to be born again

The sun is shining fantastically. The sky is blue and the white clouds gliding along underneath that dome are doing so at the pace of a parade of homecoming troops, gloating in their victory and taking their time walking, enjoying the adulation, enjoying being home.

I am listening to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. Perhaps that says it all. It probably does but I will add anyways that I am feeling really good, that I am drinking coffee, and that I am about to go join this sky, am about to head off to yoga and to wanderings, here, there, wherever.

I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

For the second time, yoga class has ended with this quote being read. Sweaty, exhausted, and vulnerable from just doing an hour of yoga, this Rilke quote is perfect, making you want to carry the calm and open feeling of yoga out into the world, making you realize that all of the things going on in your life, those things and relationships with people that consume your thoughts and energies, are better left unpicked at, left to just be what they may.

The weekend is coming to a close and it hasn't been everything I have wanted but has been things I did not necessarily want, did not expect, and so their happening was all the more nice. I had a slightly awkward but really lovely night sleeping next to Diego. I got stoned today and looked at old Italian paintings at the Met, being totally overwhelmed by much of it, overwhelmed in the good way, in the way that sometimes things are just so beautiful that it overwhelms one. I watched the sun set in a snow covered Central Park with Niki. There was that aforementioned yoga, which was a great class and put me into this really great mood that I am in now. Also putting me in this great mood was the sex I just had with this john. After a weekend of seeing terrible people and not being into the sex, being turned off and having to work hard to get into situations, it was so amazing to see this guy I saw tonight. It was my second time seeing him.

There was no talk to turn me off. He was naked and in the dark when I got there, waiting, a submissive gym-bunny bottom. I fucked him and have never had such a hot time fucking someone, getting really into it, him getting really into it also, me not wanting it to end, not letting it for a while. The yoga class felt like it was continuing, this beautiful physical exertion, stretching, and bending being centered in breath. Centered in that and hot role playing. I left his house dripping with sweat, so happy.

More of Calvino was read on this ride home. That also made me so happy. So did the orange juice I drank when I got home.

play list play

"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead . . ."

"Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desired, feared, possible, or impossible," Ludmilla says. "Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be . . ." (72)

God, how fucking beautiful both of those ideas of reading are, how true! Italo Calvino's If on a winter night's a traveler, despite pushing me more and more away by jumping narratives and genres every other chapter, is drawing me more and more toward it. There are some writers that you know you should have read, should be reading, and sometimes when you read them, you realize that you were right to not be reading them, that it was overblown, not for you. Calvino, however, is turning out to be one of those names I am wishing I would have read earlier. It is very clear that David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas must have been influenced by this novel and I am wondering how much better my reading of that novel would have been I had read this stuff long ago.

Parts of the novel are a bit much in their meta-ness and there are times when the direct addresses to me, the reader, seem a little forceful, a little hostile, crossing a barrier that I like to keep between myself and a text. But by jumping around between these various narratives and framing them through two readers a lot is being said about what it means to read and also what it means to write. I am enjoying this book far more than I had thought I would.

The sun is shining very brightly, creating lovely shadows in my kitchen. Last night, I kept waking up because I knew I had to wake up early this morning, and the full moon was also casting brilliant shadows in my kitchen. Every time I got up to pee, I was amazed by how much light the moon was shining into my kitchen. I sat on the roof outside this kitchen for a while last night watching that moon when it was not full, when it was not shining, when it was a total eclipse, and the sight was very beautiful and made me feel very lonely, aware of my precarious and slight position in this large universe of ours.

I had to wake up early this morning to go meet this guy I have seen a few times. I saw him at his hotel in Times Square, fucked him, and then listened to him talk pretty much nonstop for a couple of hours. The man seems to be falling apart at the seams. He is pretty crazy. The way he talks, nonstop and without even a need for me to actually be listening, is the clearest sign. The things he says are other signs. And his self-destructive behavior by blowing through his money on hustlers and drugs yet another sign. Since there was no lull in his monologue, I finally had to make an abrupt departure, got on the train, and read more of this book.

In two weeks time I am going to London. I will be there March 6-21 and I am quite excited. I spent hours yesterday looking at this Time Out book, daydreaming, thinking of things I wanted to see, and getting really giddy. I am drinking some really good coffee right now and that is making me giddy all over again. Maybe you want to get giddy also - well, let me share with you some songs that sort of make me lose my shit lately:

Last night, walking to Diego's house, clouds were shrouding the Chrysler Building, its beautiful lit curves visible through the fog. This city that sometimes seems so removed from the physical reality of this planet, of nature, connected with it last night in a way that seemed to me then, and still so in recollection, particularly beautiful.

Early this afternoon, I went to an apartment in Hell's Kitchen. It was on the 45th floor of the building, up in the clouds, the view astounding. The clouds were already doing something interesting today, were big and massive in a way that reminded me of the clouds in Florida, awesome things that took up the whole horizon sometimes. From the window there, I could see all of lower Manhattan and these massive clouds gliding above the Hudson River.

The scene in the apartment was weird. It was an escort and an old man, the old man probably still high from the night before, seemingly barely there. The other escort, really sexy thing who I was very glad to fool around with and to get paid for doing so, was aware of the older man's cluelessness, had seemingly dealt with him many times before. He told me just to make it look like I was fucking him, to not actually penetrate him, and that was all we had to do, that the guy paying us wouldn't know. So me and this hot boy fooled around in bed while the older man putzed about the bedroom, looking at us, going out to the living room (probably to do more drugs), and then coming back to watch some more. We put on a show, he on top of me and really close to my body, and we pantomimed fucking, this guy watching us none the wiser.

I got dressed, admiring the apartment and its view, made chit chat with these two, and felt weird about the encounter I was about to depart.

The clouds, beautiful things, and the warm weather kept me outside. I bought a salad and sat in a park to eat it. I could see the black mass of sky moving in from New Jersey and it seemed that I could finish the salad before those clouds made it to me. They were quick though, sneaky things, and a few bites into my salad the rain came down. There was a bit of sadness about not being able to finish my lunch outside but sometimes you have to bow to things so awesome, those clouds today being such things, such massive, humbling things that they are allowed to inconvenience me.

"Keep dancing," he said. He being Diego, the boy I really like a lot. I had just gotten off of the phone, having a terrible conversation with one friend, and so this conversation, this very positive one with this super nice boy, came at such a great time. That was Diego's advice - to keep dancing. And I am not going to use quotation marks here because I can't recall it verbatim, but he followed it by saying something like: So it may be a remix. Maybe it's a remix of a Rhianna song and it's no good, but just keep dancing anyway.

This advice made me like him so much more. He is so level-headed in ways that totally surprise me, so good. I am going to see him shortly and this mitigates to some degree the regret I have had all day about not meeting up with him last night because I got too stoned and fell asleep.

I have seen a couple plays this weekend, The Play About the Naked Guy and The Adding Machine. I saw the feminist art show that opened at PS1 today, saw two bands play at that opening today, Disband and IUD. I am reading Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. I don't know if any of those mean nearly as much as a long look I exchanged with Diego the other night. I understood more about human beings and life in that moment then I did during the consumption of any of the aforementioned cultural products.

People were on stage reading sex stories, some of them good, some of them not good, and I was sitting there with a boy I have been having sex with lately, Diego. He came to the reading late, came up behind me and leaned over to kiss me, and that gesture made me really happy, made this boy seem even cuter. He was wearing a cute outfit and is letting stubble grow in, drawing more attention to his big eyes and big lips. I was smitten. We sat next to each other, touching each other, leaning on one another, and I tried to get comfortable with this comfort, with just giving in to a nice moment and not wondering to what extent he likes me and how these gestures may reveal that and also not worrying, or trying not to, about how much I like him.

After the reading, I got a call from a john. And had I not been so broke then, I would have told the john I was busy, would have instead continued uninterrupted in these nice moments with this nice boy. But I was broke then and I went to go see the john, feeling terrible when I told Diego I was leaving, seeing how I had disrupted something nice and seeing a bit of disappointment in his face. I apologized, told him I would call him afterwards, and ran off to Chelsea.

At this man's apartment, I got undressed and fooled around for a bit with this guy, getting hard, getting horny, getting into whatever sexual moment was occurring. That was interrupted though by him going to smoke more crystal meth. This would become a very tedious pattern that the next two and a half hours took on - me getting into this scene, getting hard, him excited about bottoming and running off for ten minutes to smoke more crystal meth, him coming back to me bored, me getting hard again, him running off to do more crystal meth, on and on.

The guy seemed nice but there were moments (perhaps I should admit here that I was a bit stoned) where he seemed positively demonic. He was a skinner version of John Lithgow, whiter hair and redder skin, and at times, with a drugged out intense glaze to his eyes, yanking at my dick, he seemed like Satan. He also asked me questions about my sex life, getting turned on by stories I would tell him, asking me about the last time I got fucked, about various things, hot sexual memories. And I shared these things with him, jacking off as I told them to him, him watching me, jerking me off also. But then he would always ruin these memories, these things that mean something to me, by asking, excitedly, if it was raw. Saying that if it was that good, it had to be bareback, oh yeah, definitely. And he was getting off on these stories also, but by making them something else, by exoticizing someone's race or by talking about raw sex, and it was making me annoyed, turned off, ready to go.

Doing yet more crystal, he asked me to tell him another story. I told him I couldn't think of any, lying, obviously able to think of more, but not wanting this person to be able to even glimpse these things. Perverse though these memories may be, his perversity made me very uncomfortable, tainted these things that are special to me. So I held out, not giving away any more of these special things. Rather I told him I needed to go soon. He did more crystal, he laid back on his coffee table, and I fucked him, fucked him silent, finally, his eyes closed and the chit chat ending. With my dick in him and him not talking anymore, I really enjoyed myself. Bodies are such loveable things; it is the stuff that comes out of mouths that makes them unloveable. I came, we had a drink together, I got paid a lot of money, and we kissed goodbye, the odd encounter enabled by the want of money and the possession of it over, for the moment at least, a promise on his part to call me soon. And me out the door, down the elevator, out into the street, and eager to see the man I like.

I called Diego, nervous about how he would respond, it being late and me still feeling like a dick about dipping out earlier to go do sex work. It was a bit awkward, me trying to meet up with him, and him saying we could hang out later. We said a sad goodbye and I walked toward the train feeling a little low. He called right back though and told me to come over. I skipped over to his house and he played me Spanish songs, by a someone Luis Guerra, who his mom really likes. I was so excited to be with this boy after that interaction with the methhead, was closer to feeling like I understood what matters and what it is I want from my sexual interactions with other people, that I want stuff more like this and less like that.

We woke up early this morning, the sky bluer than it has been in seemingly weeks. I said Happy Valentine's Day half-jokingly because I was afraid to say it seriously. We had sex and lay in bed for a while, me enjoying the comfort of that, enjoying the sight of the blue sky and the dark bricked sides of buildings outside his window.

The rain has been falling steadily ever since I woke up. It is a beautiful sound, mostly for its ability to inhibit other sounds, to keep all the other noises I would normally be hearing now indoors, listening to this same noise I am listening to. Yesterday, it snowed all day, light flurries throughout the day. It was probably the first real snowfall of this winter, a pretty depressing statistic. Because global warming has so altered this New York winter, I took advantage of the sadly rare sight of snow and went tramping about in it. I then got stoned, read some, took an obscenely long shower, and played badminton with Niki in the snow.

The sight of snow covering Maria Hernandez park, a fresh coat of paint, made the thing, the park, my neighborhood, my life, seem new and fresh in a very pleasant way. We slid about, chasing after the birdie we kept on volleying to the other, messing up this new coat of paint, exposing the grass in some places, sliding back and forth through the snow. I felt bad, felt that the sight I was privy to, this fresh looking snow-covered park, would not be there for other people, that they would see a trampled sight. The rain has washed away all the snow, such a short-lived thing, and so my worries, as probably usual, were all for naught.







"That world, being a world of fleeting contacts, has a great attachment to photographs, as if to lend some permanence to what is usually all too impermanent." -John Rechy, City of Night (266)

bliss

Camera-shy birds, friends of mine. Not picked up were chirping sounds and sounds of them joyfully splashing around in this puddle. I wish I could have recorded when it was a total pool party, six or so birds all splashing about, so full of joy.

From the last time it rained, there are puddles on the roof right outside my kitchen window. The sun is shining and these puddles reflect that sunlight across the walls of my kitchen, ripples of light, beautiful and evocative of the sea, marching back and forth across curtains, across the walls, and across the leaves of these plants in the window. The pleasure I get from this occurrence is immense.

The past few days are all blurring together, the result of numerous open bars and its result, excessive consumption of alcohol, of smoking pot, and of being unemployed and not having much to do, much to look forward to, other than these events, other than the open bars and parties occurring at night and which my excitement about attending is usually predicated on the hope, perhaps even the expectation, of a nice moment, of dancing and feeling something close to freedom or of meeting a nice young lad and spending the night with him. There are also a fair amount of plays thrown into the mix here, which sometimes take on the aspect of also being time-fillers, of something to put into my otherwise uncomfortably open schedule. A couple nights ago, I saw a really fantastic musical, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, which I had meant to discuss at length, and which at some future time I just may do, but there is that sun, its reflection off of rippling water, streaking across my kitchen, and that has me eager to spend a short amount of time sitting here, and perhaps more honestly other things are on my mind, last evening mainly.

I went to a bunch of gallery openings with Niki, most of them unstriking. The Juergen Teller show was striking and good, perhaps though not for great reasons, perhaps more so for its hipness, the thing that attaches itself to his work and not the work itself. I then went to a Vera Wang afterparty at Don Hill's thrown by the Misshapes and with an open vodka bar. It was a funny scene. It seemed almost retro, as if four years ago could be such a thing, that here were so many people all rocking a very particular aesthetic, one so close to description and so beyond it, and some songs played from that time, from a few years ago, and all these people seeming like they were trying to hold on to something they never entirely had in their grasp.

When the free booze ran out, we went to Julius', where a party was being thrown for something or someone, dj'ed by John Cameron Mitchell. There were some cute boys there and I was soon smitten with a particular one, a Jason, cute brown eyes and brown hair, eyes in which I seemed to or wanted to recognize something. There was that energy being exchanged through glances, an I-like-you look as we were talking. He asked me what I did. I told him. His interest quickly vanished, the look did, and I should have lied I thought, should have been more vague, should not have said sex work. I wandered throughout the bar, talking to other people, still a little stung by that fizzling with a boy I had liked, and sought out even more aggressively then some sort of sexual satisfaction, some validation. There were two more failures, two men I had been hitting on and who went home, not inviting me home with them. When Gabriel said he was leaving, I was ready to go also, and was going to walk to the train with him. I got my jacket and said goodbye to Jason, which turned into a conversation, which turned into him telling me to stay for another drink.

I told him that I could tell he had lost interest in me when I had told him what I did for money and he asked me why I did it, clearly conflicted that there was a boy he liked and yet who did something which he found objectionable. We talked a bunch, getting over that initial obstacle, talked about other things. He invited me home with him and we left, rode the PATH train out to Jersey City. We split a tuna fish sandwich in his comfortable bed, talked some, laid next to each other.

His skin was soft, his face adorable in the dimmed lighting. We kissed, took off clothes, messed around a bit, and then he fucked me. I had been wanting something like this for the past couple weeks, to really get fucked silly. His penis was amazing, was big, and that surprised me for some reason on this skinny boy, and he was good with it. I am pretty certain that it was the best anal sex I have ever received. It went on and on, him telling me a couple of times when I was getting close to orgasm to hold out, that he wanted it to last longer. There were sensations I had forgotten about.

We slept curled up in each other and jerked off when we woke up hurriedly, him having to hurry up and get to work. I cleaned up in his bathroom, using his hand soap to wash my hands, this Sparkling Peach scented soap. Afterwards I kept on smelling my hands and for years I have been chasing this scent, wanting to figure out what it was, and that I found it in his house means something. There was someone in my childhood who wore this scent - I can't even remember who, but the memory of the scent is so strong. Occasionally I will walk past someone on the street and catch a fleeting whiff of this scent, a burst of childhood memories exploding for a short time, fading with the passing scent. I have wondered for so long what this scent was and this morning I found it while washing my smelly sexdirty hands with it.

We rode the PATH train back into Manhattan together and I kept on smelling my hands, old memories so easily evoked with that scent.