Tomorrow is my last day of working in the offices of my job. Yesterday, in anticipation of these changes and giddy as hell, feeling like Muriel saying goodbye to Porpoise Spit, I began to say goodbye to the things that entertain me everyday on my way to work - to the electronics store that has played nothing but Britney Spears videos in their window since I started this job, to the store with all the tiaras in the window, and to the store called simply "Shoes are Hot."









Last night was lovely. I went over to this boy's house and helped him make a giant paper crane. I played Skeeball and pool at a bar with him and his roommate, and then slept in his bed, cuddling up with him all night. All I had been wanting for the past few days was just this - to be in the arms of someone throughout the night or to have someone in my arms, to be able to feel another body in those moments when I jolt awake briefly in the middle of the night. When I got home this morning, I could smell him on my skin and hesitated about taking a shower, wanting to be able to smell him throughout the day. I have other things though, images mentally stored of him on a ladder hanging this crane and of the snow falling, the world a beautiful snow globe for a couple moments, and so I took a shower, making it hotter and hotter, standing there, losing myself, not wanting to get out of that hot shower, not wanting to go to these last couple days of work.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career

The first John Cassavetes film I saw was A Woman Under the Influence. I don’t remember much about when exactly I watched the movie or with whom, but I do, in detail, remember how I was affected by it, how I knew that I had just seen something so fragile and so brilliant. I didn’t think a film could be so good, didn’t think it could speak in that way. I am still stunned when I recall that movie and am left a bit speechless here trying to put into words what exactly it is I love about this movie, what particular qualities it has that make it so amazing.

There was a Woody Allen binge a year or so ago and in some of those movies I was able to approach a similar state of awe and jealousy.

Last night, I felt it again. I watched the first two parts of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales series, The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career. I had seen A Summer’s Tale a couple of years ago and also felt this feeling. I had told myself at that point that I was going to try to watch many more Rohmer movies, but until last night, for whatever reasons, I had not done so.

A Summer’s Tale hit me in a million places, my overly sentimental heart, my brain’s love of conversation, my penis (for the lead actor), and everywhere in between. It was a really talky movie, but not annoyingly so. There is something so delicate about these movies, balancing these things that had they just a pinch more of any of the ingredients would be too much, either too self-consciously intellectual or too sentimental.

Both of the films that I watched last night were similar in tone and similar in theme, a love triangle slowly playing itself out throughout the course of the film, during which time you observe desire, the lack of it from the desired party, cruelty from all parties, and the really staggering vulnerability that people expose themselves to when they expose their heart’s desires. Human beings are so endlessly fascinating in their desire for affection, that really this is so much of what our life is devoted to, and Rohmer gets it so unbelievably right. Perhaps it is not unbelievable that he gets it so right, but so unbelievable that not everybody else does. To watch television or most movies is really difficult for me lately because it doesn’t even come close, has a set of concerns and a worldview that I don’t want to hear. To even hear the sound of the television makes the poetry that life seems to have in some moments, some films, some books, some music, seem like reports from another planet, a dream. All I want to do is watch Eric Rohmer movies and sigh as characters get slighted, feeling it, feeling past slights, and smile when affection is returned, feeling imagined future instances of that.

Jan. 28th, 2007

I find myself walking perhaps no more often than normal, but particularly loving these moments alone walking down Grand Street, love them even more when there is just the slightest bit of rain, bit of snow, occasionally falling. I get some thinking done, but that isn't even the source of the pleasure. It perhaps is my stride, the rhythm of it, and the percieved rhythm that life has in those moments, or perhaps it is my inability in these moments to show my lack of social grace, to perhaps even feel like I may have some in these alone moments.

There was something similar felt as I lay on this man's bed and got head from him, not caring so much about him and not needing to, another lovely solitary walk for me to feel like this world is beautiful and that it moves to my rhythm. I could tease out an analogy here between the rhythm of my pace as I walk and that of his head as he sucks my cock, but that would be a little more crass than I am willing to do right now for two reasons. One, the water on my stove is boiling, ready for me to add some pasta to it. Two, and more importantly (because that water can boil all night long for all I fucking care), my dear friend Peter has just arrived at my house.

Tomorrow, hopefully I can carry this confidence, this rhythm, and use it to fly through my interview at the temp agency bright and early tomorrow morning.

neon bible

Bruce Springsteen has never sounded so good, I thought to myself last night jokingly, listening to the new Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible. For the first time in I don't know how long, but a seriously long time, I listened to an album. I did not have it on headphones while I was walking around town, nor did I have it playing on my computer as I checked MySpace over and over for reasons that never seem clear. Instead, I played it in my living room, turned off the lights and lied on the couch and just took it in, eyes closed. I had taken a decent amount of Sudafed and so was feeling a bit fucked up, nervous and jittery, slightly paranoid, definitely emotional.

I could hear him already on the second track, Springsteen's ghost, on "Keep the Car Running." And can you hear the ghost of someone still living? Would that not be the spirit of the person? Or might it be the ghost; might Springsteen in essence be dead with his, though noble, fairly boring Seeger Sessions? I did not notice this Springsteen influence at all on Funeral, but it seems so blatantly obvious on Neon Bible. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is to David Byrne as The Arcade Fire is to Bruce Springsteen?

These thoughts and other analogies came and went, notes and chords did, and I thought about this life I am living and the topic of life in general and what, if anything, it means, those questions seeming even more pertinent, even more perplexing, after this emotional week. I blew my nose not unoften, because though this generic Sudafed does manage to make me a skittish horse (though perhaps beaten dog always flinching at any touch might be a better analogy), it does absolutely nothing to in any way stop or even slow the constant flow of snot from my nose. All this and more, thoughts about love, thinking about the ones I love so dearly, about the future of a week from now when I am jobless, and about the future on that seemingly far off horizon, that horizon that shifts in some moments to let you know that it is not that far off, that it never was.

And then the eighth track came on, "Antichrist Television Blues," and though the title sounds like a Violent Femmes track, it is not by them, and it not by the Arcade Fire; it is Bruce Springsteen of the late 70s playing with this Canadian band of today. And this song started playing on the heels of these thoughts about time and life, and came under the influence of this Sudafed induced haze, and I was totally overwhelmed by this sound, it cutting through every piece of me, and I started to cry, thinking about how much this band could sound like this man, thought about singular identities, the thing we cling to and the thing that makes death and life seem terrifying, that the absence of that person is an absence of that thing, but here it is rising from the throat of this young man. The ghost, the spirit, filled him and it filled my living room last night, and it was so damn beautiful and there is nothing you can do to hold on to that. You can't grab at the air and ask this moment to stay. You can play the track again, thinking you might be able to invoke that same moment, but I did so this morning, played it in the shower as I was shaving my testes and my asshole, and I wanted it to invoke that same moment, but it invoked nothing so much as the memory of the moment.

last night in a nutshell

I approached this cute boy, said hi, started talking. Cute Boy stopped me with, "Do I know you?" I said, "No." He pivoted on his feet and turned his back to me.

don't look

Last night, I went with Ben and Joe up to the Whitney to see the Terence Koh exhibit. The train was running painfully slow at points on the way there. It started to snow lightly once we got off the train to walk there. I drank from a cup of coffee that tasted so right, a warm hug for my insides. We waited in line to get in, paid the change from our pockets, put our little stickers on, and went in. I was so excited to see the Koh exhibit and rushed up to the room where it is, a bright white light set up inside the room, projected out into the lobby, and the guard, wearing wraparound sunglasses, stopped me, stopped my joy, telling me to stand behind the line. I realized that this was it, that you couldn't even go into the room, that it was just a bright light in the middle of a room you couldn't go into, shining out into your face, a painfully bright white light that you couldn't even look at without probably causing serious damage to your eyes. Joe was really disappointed, and either him or Ben said something like, "This is it? Are you fucking kidding me?" And then I started to get it a bit more and laughed, really enjoying this piece, that in some ways the piece is a big Fuck You to people excited to see this show.

The museum's statement about the work refers to it along the lines of (the exact phrase I cannot remember) an inaccessible diorama. And it is. The entire thing is such a tease. There are all these expectations for Koh, a young, perhaps too quickly rising art star, with his Whitney show, and he essentially says, "Look away. I am too bright a thing for your eyes to handle." I think the afterimage is still burned on my eyes today. I looked, tried to. And that's what I thought of it yesterday, a brat flicking off everyone excited about his show and all the old ladies walking through the lobby on their way to the Kiki Smith show or the Picasso and Americans show. When I was leaving the museum, I had to wait in the lobby forever for everyone else to be ready to go, and it was amazing to watch all these people coming out of the elevator and shielding their eyes from this show. I particularly enjoyed, asshole that I am, when old men and ladies, white haired ones, dramatically shielded the sides of their heads from this bright light, too bright, all up in their face.

I went to bed last night thinking about this piece and teasing out other possible readings of it, it seeming more and more brilliant the more I thought about this work. That the line that you cannot cross is so far back from the room, a good ten feet or so, seems meaningful, the point of inaccessibility being hammered more and more. It's a white room, glowing with light, and not only are you not allowed to go in it, you are not even allowed to get too close to the thing. And you cannot even see the thing. You can never actually look too closely, so blinded by the light are you, meaning that perhaps we never fully see things, particularly art objects, so blinded are we by the light, the critical praise, the name we have heard before, or even its being shown in a museum setting privileging it - case in point, people thinking Kiki Smith is good, or even possibly Terence Koh. There is that reading.

As I was falling more and more asleep, a more positive aspect of the thing came to light (har har), which is that art should illuminate the things outside that art. It shouldn't be an insular thing, a language onto itself, but that it should make clearer and more beautiful the things outside of that painting, outside of that sculpture, that the grace present in that particular Pollack painting that you like, that spirit, that that is to be found everywhere, and this painting should be a reminder of that grace's existence and a string on the end of your pinkie telling you to look for it elsewhere. And the thing illuminated here with Koh's work is not any work, any object of his, aside from maybe the white room the light is placed in, but rather the lobby that the light is projected into, the viewers that that light is blinding, showcasing, exhibiting.

I departed from the group I was with, tired of groups and wanting to see Doug Aitken's work at MoMA. It was nice, though the walk there and back by myself was nicer.

On the train ride home, there was this boy who was so incredibly beautiful, slightly stocky, brown curly hair, and brown eyes that seemed to hold some promise of tenderness, a soft touch in bed. He was with his girlfriend and they kept staring at each other with such kindness, and I was terribly jealous and lonely feeling, wanting to be that girl, wanting that boy's eyes to look at me that way. Enter into this picture, Arthur, a boy who I saw a few times a few months ago and whose calls I stopped answering. It was so nice to see him in this moment. I got up from my seat to talk to him and I looked into his eyes, slightly wanting to see a warm look from his, wanting to see that other boy's glow. And, of course, it wasn't there. They were eyes that didn't seem to particularly want to talk to me. I was trying to shine a warm light, a tenderness, and I don't think that the light was too bright - that is not why he wouldn't look into it - but, rather, I think that he didn't care for this light, lost interest in it a while ago. I went to bed soon after getting home, tired as hell. Alone in my bed, I rubbed my penis against my sheets, getting lost in sleep, in erotic fantasies, wishing I was not alone in my bed.

terence koh

I looked out my kitchen window this morning and said something like Wow, Fuck, or one of those other words of Astonishment. I had gotten home sometime late, two something, three something, not sure, and didn't remember any snow accumulated anywhere at that point, but there on the roofs behind my house, white and white and white, all so beautiful in the early morning sunlight. There is not really any on the ground and I am sure the little snow on these roofs will probably have melted by this afternoon, but the snow, even knowing how short-lived and how little an amount it is, is so beautiful.

It seemed very appropriate for all this white to be there, everywhere. It seemed like a logical continuation of last night. Last night, I attended one of the most amazing events I have been to in so long. There was an afterparty at Detich Projects to celebrate Terence Koh's show at the Whitney. It was so opulent and so well executed and totally beautiful. So amazingly beautiful. You had to be dressed in all white to get in, which made the event all the more amazing. Everyone angelic in this room of white fog. You were handed a white veil to wear also once inside. Everything was white. The drinks were white cranberry juice and vodka. In the middle of the room, hidden by all this fog, was a big sculpture, a ball with rods emanating from it, which was lit up later in the evening when Terence performed. There were underage boys with white ash on their legs, walking around in tighty whities and white veils like zombies. There was a person playing a white piano wearing white robes and with a face hidden by a giant white wig.

Like this morning when looking at the snow on neighboring rooftops, I was just totally astonished again and again every time I took in the scene I was in last night. The word I used last night was dream. I said it again and again, the entire thing feeling so unreal. I had gone out to some galleries beforehand and had a really good time, and went out to the afterafterparty at 205 later and that also was fun, but neither came close to affecting me the way this party at Deitch did. It was incredibly beautiful.

This morning I really do love New York.

The anthology I have a story in got a review in this week's Village Voice:

Many of the authors are young, and Userlands suffers from a lack of consistency. Several stories read like hastily-edited entries on a personal blog, waxing poetic on a strange sexual encounter or the vagaries of everyday life...Cooper's anthology may ultimately prove that serious fiction still longs for the confines of a printed page, but it does highlight a significant trend: writers using the Internet to hone their craft. What's more, it asks what the digital revolution portends for our flesh-bound selves.

Monday night, I had sex with a boy for the first time in an embarrassingly long time, incidents in bars and old men excluded. It was nice. The boy was nice looking and was in fact quite nice, but in bed, fairly aggressive, shoving my head on his cock, biting my neck, being more forceful than I ever would have guessed, much to my delight. We rode over the Williamsburg bridge on the J train, listening to Gin Blossoms from his iPod. I had totally forgotten how amazing a song "Til I Hear It From You" is. On the way to my house, we walked by the now gutted Commodore theater, and he knew the name of it, surprising me, surprising me even further that he had been in the theater when it was operational. The ceiling is totally gone, but the roof's structure is still in place, and it is so fucking gorgeous, this shell of a theater with pieces of detritus hanging from the beams, the sky visible through all of this.

I only have eleven days left at my job and this reality struck me today as just a little terrifying and I am beginning to question whether I made the right decision, or if, I am beginning to wonder, I have put in notice at a really sweet job, with easy hours, decent pay, and the ability to play on the Internet all day. Those things are all well and good, and I very may well totally regret this decision when I am unemployed and poor, or may regret it even if I do find a job soon, hating the job terribly and longing for the situation I gave up. I may this; I may that. But I also may do many other good things, and it's that hope that stimulated me to change my situation originally and which I still hold to in confident moments, almost even sure that great things will come out of this decision, a move further along toward where I would eventually like to be.

Holy shit, Michiko Kakutani normally isn't even this harsh. Dale Peck, maybe. But coming from William T. Vollmann, a National Book Award winner, this opening paragraph of his review of Anthony Swofford's Exit A is just brutal:

“Imagine my satisfaction,” reads the Scribner publicity office’s form letter that came with an advance copy of this book, “when I found myself immersed in a dark love story that was all at once sensual, moody and elegant.” Imagine my dissatisfaction when I found myself not in the least immersed in a love story to which none of these adjectives apply, not even “dark.” For this is a novel that ends as follows: “He wanted to find answers to other questions, too, some of his own, some of hers, but they would answer those later. Together.” This is a fair sample of Anthony Swofford’s prose in his first novel, “Exit A,” prose that befits a Harlequin romance novel more than functioning as (to quote the publicity office again) “confirmation of Swofford as a major literary talent.”

Could you imagine being Swofford and reading this review? I really think I would just crumple. Totally unrelated: I wonder how my life would be different if instead of getting the job I have now, I had instead got that Harlequin job, both of which I interviewed for around the same time.

who killed laura palmer?

Last night, we were out in the hall, passing around a can of duster, inhaling it. I went with Gabriel into his apartment to pee in his bathroom. While we were there, we started to hear screaming, loud screaming from the hallway we had just left. I couldn't understand what some girl could possibly be screaming so loud about, and was concerned that the other people that lived in that hall were going to be annoyed by the screaming. I went out into the hall to see that this girl, pretty and blonde, was screaming, really pissed, screaming because some other girl in the hallway had a bit sadistically told her who killed Laura Palmer. Apparently the blonde girl had the tapes in her bag and was excited about watching the show, and she was upset, really unreasonably upset and screaming her head off. The mean girl told her that she, the screaming girl, even looked like Laura Palmer. And it was true, this screaming girl was Laura Palmer. Just as Laura Palmer was too innocent looking and so had to brutalize herself and be brutalized by others, so too did this other girl have to tell the blonde girl the killer.

What made this thing even weirder for me, it already being a very weird scene, messed up as I was on whiskey and inhalants, was that I am reading a very detailed, very amazingly written chapter in The Shape of Things to Come about Laura Palmer and Twin Peaks. I had just read this passage earlier in the day:

Twin Peaks made Laura Palmer famous as a corpse; Fire Walk With Me, which is about her discovery that the demon who has been raping her since she was twelve is her father, is the greatest teen-jeopardy movie ever made, and even as she dies at her father's hands Sheryl Lee is more alive than anyone else in the picture. The movie is driven by as heedless a performance as any in the history of film, but in its most desperate moment all that's in question is the expression on the face of a high-school girl sitting down to dinner in her family's nice house, on their quiet, groomed street, as her father asks if she's washed her hands. But like a window blown off its hinges in a storm, her face opens onto a national landscape, where promises are made for the pleasure to be found in their betrayal, where it is only the betrayal of a promise that proves the promise was worth making, where innocence is killed because it is an affront to the rhythms of the nation's story and cannot be tolerated. (149-150)

I kept on wondering what life I was living today as I read more of this chapter about Laura Palmer today on the subway, the symmetries between some of the passages in the book, some of the scenes discussed, some of these scenes of last night, and my own self-destructive behavior as of late too close for comfort. Laura Palmer "knows that it's her innocence that attracts her father, and so she tries to kill it. Donna walks into Laura's house to find her friend very dressed up, drinking and smoking. 'Where are you going? 'Nowhere fast, and you're not coming.'"(171)

And what it is I am trying to kill by partying so hard so often, I don't know. I am not even sure that I am trying to kill something, but Greil Marcus's analysis of this series and Laura Palmer's behavior struck me as really spot on, and I looked for parallels in my own life. If I am Laura Palmer, leading a respectable life to my co-workers, and getting totally obliterated every single night, what is the purpose? And the purpose for me is clear: it is the distinction between the two, that one is slightly boring, and so the fun that needs to be had needs to be that much more fun to compensate for those hours of boringness lived - that really I am just trying to live and get as much out of it as possible.

And all of this was in my mind last night, layers upon layers of meanings and past associations, all of it blurry because of the whiskey and duster, but layers which probably would not have even been glimpsed at all otherwise. I get these hints of things in these moments that I wish I could grasp and sometimes feel like I am close to being able to. And this girl in the hall, innocent seeming, screaming her head off, was recalled today, was relived as I read about Laura Palmer screaming.

Laura Palmer's "scream is so big, so all-consuming, that it's less that the scream is part of the girl you're watching than that she is part of the scream. It exists whether she does or not. It's a force that finds its host," (178). Perhaps my discomfort, my shock, at the screaming last night lied in this reason, that the scream seemed part of something else, some other scene, some other body.

let's hear it for white people

There is a really funny, really biting scene in Dreamgirls, where the Dreams record a version of "Cadillac Car," only to have it covered by a white group that totally neuters the song of any of its original soul, and which of course is the version that gets picked up by radio. I can't help but think of that as I was looking for the Marvelettes' version of "Please Mr. Postman" on YouTube, there being one version, and there being so many versions of the Carpenters' cover of it as well as The Beatles' cover of the song. The difference between the Marvelettes version and the Carpenters version is that exact same scene from Dreamgirls. The Carpenters version is so awful, so painfully white. The Beatles version is good and understands the song, that the song is a painful one, and it is supposed to be a crazed lament.

deliver the letter - the sooner, the better

Out of all the modern conveniences, the one that gives the most pleasure day in and day out, the one that I would be really sad about the lack of were I suddenly warped back in time a couple of centuries, is modern plumbing and water boilers - the ability to take a hot shower. Standing under a shower head and just being lost in pleasure, in feeling like you are waking up, cleansing yourself of things, is a pleasure that is unequaled in its consistency. There are surely things that give more pleasure, but not so every single day. The proof of how important this thing is lies in how irritable I get (and presumably you also) when there is no hot water.

Fairly hungover, waking up sometime past noon, I spent so long in that hot shower, feeling totally amazing. Just standing there, letting that hot water beat against my back, soothing that stiffness, easing me into the day.

The hungoverness of earlier today is not surprising, but thanks of course to that hot shower, to some coffee, and to Jill Scott I am again feeling alive. I drank a large amount of beer last night, got stoned, did some duster, and then drank more beer at this party we were at, finding cans of beer left around and drinking them, so many of them. JD from Le Tigre was djing at Glasslands, and man oh man, that playlist was made for me. I lost my mind a couple of times, a couple of my very favorite songs were played, songs which are normally not played at dance parties. Not enough oldies are played at dance parties, which I think is stupid, because some of these songs are more rocking, more emotional than anything with crazy hard bass lines, which I love also, and which I danced to there also, but I did not lose my mind so much for those songs as for The Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman." I don't know if you know how totally mind bogglingly amazing this song is and how heartbreaking, but if you don't, I suggest you download it. Also played were Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Streets," Aretha Franklin's "Think," and Paul Simon's "Call Me Al." I can't think of the last time I went to a dance party and could so clearly remember what songs were played the day after the party.

The laundromat never found my jeans. Tomorrow, a trip might be made to the Herald Square Forever 21 to see if they still have those jeans. I am going to eat some food and then try to apply to a bunch of jobs this evening. I have a "preliminary job interview" (not sure what that means) on Thursday. I have lots of dreams lately.

roebling hall

I could claim it was because of all the alcohol I had drank, not the least of which was a nice amount of Johnny Walker Blue Label, or I could claim that it was because I was with only one person instead of fifteen and was able to take things in - there are a lot of things that I could cite - but the truth of the matter is that this art was just so good that it could have no other effect than to strike me, to make me pause and feel something close to what I felt when stoned out of my mind the other night - disparate pieces joining, coming together, unifying, inchoate things stated, planets aligning.

At Roebling Hall, there is this installation piece by Robert Chambers, and this is the thing I am talking about, the thing that basically blew my mind. Sometimes you encounter things at the right moment, like say you are at a bar all night and things just aren't going your way, no one is noticing you and you wonder why it is you even bother, why you came out, and then there is that one boy, who, even in your depressed state, somehow notices something in you, or perhaps on the surface of you (if we were to be totally truthful), and smiles at you, and that smile at that time has more meaning than it would on some other night, a night when the world was yours and every boy smiled at you, this one just one amongst a crowd. And it was something similar, a matter of timing, the last thing seen in the night, and man, oh man, how amazing this room was.

Toward the front of the room is a light box projecting light onto the far end of the room, slowly shifting from reds to purples to whites, creating a nice atmospheric mood on the far wall, a wall on which in the middle hangs a spare wooden recliner, which stretched out as it is you notice how much the form resembles that of a human, the basic outlines, the shape, the same. And then the recliner starts to recline and shift, this occurring as the colors are still changing, and just as I would be hard pressed to tell you the amazing thoughts I had while stoned the other night, so too I would be hard pressed to even begin to try to tell you why I found this piece so affecting and what exactly it was that the movement of the chair, the spareness of the room, and the shifting of the light were able to inspire in me.

And then because, again, there was timing and not only that by the presence of a smiling cute boy, the presence of really good work hanging on gallery walls, I again was overwhelmed, this time by the photographs on display by Simon Lee of people on public transportation. I was incredibly happy and so happy to be there in this room with at least one person I cared about and potentially future ones, and was so happy to be at this point after my sour mood just a couple hours early, a sourness very well justified.

The sourness was brought on by picking up my laundry from the laundromat today, where I had had them wash it because I was too lazy to do it myself, and paid the price for that laziness, paid the price with my favorite pair of jeans in this generally sad world. The jeans I wear every single day, gray women's jeans bought from Forever 21, were not in the laundry I picked up from the laundromat. I went back and they were not there and I was so upset about it and still would be if I thought about it again, rehashed that mental state for the benefit of my diary, but I am not going to because I am feeling pretty good for the most part and Sally Shapiro is playing on my speakers, just as she has been nonstop for the past couple of days, and I love some things so much, my own self and my ability to do things with it, go here or there, and I might take myself somewhere with this sad music playing, might and probably will lie in my bed and think dirty thoughts about this person, that person, but more than anyone my own person.

I went over to this guy's house last night that I see occasionally. He offered me pot and I jumped at the offer, looking to get stoned out of my mind. I kept smoking from this joint even after we had made our way into his bedroom, as we were undressing, wanting to be totally lost and afraid that this was not very good pot of his. And I have no idea if it was or not, the amount I smoked enough of any weed to make me totally lost. He had some techno music playing and a porn playing. He sucked my dick and that, the movements of his mouth, the beats in the music and the porno scene on his television all combined so lovely, as if they were working in sync. And I joined this harmonious rhythm of perversity, totally lost in this physical action and getting more and more turned on by what was happening on his television screen. Sex while stoned, God, fuck God, so amazing it is.

The porn was of the Eastern European variety, the genre he normally plays while I am over, and which I appreciate since I love the look of these boys. The scene that was occurring on screen was too perfect and I could not believe how excellent it was, how it was made for me, that the director obviously shared the same sexual tastes that I did. The main boy in the scene contained elements from so many boys I am and have been obsessed with, pieces of all my sexual fantasies and obsessions assembled seamlessly in the form of this Eastern European boy with a big dick getting head from another lovely boy. The two boys were in these tight swim trunks, which turn me on so much. They were filmed outdoors, another check. And then they were wearing these cute sandals throughout the scene, and this might have been the thing that made this scene seem too perfect to me. My fetish for cute feet in sandals, something that was really strong in high school and has since dwindled to where I don't care either way, was brought back to the surface in a major way, perhaps because of the pot, perhaps because this scene was so hot, and I recalled the feet of some boys that I used to be obsessed with in high school and they were this person's feet, this boy in the video. He was they; they, he. And God, this scene made me so hot, like nothing else has come close to in so long, perhaps ever. I cannot think of the last time I have made so much pleasurable noise. Just recalling these details, conjuring that scene again in its hazy recalled detail, is turning me on.

After I left his house, I walked up to Chelsea to meet some friends. The night was beautiful, the streets were fairly empty, and I kept on trying to figure out why, then kept remembering that it was somewhat late and somewhat cold, being oblivious of time and temperature, and I remembered some other things, so many things.

marcus and gladwell, writers of nonsense

Last night, I was only mildly tipsy on red wine, but still tipsy enough to doubt my cognitive abilities. I read an awful sentence that made no sense in Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice and I told myself to reread it tomorrow (now today) to see if it made sense then. It does not. It is a totally awful sentence that makes not a lick of sense. Marcus is a big fan of long dashes, as are many writers unable to construct coherent sentences, but even with that long dash this sentence still makes no sense:

"The American's personal drama must always become American—and in this sense, while everything that matters is secret, can never really be known even to those who carry the secrets, nothing is private." (100)

Marcus's writing is always a bit messy, but normally it is messy and somehow coheres into something approaching brilliance. This book, so far, is just messy. It opens with a discussion of American prophecy, tracing a line from John Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr. That opening section isn't so bad, but really doesn't say anything of note, something that hasn't been said before. Then the next section is a huge section on Philip Roth's American trilogy that is mainly just quotes from those novels. The big problem though is that Marcus fails to effectively tie this chapter into what is presumably his theme about American prophecy.

The next section, which I am in right now, is about David Lynch's Lost Highway, and this section is a lot better than what preceded it, which is good and also a bit sad, because the main reason I got this book was to read Marcus's analysis of my favorite writer, Roth, the analysis which was more than a little disappointing, not to mention that it included that terrible sentence quoted above that says a lot and signifies nothing.

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Yesterday, I also read Malcolm Gladwell's piece on Enron, which is totally maddening. It reads like a parody of Gladwell's style: simplifying things with neat little systems, in this case mysteries versus puzzles, and tying in totally unrelated things to add parallels to your argument, in this case intelligence work on Nazi missile plans. Through all this nonsense, he obfuscates what it is a clear cut case of wrongdoing, the Enron debacle. Who the fuck cares if it's a mystery or a puzzle? Irrelevant! I was beginning to enjoy Malcolm Gladwell, but this article and its sympathetic nonsense toward Enron make me doubt Gladwell.

Maud Newton does a much better job of verbalizing her dislike of this article than I am able to muster at this time. That is because I need to go out the door to possibly see a band, possibly go to a gay sports bar, and definitely get out of the house, interact with some human beings.

In this week's New Yorker, there is a really nice piece by David Denby about the future of film. I am in love with this sentence, which I have italicized in context:

And there never was a golden age in which art or great entertainment poured unremittingly from the studio gates. The majority of movies at any time are junk. From 1953, we remember “From Here to Eternity” and “The Band Wagon” and maybe “The Big Heat,” but not “The Redhead from Wyoming” or “Guerrilla Girl.” For most people, memory itself is a kind of revival house in which only the most vivid things survive.

That sentence really struck me when I read it earlier today, one, for the cleverness of the analogy and, two, for the truth of the statement. I was reading this magazine, lying on my back on moist grass on a hill in Central Park today. I was lying on this hill in just a t-shirt, my head propped up by my sweatshirt, the sweatshirt not being used since it was absurdly seventy degrees today, about forty degree warmer than it should be this time of year.

After reading for a couple hours and once the sun had lowered enough so that it was no longer so warm, I put on my sweatshirt and wandered through Central Park, through the Ramble, past the Boathouse, through Bethesda Terrace, and to the Mall. The sky was absurdly gorgeous at this point with the lowering sun and this promenade has a ceiling of twisting, barren American elms. Most of today, I was still feeling a little brain dead from having drank so much last evening and this stupor was the perfect mood in which to encounter this scene. I marvelled at these twisting branches, leaveless and stretched before the blue, pink, and gold sky of late afternoon, with a slowness and an earnestness that I do not think would have been allowed under my normal caffeinated speedy state, oddly the lack of hyper-consciousness the thing that enabled a consciousness of this scene. These tree branches were saying everything to me. I had Van Morrisson playing on my headphones and he was saying stuff also, and though he moved me incredibly so, he still did not do so as much as these branches. In that revival house, memory, this is what survives from today, not all the other sights, so many in total, that constituted today and every day, but these tree branches. Those, and the puzzling juxtaposition of a Shakespeare statue and a Columbus statue anchoring the base of the Mall, the two of them placed facing across from each other.

Really, I did not think that I would ever be able to top the horribleness of New Year's two years ago, where I was at some horrible silent meditation thing before, to avoid a panic attack, I ran out into the street, to spend New Year's alone, and then to have a psychic tell me I was going to be alone my whole life and that I was a woman trapped in a man's body. Though that was particular horrible, I think last night might actually win.

I had been feeling nauseous all day long, presumably from a taco I had eaten the night before from a taco truck. I had been lying down in bed most of the day, trying to feel better, when around six o'clock, the fun really started. I had to run to the bathroom to make it in time, and luckily did, and vomited and vomited and vomited, thinking that I had thrown up everything in my stomach. But, no, of course not. An hour later, I wasn't even able to make it to the bathroom in time, but luckily I put a mixing bowl next to my bed for this fear. It's a decent sized mixing bowl and I filled up the entire thing with vomit. I had such a headache and was feeling so dehydrated and I kept on trying to drink liquids but this only increased the frequency of throwing up to about every half hour or fifteen minutes. This went on all night long until from ten to midnight, there was no puking. But shortly after 2007 arrived, there was more puking. And then none until two. And since two, none. I hope that I don't throw up anymore today. I really cannot handle it. I haven't eaten food since lunchtime yesterday and I am pretty hungry, but so nervous about upsetting the volcano that is my stomach. There were many periods last night when I was very convinced that it would be better to be dead than to have to deal with this feeling. I cannot remember ever having felt so physically terrible in my entire life.

And, of course, this would have to happen on New Year's Eve, which I had been looking forward to all week, looking forward to interacting with the rest of the world, the one night that everyone goes out and parties, all these faces you normally never see, all happy about a new year.

This morning, I woke up to a phone call from my bank, which was concerned about recent activity on my account, and it appears that somehow, even though I have my card on me, that someone was using my debit card to pay for gas in random parts of Brooklyn. Happy New Year!