Just about every item of clothing I now have is swirling around in suds about two blocks from this little internet cafe, and rather than hang out and watch my clothes spin, I thought I would come be an internet geek, check my email, play on Friendster, and update my diary. And here we are now at item #3 of my being an internet geek list.

I did not show up for work again today. The second Wednesday in a row. Nor, did I bother to even call in. Also, the second Wednesday in a row. I am so lazy. Wednesdays are the days I am supposed to work at 9:30, and I just cannot make myself get out of bed to go shelve books. Next time, I report to work, if I am not by that point fired, I am going to switch to Wednesday afternoons and just accept the fact that I cannot get up and out of bed before ten o clock.

But I did buy a 30 pack of Coors Cold for 13.46 today, which for some reason was a great source of joy to me. I bought this all the way in Chelsea at a beer wholesaler that I had walked by last week seeing the shockingly low price of 10.99 for the thirty pack before tax. Riding the subway back home, I saw a sight on the E Train that afterwards made me shake me head, amazed and mumble to myself as I was connecting to the L train, "Only in New York. Amazing. The things I have seen in this city." This was a Carribean woman, violently dancing so that her whole body was convulsing, dancing up and down the aisles of the train, singing/screaming about Jesus, and she was worked up in such a fever, we're talking about to the point that people get in all those movies where someone starts to speak in tongues in the church, and was convulsing, saying Jesus, Jesus, Jesus with each body spasm so that her body movements and pronouncing of Jesus' name coincided to give a really haunting effect. It was really wild. Bananas, I think I said. Fucking bananas, out of this world, and I really have never witnessed anything even close to whatever that was that I saw.

Yesterday, I helped this old man find some queer book at the Strand, and he thought I was so helpful and wanted to know my name. I said, "Charlie." And he said it also, and then drew a connection, telling me that his son played Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! The fucking movie I watched countless times as a kid, my own name being Charlie and all, and a movie with a main character who shares your name and gets to take over a candy factory. Shit! Charlie is now a veternarian in upstate New York. Life is insane.

And on Monday night, I went to the Cock, hoping to run into the boy who I have been slightly infatuated with for the past couple weeks. This boy David, the most lovely boy ever. Awesome things about this boy: he asked me if I liked Haruki Murakami!, he was wearing a Bucky the Badger shirt once!, he loves to dance!, he's red hot!, he's all about the queer theory!, plus a million other things going for him!, and the past couple of times I have talked with him, we have always gotten seperated and on Monday, he was there, and I talked to him for a long bit, so long a bit that I had to pee, and I was not going to leave him again without getting his number. So, I asked him and he gave it to me, but then followed it by saying, "Okay, but I need to let you know that I have a boyfriend so that you don't get any expecations." And I yelled "Shut-up" like people tend to yell in TV shows, Elaine from Seinfeld especially, when they don't want to believe something, when they are just shocked by news they have heard. But, it is true. My crush is somebody else's crush, has been for quite some time. But I did take him home with me since he is in an open relationship, and it was so nice seeing his naked body on my bed.

There's this crazy bird on Bedford Avenue that is totally oblivious to what time of day it is. It squawks all night long, like from midnight to five in the morning. And everyone I have walked down the street with has made mention of it, the first person was Colin, my new roommate, then Graham and Megan said something about it, and I have passed people on the street who were also discussing the oddity of the bird, saying: Don't birds sing during the day? A routine is being upset. Perhaps the streetlights have upsetted the bird's routine, perhaps the bird is just bonkers, but as result, the bird is upsetting other people's routines, and there is this huge chain of effect with something a little off putting others a little off, or at least forcing them to be aware of the normal order of the world and how something, albeit a tiny little bird, something has trangressed this order that the world is supposed to have and what does that mean. Is this a sign that we are about to witness the dawning of the apocalypse? And if so, the really funny thing is our response. We banter, it provides a subject of discussion, we talk about the natural world as if we could ever know it here in this unnatural town, this bird is the tiny little bit of the natural world that exists here in this city, but even the bird has been made unnatural by living here, this city that I think "Unreal City" about, chant it as Eliot did, and as Paul Outka said he recited every time he was in a big crowd in New York. Another chain of effect. But, no, no, no - nevermind what I just said about people carrying on inane banter about natural cycles and wildlife, as if they couldn't do that here in this city, that living here would somehow remove their knowledge of life, and how it is supposed to work. People do know about life and nature here, somehow, and that is the amazing thing. Is this making me an essentialist? Is that really so bad a thing? We all recognize that birds chirp during the day. We know there is something a little off-kilter when a bird is singing throughout the night - that that indeed does not follow the natural order. This knowledge is innate in us. Our residing in a city, a big fucking one, does not diminish this knowledge that we store, this life somewhere inside of us. I know this is true. I know this because Monday night/Tuesday morning, I walked with a boy, the same boy David, past this squawking bird, drunk to my apartment. And he noticed it also. And then, our knowledge of how things should work, of natural cycles and desires led us naked into my bed, where our knowledge, our nature nature was in effect, nature working, doing its little thing like a bird singing during the day, just the way things should work.