Grace

I got my hair cut yesterday at Astor Place after getting off work, thinking I might have a job interview on Monday afternoon and knowing that I probably would have had no time to get it done other than yesterday, the haircut, the trimming up of hairs around my ears in an attempt to make myself seem well-groomed, the type of person you would want to hire to work in your establishment. I was walking up Broadway toward the L train home and feeling really alive in a way I hadn't in a while, that I was on the cusp of change.

I walked past Grace Church, a thing I have done countless times in the many years I have lived in this city. I used to work a block north of it at the Strand bookstore for a couple years and this has been a church that I have always admired, thought was this beautiful old church that had survived time, tall buildings built up all around this church's plot of land. I have always wanted to go inside this church. This has been on my to-do list for years. I have walked past this church innumerable times and each time I have thought how soon I should stop inside to actually look at the inside at the church. A simple thing, a task of a few minutes I have always put off despite my desire to see this church. Yesterday, when I thought how I should soon pop in to look at the church, I realized the laziness and the silliness of my behavior. I walked back to the church, pushed open the very heavy door and finally saw the inside of this church. It has gorgeous high ceilings, lovely stained glass windows, and that heavy weight of incense, shadows, and quiet that have the ability to make you slow down and attempt to show respect with your suddenly renewed sense of decorum. The church is also in serious need of some refurbishment. Most of the painted walls are peeling and uncared for.

I left the church not five minutes later and could not believe that it had taken me so long to look at the inside of this church I used to walk past daily for years. There was that, and then there was also the feeling, even more pronounced, that change was possible, that I held it within my hands, that I could make choices to do things or I could keep talking about how I am going to do them soon. One is walking past a church wondering what the inside looks like. The other is stopping inside to see what the church's interior looks like. I stopped inside Grace Church finally and the decision felt momentous. I was aware that in the narrative version of my life that this was a metaphor. Perhaps conscious of that, constantly trying to construct a narrative for my life, that is why I stopped in on this day, a couple days before the end of the year, bringing about change to coincide with this change in the years.

Once home, I got an email asking me if I could actually come in today instead of Monday for an interview, that she wanted to interview me as soon as possible and to introduce me to a few people. It's another hotel job, working with someone who used to be my boss before. Despite my stated desire to escape the world of hotels, it is at least escaping my current one, the one that I have been at far too long, three years now. I became quite giddy about the thought of change, a thing that has been absent for my life for a couple years now, steady with the same boyfriend, apartment, and job for a couple years, feeling too settled. Throw that rug up into the air and let the furniture resettle. Maybe the room will look nicer. The dust will be cleared at least.

I went with Jacob to MoMA after receiving this email to see Melancholia. I am sure I bored Jacob with my inability to quit talking about these developments, me thinking them through out loud. The movie quieted these thoughts and concerns for its duration. I really dislike Lars von Trier and imagined that I was going to really dislike this movie as well. The first half of the movie was awful to sit through. His misanthropic worldview combined with his tendency toward cruelty and melodrama was really making me itch with anger. Quite a few people started to leave. I wanted to join them. I wondered why it was that I continued to see this director's films when there hasn't been one I have liked, that they always leave me very angry. But then the second half of the movie happened and I was so happy that I had toughed it out. It's actually a very gorgeous film that gets at the terror of death and what it means to exist for a brief short period of time in this massive universe in a way that I don't think I've ever seen another film tackle. The movie wrestles with these terrifying truths about life that used to make cry and give me panic attacks when I thought about them restless in my bed at night as a child. It is a fucking scary, scary thing to contemplate that this is it.

I have learned to stop thinking about it because things like this happen: I am starting to get a panic attack again now. But the second half of this film really is beautiful and terrifying and honest about what life means in a way that art normally shies away from for good reason. I left the theater really in awe of what I had just seen and very surprised that this was a von Trier movie that was so good and delicate. I am not sure the film should work. The structure and concept seem clunky when I think about them in the abstract, but it all comes together in this very poignant and engrossing way.

Grace Church and this film had similar effects, effects that aren't entirely definable - vague feelings of joy and sadness brought about by the mysteries time and the universe present.

My job interview went pretty good today. I am fairly certain I could be hired at this hotel to do front desk/concierge stuff, though what I had hoped for was something sales related or managerial. The hourly pay would be less than what I make now but there would probably be more in tips, there would be more chances than I have now of moving up to another job, and there would be the very great benefit of working somewhere new, seeing new faces, seeing a different part of town every day, and knowing that I am still capable of change. The place is still a construction site and it was cool to be able to walk through it and see these unfinished spaces, to wear a hard hat. I'm supposed to go back next week and talk with the general manager. 2012 is happening in just a little over 24 hours, a new year. I am really going to try my best to actually make it one, to make it new.

Christmas

I slept on a couch in Delaware this morning, a couch in the living room of my mom's new condo. The couch was too small for my entire body to be able to stretch out on. I slept in a curl, the shape of a letter that changed throughout the night, a restless tall person sleeping on a too small couch, a performative version of a Ouija board, what the letters spelled out I am not entirely sure but I think I figured it out on the train ride home. Last night, I also wasn't high for the first night in quite a while, which surely added to the restlessness. It wasn't the best night's sleep, but, because of that, was a good night otherwise. My mind was on fire, feeling reinvigorated in the way that it often is on journeys to my mom's living room. I rode the Acela down with my sister on Saturday morning. She slept most of the way and I looked at the faded industrial landscapes of northeastern cities and towns, thought about this world, the places I have lived, places I have been to, places I would like to go to, clearly both literally and figuratively here. I projected the path of my life along that of this train route, particular towns, their decay, a type of beauty I wanted to see in my own life, me aware that the town's residents moved elsewhere, wondering what directions my life should head in, where the residents of particular towns, if they were smart, if I was, would relocate to. There is a particular poetry in chemical plants and warehouses with broken windows that inspires all sorts of thoughts about the nature of America and life and what one is to do with their place amongst this mess of things.

I don't know. I never do. But I gets hints of it sometimes, often on train rides, whispers of what it is that things mean and what I should be doing with this knowledge.

At my mom's house, we watched a lot of rented movies that we had walked to a nearby Blockbuster to rent, one that was somehow still open, but one that was basically closed, the last day that they were renting DVDs being Christmas, the store soon to close. I wasn't sure why these employees would bother to come in on these holidays given that the store was about to close. They were all nerdy people though and talked loudly in too nasal voices and with too much enthusiasm about movies. I couldn't imagine where they would be with this place closed, understood in some ways why they were here still working holidays even though they would be without this shit job in about a week. When I was on a break from college once, my dad dying of lung cancer, I worked at a suburban Blockbuster with a friend I didn't really like that much from high school. Their reality, its sadness, was a little too close to home. I thought that I had escaped that, realized perhaps I did not. I thought about the job I still do, how it's not what I want to do, how it's still shit, how it's still a service job, of being servile to people with more money than you. Though a part of me knew I didn't really wish for it, the more reckless part of me wished that my job was also ending in a week like these folks' , wished someone would force that change upon me.

I got caught up on a lot of movies I had wanted to see. I nearly finished off a bottle of red wine while my mom nearly finished off a bottle of white wine while my mom's husband sipped a beer while my sister drank a Coke Zero. We ate and talked about things, usually talking about things via talking about television shows that we liked, movies we enjoyed, trying to find some common ground via halting, easy steps, particular television shows shorthand for particular values, ways of looking at the world.

I woke up this morning shortly after six having to pee, but held it because I didn't want to wake up my family yet. I got up and folded the sheets from the couch, played on my iPhone in ways that I would like to do much less of I have decided. I saw a red line on the horizon outside my mom's third floor condo, small town Delaware outside, an uninterrupted horizon. Dawn broke in the most beautiful fashion and when I realized how beautiful this thing was I grabbed my glasses and saw clearly the light frost on roofs below that had formed in the chilly night, the smoke coming from just a few rooftops, and a beautiful line of fire at the edges of one end of the sky. Day was breaking. It was Christmas and it was an absolutely gorgeous sunrise, the type that I could never see in the city, despite having seem some beautiful sunrises down Montrose Avenue as I walked to the subway station early in the morning; this was a beautiful widescreen sunrise. A long stroke of red forged its way against the night sky that was pushing back against it, saying not just yet.

This had a really stirring effect on me. I was moved for the first of many times this day. There would be many more deep impressions made today. Rewatching The Trip, parts of it deeply, deeply touching to me. I cried a couple times today reading and rereading one particular story in the New York Times Magazine, the entire issue stirring emotion and strivings to live better in me, though this one really digging that knife in deep enough to provoke tears once in my mom's living room and again when I reread it as I was passing somewhere through the New Jersey landscape on the fast Acela, towns blurring past. This was eight right before or right after passing a sign on a bridge over the Delaware River which made me very emotional for its truths about life on this planet, a sign saying in very large letters: "Trenton Makes - The World Takes." I decided I am getting a new job. I don't know what. I thought a lot about how I could work on boats. I wanted to do something with my hands. I don't want to work in the service industry any longer. There is a certain indignity about having to satisfy the needs and moods of a consumer that I find too degrading when I think about it for any sort of actual period in a real fashion.I watched the first few episodes of Louie on my sister's recommendation tonight with Jacob, and, holy shit, what an insanely fucking brilliant and harsh and truthful show. I am deeply impressed with what I have seen so far. I haven't seen a television comedy so honest before. Louis C.K. talks about the terrifying aspects of life, that we age and that we then die, really talks about how terrifying and sad and cruel life is, but because his truths are so real, so depressing, there is nothing else to do other than to laugh really, really hard, because to do otherwise would be to perhaps lose it, that the only way to face such sadness is with laughter, that it's the only successful defense that leaves one both alive and able to get out of bed and continue to go about our lives.

I came home and Jacob and I exchanged presents. We put a turkey in the oven to cook. While it was in the oven, we fucked on our couch, had dirty sex, the Christmas present I was too timid to ask for but that one I wanted more than anything, just real, passionate fucking, the type that we used to have constantly, but now which happens pretty rarely, us way too domestic and coupled, boring. He slapped me with his dick and I sucked on it, forced it down my throat until I gagged, wanting all my sensory feelings to be consumed with a hard dick, for that to be all there was on this planet, my mouth bobbing on a cock. He rubbed his dick against my ass as he sucked me off. I fucked him. I was covered in both of our cum. We took a shower. We ate the turkey and drank Bordeaux.

Trains provide this fast narrative, clear and linear, which then make it seem like life should unfold similarly. I am back in New York again, sadly aware of this, wondering how to continue this barreling drive, how to pass through scenery fast, how to reach intended destinations.

xxx-mas

what size do i get him?

I am listening to old Snoop Dog songs. I am listening to George Clinton, who I love. I am listening to Alicia Myers' "I Want to Thank You," which is an absolutely amazing song in every way, and which I heard on the radio today, and I remembered again, like I do every time I hear it on the radio, what a fucking fantastic song it is, and I turned up the radio really loud and briefly entered a period of bliss that was enabled by this song and lasted for just slightly longer than the song's duration.

I am sick, which seems to be a recurring thing this winter. I have been recovering from one bout of sickness only to come down with another bout. My back is still in pain. I have eczema on one of my hands. I am an old man.

Hey Jealousy

On Friday night, Diego came over for some drinks before we were to head out to a bar to go dancing. A friend doing that thing, casually asking about gossip he heard concerning a friend, he said to me, "Wait, so what happened with you and Jacob and C?" I was embarrassed that he had heard about this, had pretty much forgotten about it. I think it was at this point that not only my night, but my entire weekend, began to take on a different course than it otherwise would have. My head started to throb with anger. It was basically a scene from Kill Bill where the Bride sees an enemy, red flashes over her eyes and "Ironside" playing. The beer I was drinking wasn't strong enough to stifle this anger I felt coming over me. I took a shot of whisky immediately. I tried to act casual, asked, "Wait, what did you hear?"

The answer was something along the lines of: "Nothing, just that Jacob and C had been hooking up and you got really jealous and freaked out." I explained what happened to Diego, asked him how he heard about this, heard that C told some person who then told Diego. More flashes of red, "Ironside" blaring.

The reason I was getting so angry is because Diego knew more about this than I did, that it seemed a few people did. I was very angry because Jacob had clearly lied to me when he told me the one time I did freak out on him via text message that C and him were just hanging out, that I was acting crazy. C is a person that we had a threesome with early on in the summer. Jacob continued to have a crush on him after the fact, which I was vaguely aware of in the way he continued to talk about him and the fact that they would often text each other. I was a bit suspicious that there was something more going on, but also didn't really want to know for sure. But a month or so ago, he told me he was having dinner with him at the Indian place that we always went to. That sounded too much like a date to me. It also made me insanely angry that it was at a place the two of us often went together. I was high I believe and stared texting him nasty things, things along the lines of "Have fun hanging out with your new boyfriend." He came home many hours later and told me that they had just been hanging out. I knew he was lying. I know that that Indian place doesn't let you linger post-dinner at your table, that they rush you in and out.

So to hear a story from Diego that contained details confirming Jacob had been lying really, really upset me. Diego and I got very drunk and watched lots of Beyonce videos on YouTube. We did not end up going out. At some point, Jacob came home from work and Diego stumbled home. I asked Jacob why I would be hearing this story from Diego, how he would even know about it, was quite angry that Jacob had shared my feelings with this guy, C, very, very angry that this was now making the rounds of gossip for New York queerdos. Again, he told me that C and him had just been hanging out. I was very drunk and I started yelling truths I knew, told him he was lying, that I knew they had been fucking. He admitted they had been. And it came out, finally, some honesty.

I was angry and felt sick. Something had been broken that I cared a lot about; a schoolyard bully had just stepped on an art project I had made with popsicle sticks. We were supposed to be honest with each other. We had an open relationship, yes, but we were also honest with each other, were supposed to be. This was deception, lying, cheating. I told him that I didn't want to be with him anymore, that he should fucking call C and move in with him. Lying is a huge deal to me and I was quite heartbroken by this. I wanted to go back in time and allow honesty to try to occur, that now and always our relationship would not be capable of total trust, that now I would always have reason to doubt, that I had already been lied to. The thing had been broken, stomped on.

Yesterday, while he was at work, I wondered if I was still supposed to buy him a Christmas present, if we were going to be together or not. I tried to figure out what I wanted, kept wishing I didn't need to, kept wishing he would not have lied to me. I cried because I thought this was something different, because I didn't want to say goodbye to another person close to me, didn't want to have another person floating around in this city that I used to be so close to and now never talk to, a beautiful past conjured with seeing them out at bars, and that contrasted with the sorry state of present things, saying hello and quickly moving past each other. Over texts, we agreed we should talk last night.

He came home and we talked. We ate Mexican food and played on our respective Apple products. Later, I asked him if I should turn off the lights in our bedroom when I saw him asleep in bed, book fallen to his side. He said yes, and told me he also wanted a hug. We hugged and I told him that he couldn't lie to me anymore, ever again, that this other romance needed to end. I turned off the bedroom lights and went into the living room. I read David Remnick's excellent piece about Russia in this week's New Yorker, often having to reread certain paragraphs, his narrative blurring with my own, that despite my eyes scanning these lines and reading them, my mind thought about this boy asleep in the other room and my relationship with him, about what one is to do with life, how one best goes about it, the things we endure.

Montreal

I was on muscle relaxers and Benadryl. It was in the middle of the night when we stopped at the Canadian border, the bus driver delivering instructions to us over the loudspeaker that I was still too groggy to entirely comprehend as real and not as a voiceover in a dream. Giant, stadium-like lighting lit up the place a clinical white, this large stretch of asphalt out in the middle of nowhere. Jacob and I answered some questions, showed our passports, and soon were back on the bus. A bit more sleep and then we pulled into the bus station at Montreal around five in the morning. We dropped our bags off at the hotel, a room not ready, asked the guy at the front desk if he could recommend a place still open that served food and where we could hide out from the cold. He mentioned the McDonald's a block away.

We consulted our guidebook instead, not traveling to a frigid Montreal, eight hours by an overnight bus, to eat at McDonalds. We found a 24 hour diner, La Banquise, famous for its poutine. We walked past the McDonald's, past the bus station, and through the pre-dawn streets of Montreal, observing the exterior staircases on many of the buildings, the French signage all around us, and very slowly, light started to appear at one far corner of the sky. Some early morning joggers passed us as we walked along the edge of a park, matching up street by street a physical city with a street grid presented to us on a map.

The diner was playing Belle and Sebastian. This was a sign as sure as there needed to be that this was the place we should be in at this moment in time. We split an order of poutine and a breakfast plate, had some coffees, discussed what we could do during these early morning hours in a city we didn't know, and watched the sky lighten outside the window we were sitting against, a city coming into being. Despite the vomit-like appearance of poutine and despite the fact that it is a plate of fries covered in gravy and cheese curds, it was actually quite good, much more so than I expected.

With food and coffee in our system and nothing still open yet, we walked to Parc du Mont-Royal, and hiked to the top of the "mountain" that gives the city its name. There is a gorgeous view from the top of the city below. We took it in, took some photos, thought about extending this specific moment in time into future moments, this a memento to look back on at some point when scrolling through pictures on my phone or when looking at photos I have posted to Facebook.

More wanderings around the city, tiredness setting in, not much sleep had on the bus, and around one in the afternoon, we checked into our room and took a long nap. We woke up around happy hour time and had numerous drinks at a couple of the bars on rue Sainte Catherine. We took the subway a stop and ate dinner at cute bistro, L'Express, and then took the subway back a stop and went right on back to drinking in the Gay Village.

We went to Campus, a gay strip bar I had wanted to go to for quite a while. There seem to be a large number of porn stars that I really love that have come out of Montreal and this was a bar I had frequently seen listed in appearances by some of these porn stars. So there was that and there was my love of seeing naked men, really the same reason I believe, and so the two of us went to this bar quite drunk and eager to see naked flesh.

There is a stage up front and then tables surrounding the stage, right up against it, and then a bar behind these tables where you could sit and watch the stage with a very clear sightline. For whatever reason, there were many Christmas decorations up on stage, reindeer with heads that moved back and forth. I am also imagining a giant candy cane, though I could be wrong about that detail. Gay strip clubs barely exist as such in much of the US and so I was very excited to try out the numerous strip clubs Montreal has. Washington, DC used to have a really excellent gay strip club scene but most of the bars were razed a few years ago to make room for the baseball stadium they built in Southeast DC. The first strip club I went to, probably when I was 18, was Wet. This bar, mythic in my memory, is now gone. DC is very liberal with its liquor laws. Most states have laws that don't allow liquor to be served if a bar has full nudity on stage. DC does not have such laws and so had a really thriving gay strip club scene for a while. Montreal also has no such laws and so Jacob and I sat there at a table against the stage, pretending to fan ourselves, mouthing "So hot" at all the sexy flesh on display, at all the beautiful dicks that made their way across the stage.

We wanted to try out the other big strip club in Montreal and so walked a couple blocks down to Stud, which charged a small cover (unlike Campus) and which was also much larger of a club. For this reason, there were some insanely hot men that made their way across the stage, but it also felt at a further remove than the set-up at Campus. After watching some insanely sexy man play with his cock on stage, I found him afterwards and bought a lap dance from him for Jacob and I. He brought us back into a curtained off tiny little room and sat us down on a couch against the wall. He got naked and writhed his body against us. We felt him up as he danced for us, touching his ass, his back, his chest, his cock, wanting to have more access to this body, a frustration and also a pleasure had in the remove, in the distance preventing us from being able to suck his dick or for him to fuck us, that this is what it was, this lap dance where we could touch him, and the longing for more stoked our desire, made the thing almost unbearable. Jacob and I left soon after to fuck each other back in our hotel room, the horniness too much to further suppress.

The next day, we wandered around the city more, ate more food, napped again, and then found ourselves wandering drunk down Sainte Catherine looking for fun. We went to Unity on the advice of several cute guys, but the club was awful. There were what appeared to be some seriously underaged boys there, some boys looking barely 14. And, okay, maybe I can look past that. But what I cannot look past is terrible music. When they started playing Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling," that's when it was time to go.

We decided to hit up another strip club, Taboo. This was one of the most amazing bars I have ever been to. It was like walking into a shady strip club in the 1970s. Coming to this bar after hitting up Campus and Stud did this bar no favors. Both of those are very nice bars with insanely sexy men. There is something very sad about Taboo, off a lonely side street. The audience was mainly old men sipping their waters. The bar was run down but in such a beautiful way, a small long stage surrounded by a few tables, red lights as the main light source, a small bar in the back. It would be a great set for a film about a sad strip club or a photo shoot. Everything about the bar was absolutely perfect and despite the fact that it probably wouldn't be my first choice if I were to return to a gay strip club in Montreal, there was something so hypnotic about the place. The strippers were definitely the B team of Montreal strippers, guys that could not make it to Campus or Stud. Their bodies were not on point, their dance moves were definitely not on point, and many of the guys were wearing old, saggy briefs that did them no compliments. A French-Canadian boy felt up my cock when I was peeing in the bathroom. I looked at him and he said he did not mean to offend. I told him he did not offend. I think he was embarrassed though and left the bar soon after. As much as the two of us were fascinated by this train wreck of a bar, we eventually wanted to see some sexy naked men again and so headed back to Campus.

I am now in my thirtieth year on this planet and still no closer to being bored by the sight of naked men than I was when I was a young boy and looking at the naked men I would occasionally see in gym locker rooms. That there are things that can still manage to hold my interest after so many years and in such an intense way is a great thing.

There is a table for me in a few decades at Taboo, where I will be hopefully drinking something stronger than water. The pleasure I got from seeing these audience members was that of a kinship and of a knowledge that this is something that will never bore me, that when everything else does, there will still be young flesh to gaze upon, the human form to admire, bodies to long over.

1Q94

I bought a Powerball ticket for last night's game. Not one number matched. My lower back hurts in a way I'm not sure it has ever before. Bending over to pick things up or getting up from a sitting position is almost comically painful. I play the part of an old man, moaning and sighing over little tasks. I woke up this way. I'm not sure what brought this about - perhaps sleeping wrong, perhaps working out wrong, or perhaps a sign of aging. Maybe some combination of all three. I kept on taking naps today because it was about the most comfortable thing I could do and because also there was some part of me that imagined, hoped, I would wake up and it would go away. That I could blink my eyes and it would disappear. Click your heels three times and dream of home. Something like that.

I am listening to Smashing Pumpkins and drinking coffee. Soon I may look at jobs to apply to. Probably not, though. Later, after I fail to look for jobs, I am going to see Erykah Badu sing some songs in midtown with Jacob and I cannot wait.

I have been trying to read Murakami's 1Q84 for the past couple weeks now, have had in my possession for that long at least. It sits in various rooms of my house, either by my bed or by my couch and every few days or so I will remember that I want to read it and attempt to, but the weight of the thing really makes it an awkward book to get comfortable with. Today, bed-ridden, I took up the thing again. I am listening to Smashing Pumpkins and reading Murakami and going to see Erykah Badu and it could easily be ten years ago I suppose.

chilaquiles

Chilaquiles really might be at their best twenty minutes or so after they are served. The same argument could potentially be made for pizza. Sometimes the thing is better once it has cooled, when the more liquid aspects to the dish, the melted cheese, the salsa, become something else, something with more solid attributes. Chilaquiles taste best like this when you are hungry and stoned and in love with the weird, chicken-like texture tortilla chips have once they have soaked up all the salsa in the dish. The joy in eating this particular dish is a joy because it presents to us the sturdy tortilla chip, and we see its proud back brought down by the blows of some giant who had been offscreen until this moment, a threat only hinted at by the dark clouds off on the horizon our hero was marching toward. We see a giant tripped up by rope, fallen to the earth. We see that boy who seemed something else take a dick up his ass and make a face of pain, a pure emotion one didn't think possible, his detached badinage making you believe, falsely, that this guy was too cool for it all, over it. A desire's broad outlines somehow satisfied with each bite of the chilaquiles. We see the thing's will broken, and, more importantly here, feel our own asserted by its submission.

We eat and eat and cannot stop. The food runs out though, and we are forced to.

Sunday

I am not sure that there is much to The Muppets movie, not sure there needs to be. It was a fun afternoon at the movies though, watching this ragtag bunch of puppets from my childhood make self-aware jokes about their datedness, about their irrelevance. There was a happy ending, there usually is.

From there, I went to the bookstore to find a travel guide to Montreal for my weekend trip I am taking in two weeks. Jacob and I have booked overnight tickets on a Greyhound bus for a couple weeks from now and are going to spend three days exploring a city neither of us has ever been to, a city with poutine, naked go-go boys, and French speakers. I am very excited.

I went to the gym and worked out to the point that my arms are very sore and despite these numerous trips to the gym weekly, despite the soreness, there is not the instantaneous massive arms I want to appear - that thing that happens with the Hulk when he gets angry. I showered and bought a nice bottle of wine from Warehouse Wine and Spirits, probably my favorite wine store in New York. It's like the Strand of wine stores, old and dusty and too well-lit, but such great deals to be had.

Jacob and I made curry, drank some wine, and now each of us is staring at separate screens, our MacBooks before us, a distance of only a few feet in one sense separating us, distances in other senses separating us that are quite bigger.

Thanksgiving

I was riding home tonight on the train back from Delaware, the past couple days spent with my family outside of this city, outside of my comfort zone, a bit bored. It was what it was. Good and surely revitalizing in the ways that being with the family are - in ways that are both clear and also very unclear, very below the surface, that some good on the atomic level comes about by being around these people you spent many years on this planet with, with the people that brought you forth into this world, the people responsible for your atoms. And yet there are atoms just as well responding to their influence in less receptive ways, pushing away from each other, making you want to distance yourself from this type of life in the suburbs, this type of comfort, that this is why you moved to this city, and some sparks long thought blown out again show a small orange ember and there is the desire to live differently, to make it in this world and to live a life worth meaning, said with emphasis, verbally letting you know that in print this is a part that would be italicized, that you want that type of life and are serious about it, that this desire is again rekindled by being around your family, which though you love, you also want to be very different from, other than.

I watched too much television over this time, realize how much of it I watch in New York - too much since I knew about all of these shows, these stars, was able to partake in conversations easily concerning them. I wanted to distance myself from this culture, create a different one, and that's why I moved to this city I now live in and something happened and I am not sure what but I was reminded of some original intentions these past couple days, again wanted an old beat-up Saab 900 that I could cover the back of with bumper stickers that articulated far more forcefully than I would ever do so now, ideas and concepts I was excited, proud, to embrace. There is a critical distance now where a pride that proud becomes something else, tacky, gauche.

I slept and read a copy of Men's Fitness that I bought in the Amtrak waiting area in Wilmington for $4.99, the headlines revealing ways for me to obtain abs and sex secrets, and how could I not purchase a thing promising such things? I have been on a fitness kick lately that is tied to a perhaps unhealthy zeal about trying to get abs and to become more built. After I finished this magazine that I was only mildly embarrassed to read on the train, shielding it a bit when people walked past, I tried reading 1Q84, but that put me to sleep much as it did on the way down to my family's house. I slept and didn't and looked at what type of people showed up on my Grindr feed in these towns outside of New York. The lights of New York began to appear out in the dark, past my own fluorescent-lit reflection and that of my fellow passengers, the city's lights visible if I unfocused my eyes, let their focus on a close world relax enough so they could see the one beyond this one, the many other ones there. A skyline I used to see was there in this new one. Freedom Tower is now gigantic looking when you approach at night from New Jersey, it towering over anything near. It has a flat top, as it's still being built, no antenna yet to give it more shape. A massive block of light on each floor, the floors rising week by week. It's nice to see. It changes the skyline and doesn't. It's still a big light of hope saying EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE when you approach it from New Jersey after saying goodbye to your family. It's the same place you ran to, the Emerald City we staggered to through poppy fields. Even with that gigantic Freedom Tower now there, it is still the skyline I saw when I first moved here, this place I had dreamed of since I was a kid, and finally, finally fucking made it to, that, tonight, I was again so fucking grateful to have made it to this place.

Happy Together

Another weekend nearly gone by, another work week about to start, which also will somehow go by quicker than expected. Thanksgiving will pass. Christmas will too. And soon these things will come around again, again seemingly sooner than one's notion of time seems to allow for.

This weekend started, appropriately, with a snatch of conversation that has been repeating in my head ever since it was uttered. It was Dwayne's birthday and he was having a dinner at Dallas BBQ. I was seated next to an old co-worker, Sara, and she asked me what I was doing, if I was ever going to leave the hotel. I said I wanted to, but that I was lazy, that I hated looking for jobs, that I didn't even know what to try to do. If I had had more to drink at this point or if it had been in a setting outside of someone's birthday festivities, I might have been more introspective, more honest, said that I feel a bit trapped, that I don't know any longer how to go about doing things, that I feel old at times, that I have perhaps missed the boarding of certain boats. Because she is great and doesn't pooh-pooh around the issue, because she also worked the same job, she said, "You don't want to be forty and still be working at [the hotel]."

And, no, I don't. I didn't want to be thirty and still be working there. But time really does move fast and one has to be nimble and keep ahead of it, which I have not been doing. I have been drifting along on its currents, carried forward in this same job I have been doing for three years now. It is somehow Thanksgiving on Thursday.

And so I was eager to leave this brightly-lit restaurant, put those thoughts behind me, let them be less visible in a darkened bar. Erica and I went to Rawhide. We ran into some friends on the street and dragged them there with us. I drank a couple of strong drinks and felt my anxiety easing. I watched go-go boys dance, desired bodies, listened to shit music, and felt better, felt again soothed by time's currents, carried away again, not fighting the current any longer. From there, we all went to the bar at the Chelsea Hotel.

Francois Sagat was in attendance at this party and I went into stalker mode, staring at him all night, barely listening to whomever I was with, eyeing Sagat, looking for a moment when he might be by himself so I could say hello. At some point, this moment came. I had had quite a bit to drink by this point and was a drooling fanboy, but he was way more polite than he needed to be, friendly even. He had a beautiful smell, a sexy BO. I wanted to bury my face in his armpits, inhabit that smell. I shook his hand instead.

When I woke up insanely hungover yesterday, I remembered to jerk myself off with that same hand before showering, thought dirty thoughts, thought about touch and connections and human bodies and internet bodies.

I went back to sleep, slept off my hangover, and then went last evening to see Happy Together at MoMA. Desire and sadness and dreams were projected on to a screen and I projected my own baggage, memories, and associations on to those projections. The images and scenes and slowed down bits and smokiness kept burning an afterimage all night, Wong Kar-Wai often being able to do these things to me. At Eastern Bloc afterwards, Cyndi Lauper's "Money Changes Everything" was played, a song that for reasons I don't entirely understand really cuts deep for me. I got emotional and sipped my cocktail and talked to Jacob about a trip to Canada.

laser lights sending fallen dominoes back upright, one and then the next

The music was terrible, as it has lately been anytime I have bothered go to Sugarland on a Friday. The fog machines and lasers were doing their best to compensate but the dance floor was still empty. Everyone was crowded at the front of the bar, far from the dance floor. There was a two hour open bar happening and I had drink after drink, talked and did not talk with a group of SVA students. My mind kept wandering. Green lasers kept racing across surfaces and I thought about time, specifically the years I have spent in New York. It was the 4th anniversary of this particular bar and on Sunday night, I spent a similar evening at its sister bar, Metropolitan, when that bar celebrated its 9th anniversary.

I have been in New York now for eight and a half years. My first apartment that I signed a lease to was just a couple blocks from Metropolitan and I lived there for a few years, oftentimes spending several nights a week at Metropolitan. I met a boy at that bar that I had my first New York relationship with. That didn't end so well and I threw myself at him every time I continued to see him at Metropolitan, perhaps started going to this particular bar even more after this, the hope of seeing him, of going home with him if I could manage to say the right things, be charming or desperate enough.

I have hooked up with countless boys from that bar, done lines of coke in its bathroom, spent many summer Sunday afternoons on its back patio getting sloppier and sloppier. I have also now at this point in my life calmed down quite a bit from those early years of mine in New York, settled down in many senses of the phrase. My trips to the bar have become less and less frequent. It is weird to think that my time in New York and Metropolitan's coincides so closely.

I don't know where I am going with any of these thoughts. I am not sure where one ever intends to go when they start strolling down memory lane looking at boarded up windows that they once used to live in. But that's what was happening last evening. I didn't really know anyone other than Jacob and his SVA friends. I thought about when Sugarland first opened, how I was there for that. Smoking on the roof patio last night, I could see a tall unoccupied condo building that Sugarland was now in the shadow of. That did not used to be there. When the bar first opened, the Williamsburg real estate bubble was popping and everything around this bar looked bombed out, razed lots, half finished construction projects. Apparently the money has now come back for big condo projects. This building was a depressing sight to see, obstructing a view of the night sky that used to be fairly unobstructed.

Jacob at one point asked about the mural of Domino Sugar Factory at the front of the bar, wondering why it was in the bar. I was a little blown away that he didn't know the building's history and its relationship to this neighborhood, that it was less than a decade ago still an operational factory, that its closure in 2004 (a year after I moved here) was a very potent symbol of Williamsburg's manufacturing decline, that what had once been an active industrial waterfront was no longer, that the bar took its name from this, that it was a cutesy reference to this part of Williamsburg's history that had only recently come to a close.

My mind wandered even more so now, this brief retelling of the neighborhood's recent history throwing about green lasers all over other surfaces of my mind, things briefly illuminated, memories of beds and boys and shit jobs and hungover mornings and bike rides and endless slices of pizza.

The open bar ended. The music was still shit. The dance floor was still empty. Jacob was too drunk for his own good. We went to Anna Maria's and had some slices before hopping on the train home.

umlilo

I woke up yesterday morning with a slight sore throat. I took some Advil and some vitamins intended to ward off this cold and went to work. Work became more and more unbearable. I could feel a fever developing more and more, a headache becoming more and more pounding, my head literally feeling like it was about to split open. From work, I came straight home and went to bed. I have not had pants on in what is now 24 hours. I called in sick to work today and have been lying around in bed or on the couch, watching The Only Way is Essex, porn, YouTube clips, and feeling like shit.

I am drinking a cup of coffee now in an attempt to feel normal, as coffee is a necessary part of my day in order to feel normal. Sweat beads are popping up all over my forehead.

I can already see the rays of the sun becoming more and more horizontal, it nearing sundown already at this early hour. I am thinking about how I should think more about certain things, not necessarily thinking about those things mind you, just rather telling myself I should be thinking about them more sometime soon, some future date, not necessarily now.

Among these things: Figuring out a way to manage my finances, so I quit overdrawing my bank account every single month when my rent check is deposited. Finding a new career outside of hotels. Researching ways to quickly gain muscle. Figuring out a place in Central America to vacation soon. Again figure out a way to manage my finances, so that that can happen. Figure out a way to get my wisdom teeth removed. Again see that admonition about finances.

Looking at that list, I see it as stupid. I also am getting soaked in sweat due to this cold and this very hot coffee. Sweat it out, start again. Burn it to the ground. Dance around the flames and send up your prayers skyward with the smoke.

an end to Daylight Savings Time

When I was coming back from seeing Joan Didion read the other night, I was seated across from this sexy man on the L train. He looked like a better-looking version of an ex-boyfriend of mine. I kept looking up from my book to look at him. He would occasionally catch me looking at him and I would look away, pretending I was just looking around the train. I wasn't sure that the man was gay, had my doubts, didn't want to be too obvious, didn't want to get my ass kicked. Gay cruising is such a fraught activity. It often exists in straight spaces, trains in this case, and there isn't always the guarantee that the person being cruised is gay. There is the hope that they are and you look for a signal, a look held just a fraction of a second longer than appropriate, a slight smile in the corner of the lips, eyes that show their hunger for sex. And so there is bound up in this cruising a fear, a tension, a riskiness; there is the fear, sometimes large, sometimes tiny, that the person might not be gay, might be offended by your looks, might get aggressive or even violent toward you, well-founded fears in the homophobic world in which we reside.

I was never entirely sure with this person and so I did my best to not look at him too much. He got off the train a couple stops before me and that was that. In earlier days, I may have gone home and written a Missed Connection about him. Instead, I went home and sat on the couch with my boyfriend.

That was our last friendly night with each other, Jacob and I. The next night he did not invite me out with him, despite me telling him I wanted to go out. I took great offense to this, probably more so than was fair, but I can be quite sensitive when feeling slighted and then I turn very venomous and mean. We have barely talked since then. I have gone into the other room when he has been home, have tried my best not to talk to him. I thought a lot about whether I should be with this person, thought I shouldn't, wanted to be alone and on my own.

After lying in our bedroom while he sat in our living room last night, a real rager of a Saturday night at our house, I left to go meet Erica and some other friends at Midway. A few five dollar beer and shot combos later, I had softened, missed Jacob, and texted him that I loved him. I somehow convinced all these people, most of them straight, that we should go to Metropolitan instead.

I was talking to someone at Metropolitan about Werner Herzog. They had recently met him and I wanted to know everything about their brief meeting, Herzog someone I admire dearly. Behind this boy talking to me, I saw him, the boy from the train. He saw me too and smiled, clear that we both remembered each other from the train the other day. I left the Herzog conversation abruptly and went to talk to this boy. We chatted for a long while about things I can't remember on this hungover day. I remember a Robyn song came on and I sang along. We walked back to his house.

Once there, he told me he had HIV, that he wanted to let me know that beforehand. That's fine, I said, who cares. We were already naked. He said that it was a dealbreaker for the last few negative people he had brought home, that they had left. We made out and he sucked me off for a bit. There was talk of other stuff but he didn't have condoms. I came and he licked the semen off my cock and fingers. We talked about Bjork. I got dressed during this conversation. I said goodbye to this guy and he seemed a bit sad. I asked him if he was. He said no. I didn't believe it. We hugged and I sang along some more to whatever song was playing on his stereo at the time. I was really in a singing mood last night, stirred to feelings by being out late on a Saturday night with whiskey and beer in my system and an extra hour in the night.

I walked home through dark, mainly empty streets, feeling very sure of my footing, walked with a strong awareness of the present moment and my place in it. Home, I ate some cold pizza, and then slept next to Jacob.

"the answer was always with us"

a thank you

After she was done reading from her new book, she said she would take questions. There was silence and everyone looked around nervously, wondering who was going to break the silence. There were things I wanted to ask but I didn't have words for these questions and any questions I could think of seemed either too banal or too much for the setting, for the person the questions would be directed to. I was really nervous. This was one of my idols and I couldn't ask her just anything. Worse, I could not ask her something and have her give a look where I knew she was bored by the question. I wouldn't be able to continue living. I was silent and so too was the rest of the audience. We all adored her too much clearly. The moderator broke the ice and asked a question and soon other people followed, seeing that she wouldn't bite, that she is a sweet, old lady who fingers all these memories in her answers.

I had seen Joan Didion read once before, when she was promoting The Year of Magical Thinking, and that experience was beautiful even though I was in the back of a huge overflow crowd at Barnes and Noble's. This time, I was lucky enough to see her read at Paula Cooper Gallery, a much smaller event, and was even more lucky to score a seat in the second row. I was ten or so feet from this writer I adore for a good hour. She is small and spectral, a little old lady, delicate looking.

After the reading, I got in line to get my copy of Blue Nights signed. Her hands briefly touched my book as she signed her name. There were a million things I wanted to say to this woman. There was no way I could concisely put all of these feelings into this brief moment granted by her signing my book. When she was done signing my book, she looked up at me. For a brief instant, I got to look Joan Didion in the eyes and I said, "Thank you." I said it in the most sincere way. Those two words were packed with so much gratitude.

It was some years ago when I was working at The Strand when I first read her. The first book I read was The White Album, a beautiful old hardcover edition that I can still clearly picture the red and blue cover fonts of. It was a magical book, a book of spells. It really showed me what could be done with an economy of prose, how moods could be evoked with pauses and clipped sentences. It showed me a beautiful rhythm which I often find myself poorly imitating, often unconscious of the fact, sometimes conscious of it. They are short little essays, each of which packs a huge punch, paints broad pictures of this country and what it means to live. I sold the book during one of the many times when I was broke and sold off big piles of books I had acquired from working at that store. I need to reacquire it, an old hardcover copy though. Slouching Towards Bethlehem was read shortly thereafter, and I soon relisted my favorite books on Friendster. These two will always be on any favorite book list of mine.

I couldn't explain how much this woman means to me, but I am sure you have people like that in your life, and imagine how you would feel if you got to see them up close in person, the butterflies and the joy and the nervousness all bouncing around inside you. And that's how I felt last night - absolutely giddy and starstruck and full of dreams and memories and heartache.

The Umbrellas of New York

Some years ago, there used to be a crappy discount homewares store on 14th Street near Union Square in what is now a Bank of America building. The entire building was demolished to make way for a Bank of America. The building that was torn down was ugly, but distinctly so in a way that gave it a strange sort of beauty, especially as a holdout in the big-box gentrification of Union Square that was well under way then. I can't remember the name of the store any longer. During a rainstorm though, I ran into the store looking for an umbrella. In the back they had a big bin of pink and gray umbrellas that I soon saw were Patrick Nagel umbrellas. I don't know what warehouse of eighties unsold goods this store purchased these from but I was in love with the umbrella in a way I had never loved an umbrella. I bought one for two dollars.

The umbrella had a typical Nagel portrait of a whiteface smiling woman on it at several points. I was very proud of this umbrella and loved walking underneath it, took an insane sort of joy in this time capsule of an umbrella that had emerged in the bargain bin of the early 2000s. This was during a period when I really loved the work of Patrick Nagel and so finding this umbrella, this treasure trove of them, felt like some sort of cosmic present.

Umbrellas, of course, don't last. They get lost, forgotten in bars and underneath subway seats. Wind mangles them useless. I should have bought the entire stock of them at only two dollars each. But, for whatever reasons, probably though because I was very broke in those years, I only bought the one.

There are rainy days, today for instance, when I still miss that umbrella, dream about it, wish that I was walking underneath a dome of Patrick Nagel portraits, a delirious eighties vision of female sexuality and power, instead of the little anonymous black dome I now scramble about under, jostling with other black domes for sidewalk space.

now or never

"So I was working on the song and watching Aguirre, with Klaus Kinski, and I was looking at Kinski screaming on the screen. There was a lot of anger in his look. His face was just incredible. I said, 'God, I should sing.' That's how it started."

-Anthony Gonzalez of M83 in an interview with Pitchfork

That quote was a charming slap to the face. Further in the interview, the harder slap:

"It's not easy to perform and to express yourself and to be sincere. But I'm 30, so it's now or never. Throughout my career, I've lost some very close friends very young. It just makes you realize that, if you have to do something, do it now. Otherwise, it's going to be too late."

I am 30, by the way.

the limo outside Holiday Cocktail Lounge

I am listening to the new M83 album and occasionally imagining a roach out of the corner of my eye running past me on the couch. There is not one I am quite sure. I am a bit stoned though and quite tired and so perhaps a little delirious and freaking myself out for whatever reasons we like to do that by imagining a gross roach running past me. Give me another order of the heeby-jeebys please, it being Halloween season and all.

The reason why I am tired is because yesterday I was a tornado of drunkenness. I met Jacob after he got off work and we did a bar crawl through the East Village, having the beer and shot combos at various old dive bars that I really enjoy - Blue and Gold, Holiday Cocktail Lounge, and International Bar. Already quite drunk, we then went to Griffen because it was gay and there was an open bar. This was at the very early hour of seven mind you. An Adele remix was played, a Gaga remix was played. We consumed more drinks, vodka ones. Eight o'clock, open bar over, we stumble out on to the street. Jacob had been talking about fries all night, how he wanted them. We went to Bill's and had fries, burgers, and, for some bad reason, more beers. When the afternoon started we were both geographically and mentally in a better place. The afternoon started in the East Village, talking about various things going on in our lives, old country and classic rock songs over the bar speakers, sunshine coming through the leaves on tree branches, and a low-soaring army of clouds slowly on the march eastward. We advanced against the clouds in a western direction. We took the train to the west side of Manhattan and got too drunk and stuffed our face and then walked through Chelsea with our fries in a doggy bag toward a boy's house we had had a threesome with once and who I had drunk texted throughout our time at Bill's, hungers of all sorts screaming to be filled on this night.

We left the bag of fries on the street outside his apartment building, embarrassed to take them in. We could not find his apartment's buzzer on the keypad for a couple minutes, a very good indication of our state and of how we probably shouldn't be showing up at a boy's house blackout drunk at only eight something in the evening to have sex. The three of us rolled around naked and sucked dicks and I fucked Jacob for a bit and we were all pantomiming the act. Jacob and I thought we wanted sex but were definitely too drunk for it to be the thing it could be, should be. The boy told us his roommate was coming back and we should probably leave pretty soon. We got dressed quickly, not quick enough. His roommate and roommate's friend came home and it was mildly awkward when the roommate asked where I knew the boy from, but only mildly so for me because I was too obliterated to care and was on my way out the door. I think the boy was a bit embarrassed by it though.

We were on the street outside his apartment building, I mentioned the fries and asked if we should grab them.

Sum of Days

The mosquitos are hungrier. They know the game is ending, that the cold weather is going to kill them all off soon. The bites are desperate and one after the other. They are getting careless, sloppy, old. They are easier to kill.

Their hunger, their method of sating it, harms me, annoys me, and thus their life, their hunger, ends.

I am sitting on my couch, having just watched an episode of "Breaking Bad" with Jacob, him already asleep next to me under a blanket and me swatting away these mosquitos that are trying to get these last blood-drunk moments of pleasure in before their very short lives come to a conclusion, before the period is hit on the keyboard.

After going to the gym today and getting my hair cut and purchasing a book famously about Savannah, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, to read before going to that city in a week, I met up with Jacob at MoMA. We looked at the de Kooning retrospective, which, despite all my intents not to be so, I was bored by. Abstract Expressionism does not excite me. I could say "I don't get it," but theoretically I do, historically I do - it's just that in every other sense, the important ones, I don't. It leaves me cold. There is no surge of feeling looking at these things, interacting with them. A shrug of the shoulders and on to the next one. My eyes began to glaze over the images. There were a few paintings that I thought were really beautiful and evocative somehow of grand things with just big brushstrokes of color, most strikingly for me being "Suburb in Havana."

There is an installation by Carlito Carvalhosa, "Sum of Days," in the big atrium space, that did cause that swell, that surge of something. It's a hazy, energized high in which life seems to be about something and this art you are looking at comes close to somehow making that something seem within the grasp of your ability to put it into words, and yet, it keeps on eluding that grasping hand. There is a huge gauzy white fabric that is hung from the high ceilings and that winds through the space, creating a shifting maze of fabric, shifted by the breeze of the air and the people moving through it, for you to walk through, various sounds rising over the loud noise of people moving about a museum. A jazz sax would burst out a string of notes and I walked through this white fabric and felt like I was being born or that I was dying. It was really beautiful and I'm not sure why I should think so, why it should make me feel as it did, but it did do so and that it did is what matters here. My hand keeps grasping.

Columbus Day

I met Diego in Union Square and we rode the subway out to Flatbush, where I purchased beer and chips and Diego purchased vodka and salad. We then boarded the Q35 and rode out to Jacob Riis beach. We sat near a group of nude guys that were out there on this post-Labor Day beach, fairly empty and lifeguardless. I got naked and drank my beer, and Diego and I talked, as we often do lately, about our lives and the feeling that we are falling behind, that age is somehow getting the better of us, and about how we are coming up short in many ways. We discussed ways to correct this. We discussed our love lives.

We swam in the ocean. We did this in mid-October, the weather unseasonably hot, mid-eighties. Back on our towels, I said hello to a cute boy that walked past us. He stopped and stood over us, said hello. He was just coming out of the water and had worn a pair of briefs in the water. The outline of his penis was very visible through the wet shorts. I kept talking to him so I could stare at his dick. I wanted it in my mouth somehow. This guy eventually sat down on my towel and laid next to me. He said, "Tell me something about you." I said, "Tell me why you're still wearing your shorts." He told me to help him get them off. I slid his underwear off of him and we lay on our stomachs next to each other, our sides touching, a repressed desire to fuck instead channeled into slight touches. He felt my ass. I felt his. We soon heard Diego's snores next to us.

My dick was hard and was sticking out from the side of my stomach. He took it in his hand and I turned to face him, our bodies turning in toward each other, keeping close so people couldn't see our dicks, our hands stroking each other's. I took his in my hand and because I wanted so badly to put in in my mouth I touched it with the fondest of caresses, a huge charge going through my arms, my body. I licked his neck, grazed his lips, moaned lightly into his ear. A lot of people on the beach were looking in our direction and I could feel my desire running well past any blockades social decorum and legalities were putting in its way. As horniness was taking more and more hold, as my desire to get off was soon outrunning the erotic joy I got from flirting, I cared less and less that I was on a public beach naked and getting jerked off in front of quite a few people. I was actually taking quite a bit of exhibitionist pleasure from it. But some sense of shame, or perhaps decency, or perhaps fear of society and the law, told me I should cool it. I roused Diego and told him we should get going soon, that we had to get back.

We rode the bus back, rode it over the bridge spanning Jamaica Bay, and said goodbye, again, to summer.

Portishead's "Strangers"

After the Gold Rush

It is now October. I am listening to Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush," it seeming appropriately October. This comes around every year and still the magic of it is as equally spellbinding each time. The temperature starts to drop, shadows get longer, there is a crispness in the air. It is time to shed some things, to slow it down a bit and take it all in.

This evening, Jacob and I walked down to the East River from our house, hurrying against the setting sun. The plan wasn't to watch the sunset but rather just to go for a walk. It's the type of weather you want to be in. There is magic out there right now in the air. I have really been feeling it the past few days. It's emotional weather, stuff seems like it is coming back - I feel like I am.

I am wearing shirts with sleeves and collars and I love hunching up my shoulders during a breeze, protecting my neck with my collar. I pull down on my sleeves and cover my wrists more. I am hugged my fabric and wind, various elements tickling my skin, a smell tickling my nose, and memories recalled of new school years starting, those moments briefly relived, an interest in Dave Matthews Band, an interest in Smashing Pumpkins, of new projected identities displayed for a new class of people, new pieces added to my wardrobe reflecting in some ways this new identity.

Most of my fond romantic memories exist sometime in the fall and so I am overlapping lots of those I walk around Brooklyn on a night like this early October one. I walked past the houses of two boys I used to see and where I used to hang out with them on fall nights like this one. I did this walk through memories with a beautiful boy who I live with now in this present that I only occasionally occupy. We walked down Grand Street, the street I lived on for several years when I first moved to New York. We got to the East River at that small little park, the sun already down, but the sky still in the throes of dusk, some beautiful fireworks still to be set off. There were young couples as there usually are there at sunset and families of Orthodox Jews as there usually are there at sunset. We made our way down to some rocks on the shore of the water, could hear the water lapping against these rocks, saw the Williamsburg Bridge become less and less distinct from the sky behind it, the sky becoming darker and darker. The buildings in midtown slowly started to light up. We made our way back home.

Magnum Exits the Stage

It was maybe three weeks that we had him. Yesterday, we said goodbye to Magnum and another couple picked him up from our house, a new family for him, another couple attempting to live out the fantasy of having a French bulldog. They are the cutest dogs, adorable, and we somehow had put on our blinders to everything else that is involved with having a dog other than this cutesy aspect. There were many not cute aspects. Waking up bleary-eyed and stumbling to the bathroom only to step barefoot into a big pile of shit is not cute. Waking up in the middle of the night to him crying also not cute. Taking him for endless walks also not cute. Constantly cleaning up piss and shit very much so not cute.

A week into having the dog I was completely over the idea and knew that he had to go or my sanity did. My nerves became shorter and shorter. I dreaded coming home because I knew it meant doing nothing but taking care of the dog and making sure he wasn't chewing on this or pissing there. I realized how much I really do value my alone time and having a dog means no alone time.

Speaking of which, Jacob just came home.

I thought I would play George Michael's "Freedom 90" when the dog left yesterday and dance around my apartment in celebration. Instead I was actually quite sad, had really come to like his mushy face and perky ears staring at me all the time. Instead I played Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," and The The's "This is the Day," neither of which really fit the mood I was in. I was grasping for some musical accompaniment to the moment, googling songs about goodbyes, all of them rather terrible, and so I listened to these two instead thinking they would work. Maybe not every moment has its appropriate soundtrack; maybe the absence of music, a quiet, is the best soundtrack for some moments.

Tina says Lorne says:

"The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30."
This is something Lorne has said often about Saturday Night Live, but I think it's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.

You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute. (And I'm from a generation where a lot of people died on waterslides, so this was an important lesson for me to learn.) You have to let people see what you wrote.
-Tina Fey, Bossypants (123)

"It ain't no used to sit and wonder why, babe, if you don't know by now"

This morning, I woke up, it about five-thirty in the morning, groggy, not really wanting to be awake, wanting to sleep more, but knowing that I had to get up to get ready for work. I tiptoed out of bed and into the kitchen, trying not to wake Magnum, our newly acquired puppy. Despite my attempts to quietly get to the kitchen, perhaps because of those attempts, he awoke, crying and whining from his crate. I was tired and wanted to worry about getting my own self together, awake, but instead was now having to try to quiet/comfort some dog, attempt to calm him down for just ten more minutes until I could take a shower and get dressed, so that I could take him out of his crate and out for a walk to piss and shit. I became enraged. It was probably about other things. I wanted to throw the dog down the stairs, was wondering if this might have been the worst decision, that now there would be ten years of no alone time, that I will continually have this animal needing things of me, needing me to take him outside early and late when I am tired and don't want to leave the house.

I worked with this twenty year old girl today. She is harmless and funny, but is also young and says things the way young people often say them, without thinking of how they might be received. She said something along the lines of, "I never realized you were so old." So old being thirty. She meant it as a compliment she was quick to say, but given that I have been thinking about how unproductive and unsuccessful I have been with my life these last few years, it wasn't too much of a compliment to have someone a decade younger than me who does the same job that I do tell me that I am so old. I really need a new job. She also, it should perhaps be mentioned here, called me a cougar due to the young age of my boyfriend.

My nerves were already short today because of waking up to a crying dog that I wanted to strangle. I had already been thinking about the stalled nature of my life a lot in the last few days, and so to be told these things really was about all I could take. I was afraid I was going to start to cry and made myself steady the wheel - held the smile tight, didn't let those lips tremble.

Tonight the temperature is supposed to drop to the high forties. It is nice and brisk outside, fall's perfume coming down the hall ahead of her, making you look in her direction. Everyone is at their lockers in the hall, putting books away, a break between classes, and she is coming down the hallway. The camera is in soft focus all of a sudden and the film speed slows down to show her in slow motion, hair being blown back, a new season striding forward, camera showing heads gawking her way, mouths agape, books falling from hands.

I keep hoping to win the lottery and keep on failing to get even one matching number. I have finally gotten around to watching Mad Men, just started the second season tonight, and do see what a fantastic television show it is, cannot get enough of Don Draper and his depression, his disenchantment with the world, and his very successful coping mechanisms for getting through it. It's such a fantastic show that deals with issues of gender and class in specific historical circumstances so great. The show is also probably what is bringing me down and making me think about my own life, my own failed attempts at it, my lack of attempts at living. That's a good thing, the show bringing me down. Sometimes you need a good kick in the pants, someone to tell you that they are sick of seeing your cutoff "Our Place" shirt that you have been wearing every single weekend.

9/11

Ten years ago, I was living in a house in Sarasota, Florida. I was just waking up and getting ready for class when Bonnie came home from her early morning class to tell me that the US was under attack, that planes had hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Never in my life have I experienced such confusion, terror, and panic as I did on that morning. Sheer and utter panic, the world I thought I knew no longer existing, my mom potentially dead. I tried calling my mom but couldn't get a hold of her. I really started to panic, believing my mom had died in the Pentagon, where she worked. I watched news coverage and that did nothing to calm me. I might have tried calling my sister next to see if she had heard from mom - I don't remember. I do remember getting ahold of my dad at some point and he had heard from my mom, saying that she was okay, that she was fine. I cried out of relief and because there were just too many emotions for my body to process any other way.

Ten years have passed since that horrific day, all of us changed people in so many ways. A bubble was pierced and things we never used to imagine or fear will now sometimes cross our minds, the possible expanded to include atrocities that were unimaginable in America ten years and a day ago.

I'm not sure where America is now and where it would be if things hadn't happened. I know that the sky is gray now after being blue this morning, that there is a dog asleep on the couch next to me, that I'm now in my thirties, that I am very confused about what I am going to do with my life, how I am going to still make something of it, that there are several emails in my inbox that I have sent to myself, links to jobs that I should apply to, and that instead of applying to them, I have been looking at porn and taking vitamins and putting on face masks. Those are the things I do know.

Magnum

I told Jacob that I didn't think they were Amish because they clearly had a microwave if the puppies were living in an old microwave box. Jacob said that they were probably Mennonites then, that Mennonites were allowed to use electricity. We were in rural Pennsylvania, had driven up a dirt hillside road to this house. We knew that unless there was something seriously wrong with the dog, we were going to purchase him, that we were not renting a car and driving three and a half hours for no reason, that we were going to come home with a dog for all this effort.

The two of us have been talking about wanting to get a dog for at least a year now. The dog that we fantasized about getting was a French bulldog. Their expensive price tags have always made it a bit prohibitive. We kept talking about saving up money for one. At one point, there was a puppy fund, savings with the goal of getting a French bulldog, but that fund morphed into a European vacation fund, and we spent two lovely weeks on the other side of the Atlantic this summer instead of getting a dog.

I'm not sure what finally spurred it. Perhaps it is the perceived change in seasons, the desire for a cuddly thing to get us through colder months now that summer has ended. Perhaps it's because they are insanely cute and with no other planned trips on the horizon, it was finally the time. I have no idea. All I know is that we have yet to even mail out our rent checks for this month that started a couple days ago, that I intend to do that Tuesday morning, and that hopefully the checks won't get cashed until Friday at earliest since we have spent all of our money that was supposed to go to rent on this adorable little puppy that we have named Magnum.

We drove home through mountains on I-80 and listened to current pop songs and classic rock anthems and lite-rock torch songs that I sang along with, trying to keep myself awake and alert, the seven hours total of driving a bit much at times. We finally made it home. The dog got carsick and puked several times on the drive.

We have only had him for a day and he is still only a young puppy, only eight weeks old, and so we are now in the painful task of potty training. My nerves are already getting a little frazzled and I have no idea how people potty train human beings. He cries a lot whenever I try to put him in his crate, but he is warming up in ways. He loves lying on the couch with me. He licks my toes too often. He makes adorable faces with confused expressions and he is just about the cutest thing ever. I am so incredibly happy to have this puppy and know why I have been wanting one for so long, know that it was a good desire, know that this decision was the right one. I am going to be very broke for a couple weeks and will probably end up having my bank account overdrawn once this rent check goes through, but that's okay. I cannot go out for a couple weeks because I have this adorable puppy to take care of, to play with, to love.

Irene

The storm came and went. The subways closed. The city basically shut down. I didn't go to work. The feared effects never materialized. The worst did not occur. I breathed a sigh of relief this morning when I was woke up by a bit of daylight through my kitchen windows, having slept on the living room couch for fear that my bedroom windows might shatter with these terrifying wind gusts breathless endless local news coverage prophesied. There was daylight. The world had not ended. My house was still standing. I was alive. None of my fears were realized, and this was a good thing.

The past couple days have been both nice and boring. I have felt trapped in my house because of the storm, because of the lack of public transit. I had stocked up on food before the storm and so spent most of the weekend on my couch eating various junk foods an watching various movies on Netflix. I jerked off a lot. I looked at a lot of porn. And I watched way too much local news, it on nonstop, every segment basically the same person out in the storm talking about nothing, getting wet.

I responded to some Craigslist ad, horny. A couple hours later, a surprisingly cute boy was waiting at my front door. I had never seen a face picture, didn't really care that much during this storm, was just bored, horny, and thinking the world might end for me and so I might as well get off one last time. He was blonde, which initially was a minus in his column, but he was cute enough and had a nice enough dick that I forgave him that. We sucked each other off, made out, and touched each other's bodies in this very intimate way that was somehow allowed by the storm, both of us I think looking for the same thing, coming to this encounter for the same reasons, just wanting some stimulation and physical contact in the midst of our cabin fever and so we took it slow, were delicate with each other, and fingered lovingly the bodies of our traveling companions through these end times. We both came finally and then I gave him some paper towels and turned up the music on my computer which had been playing lightly during our encounter.

He remarked that he had never gotten it on to this album and how he didn't think he ever would. The album was Madonna's Erotica, which, yes, I had been playing during our hookup on repeat, but only lightly, and only because I have recently fallen in love with the thing. We talked about our experiences with Madonna, our memories of her as a child, as a teen, and what albums we had allowed ourselves to like during those times, me explaining how it was only a couple of weeks ago that I had really listened to this album, and how now I could not get enough of it, played it continuously, the thing a beautiful thing that I like to surround myself with. He got dressed. He put on his glasses last. He left. I asked him to close both of the doors downstairs behind him.

I went back to the fridge and then back to the couch where I ate and watched more local news coverage of this storm. The rain at that point started to really pick up.

At the Trader Joe's wine store, a cashier's nametag read "Diego Gabriel." My attraction to him came to a crashing halt at this flashing warning light.

It was a few days ago when I realized that next week would be September. I made immediate plans to go to Fire Island for two days with Jacob. I called in sick Monday night and on Tuesday morning I was on a ferry heading toward Fire Island, sunshine on my skin, wind whipping around me, a bunch of gays seated near me, everyone excited about being at the beach. I had to get in a little more summer before it vanished, before it was again some far off distant thing that I could not wait for, that I fantasized about through blustery, cold days. Best decision ever to call in sick, especially so given this insane hurricane that is barreling toward our city.

We ate lunch, had some Bloody Marys, looked at the cute boys that walked past us, and then headed toward the beach. We spread out our towels in the nude section of the beach, sexy sights on all sides of us. My goal was to get rid of my tan lines, and since I was naked just about every moment while the sun was out during those two days, I did a fairly good job of that. We smoked some weed, drank some Coors Lights, swam in the Atlantic Ocean, looked at the boys walking past through sunglasses while pretending we were just looking at the horizon, laughed while recalling dialogue from Smiley Face. At some point, there was an earthquake. We were on another planet though, and heard the news hour later from people more connected to Earth. Reports back, breathless evening news coverage, texts, Facebook status updates, etc. I felt like I had missed something, this collective moment that New Yorkers experienced and that I did not. I had a bit of earthquake envy. Just a bit though because the weather could not have been more perfect and I was on this beautiful island and there were no cars and no phones to answer and an abundance of beauty, both the human variety and the non-human variety: butterflies galore, green and flowering plants, deer, green ocean, and blue sky.

We checked into the Belvedere, showered off the sand and salt, and then went up to the roof deck to catch even more sun. We had the roof deck to ourselves and so jerked off up there while drinking cocktails. A bit later some other people came up to the roof as well and we watched the sun set over the bay, more insane beauty. Drunk and goofy, we hiked across the island to the Pines to go to tea dance. It was winding down, almost over, and a group of Pines boys wanted us to take a water taxi back with them to Cherry Grove so we could go out to more bars. We were getting wrapped up in something we didn't want to, getting stuck hanging out with prissy gays who didn't want to talk through the Meat Rack, and so we (very ridiculously) walked away pretending to look at something and then literally booked it down the path to the ocean to escape these boys. We walked back to Cherry Grove along the dark beach under a gorgeous night sky, so many stars, and the two of us talking about very earthly things. And why anyone would pass this up to take a water taxi I do not know; the most beautiful moments I have ever had at Fire Island have always been these slightly scary walks through the Meat Rack, trying to find your way in the darkness through the woods as you walk back and forth across the island. Back at the hotel, we hung out at the hot tub with some annoying older guys and then went up to the roof deck again where, alone again and left to our own dirty devices, we fucked, overlooking the bay. As we were finishing, this guy ended up coming to the roof. We kept on fucking, not caring because we were almost there. He watched and we kept at it until Jacob came. We then went downstairs, wiped ourselves clean in our room, and went to bed.

The next day more of the same, more poolside time in the sun, more time by the beach, more looking at sexy men and beautiful nature. We stayed until our skin felt burned, seared, and then we left, boarded that ferry headed in the opposite direction this time, back toward New York City and all its own pleasures and all its own negatives, things about it, or my life there currently, that stress me out, and that for a good two days or so I had managed to put out of mind, managed to forget about for a little while. And today, back in those things, I approached them more joyously, having gotten my sexual fill for the first time in a while and also having gotten to swim in waves and lie on sand and to hold these memories fresh in my mind. Perhaps it's easy to make it through these days, through work and drudgery, if during those times we can still hold on to memories of good times recently had. Either I need to take some Gingko, work on building up my memory's skills, or need to continually replenish my short-term memory with fun moments, things that make me happy to be alive and here on this planet.

naked guitar heroes

Beyonce - Roseland Ballroom - 8/18/11

There were many moments last evening, while I was pressed in a sea of bodies in the overcrowded and hot Roseland Ballroom, that I longed for a past I only briefly got to experience. I didn't want to live in this world or the future world that was to come. I got incredibly depressed for brief moments when I realized that there was no going back, that a certain type of unmediated experience was now forever gone, and that this would be the future. There was a very brief few years in the late nineties and early aughts in which I went to concerts and could stand on tippy toes and see the performer on the stage without seeing the same image reflected back to me on countless small screens held in hands. This was before digital cameras dropped in price point to become common sights at concerts and also before smartphone was even a term. It is now near-impossible to attend a concert and not see lit-up screen after lit-up screen ahead of you showing you the same concert you are watching, or trying to watch, but the attempt at which is being hindered by raised phone after raised phone, preventing you from not only getting a good sightline, but also from perhaps losing yourself in the experience, instead having to see it mediated it on thirty or so screens ahead of you, all different angles, everyone trying to possess something unpossessable, the capitalist urge to acquire, to cage, to stockpile always unceasing. It is really a shame because there are moments when I get lost when I close my eyes and have a moment with the performer, a communion of sorts, on what level I am not sure, but a communion nonetheless, and then that is hindered by the crowd in front of me when I again open my eyes and see their urges to document, to already before the moment has finished think about future moments and uploading this photo or video to Facebook or Youtube, and as a consequence bring a future world into this one that is trying its best to create a present-tense moment.

I know I'm old for a concertgoer, now in my thirties, and that for some people young people this is the only concert-going world that they have ever known, but I got so incredibly sad last evening by thoughts of a bygone world and the realization that this irritant is not going anywhere, that it is only bound to get worse, that at this point there is no going back, the gates have already been breached. People already think this is acceptable behavior, they feel entitled to this, and there is no way to shift these now so prevalent habits. I am imagining an absurdist comedy from decades ago, one not written but which seems like it could have been, a futurist vision spoofing technology no one thought would ever actually be used as such, in which every member of an audience at a performance is taping the performance, everyone documenting the thing, various purposes stated to themselves, all of them however really having the same reason, not the one they stated. Meanwhile, not one of the audience members is actually watching the thing, everyone instead watching the performance on their screens, everyone missing the performance in front of them, too busy watching the simulacrum of it on their devices.

I am so sick of this urge to document - and yes, I am more than aware of the hypocrisy and irony of me saying such a thing here, in this web project documenting my life, me who has made a point of documenting my life in online diary form for the last ten or so years now at this point. But I do believe that there is a difference in reconstructing your memories, reassembling them after the fact as you stew over them and write about them in your diary, and that of the urge to photograph or record every piece of art you encounter, that snapping a photo is not interacting with the thing, and your snapping the photo actually hinders my own interaction with the thing, my own desire to get lost.

And so yes, there were these moments of introspection about what it means to attend concerts in these contemporary times of ours and these thoughts often led me down dark trails that had me lamenting the way we live now. There were those moments, yes. There were also, and of longer duration and greater frequency, moments in which I did not notice the people around me and their stupid cameraphones which they held out outstretched for the entire 90-minute concert, and instead perched high up on my toes and saw this lady, only a year younger than myself and with such a big body of work already and with such enormous talent, dance and sing and do so amazingly.

The concert was styled in this very hammy Broadway one-woman show style. It seemed like a Liza show for its first half, Beyonce recounting in humorous and linear fashion her rise from a child performer, being rejected by Star Search, her father getting her and her bandmates a record deal, the many member shake-ups of Destiny's Child, her switch to being a solo artist, and her parting ways from her father as her manager. She interspersed this history of her life with brief versions of songs from each of these eras, opening with a beautiful cover of Michael Jackson's "I Wanna Be Where You Are," the song that Destiny's Child first auditioned for Star Search with.

The song was a very appropriate song with which to open, especially since Jay-Z as of late has been trying to position Beyonce as the heir to Michael Jackson's unique pop skills. And as much as there is something a little brash about such claims, they are deserved. Beyonce is actually fucking incredible. I was blown away be her performance in this venue. To see such a massive pop star play a smallish venue is such a treat and that's why I bought tickets despite their expensive price, knowing that there was no way Beyonce would be playing any more small venues anytime in the near future, if ever. She was charming, energetic, and on point with every song. She sang and danced flawlessly for ninety minutes. I'm not sure how she did it. I am always amazed by performers that don't seem to get of breath and can not only dance in heels but also belt out tunes.

The first half of the show seemed to be the favorite part of most people in the audience, not surprising given the lackluster reception to her new album, even on my own part, but for me the second half of the show is really where she turned it out for me. An album that I had thought was fairly boring suddenly became this really beautiful and great-sounding thing in the renditions she performed. Highlights and all of which I think would be great singles were: "I Miss You," a gorgeous track co-written by Frank Ocean, surely why it's so gorgeous; "Party"; and the absolutely amazing "Love on Top." This was the highlight of the night for me when she performed "Love on Top." This was one of those moments where for a good three or four minutes I forgot about the many distractions around me and shared a moment with Beyonce. Her voice and her runs up and down the scales for parts of the song sent corresponding chills up and down my spine. It's a really fantastic song that has been growing on me more and more and her live version of it was absolutely incredible; the energy that seems a bit lacking on the album version is overflowing when she sings it live. The concert presented several songs like this, in which the live version had so much more energy and life and oomph than the album version, which is really too bad because the album would probably be doing a lot better if some of that same energy could have been transferred to the album. "Love on Top" was insanely amazing and I have been recalling this particular song a lot during the course of today, my spine again tingling, the memory still strong, me again biting my lower lip, in a mix of pleasure and disbelief that a person singing could bring about so much pleasure, that the human voice can do this to you, provoke such sensations, me shaking my head back and forth because when someone is so good all you can do is shake your head, say "Damn!," and be thankful that you get to experience such things in the course of your life.

summer storms

Another rainy Sunday. I was woken up last night by the violent rain beating against my air conditioner unit. I ate some mozzarella and almonds, suddenly hungry. I looked at boys on Grindr, read Facebook, and decided three something is a little too early to wake up, and so smoked some weed so I could fall back asleep. Jacob is still asleep, a bag of piss on the floor next to him. He has a catheter in him until tomorrow due to recent surgery he has had.

His mom was here for the weekend and now thankfully is gone. I can again walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night naked, then snack on mozzarella and almonds while looking at what boys are awake in the middle of the night and kept awake by urges that, despite what they may think when looking into cruising applications on their cellular telephones, will not be easily sated.

I spent some time with my own mother as well this weekend. She came into town for a few brief hours, a free Amtrak ticket that was about to expire, and took my sister and myself out to dinner. Because of weird time constraints imposed my mom who wanted to leave town early and geographic restraints imposed by sister who needed to eat somewhere in midtown, I chose Ma Peche for us, a restaurant I have always wanted to eat at. Thankfully, ma was footing the bill at Ma Peche. The food was amazing. There are dinners that stay in your memory, the food so extraordinary, and this is going to be one of those dinners. Everything I ate was so terrific, each bite an orgasm in my mouth. It has now been two days since eating there and I still am recalling fondly some of the things I ate and drank. I drank this amazing wine, a trousseau, that was unlike any wine I have ever had. The server warned me that the wine would have a really funky, earthy taste as way of letting me know that I might not like it, but that only made me want to try it even more. It tasted like a smelly sherry. I need to find a bottle of this wine now and drink more of it. There was a crispy pig's head dish that was amazing, followed by great swordfish, and served along with this lettuce that had been smoked. This lettuce might have been the best thing there and that is not diminishing anything else I ate there to say that the lettuce was the best part because all of the food was extraordinary, but this smoked lettuce was like nothing I had ever tasted before, and combined with bites of the swordfish and avocado, there was a symphonic swelling of flavors within my mouth. For desert, I had peas and strawberries, a dish that was definitely showy, but still none the less delicious for being so. It was a riff on strawberry shortcake, except with a dried pea cake where the shortcake would be, and sweetened pea shoots as a garnish, along with pea mousse. It was an absolutely incredible meal. Now on my dining wish list is a meal at Momofuku Ko. Once I come into some money and don't have insane dental bills looming over me (about which another time), then I am definitely going to splurge on a meal there.

I made myself a halloumi salad last night and drank it with cheap white wine. That meal was also delicious. I ate it with Jacob at our kitchen table, looking out at the gray sky, storm still yet to arrive but definitely on its way, Neko Case as the soundtrack.