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.