sunday

The day had started seemingly wholesome enough - brunch with Erica at La Barricou, a couple of screwdrivers accompanying the meal. From there, Erica and I went into the East Village to see Burlesque. A bit of alcohol in us, both of us wanted more for during the movie and tried a couple liquor stores to buy some vodka to hopefully later mix with some orange juice. Outdated liquor laws still in place, we couldn't find an open liquor store, a Sunday. Instead, we popped into a bodega and purchased some Four Lokos to drink during the movie.

We went to Village East, which I had been to before and thought was a dinky little theater, but had never apparently been inside their main theater, which blew me away as soon as I walked into it - what a gorgeous old movie house. I want to try to see more movies inside this theater. Made the experience feel more glamorous, magical.

The movie was what it was and the Four Loko did what it does and the movie actually was insanely enjoyable under the circumstances. Three something in the afternoon, we were let out into the still sunny streets, ready for it to be nighttime already, ready to party. We called up various people in our phonebooks and tried to convince others to join us in our bar crawl of a Sunday afternoon. We went to Patricia Field's and looked at clothes and then stopped in McSorley's because Erica had never been and I hadn't been in a long time and the history of the bar does baffle me. This choice perhaps inspired by being in an old movie house, a desire for the older objects this city had to offer. We stayed there for many rounds of beer, light, then dark, then light again. Jacob joined us. The three of us went to Marie's Crisis. Several more rounds of drinks. A salty, bitter piano player last night. He was only nice to the adoring gay boys on stools in front of him, them dreaming of Broadway stardom, still dreaming, young boys, and him cooling a bit at the presence of people still with dreams, that or he was horny. I don't know. He didn't much care for us for some reason.

We went outside for smokes every now and then, noticing the jazz bar next door, Arthur's Tavern. At some point, we decided to have drinks in there, to bliss out to some beautifully played jazz by a quartet of seemingly retirees. Around ten, having already been drinking pretty much all day, Jacob and I said goodbye to Erica and went to Vandam. There was an open bar and I drank a bunch during it. The place wasn't at all crowded, most people probably still coming down from a Thanksgiving holiday weekend. We danced for a bit. I wanted to go to the Cock, which I hadn't been to in a really long time. Went there, also fairly empty. A couple drinks, none of the dirtiness I wanted. A taxi home. Jacob puking out his guts in the toilet once home. I went to bed.

the lord's prayer backed by a funk riff on a guitar

For no real reason, aka all the usual ones, I have fallen way behind on this Prince project I was embarking on. Work, the gym, marijuana, napping with Jacob, wanting to watch crap tv shows and funny movies, wanting to watch things that I could laugh at, could giggle at, usually in a giggly state. I wrote about the first two albums and have only listened to the first five ones. I got a bit stuck on Controversy, listened to it over and over again for a period of several days, mainly the titular track, which I keep on trying to understand why I love so much.

Maybe tonight, if I'm not too drunk after eating dinner with my family, I'll try to pick up the pieces and salvage what I can of my intentions.

It is Thanksgiving and right now I am sitting by myself in my kitchen, again listening to the Controversy album. Jacob worked the overnight shift and is asleep in the next room. I've got my headphones on. He is soon going to be transitioning off the overnights, which I am excited about because it will mean that our house will hopefully be less sleepy, quiet, that we will be awake during similar hours.

In a couple of hours, we are going to go eat dinner with my family at Freeman's. My mom said she didn't feel like cooking dinner this year and wanted to eat in a restaurant again. We did this last year and I found it fairly depressing. I thought it might be a one-off thing but it seems that she has now thrown in the towel on trying to cook Thanksgiving dinners. People keep asking me what I am doing for the holidays, them telling me what they are doing, these days bringing out the sentimentalist, the family man, in every person seemingly. I watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for a bit this morning, under this day's spell. I am sad that I am not in someone's house with a lot of other people helping to prepare food and drinking beers, a loud TV on in the other room, the noise of human beings gathered together. Next year, maybe I'll try cooking dinner for my family since the rituals of the day are what I really enjoy about the holiday, not just eating a meal around a shared table. I like the preparation, the time in the kitchen, that goes into that meal. It just feels false, like I'm not even partaking in this day, by eating in a restaurant, even though I at least persuaded my mom to allow me to choose the restaurant if we had to eat at one.

Our neighbor's apartment was broken into earlier this week, people breaking in through the fire escape that we share with them. We realized our window did not lock and have since been harassing our awful landlord to fix our window and install some sort of lock on it. The charms that this apartment held when we first moved on are becoming less and less charming. That the apartment is sinking into the ground, that it has no insulation, really old windows, a bathroom with no sink - all of these things are becoming less and less charming, an accent at first I found sexy but which now I find more and more grating.

I could also complain about my job, but I have done that for a couple years now, and it is really time to put up or shut up, to actively look for other work or embrace this current job. It is Thanksgiving, a time to be thankful, however in Facebook postings especially, but also in everyday conversation, this expression of gratitude can easily come of as boastfulness, as pride. Like I am really happy that your life is so great, that your job is great, that your hair is so fucking great, that you piss gold, or whatever it is you are so happy about, but your giving thanks for these things in such a public way can veer off into self-promotion, a non-sexual exhibitionism (the worst kind), that it is insecurity seeking a recognition that your life is, in fact, as great as you want to claim it is. But maybe it's not. Maybe that's okay. Maybe it's gray and cold outside and you aren't feeling it. And, yes, I am alive and that alone is something to be insanely thrilled about. And, yes, there is such a large amount of Prince recordings that you could spend years finding new pleasures among them. And I am happy in ways and unhappy in probably even more ways. There are things I need to change and the first among those is my need to quit talking about doing things and just do them.

Sadly, this Prince project has fallen so far off schedule that I don't know what to do with it now, most likely abandoning the project as I have only written about the first two albums and I was supposed to be doing at least one a day to lead up to this concert. I would really have to plow them, which you know, maybe, but we'll see. I was listening to his fourth studio album today, Controversy, which, in case you did not know, is amazing, the title track especially. I had only been familiar with the edited down version of this track that appears on his Hits CD. This expansive seven minute version is so beautiful, such an amazing funk song that I cannot get enough of.

Jacob's home. Just got home.

917 LOKO

I have two Four Lokos in my fridge awaiting Jacob to wake up. I thought we should consume them given the news going around today that New York has strong-armed beer distributors not to distribute caffeinated alcohol drinks in the Empire State any longer. Senator Chuck Schumer, blowhard like most of his colleagues, gave comments about a dead girl and said he wanted the stuff banned. I want hysterical media trend pieces banned. I want people that would deny adults things banned. I want stupidity banned. I want people that encourage prohibition banned. Alas, that's not how things work. How things work instead is that major media outlets rather than talking about one of millions of things that actually matter have decided that this is a problem for the nation's youth, these BRIGHT and COLORFUL cans of alcohol with caffeine in them, that people are getting fucked up for only three dollars. Such a thing cannot be allowed. It should be more economically prohibitive for people to get fucked up. We don't want poor people and young adults able to buy these things. Think of the children.

Well, because of a confluence of stupid media and stupid politicians, the offending drinks are now not allowed in several states. Children can go back to huffing paint and aerosol sprays. Parents can breath easier.

I want to smoke cigarettes, which I don't really do anymore, as I drink these. Hopefully Jacob has some on him and will give me one or two or three. In a few hours, I will again attempt to go see Bruce LaBruce's LA Zombie. Right now, I am listening to Prince's first album, For You, and watching this beautiful sky outside of my kitchen window.

Today is beautiful. The weather is hovering somewhere around sixty degrees, the trees are still showing off their fall colors, and everyone on the streets I walked today looked beautiful and happy, their beautifulness probably a direct result of them being happy and it showing. There was a joy on the street, everyone slightly aware that this is probably the last hurrah, that the weather probably won't be this warm again until March or so, maybe even April, that winter and its chilly temperatures lie ahead for us, and that this was a nice holiday in which we were allowed to wear a hoodie or a sweater, in which we did not have to wear a jacket.

I am about to embark on a project now that I am really excited about. The Prince concert is a month away and I'm going to work my way through all of his albums in chronological order, making a zine about my reactions to them, about my experiences with these thirty some albums. Or I am going to try to. I'm going to see what these writings turn out to be. I could have just posted them here as normal blog entries, but I want to try something different, mix it up a bit, see what the results are if I think I am writing for paper and not computer screens. The travel guide is again being put on hold because you have to do what interests you, go where the steam is. And Prince is certainly where it is right now for me.

liquids consumed, bodily and otherwise

I was at Public Assembly. The party was Ohio-themed, and I went there with Erica, who is from Ohio and was really excited about the party. I wasn't sure what the Ohio theme necessarily was about. There were a lot of straight people drinking PBR and whiskey. I danced a lot to some interesting music that I don't always hear played at dance parties. There was a string of Afropop/jam songs that I was trying to connect to the state of Ohio, tried doing this for a bit, but it was distracting me from the movement, from the things I wanted to do with my body to this song, that my mind was too much at work here at the expense of my body and at the expense of a physical communion with the music. The thoughts were a hindrance, a roadblock to that. Another shot of whiskey please.

Everyone was about to go out to smoke and I was going to join them, but James Brown came on over the speakers, "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing," and I stopped following the smokers and ran back to the dancefloor by myself and twirled around and danced like a crazy person because I love James Brown and I love this song and it was not the typical selection you might have expected if someone were going to choose a James Brown song to throw into their DJ set. Its newness in a dance setting was what made the encounter all the more thrilling.

I then did go join up with the smokers, quite drunk and wanting a cigarette, wanting twenty of them, one after the next, my non-smoking falling by the wayside to the whims and desires of a drunk Charlie. I headed back inside and stood in the line to pee. I ended up in line behind a certain celebrity that I think is insanely sexy and have a big crush on. I don't want to say his name in this age of Google, where it will appear in a Google Alert or search for him. Looking at the stats of this webpage, it is really odd to see how people end up on this page by searching this or that name or this or that random collection of words, and so we'll try to avoid that by saying that he is the star of Entourage.

I ended up behind him waiting to use the urinal. My mind was going crazy, kind of unable to believe that this sexy man was peeing a mere five feet away from me, that his dick was out near me pissing into a urinal that I would be pissing into. Maybe you know me well or have encountered me drunk and horny, and so maybe you know that I have a thing for piss, or used to a lot more than I do now, but it really came back to the surface last night while I was waiting to use this urinal. I was so incredibly aroused and excited, thrilled. He left without flushing. I checked to make sure no one else was in that part of the bathroom before I dipped my fingers into his piss. Someone else at this moment came into the bathroom and I quickly pulled my fingers back up before they noticed. I wanted to lick my fingers, was going to. The guy was busying himself at the sink while waiting for the urinal, his back to me. I licked the fingers quickly, one by one, wishing I could do more than catch these couple of drops of pee off my fingers, wanted to bury my face in the urinal. But that was not an option, at a straight party, probably not even an option at a gay party. I pissed myself, my pee joining this sexy man's. I flushed the toilet, sending our pee together twirling down pipes, dancing through this city's sewage.

I got bored, was horny now at this point, and my options for finding an outlet for this horniness were limited there. When Adam asked if I wanted to go to Metro, I eagerly said yes, and him, Kevin, and I walked there together. Once there, I drank more, things becoming more and more blurred. I think I asked a couple of people to have sex with me. I did say no to one person who was really creepy and told me to come home with him. He asked too early, soon after I got there. Had I encountered him a bit later, my answer might have been different.

I came home and made some potstickers, starving, those the only thing in my fridge. I went to sleep soon after, thinking about sex but not masturbating, drunk and tired, wanting seemingly competing things, sleep winning the competition easily.

fall

The leaves are changing and I am aware of this fact in a way a bit removed from past years. I have spent little time amongst these trees but do occasionally see them from the windows of high floors down below, or notice them during the afternoons after work when I am walking somewhere and the light is already heading toward the horizon and is crisp and mellow in that fall way that inspires all varieties of thought, happiness to sadness and all the points in between, and the light is caught really lovingly by the tree leaves, these dying leaves, their last embrace of a light that is about to leave them, a tender embrace on a train platform, someone heading off to a different town and it the last time they will probably ever see each other. There is knowing that, that sadness, and then there is that other town someone is heading off to and an excitement about that fact.

I work too much in a job that requires me to get there too early each day, so that I am always, despite intentions otherwise, falling asleep by about ten o'clock most nights. I have been getting stoned a lot, watching episodes of 30 Rock, and waking up hours later on the couch, aware that I passed out, peeling out my contacts, and sleeping in my bed for a couple of hours before waking up at 5:45.

The other day I was talking to an out-of-town friend who was in-town, Brendan, about my life over mulled wine and pumpkin soup at Mud. I told him about my life and I wasn't too impressed with my narration of it, with the things available to me to narrate. I told him about this project I had intended to begin working on in November, that I really wanted to finish it by the end of the year, and two months of decent work seemed like a fair amount of time to get this thing done. I still intend to do this, but do find that November, much like this year and the past ten months are speeding by much too fast. I think I'm going to start writing in coffee shops, that the atmosphere seems very encouraging of that. When I am home from work, Jacob is often sleeping before going to work his overnights, and that makes me sleepy, makes me lie on the couch and take unintended naps and masturbate, things that are all well and fine, and which I am as big a proponent of as anyone, however things which are getting in the way of goals I have set for myself.

Tomorrow is my Friday. I am going to try to see some leaves and eat a burger and maybe put this new ZipCar membership to use on a trip somewhere, perhaps to see leaves, perhaps to Red Hook to visit Home Depot and Ikea. I really do love the new Deerhunter album and am listening to it now as I write these things, as I sip from this glass of red wine, a Cabernet, contemplating what it means to inhabit a body that is going to die.

Prince

I still kind of cannot believe it. I am going to see Prince play in a month and a half. Prince! I have never been this giddy to see anymore play before, except for maybe Bjork when I was 17 and she played at Capital Ballroom in DC, maybe then, or maybe when I was going to see Cake play on my birthday, 17th or 18th - I can't remember which - but I guess the theme here is not in a really long time have I felt this way. Prince means so much to me and maybe more than any other musician living wows me, absolutely astonishes me and makes me so wow sometimes when I contemplate all that he puts of himself into a song sometimes when I am listening to one, makes me go ohshitshitshititsallsofuckingtrue. The things this man does to me with his music! More than any other artist Prince gets longing, gets what it to want a person so badly that it consumes you, his songs are full of the most intense desire, that you can feel this man's pleasure in the erotic thrills and the attendant heartaches that go with them. It bleeds through in his voice and in his guitar playing, in his piano playing. This man is insanely good with his voice and with his fingers and with multiple instruments and he knows how to communicate so well through so many mediums, that you know he is a great lover, that he has to be given how good he is with his body to make this music, say these things.

He has such a large body of work and so much of it is so incredibly amazing. Even the stuff I don't necessarily go crazy over is still pretty great music, but I keep on developing new crushes on songs. The first one that brought me into this man was "Kiss." I heard it on the radio a couple times and thought it was such an amazing song. I bought the 3 CD Hits collection of his and fell in love and I have been totally obsessed with this man's music ever since. The two songs lately that I cannot get enough of and cycle through my iPod again and again are "17 Days" and "She's Always in My Hair," both so intense and heartfelt and sincere that they make me totally weak in the knees. And I am going to see this man play in person who has the ability to make me hold my hand up to my heart and want to pause in the midst of walking to catch my breath that a person is saying these things, making these feelings real, and this man, I am going to see play, this man who has the ability to break my heart while I am riding the subway and listening to music. And you have to be careful because there used to be a time when you used to listen to music on the subway because you wanted to listen to music, that Point A and Point B were really interruptions of your time with music, not bookends to it, and you have to be careful because you don't want the case to start becoming that music just becomes a way to make the travel between Point and Point B go by quicker, that it becomes just something to do, not something you want, not an intensity of feeling and a mutually giving relationship here, the listener offering his up their heart and attention for something that was created out of what you feel is an honest need.

I am climbing out of a hangover that I had been feeling most of the day. Listening to Prince has almost entirely erased how I felt during the earlier part of the day. I am again remembering how insanely excited I was yesterday when Erica, Tom, and I got tickets to see this person and I realized that I was actually going to see this person play! That feeling came back a short awhile ago when I put on this music. Prior to that I was in a stupor as my body worked on processing and expelling all the alcohol that I poured into it last night on my journeys around this city dressed as the bumble bee girl from Blind Melon's "No Rain" video.

Jacob and I went to the screening of Bruce LaBruce's "La Zombie" at Drom. The movie was supposed to start at eight and both of us had been hoping it would because we wanted to spend our Halloweens getting drunk and sloppy and dancing, had other parties that we were going to head to at 10 when the movie ended. Nearing nine o'clock, the movie had still yet to start and someone came on stage to announce that the bar would not allow the unedited X-rated version to screen and that we were awaiting an edited version to arrive to screen. The crowd booed and rightfully so. It's particularly outrageous that either the bar didn't know what they had signed up for or that they would change their mind last minute or that they would even care in New York City about what they hell they were screening and whether its content was too risque. It makes me very angry to ponder what this means that a bar in the East Village would do this, what this means if I were to make an analogy about the current state of New York compared to what seems like not that long ago, what this shift is due to and why we allow it to happen.

We decided to skip out on the movie since I'd rather see its unedited version first and it's screening during the MIX Festival in a week or so. We rode the L train over to Hiro Ballroom for the Butt Party. We were there for an hour or so, an hour of which time also was an open vodka bar. Already over having to buy expensive drinks after our time at the disappointing Drom, we were going to get our drunk on for cheap while we still could and pounded back perhaps too many drinks during that time window. At a certain point, we decided to head to Vandam, where I had wanted to end up, where I had wanted to lose my mind and dance among insanely dressed people. We took a cab down there and once we got out of the cab, Jacob puked on the street and we paused like it was nothing. Kept on going. It was that type of night - loud and wasted, and pushing on cause you are playing hard and rock and rolling or whatever it is - you are living and you can't let things like puke slow you down. At Vandam, we drank some more because logic and moderation are of no use to a drunk mind and we danced upstairs and downstairs. At some point on the dancefloor, I decided to take off my tights. I am not really sure how I did then, if I took of my leotard to do this there on the dancefloor, but I am more and more pretty sure I must have. I do know that without my tights on and dancing around in a tutu, I felt more and more horny, more dirty, more away of my penis underneath my tutu, liked the feeling of being in it, the idea that naughtiness could be hidden from view, skirted (if you will) by a skirt. And because really maybe I am an exhibitionist and horny, I found myself with a boner being jerked off by Jacob, jerking off with him (at Greenhouse? What, I said to myself this morning, soberly recalling my insane behavior). And because it you are going to go hard, then you are going to go hard, I got head from Jacob and some other boy, and I am not sure how obvious this was but I am sure it must have been.

We stumbled into a cab to take us home and on the way home, texted people and searched on Grindr for people that we could get to have sex with us. We sent dirty pictures to some people, so horny. We got home and, needless to say, passed out, did not have sex. This morning when we got out of bed, Jacob said that our room looked like a clown explosion had occurred, costume pieces all over the floor, clearly taken off in a frenzy to make it from the front door to our bed and to be naked by the time we got there.

And since waking up, the day has been spent watching trashy movies and reality television shows and being pretty brain dead. Jacob is asleep on our bed and I am awake now, feeling quite alive, this man Prince returning my spirits, giving me the blood that the vampires and monsters and myself consumed last night as we all danced around the fire, consumed by it, celebrating the madness, the deviltry, of this life.