Arrow's "Hot Hot Hot"

It seems like whenever I am leaving Spectrum early in the morning, late in the night, where the line meets between the two, I always just miss the subway and am told it is 20 minutes or so until the next train. It happened again last night and so I flagged down a car on the street to take me home, that wait seeming horribly and painfully long at that time of the night. The driver was some Caribbean dude with a really thick accent who was blasting "Hot Hot Hot" (presumably Arrow's original version of the song). He turned it down long enough to ask me where I was headed and for me to ask how much the ride would cost and then once we were on our way again, he turned up the music again really loud, blasted it. This made me incredibly happy for inexplicable reasons.

The driver told me his brain was his GPS. He tapped the side of his head as he made this statement. I smiled, nodded my head, and continued to bop my head to the music as I watched the things outside the window pass in a blur.

32 is going to be the year. There is no reason not to be happy, no reason not to go out, no reason not to talk to someone. I am letting everything go, trying to, every fear, every grudge, and embracing what there is to embrace, the things in front of me.

32 is also bringing me much better luck with boys. At Metropolitan last night, I talked to this guy who a  year or two or three ago (time blurs like that), I had hit on at Mattachine and gotten nowhere with. It was clear that he was really into me last night, and that felt really good, but also weird. I wondered what had changed, but only for a little, because 32 is not going to be the year about worrying about such things. We exchanged numbers and I left to go to Spectrum. And then at Spectrum, some crazy British guy, quite cute, came up to tell me that I was really beautiful. We chatted for a bit before starting to make out. He said a lot of things, at one point saying he wanted to bend me over and fuck me. Real romantic stuff. Despite how I was not looking to get bent over and fucked by a cute British guy, by anyone really, last night, I let him drag me into some bedroom where we made out for a bit. He tried closing the door, which wouldn't close. The door bouncing back open each time he tried to close it was a sign, a signal from someone to walk back out that door. I told him I was going to go dance, that I wasn't looking to get bent over and fucked. I danced around to some songs I didn't know, songs without words.

The comfort, the joy, in that car ride home came from not only recognizing this song, but also from hearing words, from a human voice giving order and shape to the world, things feeling hot, hot, hot because the voice said it was so. The driver hummed along and the world could not have gotten much better then in that particular moment.

Dekalb and Knickerbocker

I turned 32 sometime last evening in a club on the westside of Manhattan and it was a beautiful and fun evening. I went with some friends who love to dance. It was inspiring to see some of their dance moves, their joy in movement. I drank various vodka drinks, smoked cigarettes, and danced and danced. The main room at Westgay seemed to have barely functioning air conditioning. The air was thick. Sex seemed more in reach. Bodies glistened with sweat. I would dance in this humid room until it became too much and then would go dance in the backroom which was nice and cool, but only for a little while before again longing for whatever effects heat produces in gay men packed into a room together.

At some point, I was waiting in the bathroom line, playing on my phone. The guy ahead of me, unprompted, told me that we could share the bathroom, that I could pee because he just needed the bathroom to do a bump. While I was peeing, he asked me if I wanted a bump. I said yes.

I talked to some boy about fades and about the pros and cons of various barbershops. He was really cute and I don't remember his name. There was another boy I was staring at all night, hoping to talk to, and opportunities seemed to continually elude me. He was wearing a sleeveless denim jacket. I was finally about to talk to him but got sideswiped by his friend he was with who started talking to me about my tattoo, mentioning Leaves of Grass. I was looking past this guy talking to me about Whitman, to lost opportunities, to his friend walking away.

I put singles in the jockstraps of the go-go boys, let my hands slide down their thighs after placing the money in their waistbands. Shudders travelled from my hands through my arms and down the length of my body, a pleasure brought about by physical contact, brief as it was, with a desired body.

I made out with some guy who had just moved here from Columbia, somewhere along the coast. He lived near me, off my subway stop. It seemed like we were going to go home together, the night having reached that point in which the people looking for sex were now grabbing what they could before the club cleared out. He told me he was going to go pee and to wait for him. I told him I would be right back, that I was just going to go smoke a cigarette outside. Outside though, I did not light a cigarette. I hopped in a cab, not necessarily wanting that boy, or any boy really, not wanting anything other than my own company. The cab driver knew the intersection I told him I wanted to be dropped off at in Bushwick and did not need me to give him directions. I took this a great sign.

Dropped off on my block, I stood for a long while in front of my building and watched the clouds emerge from over the roofs across the street and pass quickly overhead, the speed with which this world spins very obvious to me in that moment.

discovering Adeva's debut album, a beautiful birthday present that is making me so giddy

N 32

I took a psychology course in High School. The teacher of the course, his name which unfortunately I can't remember, was this guy in his thirties who seemed like he had never evolved from what was probably his high school jock personality. He called people losers a lot in this humorous bro way. He was very impressed by his own jokes in the way that certain people are whose conception of their own intelligence is quite exaggerated from what it actually is. He was the assistant football coach and for some insane reason he was teaching psychology.

I don't know why but the memory of what an absurd situation that was flashed over me while I was taking a piss in my bathroom just now. He had a big picture of Charles Manson taped to the front of the classroom and he would talk about Manson's eyes a lot, how you could see the scariness in them, the craziness in them. I now think this teacher might have been taking some sort of speed workout supplements - Stacker 3 or something. He talked about serial killers a lot, circling again and again throughout the class to the eyes of Charles Manson.

On the wall in my apartment, there is a calendar of handsome Roman priests. Mr. June is kind of bonkers. I just looked at him not too long ago and got distracted from whatever direction this narrative might have been headed in. Every morning, groggy, I walk into my kitchen to make some breakfast and am always made a bit more awake by the sight of this priest. I get nervous, I get shy, like there is some really cute guy in the room that I have a crush on and who I am working my courage up to talking to.

I am listening to Eleanor Friedberger's new album and it is so, so good - everything I want and need to hear right now, and there are words, lovely strings of them, that accompany perhaps an even more lovely backing rhythm, and together, the two of them together, look out. Smoke a little weed and if you don't see what I mean at this moment, you surely will during that one. You are welcome, by the way.

I swam in the ocean again yesterday. Today, at work, I wanted to dive again and again beneath the water, to let a wave crash against me, to feel the shock of cold water, to be immersed in something, to really inhabit mentally and physically the same place for once, a rare thing these days, my mind and body often in very different places, different countries, different decades, different beds.

A couple days ago, I saw Richard Linklater's Before Midnight. Saturday matinee screening, a barely filled theater. I sat in a row to myself and let the tears every now and then fall from my face, not bothering to wipe them away. The acknowledgement of this sadness, this release of it, felt good. Give in to it, feel sad, let the tears fall. You will feel better and you will reach for that cigarette in your bag when you get out of that film with all the ardor to exhale, the ardor to enjoy this moment of calm after a release that couples on film so often show, the camera cutting to the moment right after sex, the reach for those cigarettes, the exhale of smoke a substitute for the moneyshot the filmmakers couldn't show and still get commercial distribution. I smoked this cigarette and walked around downtown, taking in life, the stuff that happens around me, these people, many of them cute, walking around, being alive.

On Wednesday, a little more than 24 hours from now, another bingo number will get called and you can feel the nervous energy in the room knowing that the game is nearing its end, that someone had that number, they announce it, and they follow that annoying announcement with an even more annoying one, saying that they only need one more, one more 'til Bingo, while meanwhile you still need four numbers and are not going to win the thing, unless the next four numbers called are somehow all your numbers and only your numbers, but you can feel it, that it's another notch towards the finale, the tension rising more and more. And clearly, that analogy is overstretched and dramatic, but sometimes when you're a little stoned and drinking wine and listening to Eleanor Friedberger, you tend toward the dramatic, toward what might make the better story, or the easier one at least. I am turning 32 on Wednesday and it has me bummed out in the ways that birthdays always kind of do. I have never actively celebrated mine the way some other people do with weeklong festivities. I go out and I get drunk and I invite some friends to come out and dance with me but I do this because I want to go out and have fun - it's a fun independent from a celebration of a birth, that were I really to contemplate the thing, to do what I would like, I would take a hot bath and drink some wine and listen to Gillian Welch and think about all of the possible turns I might have taken at various points with various people. But then there are other times where I do just want to go out and stuff singles down a go-go boy's g-string as I jump around to some song I really like, some song that I am so happy the DJ is playing, am ecstatically happy about, yelling in your ear as I shake you up and down that no one ever plays this Bjork song! I waver between these two poles all the time, but every year as my birthday approaches, these swings back and forth quicken, become bigger and bigger, the lunges in opposite directions.

I look at the wrinkles that appear around my eyes more and more. I look at my body sometimes naked in the mirror as I jerk off, taking dirty pictures of myself for boys on Scruff or for my own benefit. I wonder about my body, sometimes try to assess its attractiveness. I think about relationships. I think about living alone now and I think about living alone when I am 40 and I think about living alone when I am 60 and the thought becomes somehow more and more depressing the older I get in these imagined scenarios, and I ask myself why, but only engage the question for a little bit because there is Mr. June greeting me every time I wake up, greeting me every time I look for a late night snack, this smile, this encouragement, the sight of this man bringing about the knowledge that certain things do in fact exist in this world, somewhere out there, and even if maybe it exists perhaps only in Italian seminaries, there is still the knowledge that it at least exists there, somewhere.

Wilco - "She's a Jar"

I want to see what their fingers like, the shape of their hand, the length of their fingers. The proportions of this body part when just so turn me on so much. I see something, some idea of a man, in the shape of a hand.

It is June and even though I find it a little uncomfortably warm in my bed at night already, even still, even in this still blossoming heat that has me kicking sheets off me in a fit of warm sleeplessness, even though my sweat is sticking to the back of the couch even more so than normal, I find myself wanting someone to cuddle with at night way more intensely than I have felt in months.

I spend embarrassingly long stretches of time at night not reading, not writing, not watching a film, not hanging out in real life with other human beings, but rather in some horizontal position, curled up with my phone talking to boys on Scruff, talking to them sometimes on Grindr, though more often talking to no one, but rather just looking at various boys, imagining why this person might be really cool or imagining why this person is probably incredibly annoying. Needless to say, I haven't actually been meeting up with anyone on there for sex, or anything really. It's this boredom and loneliness that masks itself behind some rapacious sexual desire on these various hookup apps. I encounter other people wearing these same masks and we pass each other in the hallway, pausing briefly in our act to look at one another before we again resume character and continue our cruising act down the same maze of hallways in some sex club on some floor in an anonymous office building, a way to pass the time, a compulsion because we knew at one time that this was a thing that gave us pleasure. 

There is the beautiful sound of rain coming through my open window right now, cooling breezes every now and then finding their way through the window and across the kitchen to me on the couch, a touch I am grateful for.

I have a fingernail that I cover in nail polish because I smashed it with a weight a while ago and now it is just a black nail that I hate to look at. I look at other people's hands closely and have a hard time now looking closely at my own, this one painted nail ruining some sense of symmetry - that it's indicative somehow of a broader disharmony. Finding a nail polish color to paint your one bruised fingernail that will match your unpainted fingernails is not an easy task in case you were curious. I hate looking at my one fingernail covered in nail polish. The symmetry is off.

a red diamond on by back, the spot my hands, the sunscreen, touch, did not, could not, reach

I knew the water was going to be cold, ice cold, but I didn't care. I didn't hesitate there at the edge where the water laps against the shore with each wave of water rolling in and rolling back out, dipping my foot in slightly, stepping back from the wave, and then gingerly making contact again with the ocean - there was none of that. In its place was a focused determination, a walking straight on out until it was deep enough for me to dive under. There was no flinching, no pausing, even when I felt how insanely cold it was. I knew that I was going all the way in no matter what, that there was no point in delaying the inevitable, of putting on a show, a dance at the shore's edge for no one's benefit other than your own neuroses or for your own desire, weird as it may be, to appear full of neuroses, a conception of cuteness now in vogue that values a quirkiness that feigns neurosis. What I am saying is that I knew that no matter what I would end up in this water, submerging myself into something else, completely erasing the world outside of this water. And so I dove under.

My heart stopped. The cold was bracing, something else. That feeling of discomfort and pain was something I knew to be false. I tried to let it go, those worries about how cold the water was, so I could let other things go.

I dove under again and my entire chest retracted in, heart and lungs shocked by the cold, a pause to my being, a moment to consider the paused image on the screen, a step back from the movie you are watching as you run to the bathroom or to get food and you pull yourself out of the narrative you have been immersed into until you hit the pause button, and you, now outside the narrative, are able to see in this scene frozen on your television screen, a beautiful tableaux that had been eclipsed by the plot's forward momentum.

I stayed out there, floating on my back, in love with the contrast there, the cold water underneath my legs and back, and the warm sun hitting my chest and face.

The couple other folks who had braved the water soon retreated back to their towels, and for a long while, I had this little stretch of the ocean to myself. I was thankful for this still cold water, thankful that it was a little painful, that because of this, most people weren't going in the water, and I was able to float with endless water around me, feeling like I was alone and yet also because of this (only out here in the water) feeling like I was complete. I was surrounded by the elements in a more tactile fashion than I normally am. The press of water against your skin is more felt, for whatever reasons, more sensed, than that of air. It felt so nice to be embraced wholly by the water, by anything really if I were to be truthful.

Eventually I came back to the shore and wrapped myself in a towel, another embrace. I lied down, the sand underneath my beach blanket also an embrace. And I let the sun hit my cold skin. I stayed cold pretty much the rest of the day after that. Nicky and I drank vodka mixed with some cheap Ariziona drinks, coconut flavored ones, while I pointed out all the people on the beach that I was in love with. I was boy crazy and the sight of all this beautiful skin was overwhelming for me.

I smoked a lot of cigarettes. I wanted contact, wanted to feel physical sensations. I pointed out how much I loved that person, how beautiful their body was, or how I loved that person in the black shades, black baseball cap, and black swim trunks. The cigarettes were what was within reach and so I kept on grabbing for them. The roils of smoke that danced around my lungs and throat were an easy and available form of touch, of physical sensation. It was a substitution and also a salve for the longing I felt for these other sensations. It was why earlier I had taken so much pleasure from diving again and again under the incoming waves, of lying on my back out there in the dark rippling blue, glints of a reflected sun making everything else seem dark, losing myself to the sound of water around me, to the wide blue sky above me, and to the happiness felt to be present in this setting, to be so embraced by these elements, to be aware in such a strong way (which I will admit I so rarely am) that I am not distinct from this beautiful world, and to be so happy with this knowledge.

Damn, I Wish (Oh, How I Wish) I Was Your Lover

no cheese please

I woke up quite early this morning, despite having only gone to bed a few hours earlier. I was hungry and couldn't sleep. A bacon and egg sandwich was all I wanted in this world. Maybe some orange juice to wash it down. I walked to the bodega a couple blocks from my house and ordered my sandwich from the guy working the grill, an overwhelmed guy taking breakfast sandwich orders from a line of hungover people and the couple of cops working their beat, talking plot details to Pain and Gain, which I tried to block out as I planned on watching it later that day. I waited and I waited. I watched him give breakfast sandwiches to numerous people who had ordered after I did.

I gave up on ever getting food there, that it wasn't meant to be. I crossed the street and went to the Mexican diner where there was no line and ordered my sandwich, and which I received fairly quickly. As I ate the sandwich, stoned and watching Pain and Gain, I wondered about bacon and its use in other cultures, how widespread it is, or whether it might be something unique here. I certainly wondered why it was whenever I have gotten a sandwich involving bacon from a Mexican deli, why the bacon was never crispy, always undercooked, and always piled high, about three times as much bacon as should be on a sandwich. This is probably why there was a long line for breakfast sandwiches at the one deli and no line at the diner across the street. It's always a safe bet to choose the spot the cops are ordering from, that they know where the good breakfast sandwiches are made.

But sometimes you have to cut your losses, quit waiting, walk away.

So there is this guy, this really beautiful guy that I have a big crush on. I had a very brief romance with him some years ago. He was in a relationship for the last several years that he just got out of a couple months ago. I have always thought he was really cute and when I ran into him a couple weeks ago, this always slight crush flared up into a larger one. I wanted to make out with him. I have been trying to hang out with him since running into him, have asked if he wanted to meet for drinks numerous times, and last night I was finally successful in getting him to hang out with me. We went and saw Showgirls: The Musical. I had gotten there first, on time. He was running late, so I sat there and awkwardly talked to the HR guy from my job, who coincidentally was also at the show. And then he arrived, this beautiful man, and suddenly no one else was there, certainly not the HR guy from my work asking me why I hadn't signed up for the AIDS Walk. This guy was it. He looked really fucking handsome. We chatted about some stuff and I didn't hear much of it because I was a little overwhelmed by thoughts of how cute he was.

After the show, we rode the subway back to Brooklyn together. We talked about jobs, Ronnie Spector, and David Mamet. A girl told me she loved my tattoo. I asked her if she was a big Walt Whitman fan. Yes, she said, but I suddenly got the impression that she wasn't, that she didn't know that's who my tattoo was of. She said it also looked like Ethan Hawke.

He got off at his stop to go walk his dog, but said he was going to head to Metropolitan after. I told him I would meet up with him there if I wasn't able to get ahold of Diego, who earlier I had told I would go to Spectrum with. Once he got off the train, this couple got on and sat across from me. The girl was holding a six-pack of beer, the beer this person shares a name with. I took it as some sign, of what I had no clue, but a good sign surely I thought. When I got off the train, indeed I was unable to get ahold of Diego. I was happy about this and walked toward Metropolitan to meet up with this guy. I got increasingly drunk as the hours passed and talked to him and some other boys. He eventually left to go home, seemingly with this other boy, this gum chewer. 

I left shortly after they did, feeling fairly disappointed and sad. I made myself walk to Spectrum instead of heading home to mope. I danced with Diego for a bit there before he drunkenly stumbled home. By this point though, I was worked up to a fever, unable to quit dancing, letting everything out into these pop songs that they were thankfully and surprisingly playing at this venue that normally plays the type of dance music I need to be on some sort of drug to really get into. Instead, I had Robyn, Rihanna, and Beyonce to comfort me, to sing along to, to lose my mind to and dance like a maniac to, by myself in the midst of this crowd on the dancefloor. I danced and danced until I couldn't any longer, until I had trouble breathing, until I felt like I was going to throw up. I walked out of the venue, let the night air cool me off, and flagged down a car to take me home.

I lay on my couch, stuffing whatever food I could find at the time into my face. I saw that this boy was on Scruff, which made me happy since that would mean that he presumably did not go home with gum chewer. I talked to him on there about the rest of my night and put the question out there. I asked him if I was ever going to be able to make out with him or if I should just be happy being friends. I told him I just wanted some clarity and was fine with either, but just wanted to know. 

Earlier in the night, he had told me that I just liked him because he was comfortable and familiar. I told him that that wasn't true, but it probably is.

As I was stuffing my face with slices of rotisserie chicken, I read little text bubbles on Scruff. These bubbles said that he didn't want to jump into bed with me right now, that he doesn't rule that out from ever happening, but that he just wants to be friends.

So if you follow the cops to where they order breakfast because that's where good breakfast is served, and then the sandwich guy, intentionally or not, forgets your order and you wait and wait, at what point does a more indiscriminate hunger win out over a discriminate one and send you elsewhere? It's all about figuring out when to stop waiting. It's all about realizing that just about any place can make a bacon and egg sandwich.

#1 clipper on the sides

He snaps my head back into place. Physically, he is in total control. I love the act of submission that comes with sitting in a barber's chair. With his middle fingers pressed to my temples, he will guide my head into the desired position. He will set my posture straight, force my neck back. And then in a moment, he will with gentle movements push against the back of my head, force my chin to my chest. He will do this with the softest of touches because he knows I will submit.

Curls all around me on the floor, no longer on my head. I paid the cashier up front at the Astor Place Barbershop and paused to check myself out, adjust my hair, in the mirror above the ATM, the mirror with the sign taped to it: "When You Look Good, Your Money Looks Good!!!"

I thought that by cutting my hair, I could change how I was feeling, that I would no longer be overwhelmed by allergies, by sneezing and blowing my nose every couple minutes. I sneezed as soon I walked back out on the street, reached for tissues somewhere in my bag to blow my nose.

Tonight though, haircut not working, I took my co-worker's advice and smoked weed, and now don't feel these allergies at all, feel instead the new Daft Punk album and also feel the insecurity and cockiness (twins born from the same mom) of Nomi Malone, having just re-watched Showgirls to prepare myself for seeing the musical tomorrow.

And the dreadlocked downstairs stoner neighbor is still beating his carpet in the backyard at it approaches 11 at night. He is beating the dust out of it with a metal pipe of some sorts.

oh why people who shop at 7-11s in NYC should die

There is such joy to be had in purchasing toilet paper at your local Bushwick bodega. There are no organic chocolate bars on the shelf yet. There is a cat asleep on the floor. There is salsa music blaring and a woman singing along to it. It is such a beautiful scene. It is New York.