an empty gruppo pizza box on the floor on my sro, an image conveying this moment

The weather was in the fifties today – and I do this a lot, this talking about the weather as an introduction here, as a method of somehow setting the scene, telling you these physical things outside of myself and their conditions as some way of hopefully being brave enough to get at the interior conditions, the weather of my own mind and its shifting patterns, the cold front that descended from somewhere and has yet to lift – and it had me in nice spirits once I finally left my house around noon today, slightly stoned, on a trip to the gym and elsewhere, errands, this, that, and generally just strolling around this city on my day off, thinking about things and not thinking about others, and wondering what it was that I wanted, on what path it was that I was going down, and whether I should do something about that, how to.

After running for a while and lifting some weights, I went into the steam room, the carrot that often incents me to go the gym, knowing that I will be able to sit in the heat nearly naked with a bunch of other men slightly hidden by steam and have erotic fantasies about the men around me and fairly often get to enact in some form those fantasies, jerking off with these men on occasion. Today was such an occasion, though really a non-occasion, something that has become routine, this jerking off in the steam room with strangers having become such a part of my days.

Today, the man appeared to be in his forties and was quite attractive, at least in the mist of the steam room, the mist more than once fooling me and the awkward encounter outside the steam room with one of these men resulting in a slight shutter of regret seeing them in better lighting. The man today stroked my dick and kissed my chest, my neck, the touch turning me on so much. For a good amount of time, I was in this erotic reverie, nothing outside of that physical encounter and my racing heart, but I left once some dude sat next to us, the two of us covering ourselves in towels and acting like we had not just been jerking off. Orgasm frustrated and erotic reverie now fading into normal reality, I thought to myself about what it is I am doing, again the question of what course my life is taking figuring prominently, this time at the showers in the gym, some Latin dude in the shower stall next to me, the guy always there, and always peeking through, showing his dick, probably in these showers all day, and the questions, the questions, and this, some man and his dick, being either the temptation to delay answering these questions or perhaps the answer, either good or bad, to these questions.

I have stepped back from a large number of my friends and see them less often. I have started hanging out with other people lately, namely lots of co-workers. I live in Manhattan. I go to a bougie gay gym often. I find myself taking cabs often, something that used to be a maybe once every six months thing now becoming a few times a week thing. These are some of the changes I am thinking about. I wonder if I am on the wrong track, if I am becoming a type of person I don’t like. I rarely read and never write. I am going to Mexico on Sunday for nine days and I really do hope that I am able to use this opportunity of traveling alone to step back and think through some of these things, to wonder what it is I should be doing and how to go about that.

I don’t particularly like my living situation. It often depresses me. I live with older gay men who seem lonely and stay in their rooms all day. I worry that this is my future. I need to escape this house. Two nights ago, the owner was playing the keyboard in the living room, quite terribly, for a couple of hours, till some of the guys here starting shouting down the hallway to him about how they had to work in the morning. Last night, someone was hopefully drunk and crying and making weird animal noises at the top of their lungs and it was insanely depressing to listen to as I was trying to fall asleep, to hear some man in his forties or so such a mess and making childlike sob noises for the entire house to hear.

I still think about Gabriel often, despite my commands to my mind to quit thinking about the subject, that he is out of the country and to let it and him go. I think about him sometimes when in the company of newer friends, thinking how fun he was, how much I miss him and regret that our friendship has been such a failure. I don’t know why close friendships prove so difficult for me. But the list of close friends I have burned through is quite crazy – that there is some pattern to this in my life of having intense friendships with people and then not talking to them again for a period of time, if not forever, among them: Leslie, Nora, Ethan, Niki (several times), Diego, and Gabriel a couple of times also. I think about Niki sometimes these days also, missing her as well. I have been hanging out with Diego again and he is sometimes sad and sometimes lonely and so I have been enjoying talking to him a lot these days. But my emotions are in a scramble. I can’t read the weather patterns, have no clue what is going on with the Doppler radar screen, and so am just enjoying the ride, commenting on the weather, that it was in the fifties today and it felt really, really good to not have the wind sting me with cold in the face, to walk calmly from place to place, enjoying the walking, the strolling, the living here and seeing people, some known, more not so.

I had a lot of dreams last night, one of which I am just now loosely remembering after seeing a fish on television. I was on some beach somewhere with two other people and we were under the instruction/guidance of some woman for some purpose. There were whales, seals, and big tuna-like fishes stacked on the shore - clearly some fisherman's haul. This woman told us that it looked ugly and was stinking up the beach and we needed to get rid of it. We pushed all these dead sea creatures back out to sea reluctantly, me knowing that they were someone's catch. Some Inuit looking fellow came afterwards and starting yelling at us and while the woman and the Inuit guy were talking, I told the other two people how stupid that was, how we had ruined that man's work and livelihood.

What this dream means, I don't have the slightest clue. What another dream means, a friend telling me they missed me, is quite a bit easier to deduce the meaning of.

At Eastern Bloc last night, I hung out with Micah, this boy that I have hung out with a couple of times and who I have a gigantic crush on in a way I haven't had on a person in a really long time. He spent the night at my house a couple nights ago and we didn't even kiss, didn't touch anywhere below the waist. It was a really cute affectionate sleepover. He doesn't drink alcohol or caffeine and does not smoke weed. He is also kind of asexual it seems. And yet despite how these things fuel my life - sex, caffeine, booze, weed - and despite how we have these big lifestyle differences, I am so into this boy. We kissed for the first time last night outside of Eastern Bloc as we parted ways. I walked home giddy and dreamed of pushing deal marine life back into the ocean.

I don't know where this life of mine is taking me, feel more lonely than I have in a long while, but also somehow feel in certain ways better about my life. I just got off the phone with my aunt - my dad's sister who I haven't talked to in a year or two, since she got a little too emotionally pushy on the phone with me once trying to tell me how good my dad was and how I would understand things one day. She is getting divorced from her husband, Ed, and was calling because she wanted to now make me the beneficiary of her life insurance policy, which is a weird thing to think about - to think about someone's death and about money associated with it. This conversation went much better than our last one - she still a bit on edge and sad over my dad's death, quite nostalgic and attached to him still, the two of them really close and having come from a difficult childhood in Chile here that she always hints at and tells me she is going to write me about one day. Because I have lost someone close to me lately, I was able to understand what she was going through quite a bit, how she was sad that she was getting divorced but also how she was happy about it, that the relationship wasn't good, that it was something she should have done long ago. I told her that walking away is really hard, but sometimes necessary. She told me that she wakes up now and can dream and think about the things she always wanted to do and can listen to the music she used to listen to and not have to watch TV all day. She is 58 and told me she is not meant to be married. Talking to her is like talking to no one else - emotionally draining because this one subject of my life that no one else from my family ever talks about - my father - is talked about and she talks about how I am so like him in so many ways, weird to hear if you knew the whole of him, but also probably true if you knew the whole of me. I don't know. It is a Thursday night and I am going to go drink at Eastern Bloc, see some friends, some boys I like and some boys I should no longer like. I am going to Mexico in a week and beyond that I don't know where I am going, what this life holds for me.

And Mexico wins. It was what my brain wanted to do when my fingers were most ready to hit buy and that is the reason. Brazil was my number one choice but sadly airfare to there is so expensive. A European holiday was considered to either Barcelona or Rome, both having fairly cheap airfares, but neither having warm lying-in-the-sun weather yet, and both still surely having European prices for food and rooms as opposed to Latin American prices for food and rooms. Miami was seriously in the running because I had someone trying to convince me to go there with him and we could have split an already cheap hotel room at a fancy hotel. And then I spent a long time looking at apartments for rent on Craigslist, wondering if this vacation was not the best usage of money for someone hoping to move into a new apartment. But then I said fuck it, saw the cheap airfares to Guadalajara, and hit purchase. So five minutes after midnight on the first day of March, I will be flying south of the border for nine days, definitely taking a sidetrip to the beach for part of that time, probably Puerto Vallarta, and I am so excited to be somewhere warm and somewhere other than New York and some place where I can where different clothes, hear a different language, and eat yummy food. So fucking excited!

I am getting a decent-sized tax return, am making a nice amount of money now, and am also feeling stir crazy. I am pretty certain I am going to take the first or second week of March of and go somewhere, preferably warm and Spanish-speaking. There is that option, but what is dissuading me is how I tell myself that I should save that money and use it to put toward an apartment, me also being eager to move into a place of my own, some place more like a home. Assuming I don't do the more adult option, because it is unlikely I would start doing so now, where should I go to? Most places in South America are quite pricey to fly to, more so than lots of European destinations. I am thinking of doing a trip to Guadalarja and Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, which would be the cheapest and probably gayest of my options. But since I have already been to Mexcio, it seems as if I should go to some country I have never been to before, despite my love of Mexico and despite how I haven't been to either of those cities. Another option is Lima, but there's not a beach and it's not that warm - however cheap flights and mountains a new country all sound like reasons why I should go there instead of Mexico. Another option is Barcelona, which also has some reasonable airfares on this evening when I am suffering from wanderlust and looking up all these destinations on Kayak. Any further suggestions would also be appreciated.

I am stoned and in bed. I watched the Super Bowl at some old gay man's house in the East Village with a couple of friends. It was really pleasant to stuff my face with fatty food, watch football, drink beer, and hang out with nice people. Last night, the Waste Land performance I was in went off surprisingly well. I emailed my crush from the performance today and we exchanged numbers. The weather was mild today, near fifty, and it made me so ready for spring, for summer, so done with winter.