Friday, April 27, 2007

Yesterday, after working at the PR, I went uptown, riding a slow local train to the 103rd stop. I walked a few blocks to this man's house, thinking that the walk felt familiar and wondering if I had seen this person before. The lobby and the elevator also seemed to whisper confirmations to me of this feeling. He opened his door and I recognized him, remembered him, and felt a lot more at ease that I wasn't at a stranger's house, though to this man I think I was a stranger, him not seeming to show any signs of recognizing me from a couple of years ago.

I fucked his throat for a while until he came. I came shortly thereafter. We lay in his bed and started to talk, this man seeming stoned, and the conversation was really quite amazing, one of the nicer ones I have had in a while. Rather than dipping out right away afterwards and collecting my money, I instead hung around and talked for about forty minutes, really interested in this man's experiences and his thoughts about them, about life in general, how this man, who had had so many sexual experiences, viewed sexual obsession. The conversation jumped from Woody Allen to Preston Sturges to Michael Kramer and the Body Electric school, the meat of the talk though being about sexual desire and hunger and the forms that those take and whether it is possible to categorize certain manifestions of those as more or less healthy, good or bad. I really wish I could get into it more, but sadly I have to run out into this drizzling rain sans umbrella to go to the PR again.

This man admitted that at the height of his sex obsession, he blew through $60,000 in 3 months on hustlers off the internet. He told me stories about several of them, told them fondly, and most of his joy just seemed to come from having met all these people that he would have never met otherwise, a young Ukranian boy and an 18 year old Latino thuggish type from Queens, all of them nice he said and all of them with really fascinating ways of viewing the world. Briefly, I felt like I connected with someone last night, this man, and came really close to understanding some things that have been consuming my thoughts lately, have been doing so for the obvious reasons in addition to the fact that I am currently reading this particular book. The train ride home was amazing and I was so happy, looked up from my book at more than a few points and smiled at all of this.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

four years now and two days

Four years ago, I moved to this city, New York City. Two nights ago, I celebrated with some friends and Manhattans and karaoke. And yesterday, after days of boundless joy and eighty degree weather, a bike ride to Coney Island and the weekend spent in Central Park, I crashed. It could have been the cloudy weather, the hangover, or perhaps it was the feeling, always there, that I have been so successful at ignoring with fun activities and booze. I don't know if I want to talk about the feeling, to trace its contours, for fear that I may bring it back into being by doing so. In short, there was nostalgia for the ambition I at one time had, nostalgia for old friends, a feeling of incredible loneliness, an unhappiness with my lack of a job, particularly a job that I either like or that requires very little time, and just a general sense of self-loathing.

I watched Friday though last night and the easy giggles that provided, silly as they were, were enough to shake off some of my gloom. What shook the rest of it off was the presence of a boy who made me feel less alone, desired. Ryan came over and we drank whiskey and talked about adolescence. We then laid down in my bed, continued to talk, and I was happy with that, my arms around him, talking about things and feeling the presence of something. That was all I needed. The sex that followed wasn't needed for my happiness, but it definitely added to it.

The sun is back out today. I am going to the Princeton Review for the first time in months. I am drinking coffee and listening to Bruce Springsteen and thinking of being in cars and listening to this music.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Then We Came to the End

Clothes, stinky from working out and dirty from being on my knees, and sheets, stained with bodily fluids of myself and others, are now spinning in the washing machine at the laundromat a block away from my house. Walking there, the sky was gray but there were green buds on trees, some trees even with little leaves starting to sprout, and I knew, and still know, that things are going to be so beautiful in these upcoming days and weeks, that there is so much to look forward to, not even considering all the great stuff now. Yes, these buds hint at future, great things, but also are something lovely in and of themselves and not just for what they portend.

The man who runs the laundromat still remembers my name from that time I lost my jeans there and said hi to me by name today and asked how I was doing, doing so in the most neighborly way, making me feel at ease, home. His recognizing me means more to me than any desired crush remembering my name the second time I run into them somewhere, so much more. I left the laundromat and thought about how easy this is, doing laundry at the laundromat, how common it has become, how different the experience now is from when I first moved here to this city, to New York, nearly four years ago. At that point in time, doing laundry was something fraught with so much emotion, perhaps more so than any other activity I had to do then - that to do laundry at a place not in my house, not in my dorm complex, but at a laundromat a couple blocks away, signified to me in a major way that I was living a new life, that I was alone in this city using shared washing machines, putting quarters in, waiting in places that despite being brightly lit always seemed to have some grungy aspect to them, and it was time alone to really ponder what that action meant, what all those actions meant, that it all meant that I was an adult, living my own life on my own in a city I barely knew, and here was one of the responsibilities involved with that, doing laundry at the laundromat.

The activity no longer possesses that same sense of giddiness, of feeling in some ways adult and free, but instead has just become another activity, an almost thoughtless act done every two weeks or so. After exchanging hellos with the owner and leaving the laundromat, thinking about how nice that it is when people are friendly and acknowledge you with how are yous, I got a brief flash of those past experiences, thinking of how long it took me to become friendly and recognizable to the people at the laundromat, and got giddy again, recalling that, and thinking about what it is I am doing, where I am living, and the approach of spring.

I finished reading Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, which was a good book, though perhaps mostly for managing to talk in the plural first person, using "we" throughout the novel and having the collective office workers talk in that voice. I am not sure it is the amazing book some reviews have been hyping it as, but it was an enjoyable read that in its muted way tackled pretty important questions, pertinent ones, about what it means to work in a job you don't particularly care about and the relationships that form in those environments. Emerson looms over the novel as the perhaps foolish prophet, but more so as how we have failed to live, in what major ways we have fallen short. The proof of this, how distant his message is, is demonstrated very comically by the psychotic loose cannon of an office worker being the one to quote him constantly. Today, I have started this particular book and so far, I love it so much. It is just what I want to be reading right now, this memoir of sexual obsession. It is inspiring me in many ways, good ways I believe, and perhaps you will see the fruits of that inspiration sometime, either words on a page or my dick in your hands.

Monday, April 16, 2007

I woke up horny this morning, recalling the events of last evening, reliving them mentally. I started to jack off and it hurt to do so, hurt because of the events of last night. My penis was sore from over-exertion last evening, but knowing that memories lose their luster quickly, details become confused, and the participants blurred, I jacked off despite the soreness, wanting to continue last evening while I still could, before this erotic memory either faded or became replaced in the nickelodeon of my erotic imagination by a more recent sexual encounter or by a hoped for one.

I went out into the last hurrahs of the nor'easter that hit yesterday, getting soaked with rain despite my umbrella, went out to this dirty party. The party was underattended because of the rain. The two hour open bar helped me to overlook this. That open bar helped with other things.

At one point in the backroom, G was sitting next to me on a bench and both of us were getting blown by random boys. This perhaps may have been my favorite point in the evening, the feeling of fraternity that overwhelmed me at that point, and the closeness I felt to a friend, him sitting next to me, me able to feel his body, and both of us getting off. My penis was in probably too many mouths. A couple were in mine. I came in a few mouths, pissed in one.

There were lots of sights I saw last night that turned me on then, and which I looked at for the pleasure that the sight gave me then but also, greedy, because I knew that the recollection of those sights, of that couple fucking in the corner, would give me a pleasure, repeatable, with its recall. There was the pleasure of his dick in my mouth, and though that is said in the past tense, there still is that pleasure, still is when I wake up, drowsy from sleep, still in those moments, that dick still in my mouth and me jacking off again, recalling and reliving the moments, doing so, and doing those things last night, because of their impermanence, because to not do these things and live while there is that option would be too terrible, that memories only last so long, and that other things, those things that form memories, also only last so long.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Anna Karenina

What does it say about me that my favorite section of Anna Karenina very may have well been the ten or so pages leading up to her throwing herself under that train, an opium-fuelled spiteful stream-of-consciousness monologue, something that reads like Woolf and Joyce would in a few more decades, this proto piece of modernism? The section feels so out of place and is startling to come across, and for that reason, this glimmer of something new after nearly eight hundred pages of a polite omnipresent narrator, reads like, dare I say it, a speeding train about to crash. And, of course, it does crash and you know it's going to and reading those moments leading up to it, Anna losing her mind more and more, is totally riveting.
'He thought he knew me. And he knows me as little as anyone else in the world knows me. I don't know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. Those two want dirty ice cream. That they know for certain,' she thought, looking at two boys who had stopped an ice-cream man, who was taking the barrel down from his head and wiping his sweaty face with the end of a towel. 'We all want something sweet, tasty. If not candy, then dirty ice cream. And Kitty's the same: if not Vronksy, then Levin. And she envies me. And hates me. We all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. That's the truth.' (760)
And might that be the truth? Anna, in her final moments of gloom, states some pretty compelling truths. It is almost too bad that the novel can't end here, that there needs to be that final section with Levin where he states alternate truths, ones for the living, that, nice as they are, sound a bit too ham-fisted, too tidy, too Tolstoy saying, "And the moral of our story is..."

It does feel particularly satisfying to have finally finished reading this book. I started it so long ago, soon after arriving back from my trip to California, some two months ago. The book coincided with my start of unemployment in New York, was with me as I lost my anal virginity, on so many subway rides, in parks during warmer days, and throughout my time as a chicken at Marc Jacobs. My time as a chicken, thankfully and hopefully, ended on Thursday, and so completing this book soon afterwards feels nice, as if in some way various changes are being effected, various things that needed to be finished have been finished. I have another book, many of them, that I am now ready to start. Sadly, I cannot say the same thing about my job situation, though I imagine it won't be a problem, as the temp agency that set me up with the chicken job told me that as soon as it was over they would find me full-time work. I intend to remind them of that promise tomorrow and to see what jobs they can place me in. So things are good. Certain things are finished. New things are ready for the starting. Life is going to lived.

The last section of the book is about Levin, the unbeliever, finally coming to peace with God, believing. Some of the revelations that he experiences were eerily similar to ones I had on Friday night when I was stoned and walking home down Grand Street, that there are truths outside of language, that reason has its limits, and sometimes it is better not to try to put things outside of these structures into them. But these things, what are they if they are outside language, outside of our ability to communicate these things with others? When Levin is thinking things along these lines, thoughts I had traced out for other purposes just the other night, my pen went crazy with the stars, with the stabs into the air, saying yes, yes, yes.

Last night, that boy from the subway, Ryan, came over and I touched him, sucked his dick, and felt some other sort of truth worthy of stars in the margin, felt a happiness, a sense that, yes, this is right, my skin against this skin. Before fucking me, he gave me a rimjob that did everything right possible, things I had not conceived of, things with stubble and blown air. And this is not the goodness in this world that Levin was talking about as evidence of God, but this goodness and all the other forms it has been manifesting itself in lately certainly seem like proof of something. The fucking hurt me and was totally overwhelming in the sensations it produced and so when he slipped out of me at one point, I told him he had to stop fucking me, that I couldn't take it. And so we jacked off together and though it felt like too much at the time, his fucking me, its absence also seemed like too much and I wanted the hurt, the pleasure, the overwhelmingness of it all. He left early this morning after a nice night of cuddling, left at a calm point in the storm that has been pouring sheets of rain all day long.

My sheets are stained. I have been listening to CSNY today. The sky is grey. Coffee produces lovely effects in such settings.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

According to Stereogum, that Patrick Wolf article where they cited my Livejournal is only the second time The New York Times cited a Livejournal. That entertains me enormously. In the comments section on Stereogum, someone said this:

I don't know... there is only one comment on that entry and the journal itself doesn't seem that impressive... did the NYT create a sock? You would think that the NYT would try to reference a more reputable music blog/journal/etc before resorting to some random LJ user that finishes their post waxing poetic about the tail they got that night (because of the magical atmosphere Patrick created).

I love snarky comments and was anticipating more after The Times linked to my blog, but sadly this is the only instance of it I have yet to find. There is video of the second time the drummer got kicked off the stage up here, but sadly still no footage that I have seen of the big blowup earlier.

And speaking of tail, some is supposedly on its way to my house right now! Maybe I will try to wax poetic about it after the fact. I need to stop my insane pursuit of sex, but don't know how, don't know why I should other than that my recent sex obsession consumes much of my waking and sleeping thoughts, and prevents from doing things I tell myself I should be doing, like reading, writing, and looking for and applying to jobs. The weather should be warmer. On a few trees, there are already green buds. On some, even flowers. My body, despite the cold weather, knows the same things these trees do. That is what I am attributing this recent bout of sluttiness to.

Monday, April 9, 2007

look ma, i am in the ny times!

My blog is linked to in an article in The New York Times! Can you say what the fuck? That is totally amazing, though of course they would quote me being gay and saying, "Can you say drama?" Oh, man, this makes my day, as does making out with an 18 year old last night, early this morning, after seeing Kiki and Herb.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Patrick Wolf encouraged everyone in the audience to release fluids with someone. He said this during his intro to "The Magic Position." Maybe it was his advice that inspired me. Maybe I don't really need that much prodding though, if I were to be totally honest. And so leaving that club, riding the train home, I said hi to a homo and got him to sit with me, got him to get off at my subway stop, and got him to follow Patrick's advice. He is really cute and has this boyish smile and he would probably have been an excellent person to sleep next to me, but I basically kicked him out afterwards, telling him I wanted to write because I did and because I want to wake up early and do things and not have a boy, nice as he is, in my bed preventing me from doing those things.

About that Patrick Wolf show at the Misshapes party at Don Hill's though: Holy fucking shit! I am sure you can probably read about in numerous music blogs soon and will probably see video footage of the thing soon also, probably in the news section of Pitchfork on Monday. During "Bloodbeat," he hopped down into the audience where Ben, Bri, and I were and sang and I was in close proximity to this man I have a gigantic crush on and Ben was holding him up for a bit since he was falling over, and then Patrick presumably heard the absence of a drumbeat to this song and turned back to the stage to see his drummer passed out. He hopped back on stage, slapped his drummer and yelled at him to drum. Even after being slapped a couple times, the drummer, obviously wasted, barely responded and still wasn't drumming. Patrick threw a cymbal stand at the drummer's head, and at that point I realized that what I thought was just an act was actually a band blowing up onstage during the middle of a packed performance. Patrick continued to yell at the drummer and told him he was fired (can you say drama?) and had security escort the drummer off the stage.

Somehow the set continued though everyone was made a bit nervous by this incident. Patrick joked about how you shouldn't sleep with your bandmates, obviously implying that the drummer was only hired for being someone that Patrick had slept with. At the end of this song, Patrick started to drum while he was singing, obviously trying to show how easy it is, still pissed as hell, and understandably so, that his drummer was asleep during a big show on their international tour. The drummer tried to come back onstage and Patrick again berated him, telling him that he was fired, that he was paid to drum, and that he couldn't drum and so was fired. Security again had to escort the drummer off the stage. It was so intense and insane that this was all happening. It was too bad because it definitely took the energy level of the audience down a couple of notches, everyone a bit shellshocked about what happened and about how the show was continuing somehow. I am conflicted about whether Patrick was an asshole or totally justified. I think he was defintiely justifed to be mad as hell that his drummer couldn't stay awake for his show, but also a bit outrageous to throw a cymbal stand at the drummer. But the show was really great and would have been memorable even without all the drama. He played a Cher cover and then transitioned from that into the song I had been hoping he would play so bad, "Bluebells."

The stuff Patrick was saying about the magic position and about magic sounded so beautiful to me during those moments, about making the unreal real, but his comments would probably look stupid transcribed, would lose their magic. He put a spell on me and it still isn't broken, thankfully. His talk about sex was really lovely and probably why I had it tonight, probably why I met an attractive man on the subway and let him fuck me and probably why fluids were released. It was all per Patrick's advice. And this boy, Ryan, had such a nice smile. I love a mouth that is so cute that you just want to stare at it but can only do that for so long because it is so nice looking that you want to kiss it, to put your mouth to the thing, and feel it in the way that your eyes only wish they were capable of.

Friday, April 6, 2007

I am breaking out a lot lately and that is nothing new, but what is new is my reaction, my lack of one, my comfort with my body. It could be happening so much these days because I am in a hot chicken outfit all the time, because I have started working out, because I rarely sleep, because I eat shit any chance I get, because because because, some of them lovely becauses. Most of the time, I am so amazingly happy. I am learning more and more that I contain anything I could want, that it's all right here, the happiness I sometimes used to seek elsewhere. I am not totally there yet but more and more aware of that place's presence and am slowly taking steps in that direction. I saw Patrick Wolf play last night and I enjoyed myself so much. I am reading a good book. I am listening to either Prince or this one (Smog) song pretty much all the time and it snowed yesterday for about ten minutes and I have to get dressed to go get drunk and dance and there are so many things planned for myself tomorrow during the daytime, too many really since I need to set aside time to write tomorrow. God, oh God, can it be real? Fuck me, a lack of sleep makes the world terrifying in its beauty. Oh music, sweet music. I am crying because Jackie Wilson is playing right now, and I am sure you know which song, and holy shit, I love caffeine and a lack of sleep and music and blue skys, dark ones even sometimes, and cute boys and cute kids and ugly kids and these hands and you.

Sunday, April 1, 2007

A Coney Island of the (Lost) Mind

There is so much to say and, at the same time, not much to say. It is not that the desire hasn't been there, or here, to write about my life lately, but rather that the time is not there, that those moments where there is a desire to reflect and document my current life are often not the moments when I am capable of writing here, are instead normally moments out walking on these increasingly warmer streets or riding on a train to here or there. But there is that, the slow onset of Spring that is happening, and that is a pretty major thing, making every day mind boggingly awesome at times. I am still a giant chicken in a store window in the West Village. That is still totally absurd and will last for a couple more weeks, after which I am not sure. I joined the city gym and have been going to use the bikes there pretty often. That is another source of happiness. There are my friends, there is Tolstoy (who, yes, I am still reading), and there is music that I hear and that I dance to. Today, I went to Coney Island and after dancing to ragtag marching bands, I smoked some weed, touched the ocean, and then lost my mind for a couple of hours. Watching this marching band dance down the beach while stoned was something surreal, conjuring up some Fellini scenes, completely magical and absurd looking.