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.