I am assuming that my sister is okay, and not one of the 4,000 plus number of dead in the earthquake in Indonesia. I imagine my mom would have called me if so. The last time I heard from my sister, five months ago in a mass e-mail, she was living in a town in West Java, a couple hundred miles from where the quake was centered. So I am assuming and hoping that she is still in that town and okay.

She comes back to the US on June 13, and I will be very glad to know that she is back within these boundaries I know. Indonesia is in the news quite often. I was never aware of this until my sister started living there. The country never registered with me when I was looking at headlines - those were stories I normally skipped over. It will be nice to no longer read stories about bombings by radical Muslims and wonder how my sister is.

I have wasted this weekend in a tremendous fashion and I feel somewhat guilty about it, somewhat disgusted with myself. Granted, there is tomorrow for me to still do something notable, something fun, to leave my house, but really, I doubt it. Yesterday, I went shopping for new jeans, which is really not a very fun process. This actually started a couple days ago when I was at Century 21 (where I bought another pair of boat shoes), and looked through their selection of jeans, girls and guys. They were all either really tacky or really bulky. Why is it so hard to find a nice dark pair of slim jeans? There were a couple of nice pairs of guys jeans there. However, the ones with nice cuts were marred by this greenish tint lots of expensive jeans have for whatever reason, or by really gaudy tears in the denim to make the jeans look worn. No one thinks those jeans look worn in. They know that that look is store bought, and it just looked stupid, tacky, gauche.

The girls jeans were slightly better, except there were way too many jeans with flared legs and/or sequined designs on the back pockets. After Century 21, I crossed the street and checked out OMG, only to again be disappointed.

And so, yesterday the hunt continued. I started at Filene's, which actually came very close to providing me with a pair of reasonably priced tight jeans. The fit was just a little off, and so I said no, and continued the hunt. I headed to the UES and went to that massive Bloomingdale's, which is such a large store with so much stuff, it is amazing. I still have yet to go into the Herald Square Macy's, but that will happen soon, because these old-school behemoth department stores fascinate me in an historical and cultural sense. And that was partly what was going on in Bloomingdales. Also, they had lots of nice, obscenely expensive clothing that I had fun looking at. In addition, there were many obscenely attractive gay men to look at also. Out of reach clothing that isn't me, but yet, which I want in some small class striving way which disgusts me a little. The men, also. Not my type in any way, and yet, knowing they are beyond my reach, of the same level as luxury goods, some economic allure tied to their prettiness - but there is often a link between the two, that that is what so much of advertising is about, sexualizing wealth.

I gave up there, and had to ask for directions to the exit, overwhelmed with the size of the place. I crossed the street and bought a pair of jeans at Diesel that are really tight because they are girl pants and don't really provide room for my testes, and thus, sort of hurt when I wear them, but which look really good.

And that was yesterday, Day #1 of my Memorial Day Weekend, spent doing nothing except purchasing overpriced jeans and window shopping. I really wanted to take the bus to Atlantic City this weekend, but new shoes and new jeans have put that daytrip on hold til next paycheck.

This morning, I tanned on my roof, laid out there in a pair of booty shorts without underwear on underneath, and felt so amazing, drunk off the sunshine, the heat from my roof burning me even through two towels were laid down between us, myself and the roof. I read Saul Bellow's Herzog, some of it. But more often than not, I didn't read it, because my wits were not about me, the heat was overpowering out there on my roof in this glorious sun. I concentrated on how pleasurable the sweat felt on my skin. I love sweating when tanning. It feels so amazing, being drenched in this cool sweat. It is the only time I like sweat. Otherwise, I am mad at my overactive sweat glands, that have me sweating profusely whenever I go into a building for the first twenty minutes, until my body acclimates to whatever new temperature it is placed in.

But there on my roof, things are different. I relish and love my sweat glands, their overactiveness. I lied there on my back and felt the beads of sweat dripping from my testes, down the crack of my ass, these cool beads of moisture, and when the wind was blowing in the right direction, when there was wind, and it blew a breeze up my shorts onto these beads of sweat, man, that feeling was something else, and I am focusing so much on how great these beads of sweat felt as they made their path down my asscrack because if I didn't, I wouldn't have anything else to show for my weekend, as far as pure pleasure. It was an amazing feeling and I am trying to inflate its stature, trying to make it so that my weekend was amazing, that if there was nothing else, there was at least this.

I have been masturbating a lot this weekend, as I tend to do when I am bored and slightly depressed for no good reason. I haven't seen one person this weekend. Besides that, worse, I haven't even talked to anyone this weekend on the phone even. I am feeling really lonely and isolated. Tomorrow, it is supposed to be sunny in the early part of the day for sure, and so I will again be on my roof, losing myself to the delirium of sun exhaustion, because I am not exhausting myself otherwise.

The dog that lives behind my house, that drives me crazy with its frequent, loud barking is kept in a small pen all day and no one ever really plays with it. It doesn't have the chance to exhaust itself, to spend the things its body creates, that it all just bottles up there, and it barks and barks and tries to let that stuff out, to spend itself. And that's what we all do. Some, are successful in finding ways to spend themselves. These people, they are called happy. And others of us, me during this weekend, for whatever reasons, cannot find the way to spend ourselves, it, that we can't just bark, that that is not a real solution for anybody. I have been listening to "Lazy Line Painter Jane," over and over for the past hour or so, and the woman's increasingly desperate singing throughout the song (and my singing (and typing) along with her) is providing some sort of outlet, though. And I want someone to take me out, to let me out of the pen, and take me on a really long walk, so that I come home, tired, tongue hanging out and panting, and plop on the tiled kitchen floor, trying to cool off on those cool tiles. Except, our kitchen is linoleum, and nothing that I would ever want to lie on. There is that, obviously.

What I need to do is to dance like a fucking maniac and exhaust myself totally. And maybe I also need to not be drinking coffee at eight in the evening.