Spotted Sex Pig

I am still recalling the moments spent eating a burger earlier tonight. There are some moments with food when I know that it is going to be a moment I will recall later on, that I will want to, that this is the burger I am going to cite later on down the line when someone asks me my favorite burger, and that I should try to recall all of the details. I was seated upstairs at The Spotted Pig, Jacob next to me, me already a bit tipsy on Whiskey and Cokes, taking in the scenery. The burger came and it was the most perfect burger I can recall ever eating. I asked for it medium rare, and it was actually cooked that way, unlike at most restaurants. The buns had cross hatches from being grilled and tasted slightly of butter. The patty was topped with roquefort cheese, and only with this - no onions, no lettuce, no tomato, no ketchup. It was perfect as is. I had no desire to put ketchup on it. Every bite was so insanely good. It was what good food should be, something approximating sex in your mouth.

Corner Bistro has now lost its crown to Spotted Pig. I have a new favorite burger in New York. I wish I had the means and time to eat this burger every single day. Afterwards, I smoked a cigarette with Jacob, even though I have quit and smoked only a few in the last couple of months, because it was that fucking good and I needed to calm down. This was a cinematic post-fuck scene and I had to puff on a cigarette, to both catch my breath and reflect on how I had lost it in the first place.

While puffing on these cigarettes and me talking about how much I loved this burger and how I was going to go home and masturbate to it, we walked up to PPOW on West 25th Street to go to a reading by Max Steele, Joseph Whitt, and Brontez Purnell. Each was amazing, particularly Brontez. I had never heard him read before and so it was a real treat to hear him perform, especially since he veered so much from what reading in my mind has normally meant. He had notes and what appeared to be stories in front of him, but rarely looked them, and instead seemingly ad-libbed these insanely comic monologues about shit on dick, barebacking, and white college-age lesbians that were amazing. They were raunchy and offensive, but more than anything true, and so quite lovely to hear. It was an inspiring moment, that the most affecting stuff, the things that listeners and readers will most respond to are true things, even if they make you sound like an asshole, that maybe it's not the best idea to encourage unsafe sex or to talk about how annoying white lesbians can be, that these things will rub people the wrong way, but that they will also rub some people the right way, that people will recognize their own feelings in your rants, that that is what writing is supposed to be, an attempt at honesty, and that what is true might not always be the most glamorous thing, might not be the way you want to present yourself. There are so many of my friends that I wish I had encouraged to come with me to this, that would have laughed so hard and taken so much from it, enjoyed it so much.

This burger was so insanely good.

Jacob and I fucked last night. Poppers and weed and noise were involved. It was seventy something degrees today in late October. I am going to be the bumble bee girl from the "No Rain" video for Halloween. I love avocados and sex and burgers and people reading and my new black shoes, vintage Stacey Adams, and I am reading Georges Bataille's "Story of the Eye," and of course I am reading that, of course I am.

Sufjan Stevens - Futile Devices

I had been looking for a pair of shoes, a simple pair of black dress shoes with a low heel, my problem with most new dress shoes is that they have too large of a heel that seems to be trying to compensate for something I don't want to announce to everyone that happens to look at my shoes. I found a pair I really liked a week or so ago sitting out on display at Urban Outfitters. After trying for too long to find someone to help me find a pair of these beautiful shoes, I found someone, not so helpful, but someone that worked there, and he stared me down before telling me that they didn't actually have any in stock. The shoes are nowhere to be found on their website and now they are not even in the store anymore.

There are two things I have decided my wardrobe needs right away, those being a pair of blue jeans (since my old ones no longer fit me (either me becoming larger or either my sense of how tight is appropriate or sexy shifting to something a little looser than leggings)) and a pair of sensible black dress shoes. The jeans I have found, the shoes I have yet to. I went to a couple midtown department stores this evening after work and felt overwhelmed and poor. I didn't find the shoes I wanted at any price. I did, however, find an amazing pair of purple suede boots at Bloomingdale's that I may return for and purchase next weekend when they are 30% off if I am still feeling their spell and also feeling the spell enough to drop so much money on such impractical shoes. But what are practical shoes? I don't have a job that requires them, but I am convincing myself that if I own sensible black dress shoes, aside from my own love of wearing dress shoes, my owning them will come in handy if I soon get a new job, which I keep on hoping will somehow manifest itself despite my failure to really apply for any, though tonight I did apply for a few, though these few are still at hotels, which is a world I would like to get away from.

So I didn't get shoes. I did go to Bloomingdales and Bergdorf's, which really terrifies me, the store such a weird throwback to Upper East Side haughtiness. Their shoes all sucked, though there were some other items I really did want to have in my possession somehow without paying the insane prices of everything there. I am thinking I'll just end up buying a pair at my favorite vintage shoe shop in the East Village since my searches have turned up so fruitless.

I rode the train home painfully aware of my white sneakers. I looked at everyone's shoes on the subway, some really nice pairs on display, and I wondered where they got them, really did not want to go another day wearing these white sneakers, that these pseudo-Keds are no longer appropriate given the change in season, given the change in my own mood, my desire to present a different image, to say that the lazy days of summer are over.

On the L train, I ran into Matt S., a boy I used to be obsessed with, that I used to sleep with, that I used to want to date. He lives in Philly now and is still making art, and he makes me feel like Ned, like a loser, like a sellout. He was wearing some crazy feather-like earring and a bright scarf. I still thought he was insanely beautiful and I want to be his friend and hang out with him. He is odd and beautiful and I see him about once every six months or year and it always makes me so happy. I am thinking about shoes, coming from Bergdorf's (which I did not admit when he asked me where I was coming from, only answered with a vague "looking for shoes"), and he had a stack of canvasses in his hands that he was moving and I was thinking about the Mexican food I was going to order when I got home. And I didn't always used to be so lazy, so complacent. I didn't used to be this way when I was sleeping with this kid, so many years ago. Different paths taken, paths crossed now. He got off at Bedford. I kept going. I was smiling ear to ear for a couple stops. The sadness set in not too soon afterward. It bounces back and forth. I bought a bottle of wine, a Cabernet, to try to get things to settle somewhere in between the two poles.

_________________

I am in love with this song tonight and have listened to it several times, the lyrics appropriate and Fall really killing me in the most beautiful way, making me feel everything terribly.

"it's been pretty much one damn thing after another ever since"

I had just had lunch at an Italian place in Chelsea with Jacob. He was heading back to Brooklyn to do stuff for school and I was headed up to the E stop to take the train over to MoMA. I checked out Grindr on the walk to the train, exchanged a few lines of text with a pictures of abs, and soon was at this abs picture's house on 21st Street. He opened the door and I think there may have been something in his look that wondered if I was hot enough for him, that awkwardness of sizing someone up in person that you have only talked to online and seen pictures of, all of course self-selected to make them look as attractive as possible, and then you quickly try to take in the difference between how they represented themselves and the person that now stands before you, deciding whether that difference is small enough to be acceptable. That may have been the look but then there was also something about his look that made me think he had just done meth, an intense, sex-hungry, fuck-anything-outside-of-this-room look, slightly menacing.

There was a brief second when I was undressing that I wondered if this person was going to go all American Psycho and kill me. There is a thrill and it is reckless and it is putting yourself out there in weird situations and this I love, wondering how things will go, the not knowing. There's no real reason to do this. I can get sex from Jacob, can get it from the gym, but I wanted a thrill and something pulled me to this guy's house. Across the street from his apartment was what appeared to be an elementary school letting out, young kids, innocent, everywhere, and me feeling particularly dirty, a thrill in that contrast, that the block can contain both these things. He pulled down his shorts and I sucked his dick until I got really hard. This was in his kitchen. I had only taken about three steps into his apartment. He pulled me over to his couch, which had a white sheet over it for this purpose, our meeting, apparently, and there was lube and condoms set off to the side. He bent over the couch, his ass up in the air, and I fucked him for a while, and then he told me he wanted me to cum on him. He laid on the couch and I jerked off on to his chest, him cumming at the same time. The man was insanely ripped, probably the most buff person I have ever got it on with, and the entire time we were having sex, I was into it but also was not into it, was too self-aware of this person's porn star body, waxed ass, and cartoony six pack. It all very bizarre, a fog, a dream maybe, and ten or so minutes after entering his apartment, I departed it, out on to the street, my mouth tasting like lube, me attempting to spit out the taste.

I got a cup of coffee and got on the train towards MoMA to see the Abstract Expressionist New York show. It's a big show and like most big shows, I moved through it in spurts, landing in one room, moving past another entirely, thinking that I would return on some future date to take everything in, the things I didn't see, didn't talk to. I stopped in front of things that struck my fancy and glanced in passing at things that didn't. Most ab-ex art bores me, is a little too blank, too much of a Rorshach for you to project whatever you want on to it, some of it seeming like lazy or wild scribblings on canvas. But then there are pieces that explode that notion, that cut through all of my nay-saying about these paintings and really move me, sing a song that I recognize and like, that I will stop to listen to. There is a room of Barnett Newmans in the show and had I seen one of them isolated, I probably would have moved past it, but encountering a room of maybe six of them had an entirely different effect on me. They were really quite beautiful, a painting of solid color, a feeling, thrown into relief by a vertical strip of paint, another color, a figure in this space, man in this world, a moment where you catch your breath and feel all that is around you. They sang from every wall in chorus the same song, different voices, but the same song, and it was a gorgeous one. I hummed along.

I know it is possible to have moments with probably all of the pieces in the show, but perhaps not possible to do so in one viewing. I'll return and try to allow for other moments, other encounters, other rooms, other brief fucks, memories of which I'll hold on to for far longer than the act, the feeling inspired it, its life, extending far past the viewing, that physical encounter.

To The Measures Fall

In last week's New Yorker, there is a fantastic short story by Richard Powers, "To The Measures Fall." It gets at what it means to read in a really profound way and how one's relationship to text can change numerous times. It looks at one person's relationship to an obscure English book and by way of this also says really insightful things about the large cultural changes that have occurred in the last several decades with reading and the study of literature. Any lit majors will probably geek out a lot reading it. The full text of the story is now behind a firewall, but try to find it if you can. There are many parts I love and want to quote, but will quote this one part because it ties in with a string of thought I am trying to explore in some form about our relationship to life and text in this Facebook age.

"Overnight, the World Wide Web weaves tightly around you. A novelty at first, then invaluable, then life support, then heroin. It's a chance to recapture everything you've ever lost: college friends, out-of-print rarities, quotations that had vanished forever. Your online hours must come from somewhere, and it isn't from your TV viewing. You lose whole days on the roller coaster of real-time eBay auctions. "

Too Much Water

"Ofcourse too much moisture in your lungs can cause problems, its called drowning..."

-strange words of wisdom, made stranger or wiser or funnier by their source, a conversation board on cannabis.com concerning whether ice in a bong is bad for your throat.

Ladies and gentlemen, my night, my life.

I am feeling good. I just smoked a lot of weed from my bong, which I had put a lot of cold water from my fridge in, thinking my lungs would like the feeling. And then I thought how good it felt, how great it would be with ice, remembered some stoners in college who were real serious about the stuff, I went to that type of school, and they had ice bongs, that is if I remembered correctly, and I wanted to see if I did, wanted to see exactly how these things worked, whether such products were sold, and if so, how much these things cost, wondered this cause I kind of really wanted one of these which I was more and more remembering or believing existed and thinking about how much pleasure this would give my life not only in this moment but also in so many future moments. The payday was seeming big, large - the potential returns vast.

I downloaded many albums illegally, though I hesitate to say that in these days of precise Google searches and logarithms, wondering if maybe I shouldn't tell you this, wondering if perhaps the RIAA might not have some program in place, technical thing, to scour blogs for sources of people discussing such practices, and then going after them, knowing who was infringing on these laws. "PARANOID!" A response said several times in that same earlier referenced thread, the commentators (so many!) occasionally responding to one of his questions posed, answers with that word: paranoid. Downloaded albums that I am so excited about listening to, drank wine, and wanted to acquire things, to be involved with them - this relationship between people and bands and the songs these bands sing and the things these bands may or may not actually represent - and whatever the feelings were, the things were, I was feeling really good, was feeling alive, interested in a way and with an intensity about current music, current art, that I haven't felt in a long time, and felt really good, that maybe I am not as old or as not as boring as I think old needs to be, that I do still care about these things, that art, despite a boredom of late with most forms of it I have had, still does have the power to rock me, to make me want to dance, to make me hold my hand close to my heart and mouth manohman like a drunk uncle might that's really into the blues, a white uncle. And I was really into these sounds, these feelings, these ways of presenting things. I was feeling rock and roll in a way that I hadn't in a while. Rock and roll, oh man, the things it does. It brings me to life and makes my dick slightly hard and also impossibly soft and makes me sad and insanely happy, always one of the two, always an intense feeling, that it was and is all do or die, that it all meant something, means something. There was always the feeling, the intense relationship with the present and the past and the future, really straddling the tip of a triangle perhaps the most you ever will, and the constant feelings despite their inconsistency and huge swings between faraway poles, that this is what rock and roll is, why it so much of a certain time in the lives of most people. The loudness simply amplifying in a way large enough to let you get off from the pain that this life causes and the pleasure we are granted when we recognize that pain and you can play it louder and louder and a feeling of catharsis can occur, you can expel it all, all the fucking shit, bringing all that stuff to the surface, limbs thrashing forward to a nonexistant stage, a nonexistant audience, as you dance in your kitchen, wanting to cry, but not knowing exactly why, except that it is all so fucking beautiful despite it all, so fucking beautiful.

Stop It

Weird music is coming through some wall, not necessarily weird in any objective sense, but weird in a sense given its context, a Bushwick apartment building and a neighbor on one side of me blasting what sounds quite a lot like Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, that or some other old-timey Western swing. I just watched Athens, GA - Inside/Out, was inspired to read it by its brief mention in Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. The movie was cute in its documentation of what seemed to be a really beautiful music scene, a small scale thing where musicianship was encouraged, where being in a band seems less a scary thing than it would in the music scenes of LA or NY, something that several of the people featured in the documentary mentioned. I saw the film's relation to the book, to the same type of scene that occurred in Olympia and DC in the early nineties. I don't aspire to be a musician but there is something useful that I take from these past scenes and their documentation in these two objects. The book is inspiring me a great deal, pouring gas on to a flame that was relit a week or so ago by getting to see Belle and Sebastian perform, this feeling of being alive and creating things and putting stuff out there and interacting with works of art. It's just a matter of doing it. Kathleen Hanna told a few people, awkward fans, that they needed to make a zine, that they had something to say. Reading about the formation of these bands is really inspiring, seeing what it takes to go from being a fan of a certain type of thing, consumer of it, to a creator of a certain type of thing, participating more in the dialogue. There is a lot I want to do and there are big bursts of inspiration that have been coming to me a lot in the last week or so. I went hiking with Jacob upstate and it was insanely beautiful and made me want to escape this city more often. There is that goal, the goal to write things, and the goal to get a new job. All doable, and all within reach. Just fucking do it.

And then there is this song, which somehow I had never heard until seeing it in this movie this evening, and which made me want to dance and scream and write and for a brief moment have a band of my own, mainly so I could thrash around a stage to this song and pretend it was mine.