just a dream

Last night, I had a dream in which I passed by this man on the staircase and he said, "Oh, you're the sexy guy who I always stare at walking around shirtless in your living room." He lived behind me and could see into my windows. He was the type of person that I would have been insanely attracted to and so to hear this from the guy made me incredibly excited. He had the perfect proportions of sexiness, coolness, handsomeness, and awkwardness - neither one of them overwhelming the other - everything just right. We started conversing, that delirious talk when you are talking to someone and it's clear both of you like each other.

I should mention though that I have curtains on my windows.

We Can't Stop

I couldn’t sleep last night, was kept awake by stoned thoughts of Miley Cyrus, of Chris Crocker, of America. I have watched the Miley Cyrus VMA performance probably thirty times already. I can’t get enough of it. I think there is something in there, something waiting to be parsed out, and I know it is not the thing that other people are trying to project on to it, self-proclaimed leftists trying to do postcolonial readings of the performance or conservatives and liberals alike both showing their fear and disgust of certain forms of female sexuality, saying she should have worn more clothes or that it was inappropriate. That all of these readings are off, way off, show instead the stupidity of their proponents. It was a beautiful acid dream of a performance. My head pretty much exploded with joy while watching it and I have been assembling the pieces of my Humpty Dumpty self that were scattered around my living room, trying to reassemble them and understand why it was exactly I loved the performance so much.

It was tacky, but knowingly so - this beautiful and celebratory embrace of all that constitutes life in America in the early 21st Century. You had her coming out in some demented mouseketeer get-up, a defiant fuck you to her Disney past. She continued this theme later in the performance when she started dancing with Robin Thicke, the mouse swimsuit stripped off, but a large white foam finger very reminiscent of Mickey Mouse’s large gloved white hands now on her person, a hand she groped both Thicke and herself with. It was wonderful. Also wonderful was the fact that she put to rest the critique put forth by liberals with too much time on their hands that the song, “Blurred Lines,” was a rape anthem. You had Miley Cyrus take control of the song from Thicke, that the song was not about an intoxicated woman that a guy could take advantage of (that it never was), but that instead you saw it for what it was, this fun pop song about people getting loose, getting messy, and that not being a problem.

Miley owned that stage and did her thing and I love the fact that the whole crowd at Barclays Center and that the whole Internet watching the thing online in clips and gifs were all aghast, horrified at this woman not seeming to care what society or conventions dictate as appropriate behavior for a young woman. Get it, girl.

These thoughts somehow bled into thoughts of Chris Crocker, probably because I watched his YouTube commentary video of the Miley performance. I lay awake, unable to sleep, thinking about how much I love Chris Crocker. His emotional exhbiitionism is something I can relate so much to. I have this diary, which is a smaller scale version of his video exhibitionism through YouTube and Vine. I think there is something so admirable in how he puts himself out there tirelessly.

These thoughts circled around and around, spiraling up toward some very broad insights about what life is about and what America is about, and it all seemed very profound to me at the time. I was going to write them down, but I was already in bed and I was already only going to get a couple of hours of sleep. And so I masturbated instead (really though, it might have been the same thing), knowing it would help me fall asleep.

Hunx

When the show ended, he came offstage and walked past me. He said something along the lines of "Sexy." My memory is hazy of what exactly he said because I spent the better part of the day drinking yesterday. It started off with a cute brunch in the garden of Mominette, catching up with Erica who is in town for a few days. And because whenever I hang out with her, there is no voice of moderation, we had round after round of mimosas at brunch. Julia joined us and we sat there for a couple of hours drinking and talking. We then went over to Troutman Street to see this rumored secret Jay-Z show that was happening. It was not happening. We drank Joozes on the street. I bought a pirate lighter for five dollars from some man selling them. We ate tacos at the Tortilla Factory and drank beers. Andy joined us. We went back to Erica's, drank more, and then went off in various directions, Andy and I heading to the Hunx show at Death by Audio.

I drank more beers there. Though I was pretty far gone during this show, I do remember being against the stage and pressing my face into Hunx's crotch. After the show, when he walked past me uttering some compliment, I began to chat with him. He told me some other compliments. I told him some. I asked him to make out with me. I gave him a giant hug. I told him about how I saw him play a show ten years ago and kissed him then. I probably seemed batshit crazy. I might have been.

Andy and I walked to Metropolitan and I gushed the entire way there about my brief interaction with Hunx and how sexy I think he is. I only stayed at Metro for a short while, drank half a beer before leaving to go home, drinking all day having taken its toll on my body, on my mind.

My knees hurt so much from that show last night. The stage is just a little more than knee high at Death by Audio and so I kept on getting pressed against the stage by the excited Hunx fans, kept on collapsing over the stage, my knees banging against this stage for the whole show.

I want to find a stream of the VMAs to watch online and order a burrito and talk about life with you.

what I do in school

For a class assignment on viral videos, we had to make one and our grades are determined on who gets the most views on their videos in a week. So far, a video with Spongebob clips set to a rap song is beating us. Maybe you want to watch this and help me beat Spongebob.

Washed Out's "Don't Give Up"

There are answers and then there is not seeking any, not chasing after yourself through the corridors of your own brain trying to pin down what something means, what the answer is. There is joy. There is acceptance. There is not resisting things. There is not trying to add up the numbers again and again and see if they come to something different. There is living.

It's a full moon. On my way home from school, doing a roundabout loop back from Dumbo, on the L train back from Broadway Junction, I was on the train with a lot of rowdy young, tattooed teens. They made me nervous. They were young and very impressed with their own badassness. I got off the train and walked past all my neighbors, out on their stoops like they are every night, smoking cigarettes, seemingly without end, drinking from beers discreetly, sitting in lawn chairs partially blocking the narrow sidewalk, talking into the night, their voices, the chatter, hugs, a form of connection, in this vast, terrifying world.

I bought a roast beef sandwich from the deli. A cop pushed his way past me while I was waiting in line. It was a little forceful, his push, but I am not really going to call out a police officer for bumping into me. You know?

School is going really well. It is keeping me very busy. I have had no real social life as of late. I go to work and go to school and do some homework and get a couple hours of sleep and then repeat it again and again. I have hung out with Jacob a bit the last week. It has been nice. Sometimes though I look at him and see the person I was so in love with when I was with him. Sometimes I hold that look, enjoy that feeling, dangerous though it may be. Other times, I find something else to look at, the piles of chairs all awkwardly stacked in one corner of a restaurant, a poorly utilized space.

Last week, I was a mess, felt like the person prone to disaster and reckless decisions that I was in my early twenties. It's nice to be sitting here and listening to Washed Out while drinking wine and not be overwhelmed with a sense of shame from recent behavior. You know?

And if you don't like feeling shame then don't do things that will make you shameful. Simple advice that I am learning to follow more and more as I get older in this world and both do less shameful things and as I also broaden more and more my conception of what is not shameful - at some point, in my eighties I hope, it will encompass all, that there will be no such thing as shame - I will lob shit in the direction of people I find contemptible, I will jerk off with less restriction than I do now, wherever, whenever, and I will shout obscene invective at stationary objects.

But as is, I was raised Catholic. And so I like atoning, these rituals of cleansing. I need to dirty myself, so I can feel shame every now and then, can go through these rituals, confess to you here, to you in that confessional booth, can say what I am going to do to change, how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers I will say, and I will leave feeling clean, a weight lifted off of me. It's this push and pull. It's the slap; I like feeling something in bed. I need to be roughed up sometimes, feel the physical, the spiritual force of things. I cross myself and head toward bed.

"Boyfriend"

To not have a phone is both a frustrating and a liberating thing. The proportion skews more and more toward liberating though as I am starting to get used to it. I am learning that there is really no need to check my email every two minutes. I am missing nothing on my phone; I am missing quite a lot of other things while on it. It’s also interesting to be in this city without a phone for a change, without this device that I compulsively look at. Now, I am free to observe how compulsively everyone else looks at their phone. Riding the elevator with someone, in an attempt to feel less awkward, to distance ourselves from our own fears of connecting or of failing to, of feeling socially vulnerable, we guard against these things with small little screens alerting us to specials on Seamless or new messages on Match.com even though we don’t remember ever having signed up for Match.com.

I had a very long day yesterday, colored by a haze of shame and hungover headaches on and off as I tried to click my heels and make the previous day disappear. There was work and then school. I left my house at 6am and returned at 11pm. For many of those hours, I could not wait to get home and jerk off. At some point early in the morning, on various blogs, I saw images of a naked Justin Bieber. These images were in my head all day. There were thoughts of his ass, of his backside, of his face. People talked to me at work and all I saw were these images. In class, there was talk about viral videos and good ads, and I heard some of it. I was too busy imagining having fun with Justin Bieber.

I came home, I ate a burrito, I smoked some weed, and then Justin and I had a very fun night together.

"Yes, I would mind"

A story happened yesterday, a story that for various reasons I cannot get into here. Drink a beer with me and I will tell it to you.

I am quite hungover today. I am without a phone. I am without this particular phone until November. A long story that maybe I can talk about in November here. In the meantime, I need to buy a new phone, which I am none too excited about, and which is another huge expense that I don’t want to have to deal with.

There is homework to do. The guy who makes sandwiches at my local deli seems like he hates me less and less each time I go there. Life is absolutely absurd, by the way. I wouldn’t have it any other way, though maybe have it be just a little less absurd if it meant I still had my phone.

blurred lines

He had Magnums and lube by the bed. The bed was made nicely, covers pulled taut over the edges. This is how the beds used to look in my grandmother’s house, a skill that older people must have all been taught in other more orderly generations, a task that they still seem to practice while the rest of the world has let their bedsheets lie in disarray, a world gone to hell. The centre cannot hold. Making my bed, something rarely done, involves just throwing the comforter over my sheets, hiding disorder rather than actual creating order.

It was easy, was mostly fun. There was that thrill that is always there in these cases, the erotics of money, of power, of desire, of these things intersecting. He came and I pulled out. I was going to jerk myself off but when I saw the condom on my dick, I knew I could not just rip it off and toss it to the ground. It was totally covered in shit. I went into the bathroom to take it off, gently pulled it off, trying not to get this person’s shit on my fingers, tried not to gag while doing so.

I took a shower to rinse myself off. He had really nice plush towels. We talked about the paintings on his walls as I got dressed. He had a nice collection of art. We talked about Brooklyn, about rich people, about what New York is becoming.

I left his apartment, walked to the subway and I continued this conversation about New York with myself. I thought about how great and how not great this city is, thought about how I always seem to manage though, thought about how the house might not always win, or how maybe they do but that they let me win enough for it to not feel that way.

At home, I ordered a burrito, drank some Modelos, and listened to the Robin Thicke album on repeat for hours while I spent a Friday night in, happily doing homework, thinking about this city, about life, about human bodies.

"What did you learn from the solitary cell of your mind?"

"What did you say?"

I heard someone call me faggot on Saturday night in the East Village as I was walking from one party where I had done a bit of coke and talked to cute boys to another house in the East Village where I was planning to do some Adderall.

"What did you say?" I flew back around and got in this guy's face and was ready to kill him. There is a lot of anger in me. I didn't stand up for myself enough in elementary school, enough in middle school, enough in high school, enough in earlier parts of my life. There were too many moments in my life where I allowed people to call me a faggot, to be hateful, to marginalize me, to diminish me. Those days are over and I am taking that bottled anger of never saying anything in those moments and putting them into these moments, particularly when I am a bit drunk and a little high and feeling alive and happy.

His friends apologized for him and we eventually went on our way, on to do some Adderall and talk about boys, pop music, and apartments, to be (in a word) faggots. I danced throughout the night in Brooklyn, talked to people, marveled at the beauty of certain people, imagined what it would be to have sex with them, tried to plot out the necessary steps in my mind that would allow that to happen, what charming thing I would need to say, and then I danced some more, saying things and not saying things. Endless dancing. We left as the cops came in to break up the party. The sun was coming up.

I slept most of the day yesterday or spent it hungover either in bed or on my couch looking at various social media platforms on my phone, knowing that there was a sunny world outside, a world encompassing beaches, parks, pools, and barbecues. I ordered a burrito and a taco and continued to look at my phone, knowing that all of those places lacked something as comfortable as the couch I was then reclined on.

Last evening, a bit more alive after eating and resting all day, I went over to the place Jacob is staying at and hung out with him. There is an amazing view from the apartment he is house-sitting at. It's up on the 17th or 18th floor and it has sweeping views of Manhattan. We drank wine, watched the sun throw light in cool ways across brick buildings until the sun and the light it cast against buildings both eventually faded, until we had to put on a lamp. We watched twerking videos. We watched Xtube videos. I sucked his dick, kissed his body. It felt really nice, was a release I needed. The combination of work and school occupying pretty much all of my time leaves little time for the pursuit of boys, for the pursuit of skin, of people to touch and feel things with.

I wandered through North Chelsea afterward, taking photos of 7-11s. I came home and I wrote a country song that I am performing tonight for a class. Belle and Sebastian is blasting on my stereo, one particular song on repeat, "The Boy With the Arab Strap," and I don't know what anything means, don't know if it does any good to even pose the question asking what this life or this interaction or this comment means, that I am learning it is often more worthwhile to just drink some coffee (or wine, depending on the time of day), blast that song you like, and put one foot in front of the other, to live your fucking life.

"Sugar Daddy"

I have listened to Fleetwood Mac countless times and yet somehow had never heard "Sugar Daddy." I had surely heard it since I have played the album that it's on many, many times. Somehow though the song never hit me, never registered as the beautiful thing that it is. I had never heard it.

Now, I have.

The song is penned by Christine McVie and she sings the vocals on it as well. This is probably how I came to overlook this song for so many years. In Fleetwood Mac's catalog of songs, I had mainly been drawn to the songs in which Stevie Nicks sings the vocals, enchanted like so many other people by the spell that Stevie Nicks is able to cast through her songs. But this song is so fantastic and the stuff that McVie does with her voice may be really subtle, but when you take the time to listen to what she is doing, there is so much emotion that she is pouring out into the world through this song, so much vulnerability on display.

A hard part of me softens and drips toward the floor when she sings, "All that I want is someone to take care of me. I'm not asking for much, just a little sympathy."

The song works so perfectly and has had me under its spells for the last two days. I played it on repeat the whole time I was commuting around the city yesterday, played it as I was going to work, as I was going to school, as I was traveling home on that journey back from school late at night that always takes way too long.

And, yes, I can relate to the song in its distinction between the man that gives you money and the man that gives you love, but that theme of the song barely even registers for me. What I hear instead is how in love she is with the person who gives her loving: "Cause I've got you baby, and you give me all the love I need. Yes, you give me all the love I need."

I miss that. I miss feeling that way, having someone to feel that way about, having someone give you all the love you need, being able to say that, being satisfied and full and feeling like you have someone in this world. I started crying on the train home last night listening to this song, but in the best way possible. I was overcome with emotion, which is a fantastic thing - you couldn't ask for more than that. Sure, yes, you could ask for those emotions to be the ones in which you are loved and love, but even the emotions where you feel melancholy while longing for such a state are great things - proof that you are alive still, that you are experiencing a heightened form of emotional awareness, that you are actively present in this world.

The song ends and I play it right back again. I do this until I get to my destination. I am trying to get somewhere, to get places. The music helps.