Every day I come home and set to work killing the flies in my apartment. Every day I kill every last one of them, the task of chasing them down, slowly stalking them, and banging them with a rolled up magazine giving me far too much pleasure - some demonstrable sense of completion, a task I set to myself done, a goal completed - my stated goals of writing however don't ask about. And every day, thinking I have successfully killed off these flies that swarm around my house, that there should be no more left to spawn more, I still find a few flying around the next day when I get home from work. I am convinced that shortly my efforts will be successful and that I will come home to a house free of flies.

I am eating lots of chickpeas and using olive oil to cook just about everything I eat. I just finished reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and am trying to alter my diet and food buying habits. I have been eating more plants, buying more of them, and trying to buy minimally processed foods. After reading some of his other work and that of many other food crusaders, the book wasn't revelatory, the argument having been made before in other venues, other articles and books, about the negative effects of industrialized food, and yet the book was still affecting, reminded me of things and explained others in interesting ways, laying out a cogent argument against the culture of nutritionism and showing how the ideology underlying it allows food processors to continually market new products containing some hyped nutrient.

Fall arrived on Thursday. I called in sick to work on Wednesday and went to the beach, the weather forecast scaring me that it may have been the last warm day of summer, certainly the last warm day of August. And perhaps it was, the air quite chilly now at night, the days having some scent of fall, an autumn breeze seeping in, feelings of nostalgia and loneliness and lovesickness all colliding in a way that they tend to with the onset of fall for me. I want to put on the Belle and Sebastian and wear long sleeve collared shirts that I can shelter my neck in from the wind bringing about these melancholy feelings. This week I have been consuming things: alcohol, lots of cigarettes, Britney Spears at MSG, Gloria Trevi, Paulina Rubio, Juanes, and Enrique Iglesias also at MSG, The September Issue, the already mentioned Pollan book, Didion's After Henry, and countless (mostly pointless) magazine articles. I am looking for distractions. I live by myself and sometimes find I don't know what to do with myself. Increasingly, I find myself longing for some sort of boyfriend figure, someone to hang out with and sleep next to often. I am killing flies.

It was while I was on the LIRR this afternoon headed to a town I had never been to before to wrestle a stranger, a man who contacted me and wanted to pay me money to wrestle him and pin him and scissor him and taunt him, that I noticed my iPhone no longer worked. This was and was not great timing. This was not great timing because my bank account is running a bit low after blowing through money in P-Town and after just purchasing tickets to see Gloria Trevi and a bunch of other Latin acts on Friday. This was not great timing because I really did not want to have to pay my overdue phone bill, quite large at this point, so I could get a stupid upgrade, and in addition to those costs there still being the cost of purchasing a new iPhone, of having to buy the more expensive 3G data plan, and on and on, a litany of costs I was beginning to add up as I futilely tried to get the touch screen to respond to my touch, it refusing, it no longer turned on by me, these the delayed effects of me cracking the screen a couple months ago. This was not great timing because I had no clue how I was going to contact this man once I got off the train since my phone did not work, since I couldn't even slide the screen to answer an incoming call, and since this person's info was stored in my phone. The only way in which this could have been considered good timing was that assuming I was somehow able to still meet up with this guy, I would have all this cash to pay my phone bill and to purchase a new phone, the thrill of the money no longer so thrilling, no longer this supplemental income to spend willy-nilly, now it was to be used for specific purchases, phone bills and such, and not say a weekend trip to Key West.

I got off the train, worried that I would be unable to find this person without being able to call him, that my trip out there had been in vain, and that I would not have enough money in my bank account tomorrow to purchase a new phone, would be incommunicado for a while, would be unable to call a boy I like say, the real consequence I was thinking of with regard to not having a phone. I walked past the line of cars waiting outside the train station hoping that this person would be waiting there, would recognize me, and would call out to me. Check, check, check. Things worked out as they seemingly do often and the guy waved at me. I hopped into his car and we were off to his suburban house.

He put on ESPN and talked to me about the Yankees.

We wrestled on his bed, a picture of a teenage boy across the room taped to his dresser mirror, looking like the photograph of a son, me imagining this as someone's dad. I was kicking this man's ass and taking some pleasure in being able to outwrestle this man about twice my size, to have him pinned so easily again and again. When we tired out we would lay on our backs, the tv talking in the background, and him asking me questions about my life, and me with just a few fibs here and there, answered him honestly, talked about my life in more articulate and sincere ways than I am able to talk about it with people I actually know. I have this ability to charm certain people, generally older men, and this man was charmed my verbal nonsense I could tell. Most of the two hours I spent with him was the two of us on our backs talking about life and me trying to work out some theory of seasonal weather being necessary for one's mental health, holding up all the crazies that come out of Florida as an example.

I took the train back home, falling asleep along the way, bored and annoyed with the talk of the people ahead of me, and waking up in Penn Station. I walked across the street and bought a travel alarm clock at Duane Reade, my phone dead to my fingers and that having served as my alarm.

There is so much going on and I am feeling more and more the desire to get it down but my time is limited that I have to do so. Work is taking up too much of my time but paying me well so that I can live in an apartment by myself and make silly purchases and eat out and go on weekend adventures. I really do want to write and really, really am determined to figure out a way to balance the two, to not lose and be past a certain point, one past this already late one, without commencing on this thing that I believe I can do very well and can bring something special to. I am inspired by the drive of some of the younger people I have met lately that are just doing doing doing it. A man on Friday night at 4 am at the Bedford stop chastised me a lot, read me in a really rude way. The conversation started off with him telling me I was sexy and I had my headphones in and wanted to keep them in, me not into him, not into anyone save for the idea of sleep and the voice of Lou Reed coming through my headphones. The man thought himself something deep and started to talk about what we do with our lives, how much we underutilize them, how I am dressed in a pretty and color-coordinated outfit and how that is what concerns me, how that is hardly enough, the wearing of cute, monochromatic outfits. All of this gleaned from me trying to ignore him and saying little. His accusations weren't entirely off and after a good ten minutes of his drunken prophecies I put in my headphones again and told him I had had enough, drew a line, declaring my own mental space, and defended myself against his accusations that I was rude to put in my headphones while he was talking to me, had to explain how it was rude of him to talk to me while I had my headphones in, that just because my interests did not align with his need for social interaction that that did not make me rude. It was an insane interaction, one that I want to sketch out more. I have been thinking about it a lot since its occurrence, thinking, like I too often do without actually doing it, how I need to change my life, to do this and that and less of that and that.

the absence of a couch, the presence of other things

I get it now, get why so many people make the trip up to Provincetown, why people like the place so much. This past weekend I went with Diego to Boston, spent a day and a half there, quickly seeing some old friends, some art, and the physical sites where this or that happened, seeing the graves of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere's house, pretty parks, and the amazing bookstores of Cambridge. From there, we took the ferry to Provincetown and spent a couple of nights there at this slutty gay guesthouse, The Ranch, sharing a twin bed and a fan. I got giddy as soon as the boat approached the dock, the masts of sailboats in the harbor foregrounding the onset of dusk over this cute little town, the site gorgeous, new, and something that stirred something in me.

Every aspect of this town was beautiful and charming, the place continually feeling like some movie set, some place too cute to be real. There is a lovely beach that one has to hike to through a long stretch of sand dunes and salt flats, clam shells, little crabs, and sea birds present. There are lots of fun bars to go to. There are happy hours with dollar oysters. There were amazingly friendly people. There is the most outrageous public sex site I have ever seen, probably some hundred or so men underneath a dock on the beach after the bars close, all jerking off together. We extended our ferry departure time, neither of us wanting to leave yet, wanting to milk as much from the town as possible before leaving back for home. After already checking out of our room, we wanted to have sex with some boy, Eric, but had no place to. We asked, quite drunkenly and high on sunshine and the fun spirit of the place, if we could use someone's room, told them they could watch. That was absurd and turned into a group sex session hurried by the limits of time, by the fact that the last ferry was leaving in half an hour and we had a brief amount of time to get off together before dashing to the ferry, passing out on it, and then dashing to the bus once back in Boston, getting home around three am yesterday.

I got about two hours of sleep before rushing off to a 16 hour workday yesterday, which was also amazing despite me being quite tired, despite being at work so long, and that is because the second half of that day was spent serving food at a fancy party. At this party I saw two of my artistic idols, Tar*ntino and Rushd*e. It was pretty exhilarating to be in such close physical proximity to these people, to brush past all these big names as I pushed through the packed crowd carrying around trays of fancy finger foods. And last night again, I got two hours of sleep before again having to be at work and that was okay, it was all okay, the not sleeping for days, because those days were filled with sights and beautiful beaches and a boy who I love a great deal in a blurry way and there is work again in not too many hours and then there isn't for a few days and I still don't have a couch and don't know when I am getting one. The energy that I had when I first moved into this apartment has dissipated to this heat and to my desire to burn through money going here or there and being out and seeing that person, this person, or going to the beach and trying to read a book but really just starting at people and daydreaming and swimming. And summer only has a few more weeks left to it and the couch will probably have to wait.

August 1

Diego’s head popping out of the ocean, hair and face wet with sunlight, the day the warmest and brightest one in too long, this summer not yet entirely feeling like one in the way they normally do, the weather and its coolness and its oft cloudiness somehow affecting my perceptions of summer, that something seems a bit off, but today, this afternoon, in the Atlantic Ocean on the shores of New Jersey, a fairy ride away from this city I reside in, New York that is, today, oh, the day felt so right, so summer. Perhaps it felt like last summer, to be with this boy going off on some gay adventure together, to the nude beach in NJ, that that made it feel like summer, his company, like some memory of some summer not too far back. Maybe, but why assign reasons or try to trace things back to their source and feel guilty about the well you are drawing these sentiments from, that that water made you sick once before, that you should know better, and blah blah blah – why, why do that, when the feeling is so nice? And so I submitted to it, to what it was, enjoying it for what it is and what it is not, that this affectionate friendship we have is nice, that we are friends and neither bound by standard ideas about sex, and can have this thing, and sometimes there are hurt feelings, more so on my part, but lots of times there are not, lots of times this thing is just what I need at this moment in my life, that I need something.

The sight, to mention it again because it is something that struck me so much then and has again in recalled memory a few times since the image manifested itself: We were fooling around in the water, kissing, hugging, rubbing our penises against each other hidden somewhat by water, surrounded by gays, and after a wave would crash over us, there would be this smiling face of someone I care a lot about in my face, goofy looking, so cute, that some beauty not always as readily apparent was brought out by him being wet, that I am not sure why people look better when they are wet, something innocent about us revealed, that you see the little kid splashing in a pool, so fucking happy, some lovely life. The bright sunshine and the salt water in my eyes made the image often under-exposed, the horizon darker that it should appear and yet the light on his hair and face in droplets of water, of ocean, making it seem so beautiful. I told him he looked so cute when he was wet.

He said, “Great, so I look ugly when I’m dry? I only look cute when I’m wet?”

“Yep.Uh-huh.”

We drank vodka and lemonade drinks we made from our beach bags and laid in the sun and looked at all the various types of dicks, talked often about ones we desired.

I called in sick today to work. I needed it after the past few days, which I had had off but which were spent doing the process of moving from one apartment to another. The process by this point has become hardly emotional at all, it becoming so common this past year. But I feel settled and at home in a way I haven’t since Niki kicked me out of our Bushwick apartment. I don’t really talk about it too much, but when I think about life late at night and how it’s been going lately, I see that moment as a big one that set me off on some nomadic quest for the past year, feeling a bit unmoored and lonely, kicked out of a place I thought was home. I still have a lot of anger towards Niki about that and all the more so now that I have realized how much crazier that has made me, how awkward I have felt in the past couple places I lived, unsettled.

I am living by myself in a studio apartment off the Morgan stop. It feels so great and I feel so at ease, so at home, so excited about the prospect of making this a home, of having one that I feel tied to and whatever subconscious feelings of security and happiness that having one provides a person. I have painted the walls, built bookshelves, painted tables and chairs, and it is not yet there yet, but it’s well on its way. I jerked off into all these various paints I used, me feeling like it was some ritual to make this place home, to imbue it with something, these walls and this wood furniture. I believe that things are going to be really good here. I am going to buy groceries and cook as much as possible. I am going to buy a good radio that picks up the public radio stations at the bottom of the dial, specifically 91.5 and I am going to listen to the radio and sit at this cute little kitchen table that I painted yellow and type missives to the world, and I am going to get a sofa, but maybe the radio first, and I am going to be so much happier.