Self imposed five minute time limit here to write things because I have to go pick up tickets to see "In the Heights" tonight. Thinking about sexual frustration and violence and serial killers. This morning, I started to fuck Jacob. He was hurting and said he had to shit. A while later, I was holding his dick in my hands and telling him how I wanted it inside of me, it yet to be, us playing this same role night after night. He said soon. I wanted it then. We messed around, dry humped, and I asked when he would fuck me. He said Two weeks. I lost interest, became a bit mean, was annoyed, and thought about lots of things that made me sad. I thought about topping and bottoming and how this role of being a top is not a role I am entirely comfortable with, a role I have never had to play before for a sustained period of time, a role I had only played in sex work situations really before, never having fucked Diego. And so I was thinking about role reversal and what I had signed myself up for, whether it was what I wanted, became really unsure, and pulled away as Jacob dug his stubbly chin into my neck, it not feeling good, me feeling uncomfortable and unsure of lots of things. I hopped out of my bed, got dressed, made coffee, and didn't really talk to him for a while, played around online. I eventually sat next to him on the couch and we looked at each other for a long time, he asking me why I was mad, me saying I wasn't, me not being entirely truthful. We looked at each other some more and I asked him what he was thinking. And he told me he was feeling insecure, that he hadn't fucked anyone in a few months, and liked me and was insecure about it. And my coldness melted to some extent and I again saw this adorable little thing and we talked, which is probably what I should have done in the first place rather than shutting down. We made out on my couch and he left for work.

Five minutes is up.

However, serial killers. So I watched this A&E Biography of John Wayne Gacy on YouTube after he left and really got to thinking about violence and sexual frustration and wanted to work this subject a great deal, my brain consumed by thoughts of Gacy and Dahmer today, these two epic gay serial killers and the reasons behind it seemingly some sort of sexual repression and frustration. And there is a subject here with a lot to parse out and I am trying to do so, really into thoughts of these two right now and broader analogies about sexuality.

But I have to get dressed. We have already exceeded our time limit.

the state of our union

It was at some point after President Obama had talked about health care. I am not exactly sure at what moment it was that the two of us tuned out, tuned more into each other. We had split a bottle of wine with dinner and were consuming more while watching the State of the Union. We had started to lie in each other's arms to make ourselves more comfortable. That turned into kissing. That turned into Jacob taking his dick out of his underwear. That turned into me sucking his dick. The humor in that we were beginning to have sex on my couch while this address was unfolding several feet from us on my television was not lost on either one of us, slight giggles accompanying the sex early on before the speech and Obama and a room full of people half standing and applauding and half sitting in their seats faded into the background, became less and less on my mind, the only thing for periods that began to stretch longer and longer this sexy boy and our two bodies together and our hunger.

I got my lube and we started to fuck on the couch, Obama's head looking out at us, an American flag behind him. At some moment when my dick slipped out of Jacob, I used the opportunity to get up and get poppers and to turn on the webcam, used the opportunity to push things further, to make the contrast more absurd. High on poppers, drunk on wine, and insanely attracted to this person's body, I gave myself more and more to my appetites. There was a moment when I heard Obama forcefully declare an imminent end to Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I paused and commented on the importance of his saying that during the speech. Some talking heads commented on the proceedings, a Republican governor in Virginia gave a speech, and the same talking heads again came on to discuss the evening. I was vaguely aware of these things. We came. I said, "U-S-A! U-S-A!"

He fell asleep on my couch and I used the opportunity to read more of this Patti Smith book I am reading. Eventually his snoring distracted me enough from reading and my own desire for sleep became stronger that I called his name until he awoke, until he climbed up in to my bed with me. This morning, I left for work, his body still stretched out in my bed. We kissed goodbye. I have been waking up early and going to work for this past month with a nice body still in my bed, Jacob, and I have been in such great moods because of it, smiling as I lock my door behind me, as I walk to the subway, as I take it to work, happy because of this person and his presence in my life.

Dark Side of the Moon

I have been thinking a lot today about this work I heard Dan Fishback read last evening at Dixon Place. The work talked about what it means for him, born in 1981, the same year as the AIDS crisis began, to grow up gay in the shadow of this thing, in the wreckage of this thing. It was an insanely beautiful piece and really moved me a great deal. To see someone work with such big themes in such successful ways, someone working the theme of being born in 1981, the year also of my own birth, really made me want to get my shit together and take writing more seriously, that there are really great things to be written, to attempt to say, and to witness one of my peers articulate things so well and in such a lovely fashion really made me want to spend more time in front of my laptop (and not on Facebook).

I sat next to Diego in the space, had gone with him to happy hour earlier at the Stonewall, where some young kid had proudly showed off the staples in his head to me while I was alone at the bar and awaiting Diego's company. The kid was real young looking and was sort of bragging about this "design," telling me in too flip a fashion that his boyfriend had broke a glass over his head the other evening at Barracuda and he had to get staples in his head at the emergency room. I eyed the clock behind the bar out of the corner of my eye, wondering where Diego was, wondering why this person was so crazy, wondering where I was.

The work that Dan read talked about a lost generation of gays, things and people and a culture lost. It talked about awkward adolescent moments of sex. It talked about Catwoman and Madonna and gays being persecuted currently around the world. After the reading ended, I gave Diego a gigantic hug, pulled him close to me, and wanted to feel connected, knew that I was connected to this person, that I cared so much about him, and wanted to make this known, so gave him a hug, shared a moment physically to somehow convey the impression left on us by the reading.

I had another drink in the lobby of the place, walked with Diego to Parkside Lounge and left there quickly, not really wanting to be there and walked up to Erica's house, bought some whiskey along the way, and thought about this life I am living.

I have Pandora on and "Nada Personal" is playing right now. I am losing the focus I had intended to bring to this thing, distracted by this song, by my hunger, by the fact that Jacob is coming over very shortly and that I told him I would make him dinner and that really I should get to that project, the project of feeding our bodies rather than this thing, this Internet thing. But this feeds something in me also, less easily identifiable a hunger than the one that food sates, but a hunger still.

I was cleaning my bathroom earlier this evening and there was a Virgin Mary trinket from a necklace that was here when I moved into the apartment and I had too much guilt then to throw it away, thought it a bad omen to do so. Raised Catholic and the thought of sin and sacrilege still present, some idea of consequences, of the sacred. Today, I decided though that I didn't purchase the thing, that I didn't need to hold on to it, and tossed it in the garbage.

A couple weeks ago, my aunt, my dad's sister, mailed me a box of things of his. She asked me not to throw it away if I didn't want the stuff, to send it back. They were cheap and tacky knick-knacks, a couple of religious necklaces. I left the box underneath my bed for a couple weeks, really not wanting any of it and not wanting to mail it back to my aunt who would have been real offended and even more sure that I was out to piss all over the memory of her brother, who she has some religious devotion to in her own aging state now. I threw the box away, wanted it out of my house, out of my space, that to even store these items somewhere buried in a back corner would have some energy in this space that I didn't want. If it was a Pink Floyd album or something else of his that I remember of him, I would have kept it, but they were these maudlin items that I could only imagine him buying when very near death from lung cancer and wanting to somehow atone for a life of sin. I don't carry things with me. I am trying not to. I let them go, set them on curbs on trash days. I am trying to travel light.

Just Kids

Patti Smith came on stage along with her interviewer. Patti sat down in her chair and as the interviewer was asking the first question, Patti plucked one of the small flowers from the vase between them and took a quick whiff of it. It was a throwaway gesture that I am not sure many people caught, especially as the event was insanely packed and the sight lines were fairly terrible where we were standing, but I caught the moment of magic and was already enraptured with this woman. I am reading her memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe right now, Just Kids, am quite in love with the book and the New York it describes and the relationship it describes, the way these two people lived, how they both pushed each other, and how they both loved each other and encouraged one another to become artists. It is an amazing story and to hear her talk about it tonight at Barnes and Noble's was also amazing.

There is a portion of the interview in which they talked about Patti's relationship with bookstores and how she worked at a fair number of them and her process of applying to work at them, what bookstores mean, what they did mean, and what an important job a bookseller is, what a romantic job it is. She worked at Scribner's, at Brentano's, at Argosy, and at the Strand, those first two both extinct now. She also mentioned how she tried numerous times to get a job at Gotham Book Mart, also now gone. That this discussion was happening in a Barnes and Nobles wasn't really remarked upon but was a depressing thought that did cross my own mind, imagining all these elegant, dusty bookstores weighted with history and with the touch and care of the booksellers who stocked particular books and pushed certain titles. Patti Smith described the old Scribner's bookstore in really elegiac terms, mentioning as the sad punchline that it is now a Sephora. I got really swept away in this discussion, having a similar experience of arriving in New York, spending my first two years working at the Strand and being lost all day long and night in the world of literature, of this thing holding supreme importance in my life. Now, sadly, it's role has been minimized to something maybe not even at hobby level, my actual time spent reading or thinking about literature so little these days and I thought about my time spent on the other side of Union Square for those two years and what an amazing time that was, how satisfied I was to look at books all day and talk to people about them all day and hear what they were reading and to tell them things I loved. I really did live in a world peopled mostly by dead women and men for a couple years and it was such a joy, something I miss now when I spend my days answering phones and giving wake up calls and counting laundry and doing fairly brainless, fairly soulless tasks. The difference is that I am making way more money now, but maybe that doesn't matter, maybe it does. I am not sure. Maybe the question is one more of time management and my own laziness. Maybe there is no question. Maybe just instead it was an observation, a rumination on what time and life means, and thinking to times that have passed me by now, thinking of these new moments I live in and what they mean. Biography Bookshop on Bleecker Street is closing tomorrow, a fixture on that block for decades. It is moving down the block to a new location under a different name, but was forced to move because of an insane increase in rent. And we have lost so many already and so to hear Patti Smith talk about this old culture of New York bookstores really did make me envious of a time that I am seeing the last gasps of now.

Her approach to life is really inspiring. She smelled that flower during the beginning of her interview, is taking the time to see these things and appreciate them, to recognize the beauty. There are constant connections and ghosts present and she is in love with old poets, Rimbaud and Blake especially. She even played some songs tonight, which I wasn't expecting at all, and which made me insanely giddy, patting Jacob's arms really fast to try to convey my happiness without screaming about it in the crowded bookstore, not shouting "Holy Fuck! Holy Fuck! Holy Fuck" like I wanted to, my patting of him arm some silent way of trying to convey that. She closed the evening by performing "Because the Night," prefacing it with a bit of the song's backstory and how Robert Mapplethorpe was really happy for her when it did so well and remarked slightly jealousy that she had become famous first. I felt really privy to some secrets listening to her talk and by reading this book.

When the event was over, we streamed out on to the street and met up with some of Jacob's friends. They were young, his age. He is young and most times I am unaware of this but to see him in their company made me feel a bit awkward, feeling slightly old. I had Patti Smith on my mind and the girls were wearing heels and talking about where to buy coke. One of them shook my hand really politely and unnaturally like you do when you are meeting an older adult or someone interviewing you, not a natural hello that you would direct to a peer, and I felt way too weird and uncomfortable to continue hanging out with them, to go eat with them. I told them I was still under Patti's spell and wanted to go read more of her, which I did. I came home, ordered some pizza, drank some beer, listened to Patti Smith on my computer, and read this depressing news about the election in Massachusetts.

And I could let it get me down, I could spend too much of my energy feeling demoralized that a fairly liberal state voted this way, that health care reform is now in jeopardy when it was so close to happening, and I am going to try not to. It's not going to change anything and it is a distraction. Instead I am going to read about these two kids starting out in the world, committing themselves to art, and will continue to be inspired by the book to keep reading, to keep dreaming, and to write, to create things, not only written things, tangible things, but also beautiful friendships, mystic connections, beauty, just to fucking live my life like one, like I am going to die (which I am) and to make the most of this thing.

Keys

The key cutting machine makes this distinctive noise, metal being cut, keys being shaped to a lock, shaped to match a key that opens one. The keys being made yesterday were made to fit the locks of my apartment building's doors. I was getting them made for Jacob and was thinking about my life a fair amount, about this person who I was getting these made for, and about how happy I have been lately, the noise of the tools cutting metal allowing me to lose myself in thought for a short while in this store. This person has spent every night at my house since Christmas and I felt bad that he has had to wake up with me with darkness still out my windows as I left for work so I could lock up my house. Now he can sleep in past me and lock up whenever he leaves.

My boss was fired a few days ago and her desk next to mine now sits empty, it a bit weird to think that she and her often annoying presence will no longer be there each day to exasperate and occasionally entertain me. My job is changing, the fun now less present, things a bit more strict, and I am thinking that I need to really begin to take seriously my life and what I hope to do with it.

I had this dream a couple nights ago, after she was fired and while I was asleep in bed next to Jacob, that I was still working in this same job in a couple of years and that it had become my life, that I no longer had interest in art or even mild aspirations to be an artist, but rather was content in this job because it paid well and each day ate a footlong sandwich from Subway and got stoned and watched stuff on Netflix. It was a nightmare of what my life could very easily become, something that it is in fact now.

I had this dream on the same day that my co-worker came in to work with a sub from Subway, something he does every day, on the day he talked about how he only would be working there for another year, long enough to pay off all his debt, and then he could do things he cared about, in his case acting. In the year that we have been working there, I have seen several actors who all were going on auditions when we first started working there, when the hotel first opened, all for the most part stop and who rarely talk about that anymore. I don't want the comforts of a bourgeois life to sap me of any dreams I still have. And there are some.

The constant presence of Jacob in my life these days could also be a distraction from that, much in the way work is, something that eats up my time and in which I cannot be solitary, cannot type away on my computer thoughts about him, about human bodies, or about what it is that is happening with my time here on this little planet. He has just started school again though and so hopefully some balance can happen. I don't know. I know that I do love sitting next to him on my couch, cuddling with him, getting really stoned with him, and watching Skins on my computer, often turning my attention from the screen to look at his face and how fucking cute he is.

I have gone to the bookstore twice this week and both times left without a book. I am looking for something. I don't know what. I need a book to jump out at me, for our eyes to meet and there to be some spark, and the things I have been picking up at used bookstores haven't been doing it. I am going to try again though tomorrow because I really need some good sentences in my life, a narrative to propel my own stalled one.

In the Bauhaus show at MoMA, there is this set of tables that nest in each other, one's dimensions slightly smaller than the next. I think there are four total. Each has a different color glass tabletop. The work is by Josef Albers and his fascination with colors and squares is something that for reasons I still am unable to pinpoint years after first seeing an "Homage to the Square" painting make me really happy, strikes a chord in me, something really understated and powerful in the painting series. One of my imaginary projects that I have been envisioning for a while is an Homage to Homage to the Square, detailing my reactions to encountering one of the prints in various art museums I have visited and diaristic impressions of my time in that city and what that painting's particular color choices said to me about my own life at that time. An item on my to-do list now is to find a biography of Albers to read. I found myself excitedly drawn to any object in this show that he was responsible for.

There is the issue of timing and things have converged or enough time has passed, enough casual impressions have been made of Albers, that they are starting to register, that they did in a big way, and I am now want to know everything about this person and their art, to learn more about them.

I was at the museum yesterday with Jacob. And with this person too, things converged, the timing was right in my life, maybe in his, and I find myself in this lovely situation now where I spend every night with this person and cannot get my fill of him. We kissed briefly throughout the museum, the kisses curt and to the point, fleeting, too many people and families nearby. At some point, I pulled him into the single-stall family bathroom and made out with him for a long time, giggled, happy to have escaped the camera-happy tourists everywhere, the crowds, to be with this cute person.

There is more to be said and yet I can't say it, have to get going to meet this person somewhere on the island of Manhattan. I woke up this morning between him and Diego in my bed. I woke up really happy. I have been waking up happy and sleeping good every night for weeks, this boy's presence really making life pretty great right now. I bought some new towels, a coat rack for my door, some candles, some paring knifes, and some magnets - things to make me feel more like I live in a home. I put on a face mask tonight, lit candles, and listened to Fleetwood Mac. I recalled friends and past living situations, namely Cypress Circle. I am feeling really fucking happy and comfortable these days in a similar fashion. I want to get at this, to trace things and show diagrams, to dig and get at things, to hold them close and up to my nose, but time, the theme I started with, is again pushing me one way, out the door and to meet a person.

2010

As this new year and new decade were approaching, this new time that we are now living in, I was helping Diego install decorations for the Bana party in the Financial District. I was told we would be out of there by 8:30 and were going to go back to Brooklyn, get ready, and then hit parties, celebrate this year and whatever hopes we were attaching to a change in the calendar. Decorating took much longer than anticipated and we didn't leave there until around 10:30, did not get back to his apartment until eleven something. There were worries in my mind, this particular holiday having been infamously disastrous for me in years past and all I wanted was to escape unscathed, to have a pleasant time. I did. We opened a bottle of champagne on the subway ride from Bana to his house, started the festivities, and I started to relax. Diego, Nick, and I celebrated the stroke of midnight in their apartment building, low-key, did not try to rush the clock and make it anywhere before it struck. I kissed Diego in the hallway of his building, an open door leading to a fire escape next to us, a cloudy view of the Manhattan skyline and sparse fireworks being shot off in various corners of this city, cheers from people on the street. We had made it. We were all alive. It was a new year. The pressure was over.

We drank more champagne, talked about what animal's characteristics we would like to adopt in this new year, listened to Mariah Carey and Lady Gaga, and soon left for the East Village. Another bottle of champagne drunk on the subway ride there. Diego and I were walking down Avenue A toward Eastern Bloc, to say hello to Bob, to wish him a glorious new year, and along this walk, the two of us talked about romance, about how I desired it with him and how he was not looking for that. Diego rebuffed my talk, blocked the shots, told me that I was projecting stuff on to him, that I had ideas about romance from literature and films that I was trying to stage in my actual life, that I was trying to recreate scenes I had enjoyed in books and movies, in poems, in pop songs. I told him that was not the case and I also realized (more so) that I needed to quit having this conversation, that I can't keep trying to convince this person that there is something present if they continually want to belittle that something as nothing more than the childish projections of someone experienced with relationships. I love him a great deal and I am not sure what this thing is we have - a close friendship with dashes of physical affection - but I became more certain that I wanted to see another person on this night, that I wanted to meet up with Jacob, it being his birthday and me liking this person more and more. It was and is a new year, a time for a new start, time to leave some things and some aspirations in 2009 and pursue other things in this year of 2010.

From Eastern Bloc, we went over to Matt's party. Jacob met us there and I was so happy to see his drunk little face. We hung out there for a bit. I chatted with some people but now more so remember observing people and what their intentions were, their intentions a lot more visible on their face with the help of alcohol and the weight of earthly time on their minds and the late hour of the evening. I saw more frustration on faces than joy. Jacob was looking more and more wobbly, more and more cute, and I wanted to take him home, to be in my bed with him, and did so. The 1st Avenue subway station was splashed with huge puddles of vomit, about every ten feet another pile of vomit. It was quite a sight to see, a sight that gave me a certain bemused delight, imagining the hordes of drunk people stumbling around this city, some of them unable to contain all that alcohol imbibed, some of them unable to make it home waiting for that train, some people probably made more nauseous by the lack of music, the wait for the train, and the sober lighting of the subway station. The train too was covered in vomit when we got on to it, people crowded to one end of the car to avoid the big mess at the other end.

We had drunk, sloppy sex in my bed, and woke up some time yesterday morning, me before him by a couple of hours and I continued to lie next to him, reading, waiting for him to wake up, and smelling his skin, the alcohol coming through his pores. The scent of someone after a night of heavy drinking is one of my favorite smells on a boy. Diego often smells like this on mornings when I wake next to him and I don't think I ever really identified what the smell was until yesterday when Jacob smelled the same way. It's a lovely smell that I want to bury my face in, want to press up against their skin, hold them close, and be present in the smell.

Once he woke up, we started the day, his birthday, also the start of a decade, with some vodka cocktails. We went out to brunch with Diego and Bob, were already sauced by the time we finally got a table, and our day's course was set - a day of heavy drinking and continuing to party and the new year still being rung in, a bit of absurdity to start this year, this demarcated period of time that we call a decade and that we look on as useful for organizing bits of our lives, our cultural history, and putting them into these categorizations, feeling like the die has not been cast yet, that we are still shaking the die, and could very well come up with big winnings in this decade, this unit of time, if we do this thing or that resolution, if we follow through and commit to the things that we tell ourselves we are capable of, that we will one day do in this new year.

We picked up a bottle of Andre at the corner liquor store and again I was drinking champagne on the subway, this time midday, probably no longer as appropriate, but for that reason all the more humorous, all the more fun, and we went to the Spank party in Chelsea, it a bit underattended at that time of day, more drinks, more making out with each other, and then a text from a man on 96th Street who asked me if I was in the city. I said yes, that I was, that I was with a friend, and he would have to come watch. I asked Jacob if he would be into that and he was excited about it. The two of us then headed uptown with the intention of me getting a bj from this older gentleman, getting paid for it, and Jacob watching the ordeal. It turned out differently. We got stoned, Jacob got naked, and it turned into a really hot sex show that the two of us put on for this man. I kept mouthing the words "You are so fucking beautiful" to Jacob as I was fucking him, lots of intense eye sex happening between the two of us, and on the edge of the bed there was this man that I was barely even aware of, so into the two of our bodies together and the feelings I was experiencing to take notice of him. There were occasional moans from him that would make his presence felt and which made this act between the two of us that much more intense.

He paid us and we left, went back down to the Spank party in Chelsea, stamps still on our hands and us quite wasted, tripping on life, and wanting to go back to this party, probably the only one happening at 6 or 7 in the evening, and where our friends still were. We danced a great deal, drank more, and then went to go eat some fancy pizza in the East Village with Erica care of our what I felt like were our winnings. It was a blissfully absurd day spent in the company of a boy who likes to kiss me, who will often tell me in random places that he wants to kiss me and then just wait there with puckered lips like a fish, and I smile really big and of course have to kiss this cute person who makes me really happy. We ended up back in my bed, got stoned, and started to watch Skins, but passed out early on into the episode. He woke up this morning and left for work. I am really not sure if I have ever spent so much continuous time with a boy. He sleeps over just about every night and normally in the past I had desire for space or someone else did or else there just wasn't that desire present to spend so much time with the other person. When he left this morning, I kissed him goodbye and then curled back up in my bed, it still early, and thought about how insanely cute this person was.

The curse of horrible New Year's Eves that I had been under for the past several years seems to have finally lifted and I read into things a lot, I do project, and I am taking this a good omen for the upcoming year, that I have already established honest relationships with people, that I have these close connections with people in my life right now, and that I am feeling pretty fucking full of love toward life and my friends right now.