Using my vaunted psychic abilities, I managed to track down ern modern, famous recluse, drunk, and founder of monkeyfish.com, in his usual haunt, an East Village bar. I cornered him and we had a nice chat, beer in hand, on various far-flung subjects until he escaped out the back by scaling the stone wall separating the garden from the marble cemetery. He said he was going to take a leak.

em: Monkeyfish is the word I uttered into a mike while my friend Jace was doing a sound check. "Testing one, two... 'Monkeyfish!'" I said it without much thinking. It just came to me. Don't ask me why. It meant nothing to me at the time. It is an absurdity, and like all absurdities it takes on a life of its own.

em: Some people--mostly dyslexics--confuse it with monkfish. In fact, there's a recipe on the web for grilled monkeyfish. Unthinkable. I also get many people asking me whether monkeyfish is mammal, fish, or amphibian. Good question on account of the name. The real answer is fiction. Or genuine fraud. One of P.T. Barnum's great attractions was a most curious creature called the Fiji Mermaid. It was nothing more that the head and torso of a monkey attached to the tail end of a fish. A veritable monkeyfish.

em: Now you're getting fishy with me. It's true. I've neglected my own child for an adopted one. So instead of monkeyfish.com, I've been spending my time with asininepoetry.com. And why not? Aspo, as we affectionately call it, is brilliant. And ridiculous. Or brilliantly ridiculous. It's easier to collaborate than to take the task on all by yourself. But that's not to say that I haven't any ideas left for monkeyfish. If only you could read my mind...all the ideas I've got stored up, all the stories half written, videos conceived. I know that monkeyfish.com must change, I know what it should change to, and I just can't get to doing it. I am just lazy.

em: That would be too easy. I have an instinctive mistrust of easy things. Wars easily won are not worth waging, said Churchill. Well, nothing comes easy in my life, even drinking. Blogs are an abomination on writing. Dennis Potter once said that the great masses think writing is easy, just stringing one word after another. And in blogs that's exactly what the great masses do. Have you seen any good blogs lately? Ever? It's real easy. To reduce writing to a daily upchuck of words, like a common household routine, like having a good piss after waking up, is inane. Unlike diaries, blogs don't pretend to hide behind the veil. It's pure exhibitionism. Diarists are charming precisely because they pretend to write as if no word will ever escape the bound of the page, all the while knowing otherwise. It's a game and a little wink.

em: When I first conceived monkeyfish.com I only had the faintest idea of what it was supposed to be. All I knew was that it wasn't supposed to be about the greater glory of my ego. The early design included many objects strewn on the page. Some had witty little comments below them, some did not. The idea slowly evolved. (One of my original mottos was "monkeyfish, the next flop in evolution.") An object is physical. You can see it, touch it, feel it. A thing is much more. It encompasses objects and ideas. Love, a four-letter word, is a thing, an emotion--in so far as emotions are ideas. What interests me is how objects come to take on ideas, how we imbue them with values, sometimes turning them into something totally unrecognizable and more precious in our eyes, like the oyster turning a speck of sand into a pearl. This is how a mundane object can acquire value immeasurable. The movie Amelie deftly captures this idea. I am interested in the object and the story it tells.

em: Years ago, my friend Brian wanted to start a band named Ed McDerndern & The Rocking Pneumonia. Each member was supposed to take up the surname McDerdern. I would have been Ern McDerndern. Though the band never formed, the name stuck. The name got mangled and morphed and mouthed into Ern Mo-DERN, as in the French pronunciation. Later I decided that it looked better in small case. The interesting thing is how the name backformed serendipitously a fictional history. Modern, of course, is also mod ern, and I was quite the fop in my high school days. In his song "Lust for Life," Iggy Pop sings, "Well, that's like hypnotizing chickens/ Well, I'm just a modern guy". Fittingly, I am a self-professed chicken charmer.

A child prodigy in mysticism, Madame Kowalski was thought to be the reincarnation of Madame Blatavsky, a claim she has consistently denied. She is master in all major forms of mysticism, sympathetic magic, and divination, including Astrology, Kabbalah, Santeria, Sufism, and Voodoo. "Wicca is for wimps--and pussies," she declaims. Credited with the revival of the ancient Greek worship she dubbed Elysian Mysteries Lite, she nevertheless prefers to practice the lowly craft of divination with the standard tricks of the trades. Readings starting from $4.99: palm, tea-leaves, Tarot cards, crystals, cranial bumps, sheep liver, flight of birds, chicken blood, stool stain, crow's foot, and varicose vein. Madame Kowalski readily admits to being a fraud. "But at least I am not a sanctimonious hypocrite, like Mother Theresa, that beatified bitch."