blu

I was holding a bag with a burrito in it, walking home, enjoying the mild night air. I felt the first light drops of rain, ominous, the kind you are know are going to be a torrential downpour in seconds.

I don't know where these things come from, but you can feel them before their arrival, sense it. I started to run to my house, knowing that I was going to get soaked very shortly. The skies opened up and dumped water down in huge sheets. I made it to my stoop, winded and only a little wet, protected by the little awning over the stoop from the rain around me.

Before the drops started, I passed boy after boy in my neighborhood, exchanging eyes with them, hungry, looking for various things in just about any boy I saw on the street, sizing them up for what various emotional and sexual needs of mine they might be able to fulfill. In other words, the trees on DeKalb Avenue are starting to show buds.

I went and saw The Testament of Mary tonight as an unexpected storm raged outside. This is what I love about heat, that it eventually breaks, that it can only take so much of itself, works itself into a fever, drives itself crazy, pounds on the walls, sets fire to its drunkenly-scribbled manifestos, and then passes out on the floor. I smoked from an e-cigarette as I watched the lights of Times Square dance in the puddles all over the roads of midtown.

Fiona Shaw carried a jacket back and forth across the stage countless times and wrapped various scarves around her for the duration of this one-woman show. The blocking, the need for Shaw to always be busy, really annoyed me. I nodded off only a few times and thought variously about my Catholic upbringing, my own relationship with the story of Jesus, thought about my desire, very intense these days, for sex, for romance with a boy, to touch and to be touched, thought about how that desire, summer storm of a thing that it is with its thunder and lightening spasms, is pushing people away, making them run to the safety of their stoops, thought about this application that I need to put together this weekend for this school I want to go to, and thought about the beautiful set compositions that were often created throughout the play, a curtain parted just the tiniest bit.

I ate my burrito as I watched the storm from my window, thunder every now and then shouting over the sad and beautiful Chet Baker song playing on WBGO.