Every Tuesday morning, around 5 a.m., ominous curbside noises emanating from a Jersey City garbage removal truck remind me of my intended plans to write a novel about the life of a North Jersey garbageman, as his life unfolds on the streets of an under-funded Northeast city.

It would begin: “Joe lived in Kearny. In the early ’90s, he lived in his parent’s backyard in a one of those pop-up VW vans called a Westfalia. The van served more as a bedroom than transportation, and in his spare time, he played the bass guitar in a local college band that mixed hardcore and funk in the vein of 24-7 Spyz. The band lasted two years — the Westfalia van, seven.”

And then I usually fall back asleep, as the noise of the visiting garbage truck decreases into the early morning remainder of Second, and then Third, streets.

Upon waking, I typically rehash the idea over repeats of The Sopranos on A&E, thinking to myself that waste management couldn’t possibly have been (or remains) a typically cut-and-dry “do the job no matter what it takes” type of operation; that there just has to be some element of wise ass employees and nonsensicality attached to the idea of picking up and disposing of another person’s trash, far beyond the little respite offered by Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen in the 1993 film “Men at Work.”

The novel continues: “Joe has never found any dead bodies in oil drums on his route, or been forced to ride with managers that refuse to share french fries and hate rent-a-cops. He just does the job to pay his rent and hopes one day to move from the back of the truck to the driver’s cab, listening to Howard Stern on Sirius, drinking hot coffee from the imitation 7-Eleven on Newark Ave.”

And then I just think that a guy wanting to move from the back of a garbage truck to the front in North Jersey is probably best left for those intermediately dazed thoughts upon waking and drifting back into sleep. He can keep the van, and his dreams of playing bass in a college rock band alive, but his imagined dream of advancement at work will forever die with me around 5:20 a.m. every Tuesday morning.

It arrived Saturday — a presorted standard piece of mail from Jersey City Ford: “Turn in your old Ford/drive away with a new car for $78 a month/be awesome.”

“Junk mail,” I thought to myself, as I passingly clung to the thought of a new car, with little money down, for the price of my storage space each month. I kept the piece of mail, which contained a personal bargain code specific to my name, and continued pondering the possibility of a new Ford Fiesta. A new car that was good for the environment and wouldn’t destroy my bank account or force me (back) into a ramen noodle/potato a night budget.

Meanwhile, our 2000 Ford Focus with 135,000 miles sat in front of the house, waiting in earnest to be moved to the other side of the street. Because it was Saturday, I let the car be, and left the piece of mail on the kitchen table, returning to it a few times an hour, staring at the lime green Ford Fiesta and wondering if a new car was actually a possibility to me.

Monday came, and so did two appointments: one with the dentist and one with the sales service at Jersey City Ford. I needed a filling topped off, and as a result, the right side of my mouth was numb with novocaine, leaving me with what felt like a Savannah drawl and a sloppy drinking tendency.

The dentist was methodical and precise, doing everything in his power to limit my discomfort. I left his office with a numb face, but confident that he had done the unfortunate job that needed to be done on the tooth in my mouth.

Being numb, having needles stuck in my gums all morning, it felt like the perfect time to deal with people that wanted to get me into a new car for cheap. Our salesman collected the buyback piece of mail, inquired about the 2000 Ford Focus, and took down our credit information before asking us about a test drive.

And the test drive went great. The 2012 Ford Fiesta was definitely a fiesta to drive when compared with the dulled focus of a 12-year-old Focus. And somehow, inside, I knew that the pleasant encounter with our local Ford dealer was about to come to an end.

“We can do this price for you — $299 a month,” he said, way above the price listed on the piece of mail I had initially called “junk mail.”

I said it that was way too much money, and that I was really hoping to pay $78 a month for a new car, as indicated by the mail we had received.

The sales person brought his manager over. He looked like the actor Luis Guzman, and stated that we could’ve just called and asked about the price instead of wasting their time.

We left soon after, uncomforted by their aggressiveness to get us to spend money with them, the junk mail to lure us in with, and the ability to switch to rude once the idea of spending money was off the table. I’m still trying to shake it off, which brings me back to the dentist.

Here is a doctor, who is knowingly employed by putting people into uncomfortable situations, for the health and benefit of their teeth, gums and mouth.

And in the other corner is the auto sales person, who is knowingly employed by also putting people into uncomfortable situations, for the sake of a new car.

I guess I really should’ve known better than to try to knock out both encounters in the same day. But I really would’ve appreciated that dentist at the entrance of the auto dealer, saying, “Don’t worry, this will dull the pain and get you out of here that much quicker. And it’s pina colada flavored!”

And I realize this whole entry sucks, but I sorta put off the whole free writing thing all summer long and this was my first meager attempt back at it after a long, long summer.

*Video Exclusive to the Internet from briantunney on Vimeo.

Since my arrival in Jersey City, I have known two absolutes.

1) Never eat anything from the chicken place on the corner of Coles and Newark, on the advice of an exterminator friend.

and

2) At all costs, avoid driving or riding your bike on the pothole-marked “road” that was once Christopher Columbus Drive, leading in an East-West direction from the Turnpike to the Hudson River.

The chicken place, I’ve never entered, but Christopher Columbus, I’ve been forced to cross over in both a car and on my bike from time to time. The road in question, as far back as I can remember, has always been in a terrible state. And I assumed it remained as such because fixing a road costs a lot of money. But I also thought that perhaps the local government saw an added benefit to the barely traversable road: Because Christopher Columbus is in such a dire state, it’s virtually impossible to speed on without doing serious damage to one’s car. Maybe it was too expensive to fix, but maybe by not fixing it, the road became safer for all those that attempted to use it, because cars were forced to drive slow.

Whatever the case might’ve been, something happened that would challenge my short list of absolutes in this city: road construction on Christopher Columbus in April and May. Within the span of a month, my list of Jersey City absolutes had dropped by half, and I relished in the freshly poured pavement that was free of debris and glass, able to whisk me home in just a few minutes from the train station down the block. It was smooth, it was fast, and as someone that’s ridden bikes exclusively on pavement for a long period in their lives, it was a welcome change from the bumps, potholes, loose gravel and broken glass that had formerly characterized the road.

By mid-May, the construction finished up, and people were once again free to use the road at their disposal, which happened quickly and in a literal fashion. A few weeks later, Christopher Columbus went from a pristinely paved road to a trash bin of glass and debris and speeding cars that beeped daily at my presence on the side of the road. I started getting flat tires, the cars continued to become more aggressive, and I found myself returning to my original absolute.

I even took the time to write a haiku about Christopher Columbus Drive’s trash and traffic filled return to a road I avoided. It went like this:

You became smooth road
On a Monday or Tuesday
And lasted a month

I can’t say why I chose Japanese poetry to characterize a road’s journey from aversion to usefulness and back to aversion. I just did. And it led me to wonder about the original road before construction. Christopher Columbus Drive was broken, and battered, and everything that a road in a heavily traversed downtown of a city should not be. But because I knew it was broken, I opted out of using it as much as possible, as did many other people.

And now I’m forced to think that maybe existing in a somewhat broken state isn’t all that bad to begin with, while writing bad haikus about the whole deal and trying my damnedest to avoid any use of irony that involves the name Christopher Columbus, and the invasion of new cars and a trash on a once empty road.

Newark Avenue, I have returned.

I am lucky in life (concerning drunks) in that I’ve never had to deal with the truly psychopathic drunks. Rather, I get the slightly off-kilter, middle aged “I hate my life so I’m going to throw my trash out the window” type.

Enter our upstairs neighbor, who shall remain nameless but will undoubtedly live up to all of the stereotypes of being the fun-at-first, woah now, what happened type of drunk.

It all started about a year ago. He came home, hammered, saw me sitting on the front stoop, and immediately entered into his belligerent take on property rights.

“You gonna sit on my porch,” he asked. And I remained calm, reminded him that I lived underneath him, and asked him politely to sleep it off.

The next morning, our back porch was covered in toilet paper. I looked up, wondering how, when and why, and saw remnants of toilet paper hanging from his fire escape and window sill.

And I’ll admit: I thought it was funny.

Then the trash started falling from the skies on the weekends. And I’ll admit again, at first I thought it was funny. Accompanied by the shrill of the drunk’s screaming voice, proclaiming his name for the entire neighborhood to hear, asking the weary masses below if anyone was up to challenge him.

But at 1:30 in the morning on a Sunday, no one was up, and those that were didn’t care. So the next baffling step for said upstairs neighbor was to gather the trash scattered throughout his house, and throw it out his windows.

One night, that meant footlong sandwiches, potato chips and sliced tomatoes.

Last weekend, it meant pizza boxes, empty Chinese food containers and a Billboard magazine with Beyonce on the cover.

When I take a step back, I can laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. But in the heat of the moment, when pizza boxes were raining down onto my porch at 1 a.m. on a Sunday morning, I couldn’t help but wonder about the inner rage that drives this man’s drunkenness.

I gathered up the trash he had thrown out the window, put on a pair of pants, and walked it back up the stairs to his front door. The door was ajar, and I laid the trash on the floor.

In the morning, the trash was returned to the trash can in the front of the house. And the drunk hasn’t said a word about it since.

I was in Shanghai, China when I first heard the news about Osama bin Laden’s death by US forces in Pakistan. It was an early Monday afternoon in China, 12 hours ahead of the early morning back at home in the US.

By 3 p.m. China time, I had returned to the hotel and tuned into CNN. The 15-minute news cycle repeated everything we were allowed to know at that point, including the siege, the location, the contents of his pockets and the apparent burial at sea, interspersed with photos of people celebrating the death of bin Laden at Ground Zero back at home, a mere two miles from my home on the other side of the Hudson River.

Rob Lowe was there.

I got bored fast, and turned to my next favorite CNN hobby: looking for spelling and grammar mistakes during breaking news.

And then of course, my mind raced to the 14 and a half hour flight I was supposed to take back to New Jersey the following day. I checked in on the State Department Web site, which had by then issued a warning to all Americans traveling abroad. Be alert, report suspicious behavior, etc, etc. It didn’t feel like an auspicious day to travel on a nonstop flight from Asia to North America, but I assured myself that any retaliatory attacks would most likely not be aimed at a plane load of mostly Chinese tourists visiting America.

But just in case anything bad did happen, the next day at the airport, I grabbed two extra cans of Budweiser beer from the airport snack bar and stuffed them in my bag.

A few hours later, we were cruising effortlessly at 35,000 feet over the Yellow Sea, with no access to CNN, breaking news or State Department warnings. I felt safer, I still hadn’t drank either of the Budweisers, and I decided to watch the Quentin Tarantino film “Inglourious Basterds.”

The film depicts a group of Jewish-born US soldiers stalking and killing German soldiers throughout France during World War 2, ultimately leading to the fictional demise of Adolf Hitler, who is shot in a hail of gunfire, then blown up at a Paris cinema. And when Hitler is killed, the soldier that does the killing is so enraptured in the death of Hitler that he shoots the face clear off the dead body.

Cinematically, the good guys win. And thematically, the ultimate sign of evil in the earlier part of the twentieth century is brought down by good. Watching the death of a monster unfold on my personal view screen on the plane, I felt myself completely removed from remorse. Hitler was the enemy, he murdered countless innocent people, and he was getting what he deserved.

And then I thought of the early morning party goers at Ground Zero the night before, celebrating the death of my generation’s ultimate sign of evil, Osama bin Laden. And I could understand why they were celebrating the death of an enemy.

But my next thoughts were a little more alarming, and completely detached from the movie, Osama bin Laden or the guy flossing his teeth next to me on the plane.

As a culture, we seem to have a need to have a person or movement that signifies the evils of man. Hitler was that symbol in “Inglourious Basterds,” and Osama bin Laden was that symbol to my generation.

But who would be next, what evil would they come to symbolize, and how quickly would a biopic on the life and death of bin Laden arrive at our doors from Hollywood?

This came out about a year ago now.

Same Thing Daily 2 Section from briantunney on Vimeo.

It was already light out when I awoke, lighter than usual on account of the snow reflecting the day’s sunlight back into the atmosphere. And the birds were chirping, loudly, mainly because any chances of finding food for themselves was buried under three-feet of snow.

I climbed out of bed, skipped Jim Cantore’s report and looked out the window. Snow was everywhere, and a few of my neighbors were beginning to bury out of the blizzard’s remains. I decided to join them, and within ten minutes, had assembled a haphazard, not-very-winter-ready outfit, thinking in my head that suede skate shoes don’t really get wet in the snow.

I dug down the stairs, heaved snow in the direction of the street, and slowly carved a path down the stairs to our sidewalk. It was around this time when I spotted a middle-aged Latino man digging snow in my direction.

“I’m coming that way,” he said. “Don’t go crazy shoveling, I will be there soon,” he continued.

It was a Monday morning, just after Christmas, and I had nowhere to be, nor any other way of actually exerting myself physically for the remainder of the day, and possibly week. So I waved him off and kept shoveling in his direction.

Within 20 minutes, I had cleared the sidewalk in front of our house and was clearing the sidewalk of the bakery next door. The other man was doing the same, and we had only about five-feet of snow between us to go until the sidewalk on our side of the street was cleared enough for someone to comfortably walk down without falling and/or suing someone.

We continued shoveling in each other’s direction.

“My friend, what shall we do when we finally clear this path,” he asked me.

I told him that I hadn’t planned that far ahead.

“We shall high five each other and drink a beer,” he rejoiced.

I laughed to myself, shrugged my shoulders and said sure.

By now, our shovels had cleared a path down the sidewalk. He smiled, actually high-fived me and disappeared back down the street. I returned to the front of my house, and started widening the path down the sidewalk to make it more accessible, not really thinking much about his apparent plans for us. Within a few minutes, the shoveling man reappeared from around the corner, running in my direction, with two cans of Coors Light in his hand.

He cracked both cans open in front of the bakery stairs, and toasted me on a job well done. And there we stood, amid the shoveled snow, on a city street buried under a blizzard, drinking cheap beer at 11 a.m. in the morning.

And finally, this is what I read about today.

I think this is from 1997ish?