This blog, created purposely on Labor Day, will be a collection of "oddments" about life in the Garden State: politics, culture (something I often suspect is at best a relative term in modern Jersey) and just the simple slog of getting through day after day in a state which I've watched through the years become a not-very-pleasant place to live in for so many. Even if so many also might not notice or wish to acknowledge this.

I also, however reluctantly, promise some (again, probably relative) "good news" about "Nu Jersey." Some will perforce expect this kind of coverage. Fine, as long as such  an expectation is matched to the realization that life in this state is generally so blasted that our Democratic party allowed an obvious boob like Jon Corzine to not only buy their hearts for a Senatorial nomination with his wallet, then allowed him to only compound the moral felony by purchasing its gubernatorial nomination when he so rapidly (if not terribly inexplicably) tired of serving as our then-duly elected Senator.

So I'll wish myself well here in lieu of waiting for others do so. I'll also point any readers who might pop up (however accidentally or inadvertently) towards what might just be the best ever "Jersey novel." It is "Dead City" by Shane Stevens and, no matter that much else is both better-known and highly touted, Stevens' novel is much more a hard kick to the gonadian zone than, say, Janet Evanovich's series of novels about Stephanie Plum

Something real and more substantive will be posted later this week. In the interim, if anyone can get hold of a copy of "Dead City," please do read it. Besides its sheer verbal power, Stevens is the rare writer about organized crime in NJ who isn't at all taken in by the myth that our "OC's" (organized crime members, who can as easily be Russians, Dominicans, ghetto gang bangers and 1%ers as Mafiosi), our "LCN's" (bona fide La Cosa Nostra members and their associates) and "Italians" (a term law enforcers often use among themselves, though they seem to get into trouble with their image-conscious superiors if they utter this one publicly) are actually often quite cuddly and even personally likable. No, they're not, not at all, and they're generally just unregenerate scumballs. Like oir love Stevens' novel, which dates to sometime back in the 70's, he knew much better and he wrote with all the groin-driven intensity of James M. Cain at his best. (Cain is a writer very much worth reading. His original source novel of "Mildred Pierce," for example, is not at all the dainty exercise that the recent Kate Winslet TV series for HBO seemed. And his "Double Indemnity" has a very different, near-dreamlike ending than the movie version.)

Enough for now. To all and sundry, then, please have a wonderful rest of what constitutes Labor Day in 2012 America (which of course has as much to do with Samuel Gompers or Joe Hill as it does with Bugs Bunny or the Book of Mormon and much more to do with the fortunes of Macy's and Kohl's  -  but then, too, should either chain go, it is probably all over for the rest of us as well).