"our love is all we have; our love is all of god's money"

I was riding the train home from Middletown, New Jersey today, up along the coast of New Jersey, through marshlands, through early suburban development, now rustic looking, through faded industrial cities. The sky was grey and overcast and I was listening to Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," feeling the album in a way that I did seven, eight years ago when I was obsessed by the thing, and was getting quite moved on this train ride, plastic bag full of leftovers by my feet that my mom had sent home with me. I had been in a hurry to get out of that house this morning, was bored and felt uncomfortable. I thought about that, about my distance from my family now, about how much I enjoyed holidays as a kid when they were big extended family affairs, but now they are depressingly quiet, my mom's husband saying all of one sentence to me while I was there, that being if I wanted any more coffee.

And so I felt a bit lonely, leaving that place in New Jersey while the weather was so grey, passing ghost towns of what used to be prosperous cities, trash strewn by the side of the tracks, an unbelievable amount of mattresses, me wondering how they ever got there. I was reading Don DeLillo's "Midnight in Dostoevsky", which is an incredible short story, and which contained series of lines such as this that had me pausing and taking in the scenery passing outside my window while I contemplated the thing I just read:

"At times, abandon meaning to impulse. Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks—to register what was out there, all the scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human noise."

I got home a few hours ago and called Diego, really wanting to see his face, to feel connected to someone strongly after a day just spent wondering about the extent of my connections to anyone, my family even seeming distant. He called me back a couple of hours later and it was pleasant conversation, spirited. I asked him when I was going to see him today. He told me he didn't think he'd see me tonight because he had to get a haircut and hang out with this guy.

I knew what that meant and asked him who his date was with. Some young boy, he said, brushing it off, wanting to move forward with the conversation, past what he feared was a speedbump, what was one. I asked him why he was such a heartbreaker. He asked how my Thanksgiving was. I told him I couldn't talk to him right then and got off the phone.

I called back a minute later, frustrated that every time I try to discuss this thing, the conversation is redirected. We talked about this thing. I told him that I really liked him and that I felt really sad. It was an awkward conversation, was me being sincere about my feelings toward him, instead of the flippancy that normally marks our conversation, a mistake maybe. He had told me a while ago when we again started hanging out that he was incapable of a relationship, that he did not want one. And despite him telling me this, I had hoped that us hanging out often, having sex often, making out often meant something else, that for me there was a great deal of romantic sentiment involved, that I am absolutely crazy about this person. He referred to us as friends and again said that he wasn't available for a relationship. We talked about how to proceed so that I would not be sad. I said I would probably establish distance, should probably not be physically affectionate with him, etc. The conversation had a force of its own, taking me to these conclusions, and him as well reluctantly. Had he not already had plans tonight, I probably would have been able to hang out with him and would not have raised this subject, kicking it further on down the road for some other day.

It's really painful to admit your love to someone and to have them tell you that that's not what they are looking for. I think Wilco may have had something to do with this, but I can't blame Jeff Tweedy for the result. And I don't know. I guess it's time to move on, probably was a long time ago, but I still believe that there is something really lovely that exists between the two of us. And it's the knowledge that that thing there is there that makes me particularly crazy. I have gone on some dates in the past couple months with boys and haven't been invested in them, have had my attentions and hopes still focused on this boy, hoping that it would become something, that I would be able to admit its existence, that he would.

I haven't felt this sickness in a long time, chest suddenly feeling empty, wanting to vomit and cry. I have Wilco on again. The call was ended by him, saying that things were getting too intense, that he just got back into town, and that he would talk to me later. I feel sad, incredibly so, and thank God for this band right now. I know things though and I should acknowledge those things and feel free, feel unburdened by what I had been hoping for, know now to focus my attention elsewhere, to try for love with others. I know that, and yet, yet I still hope that he will call and tell me otherwise. Turn up that stereo and call your friends you haven't seen in a while. Get out of the house.

There has been an absence from the world of diarying for the past month or so not by a choice and not by what usually happens - the indifference of a drunk and often rudderless late twenty something - but rather by the death of my last laptop. A new one has been purchased and today Time Warner has come to my place of residence and installed high-speed Internet, now a thing I need to pay for each month, my neighbors with unlocked networks apparently deciding to lock theirs in that time I was sans computer, sans some device to write on this world wide web the slights and joys I have had over these past few weeks, and they have been numerous, though perhaps not abnormally so, that they are always numerous in any given span of weeks, that that is what life is, and we are continually surprised by the myriad ways in which joy and sadness can present themselves, all the wildly varying recipes, recipes calling for totally different ingredients, totally different methods of baking, and yet still producing a pie that tastes the same.

And so with this Internet now being streamed into my house, I am writing to say I am still here, that I am going to get back into this habit, that perhaps it will not start in depth tonight as I have to wake up in five hours to work on Thanksgiving morning before racing up to Penn Station and catching an NJ Transit train out to my mother's house where I will try to be thankful and probably in fact will be. And so there is this, the world of diaries which I am happy to have Internet for. And there is also online porn. I have jerked off far too many times today, so excited to again be able to watch dirty videos online and to be able to do so on this fancy new computer and with a high speed connection. Sadly, XTube was down, but YouPorn, itsallgay, and various other dirty video sites were up and running, and I ran along with them, unable to sate my appetite for this stuff. And there are two other things that this www has provided to me and really this is why I had originally logged on, just to gush about these two products, enabled by two things about the Internet I am so excited about.

So, first of all, there is YouTube. Today, I heard Wilco's "I'll Fight," and because there is this thing called YouTube, I have been playing it over and over again for the past several hours, unable to get enough of this song, thinking hard about life while listening to it, and the song somehow giving life the narrative I want it to have right now, its sense of determination and its clear statements, no modifying adjectives to diminish their assertive nature. I am listening to it now as I write this and it is informing and probably distorting everything I had wanted to say.

Second of all is that because I now have a decent Internet connection and a decent computer, I can now stream this vast library of old Netflix movies. I just watched Paul Morrissey's Flesh and, holy shit, what a beautiful film. Joe Dallesandro is captured so lovingly as this beautiful ideal, this beautiful hustler, cocky, aware of what he has, horny. I don't know how I had yet to see this movie, but I am so glad that I finally did. Some great scenes between hustlers and johns made me think a lot about sex work. Some lovely shots and quick cuts made me think of life, of boys, of desiring a particular body so much and what both the cause and the effects of a decision to worship a body are.

And there is YouTube, a jukebox that was heaven sent, playing any song you want to hear at any time, and here is Wilco's "I'll Fight":