summer

It is some day in mid- to late-July and I am sitting on my couch, a red couch, having just watched Godard's Contempt with Jacob, who is now asleep next to me looking as cute as can be and I have Aimee Mann playing so as not to wake him up, to continue the noise that was filled earlier with the Criterion commentary regarding the film which I became bored with because I wanted to write here in my diary and tell you about my day, my life, how things are going, wanted to perhaps tell myself how these things were going, to try to somehow verbalize these things for my own benefit, to get at something, to let myself know something it doesn't know but wants to.

In the middle of the movie, there was a lightening storm outside of our window. Jacob said he wanted to go up to the roof to watch it. We put the film on pause and headed up with full glasses of white wine and my pack of Parliaments to watch the occasional bolt of lightening streak across the sky, afterburn on the clouds surrounding it, white illuminated fog, brief enough to hint at other things.

We sat on lawn chairs that were up there and talked about all the places in this world that we would like to go.

Brigette Bardot is gorgeous, as if you didn't know, as if you haven't heard other people say that already, but she really captivated me in this film, her beauty. Why do beautiful people hold such power and what does that mean? What is this thing that we call beauty and why do we give it so much power - a hoping that there is a God and that these things are proof of divinity, nice lines, big lips, and a pretty face? I'm not sure what the elements are that compose such a concept but I think they are present in the person asleep next to me on the couch, this beautiful boy, Jacob, who I am more in love with each day.

We saw Inception last night and could not stay awake for the thing. Today, after work, after running into an old friend that I no longer talk to, already a weird encounter, this SUV pulled up next to me and called me over to it, me thinking it was for directions to something or other, Holland Tunnel or something. He asked me what he could do that was fun in the next few hours. He was a middle-aged Orthodox-looking Jew. I was very confused why he chose me to approach, or maybe not considering I was wearing a mesh tank top and cutoff shorts, but I am pretty sure he was thought I was selling myself walking up 8th Avenue, which in many ways I was and am, but was not in this particular way or was not trying to. He told me he was visiting from Israel and couldn't have fun there (what he meant by fun, I didn't ask), that he lived with his parents, and only had a few hours by himself, and that he wanted to find a place to get a massage. I told him I didn't know of any places, that I was just heading to the gym. He asked if my gym gave massages. I told him that they did not. I ran a lot once at the gym, able again to run know after a good month or so where my IT band had been too tight to run, or even really to walk without a limp. It felt great. I am so happy that I work with someone studying to be a personal trainer, who told me what was wrong with my knee and the stretches I needed to do to ease the pain. I did that and then I sat in the steamroom and jerked off with some man before taking a really long cold shower, afterwards staring at the brief and sometimes not brief sightings of naked bodies in the gym.

I was going to quit smoking when New York raised the price of cigarettes, but I did not do so. I am trying to get Jacob a job at my workplace. I am really in love with cold white wine on these hot summer nights.