I’m living out of garbage bags and boxes in my friend’s sublet … but the truck’s been returned, the storage shed filled and I’ve managed to make a tub of hand-cranked ice cream in the new kitchen.

Here’s a tip for all you ice cream makers out there: if you’re making coffee ice cream, never, ever flavor it with espresso. The results are cold and creamy, yes, but suffused with a black grit that triggers the bowels while destroying your bedtime. The taste is not unlike eating the sweet sludge from the bottom of a Turkish coffee.

My farewell party was better than I could have hoped. All the folks I loved the most in DC came … along with a mysterious emissary.

Suicide_blond has been a regular reader and frequent commenter here over the past year or so. She’s always had a few kind words for me, punctuated with vigorous ellipses. When some of the DC blog scene’s egregious rotten twats have had a good go at me, she’s stuck up for me. I’ve never met her in person and I’m not sure I ever will.

After the farewell drinks had flowed for a few hours, a tall, grey-haired man in sunglasses and a suit walked into the bar. He immediately began shouting my name at the top of his lungs. All the patrons around him followed suit, until finally my friends grabbed me. He said

This card’s from Suicide_blonde. She wants to stay anonymous

He handed me a card, addressed to my name at And I Am Not Lying, For Real. It read “Dear Mr. Simmermon: Enjoy the Big Apple … or die trying!! Put some Johnny Cash on the jukebox & have a round on me …” There was a twenty dollar bill inside.

The man in the suit took a photo of me with the card and us together, then walked out into the night.

That’s class right there — weird, story-worthy class. It’s better than meeting in person, if you ask me.

Moving day was clear, cool for July. Every other time I’ve moved, it’s been a hundred degrees out. The one time I moved in December I was in Australia, so it was still a hundred degrees. I had plenty of help packing and cleaning from some incredible people, and the day was pretty painless, all around.

I got up early Sunday morning, well before the alarm. I was heading up to hail a cab to the U-Haul facility (never, ever use U-Haul), when I just had to freeze. The street was completely quiet except for the trees whispering. I was just absorbing it all when I heard this sound all around me, from inside and outside my eardrums — a sort of THUNK, THUNK that shook me to the mitochondria.

I’ve heard that sound before and I love the way it makes me feel. It’s the best feeling in the world.

I got the truck, we loaded it up, ate some pizza and swept the apartment out. Me and my friends stood there in the empty place, swapping stories and toasting from a warm bottle of ouzo. Our laughter rang out in the empty apartment, and the stories started to fall flat pretty quick. It was time to go — two hard dude-hugs and I was out.

I was driving the truck down 16th Street, taxidermied owl in attack position strapped into the passenger seat and lucky ram’s skull on the dash with “Like a Rolling Stone” blaring when I heard it again: THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, louder this time, and feeling better with each THUNK.

I heard the sound at 16, as the theme from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” announced the Ramones’ imminent performance. I heard the THUNK an hour before landing overseas with 3 grand and nowhere to live, heard it when I flew to LA this winter to pitch a TV show.

It’s the sound of my life as a giant roller coaster, THUNKing its way up that first big hill with me in the car up front. I can see the track curving away up ahead and I’ve got no idea what that first drop’s going to feel like, but I know what it is. It’s the wild ride of the rest of my life, fast and full of turns. It scares the crap out of me and it’s the most exhilarating feeling in the world … and every time I feel it I say “hello, old friend. Didn’t think I’d see you again, and I’m so glad you’re back.

I’ve been living out of trash bags in Brooklyn for the past three days. Haven’t got a job yet, but I’ve got some leads and I can’t think of anything at all that I’d rather be doing.

I’ve been sweating into the same reasonably priced department store suit for the past three days, dragging ass and laptop all up and down Manhattan looking for a job. I leave my wool jacket on during interviews out of the very real fear that my shirt will draw flies to its translucent back.

My feet are two thick flaps of pure pain, suffering daylong beatings in my dress shoes then slapping the pavement in a pair of hip and useless Chuck Taylors at night. I sleep four, maybe six hours a night, get up, put on the suit and trawl the town all day in a flurry of meet-and-greets with recruiters, then spend the night drinking iced coffee in my underpants, hunched over a laptop trawling the job boards and sending cover letter after cover letter.

Everyone knows this, everyone understands this, and nobody says it out loud: New York doesn’t fucking care. New York doesn’t care about what you think, how you feel, or what kind of behavior was normal back in your sleepy Southern hometown. Anyone that thinks differently is a complete fool. That city’s full of heartbroken fools that thought they knew and learned with their hearts the hard way.

The past few months, I’ve been slacking on the writing and slacking on the gym. I’ve just sat here in my festy little apartment swatting cockroaches and cussing the darkness, getting fatter by the day. I’ve been mad at the world for denying me adventure, travel, work and thrills and mad at the Web for delivering just enough distracting material that I can’t get down to brass tacks for myself. I’ve been mad at everyone and everything, blaming everyone but myself and then I swept that clutter away in the past few weeks and had a good go at blaming myself.

The thing I’ve learned, the thing I always forget is this: everything starts now. Right now. That new job, that fitness program, the blog post, that pitch to that magazine. It starts right this second and doing anything else means not doing what you wanted in the first place. Which leads to too many drinks, too many late nights and dreading the morning, when you wake up to a huge empty day alone in the apartment blaming the entire world.

I’ve realized that I’m never going to be happy with myself or my writing unless I find a challenge and a challenging community — find a place where everyone’s racing ahead and try to catch up. I need to be someplace I haven’t figured out, someplace that doesn’t care and just fight like hell for a little while.

And maybe I’ll never be happy with myself or with my writing. It’s my personality that needs to change, not my ZIP code. I’m a moody dude, and things are never good enough. I’ll come to terms with it or I won’t, but I’d sure like to tackle this in a new town.

The mother in Almost Famous sees right through a cocky rock star’s bullshit and tells him “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” Works for me. I’ve been bullshitting myself for a long time and when I heard those words the other night they cut me like a laser.

I’m moving to New York City, the city that doesn’t fucking care, in precisely seven days. I’ve put in notice at my building in DC, rented a truck and a room in that beautiful stinking city. Hopefully, this will be bold enough.