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.