Now watch me get cancer.

And then I stepped into this bar last night where about 40 people were playing ancient Irish folk songs, and it was like I just walked into the Podling village in The Dark Crystal before the Garthim attack. The pure, nuclear-powered joy threatened to explode the place.

Also, everyone I've been playing bluegrass with looks like they were scraped off the back wall of a closet five minutes before they got here. The Irish people are all exuberant and young-looking, even if they're not young (and many of them are). Some cute chick kept smiling at me so I went over and talked to her. The best I've gotten from a bluegrass girl has been a moonshine jug hurled at my face.

I am standing on a bustling Manhattan street corner on a cold night, waiting for a girl who is supposed to meet me for a date. She is not a girl I know, but a girl created by my imagination for the purpose of this dream. I can see her face in my mind, though -- in the dream-world we must have met before -- and she's cute enough. I wait and wait, and she doesn't show up.

Suddenly, someone runs out of the crowd and embraces me. It's my longtime (real) friend Amy Carpenter, who lives in Phoenix now, I think. We talk about old times and laugh. She has somewhere to go, and of course I have this date, so we part ways and promise to keep in touch.

I keep waiting but the date-girl never shows up.

He wore a Band-Aid on his face! That's how badass he was!

And not even a normal Band-Aid! A weird bone-white one! Kinda looks like a Breathe-Right nasal strip!

Maybe he eventually ran out of Band-Aids and switched to masking tape!

But WE DIDN'T CARE!!! This seemed cool to us!

Remember his GIGANTIC hit "Hot In Herre?" No, I didn't misspell it! That's just how people were spelling things in 2002! It seemed totally normal then! And not just retarded, like it seems now! No, I'm not making this up! Look, everyone was doing it!

I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, NELLY was the coolest guy in the universe back in 2002! I was working at VH1 then and every show we made was either about or hosted by Nelly! You know Flavor Flav? Well, that was Nelly in 2002!

So what happened to this guy? It seems like everybody forgot who he was!

Well, guess what! He's releasing a new album next month, that's what!

Here's what Jermaine Dupri says about the coming album:

"Nelly's got a crazy collaboration he's trying to put together, which is him, Janet and Mariah Carey all on one song...That's what he wants. If he could convince them to do it, it would be crazy."

WHOA!!! Nelly, Janet Jackson, and Mariah Carey!

Somehow, Nelly just ensured that he'll be even MORE irrelevant when his new album "drops!"

Or is that "irrrrrrrelevant?"

"What if Brooklyn’s recent cachet as the locus for what’s next is little more than a thin and fragile crust of chic, hiding the insecurity of people who constantly measure the social currency of their ZIP code by Manhattan standards?"

Hmm. That's a good question. I'll have to seriously ponder this one. Oh, wait, I forgot -- WHO THE FUCK GIVES A RAT-FUCK ON PLANET RATFUCKTRON?!

"'The dark secret of Brooklyn is that many of the people who are going there are going there because they can’t afford Manhattan,' said Douglas Rushkoff, a writer and former Park Slope resident."

No, that's not the dark secret of Brooklyn. That's a well-known fact. It's called "Why People Live In Brooklyn." The dark secret of Brooklyn is that many of its neighborhoods are now more expensive than many neighborhoods in Manhattan.

New York Times, I cry for you.

An "indoor drive-in."

That photo is just so pathetic.

A car stuffed into a room barely big enough to hold it, on an Astroturf mat, overlooked by a single fake tree.

$75 admission price.

I have a theory that this thing was created by people whose intention was just to make fun of New York City. "We put a car in a bathroom stall and charged people $75 to sit in it -- and they did!"

UPDATE 9/22: Jen has brought it to my attention that it is not a fake tree, but a pathetic, spindly real tree, chopped down and screwed into a base, Christmas-tree style. That's somehow even worse.

Also, please note that all the screenings are SOLD OUT.

New Yorkers, you're ridiculous.

Anyway. So I was on Fire Island with a bunch of friends who have been renting this house for a week each summer. We played "The Great Dalmuti" and grilled things and hung out and talked, and that was, obviously, fun. What wasn't fun was that Fire Island is douchebag central. Squalid bars packed with fratboys trying to pick up "Girls Gone Wild" rejects. Which would have been fine if they kept to themselves, but these were really egregious shitmongrels. Pure human trash. Example: I went for a walk with one of my friends and this drunk guy and girl came staggering out in front of us, shouting "High five! High five!" We high-fived them and tried to avoid further contact, but then they grabbed us in some kind of doucheface wrestling hold and started blathering something like, "It's about the love! THE LOVE!" I think they wanted us to fuck them or go get tattoos of John Mayer's face with them, one or the other. We had to do some kind of crazy improvised aikido shit to escape.

The houses are built all right next to each other, and they're all filled with loud drunks, because nobody actually lives on Fire Island. All the homeowners live somewhere else, and rent out their Fire Island houses to people who want to get drunk and have four-ways with strangers in another stranger's house. If you're into that, go to Fire Island, you scumsucking piece of shit. Thank God I was there with friends.

I'm pretty sure I didn't see a single gay person. I'd say that's because gays have taste, but the Village People kind of undermine that point.

I've been looking for like 3 days and I can't get anything half as good for less than what I'm paying now. The NYC rental market is so goddamn depressing. If any of you have a lead on anything at all, please email me:

andyoulovetony@yahoo.com

I'm honestly open to anything at this point, but bonus points if it's some kind of deal.

Asking for leads on apartments in NYC on a blog is only slightly less presumptuous than soliciting kidney donors, I know. I'm sorry. These are the extremes I've been driven to.

Some guy asked me that on the street today. I am not from here in the sense of being raised here, but I've lived in the city for a while now, and I've learned not to answer non-specific questions from strangers on the street. There are three categories of people who ask vague questions.

1. Tourists who haven't learned the correct procedure to ask New Yorkers for directions

2. Panhandlers luring you into a fake conversation which they hope will serve to make you feel guilty for refusing their subsequent request for money

3. Crazy people

I like avoiding categories 2 and 3, but I'm more than happy to give directions to tourists. The thing is, you have to get your question out immediately. If you see me walking down the street, you have about a half-second window as I pass you to get your complete question out of your mouth and into my ears. I will process it as I continue walking away from you, look back over my shoulder, and give a response. If you squander your half-second by asking if I'm from around here, I'm already gone, baby. Because I AM from around here. And we know not to answer that question.

Here's the fix: all the washing machines charge ridiculously uneven sums like $1.89 or some shit, while the dryers go in 25-cent increments.

Result? You will never use exactly all the money on your card. This is not just unfortunate happenstance -- this is a concerted tactic on the part of the laundromat to bilk you out of your $5 for eternity along with whatever handful of change you're forced to leave on the card at any given time.

Why do they even offer to take back the card and return your $5? Why don't they just say, you bought the card, it's yours now? Here's why: they want to saddle you with the eternal torment of knowing that you will never be able to get that card down to $0 and thus never be able to return it with a clear conscience. That's my theory, anyway.

So of course my number one mission in life for the past year and a half has been to get every last penny off that card. Occasionally I got it down to seven cents; I think once I even got it down to two cents. But nope, if I couldn't get all the money off, I'd put another few bucks on the card and do another few loads of laundry.

Well, last weekend, the constellations aligned or the groundhog saw its shadow or something, because I got EVERY LAST PENNY OFF THE CARD. Sure, my clothes could have used a few more minutes in the dryer, but that would have required putting at least one more dollar on the card, and I didn't need a whole extra dollar's worth of drying time (which, by the way, is 26 minutes -- 6.5 minutes per quarter -- these are the fucking stingiest dryers on the planet).

Card with $0.00 in hand, I marched to the counter -- undoubtedly the most triumphant-looking thing that has ever gone down in that place.

And here's the proof that the whole crazy-prices thing is totally intended to be evil: the lady looked at the balance and chirped, incredulously, "How you get all the money off this card?"

Then she gave me my $5.

(Oh, by the way, Project Shirt or whatever I was calling it is aborted. I couldn't be bothered to consistently not run that one shirt through the dryer. Nobody seems to have died yet.)

I wash colors with whites. I wash everything with everything. I have never had any clothing disasters due to this.

I also usually dry everything, even stuff marked "line dry," at inferno-hot laundromat temperatures. So far, I have not died.

But is my clothing's quality being degraded in some way?

Today begins THE CLOTHING CHALLENGE.

Two shirts from H&M, both requesting "line drying," identical except for color, will be treated in two different ways.

Shirt A will be washed and dried according to standard Tony procedure, violating the tag's request.

Shirt B will not be dried in the machine, but hung up after the wash cycle, still wet, as per its manufacturer's desires.

I will compare the shirts after a number of weeks and report whether Shirt A is noticeably worse-off than Shirt B.

Perhaps I will even involve girls in the mix, asking them to judge (under strictest double-blind conditions) which shirt was subjected to the abuse of a dryer, and which was not.

If even GIRLS can't tell the difference, I am going to dry everything in dryers for the rest of my life, including my own body.

On the other hand, if the shirt I put in the dryer disintegrates into a cobwebby vestige of clothing, I vow to become a full-fledged metrosexual, or POSSIBLY straight-up gay.

Stay tuned.