For the past several nights I have been sleeping in the East Village. As I type this diary entry, I am sitting on the twin-sized bed in my tiny bedroom, which is right against a window looking out on to East 7th Street. There is a tree outside my window and I can see the branches move in the wind, and can feel comfortable knowing that I am not in that cold wind, but inside my new place of residence. On my window ledge sits an amaryllis plant which has yet to flower and which was brought over as a housewarming gift by Diego last evening. It was such a sweet and unexpected gesture, especially coming from him, and especially after a weekend spent moving shit, having asked friends to help me out and them not really doing so. I look at this plant though and I like it a lot and wish I could like it more, wish that I could think of it as sweetly as I sort of am anyway, think of it as this sweet gesture from a boy I love.

When he came over yesterday, I wanted him to be naked with me in my bed, wanted things to be what they aren't. We talked about how our lives were going and during a lull, I asked him what else was going on in his life. He said that he was in a relationship now. I kind of knew this already but had yet to hear him say so, for him to make more clear that he had moved on. I felt really stupid that I hadn't, that I liked this boy, that I had had unreal expectations for him coming over, that those expectations were now clearly not going to be met, that I would be disappointed, and that I was not this boy - a swirl of stuff really, and my mood crashed as soon as he said this. He asked if he should go and I didn't say, "Yes, please," like I wanted to, instead tried to play it like the non-crazy person and tried to converse with him normally. I was unable to. I told him that I was really sad and at some point he left. There is a plant on my windowsill, a flower that I am supposed to water and take care of, and it is something I am going to see all the time, and all those times I will probably think about this boy, and so I am not sure I necessarily like this flower, wish that I could like it as much as I actually do.

Yesterday, I ran into this guy I had gone on a kind-of date with once, and he was reading a book about meditation, and he told me about his meditation practice, done as soon he woke up each day, before showering, before eating, before anything, and how much the practice had centered him, prepared him for each day, allowing him to be aware of himself, of what's real, and what's bullshit. It sounded really nice and I thought then how I should try something similar. I often think such things when people talk about things they are into, things benefiting their lives; rarely though do I follow through on such desires, the desires passing whims forgotten soon after, a song played, The Ikettes' "I'm Blue" instead holding my attention.

That song came on last night while I was hanging out with Diego and how apt I thought, how fucking apt.

I moved the rest of my shit out of my apartment yesterday with Gabriel. We lugged it to the thrift store by my house and threw the rest in the trash. I was glad for the help, really glad. I felt a bit sad about leaving the place, about the circumstances of my leaving, remembering again how much a friend proved to be not one, thinking human relationships are generally all shit. I left my keys on the table and didn't say goodbye to Niki, never really want to say anything to her ever again. I am quite good at ending certain things with people and yet with others cannot seem to do so for the life of me, even knowing the score, how the game is rigged, and which team is going to win, still keep betting it all on the losing team.

It's okay and I am, am feeling quite good about things. I am alive and in this city full of lovely people and I don't have to talk to a one of them and could talk to all of them, and it is all there and I am happy to be there also. I live in one of the most lovely neighborhoods in the most amazing city on this planet and am working at a great job and will only be working four days a week and things are actually going so fucking amazing, and and and -

I am realizing how late it is in the year finally, the temperatures having finally dropped to the bitter windy cold that normally marks this time of year, the warm early fall temperatures of sixties and fifties fading, November now feeling like November.

I went to IKEA tonight and nearly lost it. I felt weird about being there but needed a narrow bookcase and a small desk for my room and wanted it then, did not want to scavenge countless stores and look at pricey things that weren't the size I needed. It was depressing, the store, reminded me of the one I went to in Northern Virginia, in the suburbs, the one I would go to with my mom after driving on the highway and then parking in a giant mall parking lot. I remembered having to walk through this maze of dioramas of perfect little rooms, so well furnished, and it was all shit, all numbers next to these boring lives that I guess I am aspiring to now, or feeling like I was in that moment, and writing down the aisle and number where I can find this bookshelf, where I can purchase my unhappiness. I wanted to hurry up and get to where I could pick up the furniture but kept on having to walk and walk through the maze of imaginary rooms I was finding myself longing for, and I felt crazy, felt the lure of being an American consumer start to hypnotize me with its song. I needed to get out of there, but I ended up passing tea candles I wanted to buy, 100 for only four dollars or so, and wine glasses and lamps. I had to catch my breath and tell myself to get out of the store, that I didn't want to be a headline in The Onion: Man Has Panic Attack In Ikea; Medics Called to Scene to Subdue An Extreme Case of Consumerism Anxiety. Or something like that. The lights were so bright. I got myself together, calmed down, did not want to be some headline, some crazy person freaking out in IKEA, and I bought my shit, arranged to have it delivered and left.

Tomorrow evening, the packages will be delivered to my new East Village place of residence, what I call the gay boardinghouse, what my coworkers jokingly call, and which I am realize may in some ways be true, a halfway house, them all a bit more bougie than me. And I have some anxiety now because I am working full-time and getting paid really well and have disposable income available to me so that I can make purchases at IKEA and arrange to have them delivered, and I am away that this is short term probably there, that house, six months or so, that I still think I am going to move into my own apartment, but now have more ambitious dreams residence wise, and those, those are counterbalanced with nightmares, worries about the onset of adulthood finally here at 27 for me, a steady job and a place not as far away, and talking about different things and with different people.

And I am trying to hold on to some things, but everything seems up for grabs right now. And I am trimming down my belongings, getting rid of a nice chunk of books, deciding which I actually need, which are worthy of taking up space in a small room, and which are just filler, just things that sit there and which mean nothing to me, texts that I have and probably never will have a relationship with.

You have to decide what to keep and what to get rid of.

I slept with Diego last night and that is part of it, part of what is making me feel better. I hadn't had sex in a while and so it was nice to have this boy in my bed, to get stoned with him while sitting on my bed at four something in the morning, having just devoured some Little Debbie brownies. We woke up this morning and got off a couple of times before he left and before I left shortly thereafter to go look at apartments. The other part what is making me feel better, feel pretty damn excellent actually despite the blistery wind, is that I now have a set of keys to a room in the East Village. I am going to live in what is basically a gay boardinghouse just a couple of doors away from Tompkins Square Park. The guy that runs it is humorous old pervert, who kept on making sex jokes the entire time was there, and who hosts sex parties every Thursday night in the basement. It is a boardinghouse setup with a bunch of rooms, bathrooms on each floor, and a shared kitchen. There are some downsides, one being the size of the room. It is small, but for the price and the location I don't care. There also isn't a stove here and you are supposed to store your food in your room, which also is something I can live with since I don't cook all that often now. I am on the fourth floor and have a window that looks out on to trees and there is cable in every room with oodles of channels and everyone seems so nice and I am going to live in fucking Manhattan and I am so fucking excited. I can't believe this happened today. I was on my way to look at some studio in Bushwick when this guy called and so I went over to look at the place and wanted it as soon as I saw it, thankfully had my checkbook with me, and now I live there! I am going to move my stuff out of here over the next week and hopefully be residing there my next weekend. So excited!

I had just recently been able to stop myself from nodding off, comfortable in my seat, warm after walking around in the cold all day, and so quite a bit tired, when I started to notice the little old lady seated next to me nodding off hardcore, practically asleep in my lap, so bent over she was, and I wanted to giggle, did do so, kept having to bite my tongue because it was quiet and everyone was taking in the things being said so seriously, this being a Serious talk, and so I bit my tongue and kept my giggles to myself, woke myself up this way, and began to listen to the talk, this serious thing, that I had come to hear, a discussion between Derek Walcott and Tom Stoppard on art and power at CUNY.

Both had interesting things to say, though it wasn't much of a discussion, and was quite unfocused, the moderator doing a terrible job and failing to shape the discussion or even help define the terms being discussed, vague ideas themselves, that being art and power, and so it was vague talk about undefined concepts, and so not terribly that thrilling. It was quite a joy though to get to see Tom Stoppard and listen to the way his mind worked as he mentally thought through some issues and verbalized them in really clever ways, in nice language.

Earlier this day, I had spent walking around my neighborhood, looking for For Rent signs, and calling up numbers talking to people about numbers, how many bedrooms, how much, addresses. There were few leads and there are still three or so weeks until the point at which I need to be out of here, and so there is time still, a bit of it.

Surely thoughts of this were part of why I was distracted a bit earlier during this talk and began to nod off. There were thoughts of other things and are still, this season and the physical landscape, shifting in slight and incredible ways, play a large part I believe in these expansive thoughts. In there also is the very real fact that I will be residing somewhere else soon, that I will have potentially a new neighborhood, and things, my very way of living, will be new and different. There is also the change in my relationship status, those leaves having fallen early, a month or so ago, and yet me, still trying to throw them back at the branches, hoping the branches will take them back and tell them that fall has not arrived yet, that it was a mistake, that there shall be no autumn ever, only an endless summer. And the branches have not, they can not, that fall is here.

And this weekend, I saw Diego at Mr. Black's, its opening night, Justin having performed, me having gotten into an argument with Gabriel, and me so excited to see Diego, hoping for sex, something else also clearly, and my excitement dipped quite a bit, crashed honestly, when I saw him with his new romantic interest. I felt stupid, really stupid, for thinking that the seasons would rewind themselves, that autumn had in fact not occurred, was never going to, was only a myth, dated religious dogma like geocentric models of the universe.

There is the fear of death in me. There is the longing for ends to never occur, that if they can here now, then they can later, will, that there is an end to it all. It terrifies me so much. This terror brings about such loneliness in me. The auditorium was packed with people during this talk tonight and I didn't know who they were, probably never will, never could, even had we been introduced. I look at people and pass over their faces, not able to recognize them, my brain distracted by other faces, those in my memory, of a few boys, and I look for them down every street I walk and don't see them but also don't see the other faces, too busy looking for these several.

And that probably wouldn't make me happy. It would at times, those in bed, and it wouldn't at others, and it would all be yet another way of denying the existence of these seasons, of mitigating my fear of them and of dying with the comfort of another body, something to make reality something else, something bearable and potentially, if I am lucky, enjoyable. And that's all bullshit today because these thoughts are willed distractions from the watermelon porn I need to be making and the books I need to be writing. And my tooth hurts, the one that got the filling, and I think the dentist did something wrong, and I feel where a piece of my tooth used to be, my body, and where it is not; a piece of me that was present, no longer; my body slowly dying.

Last night, people lost their minds on these streets of New York City. Every place, every bar, you walked by, people were watching the election coverage, everyone on the same team, everyone so fucking happy. It was such a beautiful sight. I am so glad that it is over and that soon the years of George Bush will soon be over. A person of color was elected to the highest office in this land. That is amazing. You can look at the portraits of all the presidents - I remember doing this in US History class, their portraits all lined up on several facing pages, them all old white men - and here is a break from that, a change, a dark face, still a man, but not a white one. And that is a staggering change that, a couple of years ago, I would have said was not going to happen anytime soon. Was everyone crying last night? Talking to my co-workers today, so many people mentioned how they bawled their eyes out last night. Catharsis, realizing that it is not as fucked up as it sometimes seems, that there is potential, that change can occur, that we can bring it about. What a beautiful fucking day it was.

And, yes, yesterday, I got two fillings, leaving half of my face numb with novacaine all throughout the celebrations, and yes I still don't know where I am going to live, and yes I may have poison ivy, and yes I am often lonely, and yes to so many things, but also yes to the fact that I was witness to and a participant (by voting) in one of the most beautiful moments of this two hundred some year old experiment. It really is so fucking incredible and inspiring. And you realize how much so, in case you forgot or weren't able to concieve, when you see Jesse Jackson crying nonstop, when you hear people from the civil rights era talk about what this means to them, when today my (black) boss told me how his nephew was sobbing his eyes out last night and how he, my boss, out-sobbed his nephew, that things we were told weren't possible are, that things we were told about our own potential can be shown for the bullshit it is. So fucking awesome.

Defend Your Porn Shops, Defend New York

New York City is continuing its war against gay people and against sex. While Proposition K, decriminalizing sex work, has a good chance of passing tomorrow in San Francisco, here in New York, police are harassing customers of gay porn stores, entrapping them in prostitution charges, people that are not sex workers charged with being so. It is so incredibly fucked-up and makes me seethe with rage toward the powers that be in this city and how they are reshaping this city in terrible ways. What I am talking about is the excellent cover story of this week's Gay City News, which details a series of arrests that have occurred at Blue Door Video in the East Village, many customers being entrapped in prostitution stings. It is fucking outrageous that our police resources, our public dollars, are being directed in this effort to stigmatize and intimidate patrons of porn stores, mainly of course gay porn stores. I patronize gay porn stores and I have the right to do so, want to be able to continue to do so, don't want these places closed for fictitious violations and offenses, don't want to see another Wachovia or Chase or Bank of America branch where something useful actually was. And maybe you moved to New York for the same reason I did, to escape all this bullshit and to live somewhere that had life, that wasn't stupid suburban bullshit on every fucking corner. And maybe if that's the case, you should tell your elected officials to back the fuck off of your shit. Contact City Council here or the mayor here.

And this is on the day where stupid Bloomberg signed the bill overriding the term limits that voters enacted by referendum. I think term limits are stupid (that that is what elections are for), but think that if voters vote for them, then those same voters should vote to get rid of them. It makes me so angry how the process of overturning this was done, so angry with the mayor and with the City Council. It is all so dirty.

Spring/Forward, Fall/Back

I am bored, very bored, and hungover, or telling myself I am hungover to somehow excuse the being bored on my part, to make sense of it and I don’t know if I can, am not sure what it would be to ever make sense, because honestly I have never done such a thing, this making sense thing, and so it is November now, November 2nd, and some years ago on this day my father died. Yesterday was the Day of the Dead. Tomorrow is my sister’s birthday, the anniversary of the start of her life, and I have yet to get her a gift to commemorate this thing, am not sure what I should get. But were I sure about that, then that would be surprising, as these days I am sure about so incredibly little.

And is that true? Or is it just a pose, just a way of writing something and having it sound interesting, dramatic?

This day has been spent in a fog. I have masturbated, cleaned, masturbated, eaten, and masturbated some more – one of those days when my worst impulses take over, when there is the desire to do something but not the will to, namely writing, and so to distract myself from that short falling, I take my dick in my hand and think about my friends naked and recall certain things.

I called Diego earlier today during one of these masturbation sessions and asked him what he was doing later, asked him this because I wanted him to fuck me while wearing this pair of combat boots I saw him in the other day, told him this on the phone. And he has to work so it is not happening, but seemingly will soon, maybe even later this evening. And I have been on Manhunt and on the M4M section of Craigslist and my mind circles back again and again to sex as a distraction from thinking about writing, this day all to myself, no commitments, my roommate gone, and me having declared that today would be a productive writing day, and instead it has been anything but that. Here I am, trying to make up for lost time, writing instead about how I haven’t been writing.

I have been reading this Queer Zines book and it is really fantastic and has me inspired to make small things, first off this NY Travel Guide that I have been dreaming of for the past couple months, to make it even dirtier than originally conceived. And so I am going to drink more coffee, maybe jerk off some more, play some loud music until I completely lose my mind, write a couple travel guide entries, and then maybe get fucked by a hot guy wearing just a pair of combat boots. I have had this fantasy for a while, thought about it when I first starting seeing Diego, and it was only the other day, after we had had sex and his boots were lying on the floor, only now that we are no longer together, and now that I have confessed dirtier things to him, that I told him I wanted him to wear them and fuck me. They are from an Army Navy surplus store, cost him twenty dollars, and he believes, for reasons I am not sure and which I find doubtful, that they are the boots of a dead soldier.