It is a cloudy day, rather lovely, and its loveliness is being paired with the equal loveliness of coffee and Morrissey. Perfect weather for curling up on my couch and thinking about the gap between how I am living my life and how I would like to, and thinking of ways to collapse that space, and then realizing that, in fact, right now, aside from a few minor things, the space between how I am and how I would like to live my life is very thin, very thin indeed. And this is great news. Of course, I would like to be writing instead of thinking about how I should, how one day, I will get around to penning stories to show you. Of course, I would also like to have a job that involved less time and more money. And of course, I would finally like to get ahead of the bill curve instead of constantly tightening my belt and worrying about finances. Those are problems everyone, most everyone has. And they are nothing. They are moot because they are problems that will always exist, no matter where I am working or how much I am making. It will always be One day... and If only if... And citing them as problems, citing financial poverty is a sad, sad way to try to justify spiritual / mental / artistic poverty. There need be no correlation. So the only real problem is wishing I lived a more creative, exuberant life. And that is something that is going to be remedied starting right now. Today.

I encounter art a lot, pretty much every waking hour and sometimes these are really meaningful encounters. I read constantly, spend forty hours a week surrounded by the thoughts and utterances, the gorgeous turns of phrases of innumerable living and dead comrades, and I spend my days off going gallery hopping, my nights listening to music - and yes, I am a very diligent consumer of artistic products, but for what purpose? What is being achieved by this? The right things? Any thing? Yes, things are, but is it leading somewhere, what is it going to culminate in? And so, today, for this reason, I quit my "internship" at Lamda Legal, knowing that I do need time to myself. That there must be some reflection to absorb the week's offerings, some time to think things, and even produce tangible products from this thought. Yes, so the resolution is that my days off will focus on a "self-improvement activity" (do with that phrase what you will). The main goal is to write non-diary entries on my days off, to see how that goes, if anything comes of it. But, these days could also include learning either Greek or Spanish or the guitar. Reading narratives will no longer consume my days off. Maybe occasionally it will, but I will no longer spend my days off plowing through a good book. I do that all week long.

I am going to make my ideal life and my lived life congruent. There is no reason not to, and nothing but my own lethargy preventing me from doing so. But again, today, I realized that the incongruencies are tiny, that all I need to do is channel my exuberance. I already have the exuberance because I am trying to live as honestly as possible. I am becoming better at talking to strangers, which is the result of letting down my guard more and opening myself up to emotional experiences, and disclosing my true feelings of joy and of sadness when they occur. And that is what I mean by a life of honesty, about going with your feelings, not letting those howls be restrained be decorum. I am reading Whitman again lately, if you can't tell. That probably has a lot to do with my recent joy, as does the temperate weather of the last week, as does the fact that I have been sharing a boy's twin-sized bed for a week or so now, a boy whom I like.

Last night, on my way to his house, I stopped at La Bonita bakery and bought a coconut doughnut for fifty cents. I started to eat it on my way there, only to drop it after my first bite. Two fat guys pointed and laughed way too hard, splitting a gut, exclaiming, "Ha-Ha, He dropped it, Did you see that, Eat it." And I picked it up, smiled, took another bite and continued on my way until I walked past a car covered in eggplants. And the sight was too surreal, probably made all the more so by my intoxication. I gathered an armful, went to the bodega, bought beer, got laughed at by all the guys hanging out in the store about the eggplants, and then finally made it to the saftey of Matt's, where we hung out in Kevin's room, looking at Kevin's high school yearbooks, listening to music, talking. And the three of us sat on Kevin's bed, talking about something or other, and I was so happy to be there, on a comfortable mattress, with two intelligent cute peers of mine, laughing and talking about nothing into the early hours. Those are the moments I live for. Just talking and being in close physical proximity to my fellow humans, being alive and comfortable with that. I could want nothing more in the world. Eventually Matt and I left Kevin's bed and collasped in his own, throwing off clothes with pefect ease as if the act were nothing, just making ourselves more at ease with each other, feeling the warmth of his skin, smelling his particular odor of sweat, cum, and mold, and doing things, being in close enough contact throughout the night, so that when I came home this morning, I could still smell it, him on my skin. I stunk and I loved the smell. I breathed deep, but never deep enough to understand the appeal of this smell or what exactly its components were, but instead it was always just on the tip of my tongue what it was about this smell, what it recalled. It was always almost coming to the surface but whenever I tried to think about that flash of recognition, it faded back to the recesses of my mind, to the recesses of some past experience, some past person or odor that this one evokes.

Have I told you that I missed you, that you are that thought being evoked by the odor of sex? All of you, those moments of closeness and of awkwardness. I miss it and experience some form of reunion with you by the sniffing of this scent. I am happy with it and hope for your happiness, would like to somehow add to it, be involved in it.