Another year is nearing its close. The curtains are about to come down and I, both audience member and player on the stage, am unsure of what this performance just was. I have been reading over my diary entries from the past year, as has now become a ritual thing for me to do on the last day of the year, and have been realizing that a lot went on this year, a lot I have forgotten about, and also a lot of the same, a lot of things never done.

I quit my copy editing job in the beginning of the year and had a few short-term jobs scattered throughout this year, the BN.com job, being a giant chicken in a store window, being a nutcracker in a store window, that solitary day as a masseur, and the occasional sex work job. Because of this, because I spent so little of the year actually working, it would have seemed that that time freed up would have been put to use writing, but so little of it was, probably less so than when I was steadily employed. The year started with a story of mine being published in Userlands, something that I told myself was going to be a catalyst for me to be more productive, write more stories and submit them to places, but served as no such thing. Obviously this is something that I plan on correcting in this coming year.

I moved out of the apartment I had lived in for four years, moved out of Williamsburg, moved to Bushwick. The move was probably a mistake and is something that I find myself regreting when I am hanging out in Williamsburg, thinking of how I used to live a couple blocks from this bar, or how I used to walk underneath the BQE and it feeling comfortable, a sign of home, whereas now walking under it provokes memories of that past feeling, reminds me that this is no longer my neighborhood. But living here has presented new joys in both a new neighborhood and also in living with Niki, who, aside from occasionally making me crazy in a bad way, makes me really happy with her energy and craziness. My other roommates, the bedbugs, do not make this a pleasant place to live though, and will sometimes inspire the fantasy of burning everything I own and running away.

I had nice trips to Florida, to Chicago, and to San Francisco this year that provided me with joy of a certain kind that seems to only come from excursions away from New York, and which, thinking back on them, make me want to take more little trips, visit more people, look at my life here from a distance that perhaps only a physical distance can provide.

It was in March that I had anal sex for the first time and that opened the gates to what has since been sexual adventure and sexual hunger, heightened forms of the things that I had yet to experience. There were brief things with numerous boys I had forgotten about until rereading over these entries, recalling fondly my experiences with most of these boys. There was that interaction and time spent with the writer, which started out so great and ended in a big ball of terribleness, me running away from his condo and taking a bus to a friend's house in Miami. Thinking back over these boys, I still have warm feelings toward most of them, but it seems to be reflexive, memories of that original warm feeling and not the actual feelings. I am so fascinated by the heart, by human beings, this seeking out of something in others, and the ability to find hints of it in romantic and physical affection. There is something magical about the whole process. There was also some major heartache toward the end of this year about a specific person and specific incidents.

This is becoming boring, the recounting of things already recounted, which may have been boring in that first recounting. So much of I did this and I did that, and la de da, because we all do these things and we all did those things, and the purpose in this is not to say what we did (unless of course we say that very well, which currently I am not doing), but to get at why we did it, why we do any of the things we do, the reasons why these I dids are the I dids they are.

I had a lovely time this year, did lovely things, had nice moments with friends that I think of fondly, but there are also so many things I did not do. I am becoming aware of the reasons for that, have been thinking about them ever since I went home for Christmas, and am going to try to remedy them. I am going to be more productive in every sense of the word. There are never moments when I forget that I am alive; there are however many moments, most moments actually, when I am not as cognizant of what that actually means, the implications, the scariness, and the beauty of that, as well as the duties and obligations incumbent upon someone aware of those things.

Another new year is here, will be very shortly, and there are only so many times that I will be able to say that. Goodbye 2007. Best we go our separate ways.

Tonight could have easily ended in a manner very distinct from how it did end, from me here typing away on the Internet, telling you, the presumed reader (is there such a thing?), about how I fucked up, how I blew chances with a boy I liked a lot, and instead had to come home alone and have ended up on this thing, this Internet, feeling more than a little inept.

I saw There Will Be Blood this afternoon with Niki and the movie was quite good, the type of movie you can say that about, but it was not the type of movie that I am going to be raving about to friends, the type of movie that will inspire thoughts for days, months, or years in me, was more so the type of movie you can recognize as good, rather than the type you want to shout is good. Despite most critics calling it PT Anderson's best work, it is my least favorite of his, his earlier works touching something more in me, saying something I was more able to respond to.

After the movie, Niki and I had Ethan over for martinis and played Scrabble. I won despite a couple of martinis downed and a couple of whippets inhaled, won by a decent amount of points also. Afterward, Ethan and I went to Boysroom where I proceeded to get more drunk and showed my penis to a group of boys who asked to see it, saying that they had heard I had a large penis, a rumor that someone else told me they had heard recently, a silly rumor that is really funny and which also gives me some small source of pleasure.

I had recieved a message from the hot boy from the threesome I engaged in with last week, David, saying that he wanted to meet up tonight and that he was headed to Brooklyn. This is where my stupidity begins to show itself. Rather than drop what I was doing right then and go to meet up with this really attractive boy that wanted to sleep with me, I took my sweet time at Boysroom, and then from there did not even head straight (er, gay) to the place he was at, but rather took an extended detour at Galapagos, assuming that this boy would continue to wait at Metropolitan for me. Unsurprisingly, boy did not continue to wait there, and by the time I finally did arrive there, I recieved a text message from him telling me he was in a cab headed back to Manhattan and that I had been too slow.

When the fault is not your own, when it is for some other reason, or for something more vague, more unclear, it is easier to go on with your night and not feel like you have blown it, but when it is clear that it is your fault, that when the boy you had wanted to sleep with tells you that it is your fault, that you had been too slow (so slow) in meeting up with him, then that is hard to deal with, makes you regret the trajectory of your night and your dilly-dallying ways.

And so rather than sleeping with this boy, who I think may have actually been the hottest boy I have ever slept with, I am instead going to go jerk myself, and probably do so with a bit of self-loathing, probably do so a bit as a chore, and then drift off to sleep, to dreams beyond my control, but which since they are beyond my control may hopefully be something other than this current mental state, may be something hopeful, something sexy, something sweet. There is that possiblity, and then there is the other possibility, the other ones.

Yet another awkard morning this one, though at least it followed an amazing night. I have to leave for work in ten minutes, have to leave to go sit in a giant swan dressed up as a nutcracker and pose for pictures with people for ten hours, and so because of this approaching departure, because of my need to get dressed for this departure, there is the need to be briefer than I would like, the need to note to myself to revisit this subject in long form since it was weird and great.

That cute 20 year old from the suburbs who I had a tea date with a couple of days ago came into the city last night to hang out with me and was going to sleep over at my place. We ended up at Metropolitan, him drunk, drunk in the way that inexperienced drinkers can get, that young people can get, and his youngness became more and more apparent. There was another boy he was talking to, a sexy boy my age, a David, who I started talking to, and who told me he wanted to sleep with me. I told him that the 20 year old was already going to sleep over at my house. He said that was okay.

A threesome ensued at my apartment and the boy I had orignially liked became this boy that I had very little interest in, other than observational, looking at an inexperienced young person. This David boy had a big nose, brown hair, and am amazing body, a lovely dick. He was dirty and fantastic, and I really hope that I can see a lot more of this boy, but even if not, last night was a great experience.

David left early this morning to catch a flight. The 20 year old acted very awkward later this morning when we both woke and got dressed while I was making coffee, asked for directions to the subway, seemed eager to go, seemed perhaps a bit embarrassed about the night before, the sexual guilt of people still young, or perhaps confused about my feelings toward him after seeing me really into this David boy. I wasn't sure, was still too tired, too pre-coffee to pursue it as a line of conversation, to care much. I gave him directions to the subway and kissed him goodbye.

What I am after is the spirit of adventure. I had it a couple of days ago just through conversation with this boy, Taylor, talking to him over tea and as we looked through old clothes at various thrift stores, about life and art and movies. There was a giddiness there, a sense of possibility, of things to come, that brought a lot of joy to me. This was in contrast to my interactions with a boy the night beforehand, in which giddiness was near absent.

Last night, the spirit of adventure took a more literal form as Diego and I wandered through Chelsea drunk with the plan to find someone on the street who would let us have sex in their apartment. The streets were fairly empty, it being kind of late and very cold. There was one person who was into the idea, but who was unable to host us for some unspecified reason, probably because he thought we were potentially crazy, which, last night, might have actually been the case. We decided to go to the Eagle and stopped in a porn store to ask them if they knew where it was. In the porn store, we saw a box of whippits and both started recalling with glee past times with whippits. We bought a box and went into adjoining video booths, being told we couldn't share one, and through the gloryhole would pass the cracker and balloon back and forth, getting high in the back of some random porn store on 8th Avenue. There was something beautifully absurd about the whole thing and Diego's embrace of it made me very happy, made me like him even more.

Passing the whippits back and forth and constantly having to put money into the video booth became too much of a hassle and I convinced Diego that he should come back to my house, despite him saying earlier that he couldn't go out to Bushwick since he had to work in the morning. At my house, we listened to music really loudly, which always makes inhalants and the wa-wa sound effects of them much more fun. I dug out some old crackers and we did them at the same time, collapsing afterwards into laughter on my bed. Laughing, absurdly high, I felt so close to this boy laughing next to me, saw his goodness and prettiness clearer that I had earlier.

We undressed, pushed the whippets to the floor, and had sex. It felt great and something outside of the actual physical sex felt great also; the knowledge of who it was with and the interactions outside of that sex imbuing it with something also contributed to the joy. I felt young, felt like I did some years ago with boys when interactions could be so playful and both seemed to be chasing after new experiences, pushing things. I felt alive.

This morning, I felt a little less than alive. My cold seeming to take hold again, sore throat and runny nose. There were and are pleasant memories though. There are teas and cold medications. There are movies, books, daydreams, recollections.

I am after something, trying to wash something out of me, and have a pretty steady stream of dates lined up for the next few days, nixed two potential ones for tonight to hang out with one boy I like a lot, and plus have other boys I should call and make plans with. I am not sure what I am doing. I know that I do sometimes get lonely and do want someone to spend time with and be physically affectionate with and this is how I am responding to that. I hung out with Diego tonight and soon found myself naked with him at this party. The two of us started a lot of naughtiness and had lots of fun. The best part was that after we came, he didn't have guilt, wasn't no longer into me, and instead kissed me a lot, telling me he liked me , and how much fun he was having. We were outside smoking a cigarette with an Ecuadorean and the two of them spoke in Spanish. I am going to crack open these Spanish books and learn this language. I really want to live in Latin America. The cash and my license were stolen from my wallet while I was pantsless, and yet that hardly bothered me; there were his lips to kiss, lovely lips. We were asked to dance at this New Year's party. He is so beautiful to look at, so pleasant to touch. The memories of these things will lullaby me to sleep.

american nights

For the first time since that terrible New Year's Eve of a couple years ago, I got a psychic reading, this time at the Marc Jacobs Arabian Nights party in the Rainbow Room, a weird setting, loud and distracting, to get a tarot card reading in, but also for that reason, for having to silence that out, to focus my attention and lean in close to hear, a good setting. Plus there was the night skyline of Manhattan to look out onto as this reading was being done. She told me things that I found to be true, or things just vague enough to have broad applications to my life, telling me that there had been changes in the past three months in a close relationship, that I am thinking about moving to somewhere closer to nature (or to live with someone closer to nature, she said), that I am going to get a new job or move after the new year, that I am nearing the end of a nine year cycle (as I will turn 27 in June), and that until that point, for the next six months, I am going to be processing a lot of things and cleaning my emotional house, and that after that point, I am going to fall in love. I enjoyed this reading a lot. There had already been some whiskeys consumed by this point, allowing me to enjoy it even more, to approach it earnestly.

The party was amazing. So much money must have been spent on it. There was the space itself, which must have cost some change, then the full open bar, the buffets, and then all these performers - tarot card readers, sword swallowers, and dancers galore. Everyone was dressed in really amazing, extravagent, and sexy costumes. So many sexy costumes, man oh man. I talked to some store people that I had never talked to and they were really nice. I talked to Adrian and made out with him. I exchanged numbers with this one boy, and who by the time I finally got home had already found me on myspace and written me, and these interactions were nice, were pleasant, and yet were like a lot of my interactions with boys lately, in that they are nice and pleasant, that there are boys that like me and that I exchange numbers with, maybe make out with, but that things never seem to go far beyond that, that I am not giddy enough over these boys to muster the will to hang out with them. But I am thinking about calling some of these boys up that I have met recently and trying to make giddiness.

Later in the evening, Gabriel and I tried to sneak Ben in, which proved quite difficult, but which we did finally succeed in doing, however the process resulted in Gabriel not being allowed back in. So the three of us left there and went to the Kiki and Herb afterparty, were there for a bit, it feeling weird to see all these often seen homos in the swank setting of the National Arts Club. Things seemed more appropriate when the party migrated to Nowhere. I drank more there, hit on more boys, exchanged some bjs with people, and then despite seeming successes with boys went home alone. The last time I slept with a boy, spent the night with one, was weeks ago, was Diego. Right now, I couldn't say what it is that I want, but last night, walking home alone, the thing was to not be walking home alone that I wanted, to not know that I would be sleeping alone.

Last night, after changing out of my nutcracker outfit and getting off work, I went to meet Ben at a house party somewhere on Bleecker street. It was a Jewish party. It was a gay party. There were bottles of booze all over the place, some snacks, and some cute boys, some very cute boys scattered around. Just about every person I talked to made some reference to Jewishness, asked if I was Jewish. The Jew envy I used to have a few years ago would briefly resurface with these questions.

There was this boy in a scarf, always the boys in scarves, that I was attracted to. His name was Eric. Ben, him, and I peed together, squeezing past some religious singing to get into the bathroom. The boy was pee shy. I touched his penis slightly and watched it react, rise a bit. Both Ben and I were hitting on this boy and that made me feel slightly uncomfortable - feelings of competitiveness, insecurity, etc. I started talking to this other boy, Adam, who was very attractive, who shined in his eyes, and who I was having a lovely conversation with before some crazy person stepped between us to start talking to me about spirals. Adam escaped the spiral conversation and I wasn't so lucky, was stuck for a while trying to be polite and listen, meanwhile silently cursing this speaker for ruining the interaction, something sweet and intelligent, that I had been desiring for the past week or so.

I found myself making out with some boy, a yoga instructor, because he wanted to and I thought I needed something that could be got from making out with a stranger, some feeling of desirability. I did so for a bit before I realized it wasn't what I wanted and pulled away from his lips. And there in front of me were Ben and Eric making out, which was a bit of a discouraging sight, though if I were a better human, free of pettiness, envy, and jealousy [cue Joni Mitchell's "All I Want," which addresses this theme perhaps better than any other song], then I would be happy to see my friend happy.

It was time to flee. Yoga instructor was very confused that I was leaving, gave me his card. I wrote my number on some slip of paper found in my bag and gave it to Adam. It was drizzling as I left the party. I tried unsucessfully to read The New Yorker on the train ride home; various predictable strains of thought instead kept on distracting me.

first snowfall

There is an inch, maybe more, of snow on the ground, and the snow continues to fall. It is a beautiful sight, the first snowfall always is, as are normally the second, third, fourth, and fifth ones, but this one is particularly beautiful for its unexpectedness. I had not been paying attention to the weather and was unaware this was to occur and to wake up this morning, look out my window, and see white on roofs, on window ledges, on car roofs, on streets, was such a pleasantly shocking sight.

I haven't been writing here or elsewhere in a long time, haven't been doing so with the same zeal even when I have. I have been going through some changes, am still going through them, and have been unable to write about them because they aren't so much consciously set changes as things that events, time, and perhaps the stars are setting for me, and I am slowly trying to resituate myself in a way that enables happiness and a sense of meaning.

[Redacted]

I am reading Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask right now and it is helping to see some things, to see situations I find myself in and to wonder what ideal situations would be, and also, since ideal situations so rarely occur, how I could find space for happiness in situations that are attainable. The book details the early stages of recognizing homosexuality so well. The main character's experiences and the contours of his frustrated desires are something that I recognize so well. It is always a pleasure to come across experiences that you had forgotten about, the pleasure of watching that tough boy in your gym class for instance, and to come across them written about so intelligently and well! The book, also, is making me excited about reading, and, what I believe its corrolary is when you are really excited about a text, writing.

Though I was just an hour away, that distance was still enough of one, a distance, for me to feel some perspective, to step back and think about the way that I have been living my life in New York, how I would like to be, and the space between those two. I rode the train there in the final hours of daylight, watching the sky slowly change colors over the meadows of New Jersey, over the stretches of decaying industrial infrastructure, over older towns like Newark and Elizabeth. I got a lot of reading done on this train ride, but one of the things I read, one that stands out in my mind and that colored not only this train ride but the trip that followed, was a piece by John Updike about snapshot photography in the stunningly excellent year-end fiction issue of The New Yorker.

This Updike piece looking at the history of snapshots, of how they became "visual trophies," obviously borrows a lot, forthrightly so, from Susan Sontag's On Photography, but it's a book I haven't read in a while, and so all those connections between the desire to capture images and the fear of death were all brought to the surface of my imagination as I looked out on a gorgeous sky and wanted to somehow document it, wanted to have a record that this moment did exist, this moment of overwhelming beauty, but it was the knowledge that this was a sky that would soon be lost, that soon it would be totally dark, that led to the simaltaneous feeling of joy (knowing that I was/am witness to a transitory moment of grace) and sadness (knowing that the moment is transitory, that they all are, that everything is so short-lived).

My mother picked me up from the train station and we rode to her house under a then purple sky. I ate lots of food there, most of it probably not good for me, read some, and watched several movies. During The Simpsons Movie I found myself crying midway through it, terribly upset by Marge's decision to leave Homer, terribly upset for Homer, terribly upset because human beings can do things and push away people they care about.

I had a lot my mind when I sat down to write this. I am distracted though by a terrible discovery.

This is my new job. This is me at my new job with friends:



I really love this job right now and you should stop by on weekends and pose with me and make me love it even more.

Life is good, so good, and it is this despite obstacles to its goodness. I slept with a really sexy boy last night. I kissed a boy in the store today and he gave me his number. I have a new confidence and luck with boys that just keeps snowballing into more luck, and this thing is providing me much happiness, so many new nice interactions. Niki, who, despite two major fights with, I considered a good friend, has proved otherwise this morning, telling me I needed to move out of the apartment because she was pissed off at me that I wasn't here early to help her clean, because I came home at ten am instead of eight am because I had sex again this morning with a boy I am really attracted to (God forbid), though what she was really pissed off about is also too obviously guessed at. It is such stupid bullshit and would make me so mad if I hadn't dealt with stupid bullshit created by this person for years already, and maybe it is time to sever ties for good and move out like she demanded.

But there is this job and boys and friends and life and I am so happy.

There were some events this weekend, on Friday and Saturday, that made me feel a bit pathetic, a bit undesirable. The usual sorts of things - trying to hit on boys and failing. There was one really spectacular failure at Metropolitan on Friday night. And so this is the background, the need, very strong at this point, for some sort of validation. And last night, I sought it and got it.

I went to this slutty party for the MIX festival at Boysroom and encountered quite a few crushes, made out with all of them and more. It was nice to be hit on by lots of cute boys, though displays perhaps a lack of a strong emotional constitution on my own part in deriving satisfaction, gratification, from the attention of others. I told four boys there that I wanted to hang out with them soon, and if I actually went about this could have a full week ahead of me, but probably won't, got the thing I needed at that point, some validation and some sexual release, washed away thoughts of other things, insecurities.

Today, I was going to try to get back to past places and did not do so, am going to again say tomorrow, tomorrow, and maybe one of these tomorrows will hold to these resolutions, objectives, set the night before.

I just sat through a bunch of queer short films and it was a really nice experience. In between the two screening events I went to this evening, I found out that I am going to be the nutcracker still, that I do have a job to look forward to, for a month at least, and that I can postpone for a little while longer worries about employment and making money.

During the second event, which was curated by Butt Magazine, there were so many amazing films shown. My favorite though (unsurprisingly) was "ITSOFOMO" by David Wojnarowicz. Wojnarowicz is one of my heroes and one of my artistic idols and to get to hear him saying things with a white-hot intensity was electrifying. I want to go back and reread Close to the Knives. I wish I had not sold my copy of the book, that I still had it, and could reread it tonight. It was so good, so urgent, so passionate, and it made me want to approach things as intensely, to start making art as if these are end times (and maybe they are) and remove this idea that there is a lifetime to make great art, to do so now. I am so excited in a way I haven't been in a while.

I then fooled around with this angelic looking boy that I am really attracted to. He told me my penis was perfect as he sucked it. I went down on him. And the entire thing was nice, totally physical, and sweet in a way distinct from most other random sexual encounters. I stopped it because I was leaving and because we were on a chair in the back of the lobby area, pretty exposed. Again we said that we should hook up soon - vague intentions and plans to have a threesome with his boyfriend sometime.

Then, excited about all of these things, about the idea of creation and of life, I came here, home. I am satisfied in the right ways and so hungry, so unsatisfied, in the right ways.

I talk a lot about my love of sunshine, but both today and yesterday were so beautiful for their lack of it, for their greys, for their heavy skies pregnant with associations and memories. These are such beautiful fall days, kind of wet, gray skies, leaves on the ground, even better looking when they are wet and on the ground, the colorful leaves still on the trees, and the skies again. I was walking to my bank today in the rain, a light rain, and that sky, how low it looked and how long it stretched made me feel very safe, made me feel like I was 14 and on my way home from school.

I don't know what my future holds and in this weather those thoughts are pushed out by comforting thoughts of my past, of living under similar skies.

There is the need for a job, for income, a very pressing need, and still doubt about whether or not I will get to do this nutcracker job. There is concern about my lack of artisitic productivity. There is concern about this apartment and slight thoughts toward a new one since now Niki is the one eager to move. There are feelings of loneliness and wondering how to go about making connections with people worth doing so with. But there is nothing to do about that right now, or at least not too much that can be done right now, too little time today for such concerns. I am going to take my copy of King Lear and ride the train to go a screening at the MIX festival. There is always tomorrow. I tell myself this every day and keep pushing that tomorrow further and further out though.

How does one recover from a terrible day? My normal method of hanging out with close friends and having fun was prevented as most close friends were occupied doing fun things, going to MoMa or going on dates. My method of dealing with terrible days if often a variation of this practice, of doing something fun to put the root causes of that terrible feeling out of mind, to wash away any negative feelings or thoughts with fun, with happiness (of a sort). I wonder if this is the best practice, if not instead I should be wallowing in that negative feeling, wrestling it and coming to terms with it, dealing with the things that make me feel a certain way and changing things about my life to prevent that terrible feeling from (re)occuring.

I did not try this new approach this evening. Instead, getting home from work, from a terrible temp assignment, I masturbated for about half an hour. That was the first exhale. Then I had a beer. Second exhale. It was shallow breathing though. I then put on some Tina and Ike and had myself a dance party and that felt really good, danced to "Nutbush City Limits" a couple of times. Then I bought some cigarettes, ate some yummy greens and cheese, drank some more beer, and watched a movie. I am feeling better. There is still stuff inside that I think I may need to dance out later, may need to put Tina and Ike back on the stereo.

And the really frustrating thing is I am not even sure why today dug under my skin so bad, why I was ready to cry on the train ride home. I was working in the pantry in the executive offices of a really big development company. Basically I was responsible for stocking various fridges with snacks and sodas for rich developers and cleaning up their messes. Their offices were high up at Columbus Circle, overlooking Central Park. I decided I hated it within ten minutes, felt really low doing this, more so than doing sex work, that this was demeaning work, picking up plates from conference rooms. And boring! So fucking boring! Standing around a kitchen with nothing to do most of the day, trying to look occupied when executives came into the kitchen and looked at me like what I was, the help. It was terrible and made me feel terrible with each slowly, ever so slowly, passing minute.

So on my lunch break, I called up my temp agency to tell them that I couldn't do this job tomorrow, that they had to get someone else to do it, that it was making me feel terrible, and was something that I did not want to be doing, that I did not want to work with food. It was a kind of terrible feeling up until this point, the manageable type, where I had my freedom to look forward to the next day. Temp Lady, however, tells me that she does not appreciate this at all, that she is annoyed with me, and that if I cannot do her this favor of working there this week then she may not have me be the nutcracker - this job that pays $25 an hour and which I am (or maybe was) really excited about - that she did me a big favor by giving me first dibs on that job and that she could find plenty of other people that would want to do it. I apologized a lot and offered to do the job one more day if she was unable to find someone, but that I could not finish out the week there, that I hated it and it made me crazy. The conversation ended with her saying that I didn't need to go in tomorrow and left unresolved whether or not I am still going to be the nutcracker.

So at that point, with my future plans for work thrown into question and with still four more hours to go at that terrible job, I really sunk fast into feeling like shit. Those four hours were torture, were mind-boggingly unbearable, and at so many points I was ready to either dash into the bathroom to cry or to just grab my bag and run for the elevators. Today, I hated New York so much and gave serious thought to running away. Neil Young is playing right now (about ten exhales) and that too is making me want to move, move to a place where I could play this more often and where it would seem appropriate to the pace of things, to the mood.

But a reason not to move, and not neccesarily a good thing for the future of Bushwick, but the best moment to my day was going to Associated and seeing not only parmesan cheese finally stocked there, but also feta, - sweet, lovely feta. I took it home with me and, at home, me, the feta, and some greens made some sweet, sweet love as my Coors Light looked on jealously.

I was supposed to hang out with this boy tonight but I canceled that date because I was feeling a bit sick still. Instead of sitting at home writing and watching movies while consuming warm liquids like I had planned, I trekked up to Hell's Kitchen where I saw this man for money. He was this musclely dude and before we had sex he smoked a bunch of crystal, which amazingly I had never actually seen anyone do, and it was fascinating and a bit depressing, depressing because as soon as I saw the person I thought to myself that he looked like a methhead. It was depressing to watch this and yet I drank a beer as I watched it, and yes some thoughts did cross my mind about where lines are and whether those lines are based upon anything other than social acceptability, drinking now a fairly acceptable practice for a few centuries (discounting that brief Prohibition era), and my drug a drug still the same.

He sucked my dick for a while, lifting me while doing so, me really turned on by holding on to his back and feeling that mass of muscles there, his biceps, a type of body I am not used to at all. Then I started to fuck him and he came probably within a minute of me doing so, disappointing me because I was really enjoying the sex and wanted it to last longer. I jerked myself off, made some awkward post-sex chit chat, and then headed back home.

At home, a message from that boy asking if I was sure that I didn't want to hang out. I told him to come over. We watched Coffey on my couch and the conversation was a bit awkward, lacking steam. He is a nice boy, cute, and reminds me a bit of early John Cusack. For these reasons, I should like him. For these reasons, I don't.

After the movie, a great movie by the way, we laid in my bed and I tried to sleep, not really wanting to have sex, being a bit sick and also spent from just having sex with some other dude. My attempts to just sleep next to each other though were foiled by touching and kissing on his part, a turning of the tables from how it usually is when I sleep with people, me normally being the pawer at someone else's backside. Eventually I gave in, or horniness did, and we fooled around a bit and jerked off. He went to the bathroom afterward to clean himself up and started talking about all the bug bites on him. I got out of bed to see and, true enough, his back was covered in all these swelling bug bites, very clearly from my bed. It was pretty embarrassing. I didn't have any bug bites but he had so many. And so maybe he was bitten by bedbugs and maybe by fleas, but certainly not by anything anyone wants a stranger to be bitten by in their bed. Rather than get eaten totally, he left, deciding to go home. He asked me to walk him to the subway station, a bit of a rough walk, and I knew that this was why he had asked me to walk him, and it was that, that softness, that lack of edge, that niceness, that prevents me from being able to get smitten with him. I got dressed and at 3:30 in the a.m. walked him there, not pointing out how I would have to make the same walk back by myself, not really caring, excited about my bed to myself.

In that period before we started to fool around and where I really did try to fall asleep, we talked about Coffey and it was a pleasant conversation, the question being asked by me to him why it was that movies like Coffey are so enjoyable, movies in which one person alone kicks ass, kicks the asses of about thirty people. He responded that we like them so much because we wish things worked that way, wanted them to.

some quick notes

This past week, I haven't had the time to update properly here, haven't had the time to detail the going ons of this week. And again, I am faced with a shortage of time, having to leave my house very shortly to go see Tom Stoppard's Rock N Roll. And though I am in the early stages of a cold, have a foggy head and am unbelievably tired, I am still so so excited about seeing this production. I have really high expectations and I think they may be exceeded.

This week, I blew off an interview at a fancy pants job not once, but twice, in the process alienating myself from yet another temp agency in this city. I worked one day at an erotic massage parlor and that is a story I mean to write this weekend, it being weird and sleazy in both good and bad ways. My second day was supposed to be today but there is that cold that I made reference to earlier, and so I am going to try it out again next week and see if I like it better, see if I do better. It is an America that I have always been attracted to, that I wasn't sure was still present.

I went to yoga this week and felt really good afterward and want to have that feeling more often, am going to try to start going regularly.

I am going to be an elf this holiday season at a fancy pants store and live out some version of Holidays on Ice and Elf. I think that some friends are going to be elves with me and so hopefully it should be quite fun.

I kissed a boy last night and am supposed to have a date with him tomorrow night. Hopefully this sickness will be tamed by then with all these warm liquids, these teas and soups. Now, to put on some pants and leave this house, to venture out into the world, a task that is amazing in its dailiness, in its ordinariness, when really what could be more awesome than one person, an individual, trekking off on their own, stepping outside of their house and into this world, interacting with this large thing.

I met a boy last night with a religious name, a Christ I could worship, that I was forced to. For someone around my age, some cute looking boy, innocent enough, he has a dirty side that I normally don't even find in much older people. The role playing was fun, was perhaps the most intense form it has ever taken. I might see him tonight again, though there is some reluctance on my part to have to play this role multiple times, that one time is fine, but it seems that there will be expectations for a reprising of the same role and maybe that's okay, but maybe it's not. And it is a bit of modesty, a bit of shame even, that is holding me back from detailing this, but also the constraints of time, as I need to leave my house soon. I might return to this topic later since it was something new and thrilling and odd.

I saw Xanadu yesterday for the second time, this time with my family. I am off to go see a stage production of Die Mommie Die. I have been drinking a lot this weekend and most of it is a blur and this upcoming week will be a chance, hopefully, to balance that out, to take various tasks seriously, to buckle down, and be productive in the various ways that I would like to be and that I also need to be.

I spent a large portion of this day in bed, sleeping off a hangover and, when not doing that, masturbating to recalled memories from last night. Though surely it was not the most productive way I could have spent my day, that I could have been looking for a job, reading a book, writing a book, or doing some sort of physical activity, it was an entirely lovely day. The fog of tiredness and the residual traces of stimulants in my body keeping my mind in this continous loop of replaying sexual moments from last night was a lovely combination. The tiredness wanting sleep and the horniness preventing that from happening. This half sleeping masturbation marathon that consumed my day was really lovely, and no it wasn't other things I could have been doing, maybe even should have been doing, but on its own, absent from other concerns, it was nice, really good feeling.

You have heard the story of last night before. I have lived it a few times. Open bars, a fair bit of booze consumed, hopping from Halloween party to Halloween party, and ending my night at the Cock, drunk and horny, being really slutty. All stuff you have heard before. I have heard this CSNY album I am listening to many times, but that having experienced it before, many times even, does nothing to diminish each experience as such, an experience. I like to listen to the same things over and over and over.

My stomach craves pizza and I will, as I maybe too often do, cede to the desires of my body and satisfy that desire for pizza.

I saw Fuerzabuerta last night and enjoyed parts of it a lot, but at other times felt like I was at a school pep rally or at some hip hop show, an mc saying, "Hey," making us respond with "Ho," that there wasn't room to step back from this forced crowd experience, that we had to walk this way and that, had to dance at certain points. The visuals were pretty great though, especially the people in the pool of water above our heads.

Yesterday, I lost count of how many times I was called "faggot". I have been getting called it more and more so since moving out to Bushwick, but yesterday, wearing spandex pants and booty shorts, people were especially free with the word, really surprisingly so, distressingly so.

It's been a week now since I quit my temp job, since I quit that temp agency, since some other stuff. Looking at job listings is only slightly less boring to me than probably doing most of these listed jobs, aside from of course being a pedicab driver or a dogwalker. Being in motion sounds really nice to me. The ideal job to me would be to be a car mover, to drive someone's car across the country for them. So you're moving to the West Coast and want someone to drive your car out there for you? Dude, I am your man. As you can see, I am taking this job hunting real seriously.

I care and don't care. There is the recognition that money is needed, that it is some necessary thing enabling me to pay my rent, eat food, and to live in the most general sense of the word, and that in order to get this money, I must do something, some task I most likely will not enjoy (but hopefully not detest), and that this will consume hours from my days, days from my weeks. I hate this recognition, this knowledge, this reality. This is why I quit jobs often and do sex work and am often broke and often happy and still alive. And so what to do, what to do, except sigh like Tolstoy in accepting the thing, laughing at it, shaking my shoulders in resignation before I pick up the shovel, and say, "What is to be done?" That was a refrain that would appear from the lips of numerous characters throughout Anna Karenina, and beautiful it was, true it was, this thing, life, often forcing us to ask that question, to grin and bear it, that this thing, life, is often an asking of that question, there are things that happen, sometimes terrible things, and things we must do, and we go on waking up each day and moving through this thing, hopefully asking this question with a smile, realizing that there is something beautiful about this process.

Maybe today I will try to find a copy of War and Peace. The cold is finally settling in, the leaves are starting to show colors different from their greens they have been wearing for the past season or two, putting on those fall duds they have had in their closet all year also. And the weather, the time, and my own mood seems right for such an undertaking, perhaps that book or perhaps Middlemarch - something large, something epic, something that will bore me at times and at other times, because I have been through those boring times, thrill me, something overwhelming.

I went to the Met yesterday to see "The Age of Rembrandt" show and most of the Dutch stuff, beautiful as it was, bored me in its setting, surrounded by other technically accomplished similar paintings. The Vermeers, as they always do, stopped me in my tracks, slowed me down, and forced me to admit beauty and greatness. There was another painting, a still life of silverware toward the end of the show, that wowed me so much, though now I cannot remember the painter's name. Coming out of this exhibition space, it always spits you out into the room with the Caravaggios. I was feeling sad walking through the exhibit and was excited about ending up with my favorite painting in the Met, Caravaggio's The Musicians, like coming home to your mom's arms after a trip as a kid. And there where this painting had hung was another Caravaggio, a religious scene. My mom was not there. There was no one there to pick me up from the bus stop, no one to welcome me home. I was sad and getting sadder, needed answers. I asked a guard I found nearby. He didn't really seem to have the slightest clue, didn't know the painting I was asking about, even though it hung in this gallery on that wall there for at least a couple of years, and had been there fairly recently, the last time I was at this museum. The guard, sage old man that he was, simply said, "New things come. Old things go." His wisdom seemed like something else, something terrible. I went into Central Park and read poetry and tried to connect some dots, tried to feel okay.

The moment, the terror and sadness, passed. Last night, I found myself at Boysroom, dicks in my mouth, semen on my chest, and felt happy, or at the least did not feel those other things.

Friday night, I got smacked upside the head with what I think was a leg cast by a careless performer at this queer rock show in Bushwick. It hurt like hell and since it was right to the side of my head totally fucked up my hearing and my sense of balance. My hearing is still not back to normal. One of my ears feels like it is filled with water. This is disturbing, especially so since I don't have health insurance, and yet this is probably one of the least of my worries right now, though certainly up there on the list, a fairly long list, of things stressing me out and/or making me sad.

After calling in sick on Thursday and Friday to my terrible temp job at BN.com, being lost in a sea of cubicles all day long, no view of sunlight, punching in numbers all day long, and trying my hardest to stay awake, I quit yesterday, quit via email saying that I hated that job, unbearably so, and could not ever return to it. Needless to say, that was also an act of quitting my temp agency, something I didn't want to do, but something I had no choice about if I were to quit that BN.com job so rashly. As was to be expected, I got a very angry voicemail and email from my temp agency. So while there is my happiness about never having to be in that office again, there is also an awareness that I need to find a new job quickly and yet have no clue whatsoever about what that job should be. I could go on about this for a while and there are many threads that these thoughts take, but I will spare you those, saying only that because of another stressful thing in my life, thoughts about what I should do about my living situation, I have been pondering the possibility of working or volunteering in some other location altogether. Places being considered in these day dreams were San Francisco, India, Mexico, and now that Niki is trying to convince me to move to Puerto Rico for a month and sublet out this place, there are more than passing thoughts about moving to Puerto Rico.

So, yes, where to live is another big concern of mine these days. There is the option of staying here, which is not at all a bad option, of moving somewhere else closer with Niki, of trying to find a room that I could move into without Niki, or of saying goodbye to this town and all those options. But this concern and thought process circles back to the earlier concern as I think about how all of these options require more money than I have right now and how I need to continue working.

Also on my brain, and the thing that had been occupying pretty much all of it yesterday as I laid in bed crying or sleeping or thinking about how I should get out of bed, is my relationship with G. On Sunday night, I had a talk with him on his roof, him telling me about he was upset with me for Friday night and being sexual with him despite telling him I would not be when I told him he could sleep over, and then him saying that he did not want to have any more sexual contact with me, saying all of this in fairly stark terms that removed what I had loved about the ambiguity of our friendship, the occasional sexual encounter. His saying this prompted my eyes to get really watery as I tried to explain why this made me sad, doing so by confessing a known secret, saying how much I like liked him and how I had some romantic sentiments for him. And so this just made clear to me in a very definitive way something I had already really known, that G was never going to like me in a similar fashion, and it was this definitiveness that really broke my heart, that, as well as the now imposed boundaries on our freindship, and how now it would no longer be this thing that gave me so much pleasure, this odd sexual freindship. That there are rules and boundaries stings. I was totally misled growing up reading Anais Nin and Henry Miller and Ginsberg. That is what broke my spirit, realizing that sex, even in this one situation where I thought it could, cannot be this free and casual thing, that there always must be some drama attached to the thing.

About this also I could say more, but those tears have been cried already and it is a lovely day and my friendship with him is still there, will still be something great and enriching. About all of this, I could say more. I could, could do that, or I could do things, could apply for jobs instead of talking about it, could look into opportunities in India and Mexico rather than dreaming about it, and could look at apartment listings rather than fretting about that. Also, I have still yet to think of a Halloween costume.

Niki came home last night from Puerto Rico and I had had the radio on. We cracked some beers, talked for a while, and then a song she really liked came on, a really cheesy nineties dance song and she turned it up really loud, so loud that it even felt loud to my partially deaf ears, and danced around the living room to the song, danced around in a banana costume she was trying on, and I joined her and sang along with the radio, danced like a maniac, and felt so good, so good after spending all day feeling so bad, and there it is, the solution: social interaction and physical movement, dancing.

october 15 already

Bushwick, Brooklyn

My desires are for other things at work, usually sleep, but often these days for a noble life, a life of meaning and adventure, a different life. There, I have been listening to the “This American Life” archives for the past week or so, hearing stories of people who are living in ways different from me, living in other places, doing more compassionate things. At work, in that sea of cubicles, my desires differ from those that take place outside of that space, probably because most of my desire there is to somehow imagine my life in a different setting, one opposed from the tedium of this temp job. Outside of that setting, I no longer have that thing that seems necessary to oppose; outside of that setting, other things are opposed, loneliness, boredom, and distance among them.

And so on my lunch break, I did agree to meet up with this man who I met on the street not too long ago for an after work roll in the hay. Back at work though, listening to these stories Ira Glass had compiled, that desire for sex with a stranger had vanished. There were other factors at play also, chief among them my bowels and how they had yet to still fully feel regular after being fucked on Saturday night by this nice boy with soft skin and a big penis. So I texted this man met on the street some excuse saying that I could not make it after all, not feeling that, no longer needing the thing he provided me when I met him, having since had sex with more attractive people, but more importantly younger ones, my peers, people I at least have that in common with.

I am really happy for the most part, but something is off and I would be the first to admit to that. One manifestation of that offness is the infrequency of entries on here as of late, and the lack of care with the ones posted, there being very little self-reflection and introspection, rather just a flippant recounting of events, of this and that happened, or I saw this and went here, and while that may at some point in the future interest me, when I want to recount what it was I did on that particular day, it fails to do the thing I want to do with this, to have a stronger relationship with living, to intensify my living, to give it a meaning I otherwise may not have noticed when rushing through the actions, when making out with that person, when dancing at that bar drunk off an open bar. There are those details, but I want to get at the narrative behind those things that make me happy enough. And that there is the problem, the thing that is off; there is not much of a narrative to my living these days. My head is a muddy mess. I haven’t thought clearly in seemingly months. There are things on my mind, things about my current situation as relates to boys, to health, to my job, to sex work, to my friends, to my apartment, all of them in a less than settled state right now, and there are thoughts about how to get things to an ideal situation that would remove those thoughts, would at least no longer have them as thoughts that cloud out other thoughts. There are thoughts about exactly what ideal would mean, something about which I am not even sure, and that unsureness about what ideal would be to me is the thing more unsettling than the actual lack of idealness.

On a cold morning a couple of days ago, I took a shower, a really hot shower, and I stayed in there for a probably a good half an hour, it doing for me what all my thinking and not thinking about these things had failed to do, to remove all these thoughts from my head and to make me present, to make me a body instead of a mind. It is why I love swimming so much, the water at every point on my skin, this total body sensation, making me a body, feeling things at all points, pleasure on the entire surface of me. The physical contact making me aware of physical reality in a way I not always am. In movies, when someone gets hysterical, starts panicking, another character will usually slap them, saying, “Get a hold of yourself.” And it is that slap, that forcing of physical reality upon them, that brings them out of their mental convolutions, situates them in their actual present. Showers, sometimes, can have that effect upon me. Sex, too, often does, and that is why I am so often chasing it.

Going through a stack of old IDs, business cards, and other crap, I found an old, old, split in two New College ID, which hopefully I can superglue together or relaminate and use as a student ID for rush tickets to musicals and whatever other discounts I had been using my old student ID for. I was looking through this mess in search of my Brooklyn Public Library card, which I did not come across. I did however come across old library cards for three other jurisdictions: Sarasota, Florida; Alexandria, Virginia; and Madison, Wisconsin. I also came across cards for various grocery stores: Winn Dixie, Albertsons, and Willy Street Co-Op. These all sparked nostalgic memories of past places and also in the turning over of those memories sparked the desire for new memories in me, things that I could come across on some future date when looking for something or other and finding evidence, libray cards or grocery store discount cards, of some past place I have lived, some past life. Adding to these thoughts was a card from the Ungame deck that Jamie had gave to me when I moved away from Florida, writing her phone numbers and email address on it. The card, chosen very perfectly, asks the question: "If you had to move and could only take three things with you, what would you take?"

This has resteeled my resolve to find a copy of the Ungame. I need to call some stores maybe as I think I might be giving up on ever trying to obtain it on eBay, now being burned twice and never recieving it. Last night, I saw a production of Carmen at Lincoln Center. It was a lovely thing, my first real opera experience in an opera house, and it's all about love and obsession, and, needless to say, I liked it, related a tad bit to a couple of the characters. Now to go to the library, get a new card, and hopefully get a copy of Devra Davis's The Secret History of the War on Cancer. You should listen to her interview on Fresh Air, particularly if you are a diet soda drinker. It should scare you off of aspartame forever hopefully.

At some point this evening, I lost my wallet, the wallet I have had since high school, purchased at Wal-Mart, the one on Route 1, and have never been able to replace, despite the holes in it through which change always fell through. This is perhaps a chance to get a nice new wallet, but I am still a bit sad that I have lost my ID, my debit card, my newly purchased MetroCard, perhaps my Social Security card, and my student ID, which I have used on many occassions to take advantage of student discounts and which apparently I will no longer be able to reap the benefits of, student ID now lost in the Chelsea Piers bathroom where I took a shit this afternoon and where I am guessing I must have dropped my wallet.

To put this bad news out of my mind and also to put out of my mind the stressful goings on of my apartment (a plumber tearing apart our kitchen walls, Niki getting into a fight with the landlord, and my wanting to move out already), I got drunk at gallery openings this evening. Afterwards, friends inside a bread shop, I, hungry, picked up a man on the street. I said goodbye to my friends and went out for drinks with this man. He bought me a couple of drinks and we talked about our lives. We did this and at some point we walked back to his apartment and we fucked around and we fucked and we did so not safely and lately I don't know where my brain is when I am horny but it is far gone and perhaps I secretly want HIV because I have particpated in quite a bit of unsafe sex lately, and I don't know. The man gave me an old MetroCard of his so I could get home and I used it, fell asleep on the L and thought about the sex we just had, how even having it just once unsafe would have been stupid, would have been inexcusable, but that it happened twice is something else. At the least, his dick was nice, gorgeous. Though I now regret it, I did have fun, so much fun, got what it was I wanted out of my night. And he lives two blocks from my place of my employment and perhaps I have now found a way to occupy my hour-long lunch breaks.

junot diaz, leonard michaels, wes anderson

Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao had at first won me. I was wowed by his looks, by his charm, but by the third date, the charm became something else, a grating, trying too hard thing, and the looks not much. The first half of the book has so much promise and the voice it is written in is so great, so full of life, but Diaz's tendency toward footnotes to explain Dominican history and the book's long forays back into familial history in the Dominican Republic sort of turned me off. The rushed, over-dramatized ending turned me off even more. Diaz is a great writer and I should probably read his short story collection, Drown, to see him in a format that would probably suit him better.

I can't remember which critic commented on how immigrant literature, much more so than other contemporary fiction, continues the model of the early novel, tracing a family history's back a few generations. I read someone say this not too long ago, and, yes, there is a Coors Light at my side, perhaps aiding in my inability to recall more details about this argument or its author, but something about this novel and its rewinding back to the history of Oscar's parents and grandparents and their lives in the Dominican Republic turned me off. I am not a fan of these big sweeps through time, tracing connections, seeking them, between stuff that happened to your parents and stuff that happened to you, looking for overlaps and repetitions, seeking something distinctive in your genetic makeup that also appeared in your parents' lives, in your grandparents' lives, and on and on, all the way back to Adam. It just isn't how I think that life works and is a less interesting (though perhaps easier) prism in which to view life and write about it. There are things that repeat themselves in a person's life, themes that rear their head again and again, but I don't like (and don't believe in) the fatalistic qualities some literature wants to attach to families and one's belonging to a certain one. At some point, the novel became a pastiche of so many other novels, striving to be this new American multicultural novel: the Spanglish throughout the book, the overusage of footnotes a la David Foster Wallace, the hot-headed Latina ladies, the hints of magical realism, and the references to comics a la Michael Chabon, opening the book with a Stan Lee quote even - Stan Lee and his creations have been name dropped so much in the past five years in literary fiction, the trend of which is certainly deserving of further commentary, but which I am not capable of mounting right now.

Okay, blame it on the Coors Light and the coffee consumed earlier. The above does very little to convey how much I actually really liked this book and how good a book it actually is. When something I like a lot (people included) disappoints me (even slightly), I take it real hard.

I have started reading Leonard Michaels' Collected Stories, and so far, so great. I had never heard of him until I picked up this book and if I am not too presumptuous I am guessing you haven't heard of him either. He is an amazing short story writer, dead now, and at one point more well known. I hear so much in here - the bleakness of Carver, the urbanness of Salinger, the slight surrealism of Murakami's short stories. It is really great stuff and amazingly well written. It is a bit bleaker than my worldview and often the stories have the subject of an abused woman, presenting surely problems to some, but the writing is fantastic, sentences that I reread and reread, looking at the mechanics of them, at the amazing word choices, and at how perfectly formed they are. I will quote from some of it soon. I am still early in the book and may surely change my opinion by the time I reach the end, but right now I am kind of in love with Leonard Michaels.

This evening I saw The Darjeeling Limited. It, of course, was really good. Wes Anderson has made a Wes Anderson movie and I can't imagine that he can make too many more before it becomes boring, becomes all of his other movies, but he is not there yet, and I really enjoyed this movie a lot. The movie had me feeling lonely and I looked at one of its stars longingly, wanting to touch him, to play with his hair, looking at his hands and feet, longing to touch both, wanting to touch other people, thinking of other people I have touched and their distance from me physically and otherwise at this particular time in my life, thinking about that a lot because this is a movie about travel and distances, about collapsing those emotional ones, doing so in this travel movie, and, yes, perhaps traveling physical distances is the best way to collapse those emotional distances.

I watched it alone, the theater packed with groups of friends, couples. I rode the subway home looking at faces, wanting one to look at me, wanting to make some sort of connection with someone, wanting to kiss someone and talk to someone and lie next to them and to feel giddy about another human being. That didn't happen. I picked up a Coors Light and a bag of Doritos at the bodega downstairs and consumed the both here in my apartment while listening to the Rolling Stones.

Rushing back toward the building I work in, I reached into my bag to pull out my wallet so I could have ID ready to enter the building. Near my building, at the intersection of 8th and 16th, pulling my wallet from my bag, I noticed that I dropped something while doing so. I look down to see what it was, as do the other people around me, office workers on their way back from lunch. A free sample of lube that I had picked up somewhere! Lube! It was pretty embarrassing, more so because one of the guys who noticed said, "Hey, don't lose that. That's important."

Then I listened to Harold Bloom presumably lecture on Wallace Stevens' "The Poems of Our Climate," but really losing himself in digression after digression to the extent that it almost seemed like a parody of a lit professor. I have mellowed in my hatred toward Harold Bloom, no longer consider him the enemy. I can recognize that he is kind of charming and does have some nice moments of insight, but still, even though I am longer as committed to politicized readings of texts, I still cringe when he gleefully says that to avoid problems (you know, being forced to discuss black, Latino, and women poets), his course on reading poetry just won't include poets born in the twentieth century. Ignore that part and a couple of other parts and instead listen to this old man riff on life and poetry in a pretty entertaining fashion.

Now I am on my way to potentially use this sample of lube at some hotel in midtown with some man.

"Hey rainbow!" I am wearing a striped shirt, knew they were talking to me. "Hey rainbow!" I am glad I had crossed to the other side of the street, having seen this pack of guys hanging out on the stoop on one side. They continued to call out "Rainbow" to get my attention before giving up and calling me faggot. As a faggot, I hate that I have to live in white(r) neighborhoods, more gentrified ones, to feel safe walking on the street alone late at night. I was pretty scared and was also made voiceless, was not allowed to respond how I would have liked to, yelling obscenities back, because then I certainly would have suffered bodily harm, the streets being totally empty aside from these aggressive males. I hate how I have to bike everywhere late at night to feel safe, how every time I have walked on foot in my neighborhood late at night I have suffered harrassment of one sort or another. It's so beautiful during the daytime, but at night, males own the streets, aggressive, homophobic ones who make me feel very unsafe.

I had left this bar, Sugarland, feeling like shit. I had hit on this one boy there, a fairly boring boy who I had slept with earlier and who I thought liked me, hoping (expecting) that he would sleep with me. Instead, I got the cold shoulder from this boy I didn't even like all that much and that hurt so much more than being rejected by a boy I thought was really sexy or by a stranger - that to be rejected by a fairly unsexy boy, bland as could be, who was not a stranger took my already fragile self-esteem down about twenty notches.

And so I left the bar, doing so because I was unable to talk to anyone with any confidence at this point, that my night seemed over, got a slice of pizza at the Beford place by the subway, and there in their wall of mirrors checked myself out, questioned what it was I saw, and really felt like shit, just wanted to stuff my face with this pizza and ride this train home. I did so, and of course after getting off the train would not even be able to sulk home in peace, to wallow in self-pity as I had planned, but instead would be called faggot by a pack of men and would keep my gaze ahead, not wanting to engage with them, not wanting to get my ass kicked.

Yesterday, I played hookey from work, leaving early by claiming I had to go to the eye doctor and instead going to see a matinee of Wicked and then, a few hours later, a performance of Phantom of the Opera. That I was lucky enough to see both for free in one day was amazing, and seeing the two basically back-to-back allowed me to think about those types of productions, the lavish, big musicals. I have been to a few Broadway plays now but had yet to go to what people generally talk about when they talk of Broadway shows - these types of shows. They are both gigantic productions with big casts, fairly crazy stage effects, and things flying through the air over the audience - monkeys in the case of Wicked and a chandelier in the case of Phantom. Both were pretty amazing in this respect and definitely wowed with me with some of the effects. That said, both probably would have been pretty boring without these garnishes, that the effects were a large part of the show. That, however, is not a problem for me. I was trying to tease out an analogy yesterday after seeing Wicked to Gabriel about how the musical was analagous to the wizard of Oz - that both were amazing, Wow-inducing things because of the smoke and mirrors, that really the wizard is a small man behind a bunch of machines, and that this musical also had its power because of these things, bombastic effects to win over the audience. And I am easy, was won.

My job has possibly gotten even more boring, as today I opened envelopes, removed checks from those envelopes, and stapled said checks to envelopes - did this all day long. And yet, today was one of the least boring days as I decided if they were going to give me such boring work to do, I would need to play my iPod to be able to make it through the day, and I listened to loud rock and roll and was there and was not there, was in various songs all day long, living out fantasies and memories for three minute stretches, some pretty amazing fantasies, some pretty amazing memories.

Tonight, I tried to go to see a screening of a Wes Anderson short. The event was at nine. I had left at eight. Even if I had actually been at the event at eight, it is doubtful that I would have gotten seating, but by the time the M train finally came and rode the two stops before stopping at Myrtle and making everyone wait for a J train the time was 8:40. I gave up then, walked home from there, resolving to myself, yet again, that I needed to move. The location is not convenient for the type of lifestyle I am still holding to, running to this or that event, wanting to go to this or that bar. There is too much commute time. But then, walking home from the Myrtle stop, through Bushwick, the non-industrial parts of it, I again appreciated so much where it was I lived, that the neighborhood is that, a cute neighborhood with lots of life, homes, trees, and people.

I live across the street from a beautiful park. Right outside my door there is a bodega that sells roast beef sandwiches for three dollars. Near my old house, if I desired a late night sandwich, I would have had to go to Sunac or Hana and pay six or seven dollars for a sandwich. There is an amazing fruit stand with so much cheap produce right around the corner from my house. There is a pizza place less than a block away, another one two blocks away, and countless Mexican, Dominican, and Salvadorean places all over. This is the image of New York I had in my head as a teen when I daydreamed about moving here. Fruit stands always factored into those fantasies. In my imagined New York, there were fruit stands on every block and that I finally am living in this imagined version makes me so happy every time I walk past the place, Angel's.

There is all of that, and then there is its distance from places where I spend my time, where I hang out, where I work, where I get drunk, where I go to events.

Niki is watching Dancing With the Stars. We live in a railroad apartment. Even in my room, headphones playing Gillian Welch, I can still hear the car commercials. The sound of television really makes me crazy. My job is boring and each day I struggle to stay awake, have to list for myself the benefits of working, that it could bring, things I can buy, places I can visit, houses I can move into, if I continue to work. Today was amazingly beautiful and on my lunch break, I laid out shirtless by the river, wanting oh so badly to be able to dive in, to be swimming in water.

Death Proof and Exit Ghost

Death Proof's opening credits are superimposed over a shot of two feet propped up on the dashboard of a car speeding down the road. They are sexy things, obviously loved by the director, Tarantino, and throughout the movie there are so many shots of feet, Tarantino's foot fetish coming out in a much more explicit way in this movie, rather than the less explicit thing that people have noticed in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, Uma's toes wiggling. Here are long shots of feet hanging out car windows. Here is Kurt Russell staring at a pair of them with all the longing in the world.

I understand the pleasure it was for Tarantino to shoot this film, to shoot these feet. I squirmed because I understood his longing gaze, have shared it, though for men's feet and not his ass-kicking female stars. There were memories of other feet provoked by these shots, my desire for them.

What a pleasure this movie was, a giddy joy that I only get when watching Tarantino films for the first time - his love of seventies cinema, his soundtracks, his references - it always thrills me so much on first viewing.

There is more that I wanted to say, but this hangover, odd thing it is since I don't think I drank that much last night, is getting the better of me, that or the giant thing of ice cream that I just ate, the coffee drank beforehand, and the gas that the combination of the two is giving me. I went out dancing at Sugarland last night, there surprisingly being a lot of people there, people dancing even. I made out with this boy there, a Brian perhaps, and let him take my penis out of pants and stroke it, me enjoying that so much. He wanted to come home with me and I didn't want that, didn't want the stranger in my bed, those moments outside of sex to fill with conversation. I just wanted this moment on the dancefloor and when I realized that by having this moment I was leading him to expect future moments, I had to say goodbye, had to leave the bar, and on my bike I got, biking home, and that ride, aside from the brief hill on Central that I had to ascend drunk, tired, and winded, was such a joyous ride, one of the highlights of my night, the streets empty for the most part, and there was me and this rusting piece of metal going from here to there, being in movement, and feeling like I was accomplishing something I could point to, that my legs had gotten me from this point to that one.

Today, I exchanged Philip Roth's Exit Ghost for Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The Roth book, his last with the Nathan Zuckerman alter ego, was lacking. Maybe it was supposed to be and I have been thinking over the book in moments today as I have been walking or riding the trains, wondering about what exactly he was trying to say. Nathan Zuckerman, in the book, admits to senility and having trouble in his advanced age continuing to write, and perhaps this book, Exit Ghost, was supposed to reflect that. It is a bit unfocused and there is very little of the exuberant prose that normally thrills me about Roth's writing. There is Roth defensively critiquing the contemporary practice of reading the author's life into the work of fiction, of seeking out autobiographical details about writers as if that should help reveal the text, and that part, though a bit obvious, I enjoyed a lot, not least because of my sympathies toward Roth's view, coy as it is with his Zuckerman character mirroring his life so closely. However, Roth's digs at feminism (an aged version of it he is still imagining that he is fighting apparently) and at trends toward p.c. selections seem out of place in the novel's setting of 2004. It all seems so nineties, that tension. There is also a lot going with the practice of writing and how one is to do that, what that means. The book is a mixed bag, certainly a good book, but not the great book that I had been hoping for. If just about every critic is to be believed, hopefully this new book I picked up today, the Diaz book, should be fucking amazing!

What a thrill it was to watch Death Proof, to see these ladies so excited about test driving a Dodge Challenger, a 1970 one, what a fucking thrill. If you had only been here next to me on the couch in my new apartment in Bushwick, you would have known; you would have heard be squealing in delight, so full of joy and excitement that I couldn't even process it, could only make shrieking noises of pleasure.

BNdotCommunist

The office I work in is in a building that takes up an entire city block. The company I now work for takes up an entire floor of that building, an entire block. It is a daunting walk from one side of the office to the other, from even my cubicle to the bathroom. It is a job gotten through my new temp agency, me finally abandoning my old one after they offered me one shitty job too many, to the point that it was insulting. It is the Website of a massive chain bookstore and I work in the accounting department doing boring, fairly mindless tasks. I started yesterday and so far have no real complaints. The location is ideal and there is all the free coffee my coffee-loving self can handle. Hopefully by working full-time for a while, a couple months maybe, I can get myself better positioned financially, pay off some bills, not constantly be broke, perhaps go visit people across the country and perhaps across the Atlantic, and also perhaps have some money saved in case I want to move, somewhere else in New York or somewhere else entirely.

My new room barely gets any sunlight and so I sleep much later than I would like to, lack the spirit that the sun used to fill me with in the mornings in my old bedroom, and so another plus to this job is that it forces me to get out of the habit of being lazy, to wake up earlier.

Boring jobs have another plus, a plus that I enjoyed so much today and which I was so grateful for, that being the ability to daydream all day long. The tasks are simple enough not to occupy all of your attention and the quiet of an office environment is great for uninterrupted reflection, for thinking about things, reliving recently lived moments. You find yourself horny in the morning, still tired, recalling the body of your friend that you slept with this weekend, his patch of hair on his chest, the thought of Matt's patch of chest hair intruding on this daydream, the realization that the patch of chest hair is similar on both boys, that perhaps this has something to with the attraction to both, perhaps, or perhaps just a coincidence. And because there are eight hours to get through, these thoughts can be teased out, chased in any direction they will lead you, thinking about life and fiction and their relationship, this being sparked by reading the new Roth novel, thinking of that boy, this boy, of electricity and the Internet, of dancing, of Tom Petty lyrics, on and on, more time with my own thoughts than I have gotten in so long.

With Ben B. tonight, mentioning this satisfaction I was finding, warning me, he joked that I better have a good imagination, that the well of thoughts would dry up soon.

I wandered the Natural History Museum by myself yesterday, there for an hour depressed that my friends were nowhere to be found, feeling lonely and depressed, the massive whale, normally able to thrill me so much, did little to mitigate the self-pitying mood. I decided to walk to MoMA. On the way there, there was an injured horse on 59th Street, looking terrible and in pain, and that was unbearable to look at, was almost the thing that pushed me over the edge. My life and scenes from Anna Karenina were starting to blur. I felt like Vronsky at the races, everything falling apart.

At MoMA, in the fairly terrible "What is Painting?" show, there was one very pleasurable thing, a Philip Pearlstein painting. I love Pealstein's work so much. His figurative paintings of middle-aged naked bodies are so sad and beautiful, so real in a way that many other things seem to not be. I stood in front of that painting for a very long time, pondering the two naked bodies, both female, and thought about this flesh we carry, that carries us, and the thing inside it pondering its container. Pearlstein's bedroom scenes of ennui grow on me more and more each time I see them.

Tonight, I had some man come over to my house. He spit on me, gagged me with his cock, called me names, slapped me, and in those moments, I felt most good, most happy, was able to not think about the things I have been thinking about for the past couple of days. There is no time to feel self-pity with a dick down your throat, making you gag, tears starting to well up in your eyes. There is only that thing, that moment you are currently in, no past, no future, just this now, this intense physical feeling. It felt so great then. But it ended, I was drenched in semen, literally dripping it from my hair, and this man reminded me that we had had sex a couple of years ago, and then we were back. The present was no longer just that; it had associations of the past with the recollection of the encounter with this man before; and there were thoughts to the future, to the semen all over everything I had just washed, to it all over my self and to how I needed to take a shower to be clean of it, thoughts to a future self, a clean one.

Teddy

This 19 year old boy, Melvin, came over to my house last night. I met him on the Internet and he is this cute, shy Puerto Rican boy with lovely skin to touch who graduated high school in June and still lives with his family. My apartment has now been baptized; sex has been had in my new residence; things feel better here. He was young and that youngness showed through several times, him looking very nervous when he first came into my house, not really knowing what to do with himself, later showing when after making out and starting to undress he said that he wanted to get to know me before we did anything. Frustrated at first, I lay back on my pillows, making conversation to make him feel like he wasn't a slut, a body being used just as a body, and then remembered being young, younger, remembered those early sexual experiences and how then I wanted similar things from them, had different ideas about what they should be. He had this cute smile and talking to him, looking at him, remembering what things felt like not that many years ago, I enjoyed the conversation, the getting to know each other before anything happened. I also enjoyed the anything happening.

Afterwards, I biked away from my house toward the bank and on the way, my back tire popped in a major fashion, becoming totally flat. There seemed to be some symbolism here. I wasn't sure what it was, but it seems as if it signified something after having this nice sexual experience. Earlier in the day, I had read J.D. Salinger's "Teddy" and so life seemed important and unimportant, its unimportance the source of its importance. After reading that story, I tested negative for HIV, which was a relief since the story and my having randomly read it that day, its message, seemed to me to be a foreshadowing of something ominous, of me falling into an empty pool, cracking my head open, and someone approaching the pool scared, hearing my sister's scream, the scream "highly acoustical, as though it were reverbeating within four tiled walls." And for a story that takes as one of its themes notions of space and how physical objects and spaces seem to be so only because of logic, that reference to the four tiled walls and that "as though" doubting its reality seemed really significant.

eight steps, but to where?

There were a few moments early this morning where Niki and I would look at each other and just start to laugh, laugh because what we were doing was so spur of the moment, was so hairbrained an idea, was so absurd in every way, because this is life, these absurd moments strung together. On the subway ride this morning, Mikayleigh and Niki had whitening strips over their teeth, and her speech hobbled by this product, Niki asked me what we were doing, and that was one of those moments where we laughed. The question was apt, too apt, and the answer too funny. We were on our way to audition to be Disney characters on a Disney cruise ship, a job that would require an eight month commitment.

Mikayleigh had flown up here from Florida specifically to audition for this job, believing she had it in the bag. At some point in the day yesterday, she convinced Niki that she should audition for it also. The two of them sold me on the idea when I got home late last night and the idea of spending several months on the ocean sounded so good to me then. Being a Disney character, Goofy most likely, did not sound so good, but it sounded easy enough and it would have paid really well, enabling me to travel and perhaps live in foreign locales (Mexico City at the top of that daydreamer’s list) with the money paid after not having paid rent for months and having no real place to spend the money being earned.

And so this morning, after sprucing up our resumes, printing photos of ourselves as costumed characters, and practicing some eight steps, we headed off to this dance studio in our very amateurish dance outfits. It was a world far removed from my normal one and so fascinating to observe, very A Chorus Line. Everyone handed in a headshot with their resume printed on the back and then sat down in this mirrored dance studio doing stretches in their spandex dance outfits and jazz shoes, doing this, but more so applying make-up, perfecting it, in the mirrors.

They split the mass of people auditioning into two groups. We were in the second group and we could hear the choreographer yelling instructions through the room next door. Nerves started to set in for Niki and I and we began to take more seriously how out of place we were amongst these professional auditioners.

Group Two was called and we went into the room next door. A dance routine was hurriedly explained by the choreographer. Somehow this routine was learned by most of the people there and I felt more and more nervous about how bad I was doing. I was looking at the other people around me in the mirror, copying their moves, but not fast enough, and found myself bumping into my neighbors a few times. After these group run-throughs of the routine, we performed for the casting director in groups of three, small groups where I could no longer so easily conceal the fact that I was just faking my way through this dance routine, spinning on my right foot rather than my left, following my neighbor’s lead belatedly, and trying to keep up.

Mikayleigh had told me that I was definitely going to get a job, not probably, that they desperately needed tall guys all the time for Goofy, and from the room full of hopefuls, it seemed to be true. Ninety percent of the people there were females. I didn’t do totally terrible during the dance routine. The casting director asked me my height, then asked me to smile at him so he could get a good look at me, and that was it. After all the groups of three had finished, he looked through his list and then read the names of the people he wanted to stay. Niki’s name was not called, Mikayleigh’s wasn’t, mine wasn't. Our dreams of life at sea were quickly put to an end.

We crossed the street at Mikayleigh’s suggestion, heading to White Castle, she incredibly disappointed about not making the cut. We ate little burgers, quite a few of them. It didn’t mean as much to me and so the burgers didn’t need to comfort me and I wasn’t drunk, which really is probably the only way to enjoy those burgers.

It was a lovely day still, getting to do something and see a side of life that I probably never would have without this visitor. I tried and had fun, got a free dance lesson.

Later this day, this same day, the three of us found a gorgeous couch and matching armchair on the street. We carried them the couple of blocks to our house and then I made a dinner, a lovely thing because it was made with love, for us and I sat on this new couch eating the yummy thing, drinking yummy rum drinks.

Mikayleigh left tonight, not before making me laugh over and over again with amazing stories, and not before christening our nameless cat, Kitty, Bob Dylan.

the savage detectives, a midsummer night's dream, 33 to nothing, walmartopia, darwin's nightmare

Another week, a work week, has ended, and I am again aware of how I have not worked during this week, how I have not only not worked in the sense of going to an office, doing shitty work, and getting paid for it, but how I haven't even really done much with my free time, my not working time, to justify that not working, how despite living in this new apartment and having lots of alone time, I still have not been able to make myself write amazing things, that instead all this alone time is just being put to use to make myself elaborate omelettes and to watch video after video on either xtube or youporn, masturbating for hours and then feeling incredibly guilty about doing so, about how by doing so I have failed to do the things that I should have been doing with that time, namely writing great things and/or looking for money-making opportunities, legit stuff or that other stuff I do.

Despite not producing any things, I have consumed a great deal, and it is a nice stew in my head right now, all these cultural products and the thoughts they are inspiring.

First off, I finally finished Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. The book traces the history of these two Mexican poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. They start a poetry movement, the visceral realists (obviously a gibe at the magical realists), and treat it like membership to a kid's clubhouse, at one point randomly kicking out members. Small in terms of how many pages she is mentioned on, but looming large thematically over this book is their obsession with Cesarea Tinajero, an older poet who they have found one poem by, and who they trace down across Mexico. The book is intentionally messy and because of its set-up lacks the novelistic voice that I normally like from a work of fiction. Instead, the novel is the diary of a young poet infatuated with the visceral realists and then interviews with many, many people about their relationships with Belano and Lima. I kept thinking that this book would all come together, that the messiness would be worth it, that the ending would make everything clear, its purpose, however as I neared the last thirty pages, I knew that it would not happen, that the book was just messy and not what I wanted from a novel. There are genuine moments of beauty and some really stellar pargraphs and pages, but compared to Bolano's shorter fiction, this book just didn't do it for me. It did provoke a lot of thoughts in me and gave me so many intense instances of wanderlust, particularly for Mexico City, but I would have a hard time recommending this book to someone that was not already a big Bolano fan. I am still processing the book though and these feelings very may well change, particuarly as I re-read the criticism about the book I had read, much of it essentially hailing this book as a masterpiece. I would like to go re-read those arguments to help me process what this book was trying to accomplish.

Several plays were also seen this week. A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Delacourte Theater was the best of them. It is a play that I love a lot, that I acted in high school, and that I have seen several times. More and more levels of meaning to this play become apparent with each encounter. The metanarrative aspects to it with the interpolated play, Pyramus and Thisbe, are so weird and seem very modern. There is so much to parse out there on the nature of plays, of acting, of performing, and even more so of watching, of what it means to be an audience member to this thing and the relationship between a work of art and its audience.

33 to Nothing, a musical, dealt with a band in its death throes, breaking up for various reasons, and their last rehearsal session as things start to fall apart. The play dealt with aging, with attempts at artistic greatness, and when and at what point one must realize that they are never to achieve such a thing, that they will always be a mediocrity, and give up the struggle. There were amateurish aspects to the thing, but it did, in not always subtle ways, present questions certainly worth being asked.

Walmartopia, another muscial, was at certain moments silly and at other moments a little ham-fisted, but really what else is to be expected with a leftist musical? For what it was, it was really good. The two lead actresses had amazing voices and to hear them sing was a joy. Wal-Mart is evil and this country is fucked up, the world is, and the musical could have been so much more terrible (not that it was terrible at all, just at time a little preaching to the choir).

Perhaps it should be mentioned now, amdist these terse and superficial critiques (if they even can be called that) of artistic products that I am a bit drunk, having gone to some party in the East Village tonight where there were cute boys and where I drank a decent amount of vodka.

Gallery openings were went to last night and tonight. So there is a whole mess of stuff bobbing around in my head from those, chief among them though the new Larry Clark stuff on view at Luhring Augustine. Most of the photographs focus on this young boy (of course, it being Larry Clark), and Clark elevates this boy through his gaze and his lens to such a beautiful status. When a photographer loves their subject it comes through so clearly and there is some magic on display on those gallery walls, something that I would like to talk about more and something that I may upon second viewing and when I don't have so many other things in my head right, artistic products, boys, and otherwise.

But the one reccomendation that I would like to make to you, the thing that is most on my mind right now, is this documentary I watched today, Darwin's Nightmare. I could say stuff about it but it would be better if you were just to watch it. It is a movie that will break your heart and think that the world is hopeless, which it very well seems like it is. It focuses on a village on the shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania and how their economy is built upon fishing nile perch from the lake, a species which is non-native to the lake and which is totally destroying the ecosystem. There is terrible environmental stuff happening. There is the exploitation of the natural resources of developing nations by developed nations. There is a country suffering from famine but exporting all of this food to Europe. There is HIV and AIDS, large numbers of people dying from these, and stupid preachers saying that condoms are a sin. Then there is weapons smuggling on these same cargo planes that take the fish out of the country. I felt physically ill at so many points during this movie, realizing that the world is a terrible place, that by my purchases and my existence in a developed nation, I aid in its terribleness, and that really there is little that can be done to stop it. This movie and some of its scenes will be on my brain for a long time, and that I think is a good thing, will help keep me focused. If you have yet to see this, I suggest that you do.

And there all these things, all these cultural products consumed, plus many not even listed, and it is all floating around in my brain, and it's so easy to consume this stuff, far harder to do the opposite and produce, but I am aware of the things that need to be done, aware of the things I am doing, and am moving myself in that direction.

books in hands, in my head

Yesterday and again today, I lied underneath branches, leaves, looked up to see the sunlight sometimes filtering its way through the mess of green shading me. There was a book in my hands, Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives.

Occasionally I would read from it. More often though, I would look at the leaves above me, at the families, couples, and single men sitting in the park with me, thinking how nice this place was, how lucky I am to live right across the street from this park. Thoughts shifted to the nature of sitting in parks, of loittering, of doing nothing but being in public with others sitting on benches just passing time, contemplating the nature of passing time. I am here and not here. Some pieces of me didn't make it in the move to this new house, new subway stop. New items are being picked up though and I am falling in love with some things, with some ideas, am dreaming about things in a way I haven't in a long while. I feel new and old enough to recognize that newness as something else. I still love Neil Young. I bought a bilingual Neruda book yesterday, a half-hearted attempt to pick up some Spanish. I am determined to learn it, all the more so because the fishmonger spoke no English today and placing an order proved difficult, proved embarrassing.

Last night, I fucked this man, the second man I have done this to, and enjoyed it tremendously. There was a book in my head.