Saturday, January 29, 2011

and in three days time

It started on Wednesday. I thought I was just hungover from the night before, reckonings the day after the state of our nation told across channels. But the pain shifted, become less vague, more precise, a soreness to the throat, a listlessness setting in, something about to be taken from me, the echoes of footsteps just over that ridge marching this way, the troops on the move toward me. And by the time I got home from work and errands, it was the flu, setting in so fast, pounding headaches, deliriousness, insane body chills, and a feeling very little like what is commonly assumed to be meant by feeling alive.

I have been taking a lot of Theraflu and Nyquil and eating pineapple and smoking weed at night to help me with the sleep since I have been sleeping all day, cold medicine taking me in and out of waking life. I have taken baby steps to pulling myself back into normal reality, meaning leaving not just the house, but my place on the couch where I sweated through blankets and t-shirt after t-shirt, my body sweating so much each night, each morning me wondering where it all comes from, all this sweat, my body trying to boil this thing off, the joy I get from the steamroom only slightly present here - there is that cold sticky shirt, wet, clinging to my skin, already chilly again.

I wonder what the lady at the bodega thinks of me, why she doesn't ask me how I'm feeling, me stopping in there two or three times a day to buy armfuls of cold medicine, plastic containers of diced pineapple, and cartons of orange juice.

But today I have felt much better, enough so that I have decided that this is the last cold medicine I am taking, this Nyquil I just consumed not too long ago, or maybe so long ago, maybe its drowsy-inducing side effects beginning to take effect. And tomorrow the cold will be over and I will try to get back into a busy life. I have decided that this will be. I will go the gym to make up for all this time on the couch and also because I am going to LA in three days and perhaps going there, someplace new with new faces, especially if that place is LA for some reason, there is on my part some desire to look more attractive than I might normally attempt on any said day. I got a haircut. I have clipped my nails. I don't know what date I am preparing for. I think I am going to try to find some new looks tomorrow after working out. This a very gay paragraph I am realizing. Not sure that is a problem, but at some point I am sure I would have been a little bit judgmental about these concerns I am now concerned with.

There is a storm headed this way on Tuesday supposedly. I am hoping this thing moves on a slow path so that my flight is able to take off and leave before this stupid burst of winter comes this way. I have come to really tire of winter now. I have had it with the snow. I don't need to see anymore for another year. I am ready for summer. This batch of flu and feeling insanely chilly for three days, extra miserable, has really made me ready for this winter to end. And so I must escape this city for sunny California for a brief bit, and Weather Gods, please please, think of how much I have sung your praises all those days spent on beaches together, please please do not in any way interfere with my ability to fly away for a brief while into California, dreams of Joan Didion and Joni Mitchell floating all through my head.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

that i am listening to mellon collie right now should say a lot

I am trying to work through some issues concerning what my life currently is, what Life in the capital L sense is (or, more truthfully, what I believe it to be, or want it to be, or am told by poets and writers it should be), and whether or not my current life fits in that broader idea about what life should be. Specifically I am thinking about dreams and aspirations and how they fade for so many people, how lived reality and the day-to-day activities that soon become part of a working person's life trying to pay their bills sometimes runs up against that. I am thinking about aging and careers and supporting myself and growing old. I am thinking that soon I will be 30, that I wanted to be a writer and sometimes tell myself I am and sometimes will even tell people drunk at a bar that that is what I do, and then I think about what I actually am - a person who does very little writing, only really the stuff here you may or may not read on this blog, on this website, that every project, small-scale mind you, that I have set for myself as a goal has fallen by the wayside, never even really gotten started. I am not entirely happy with what I am doing, my job, the thing that pays me money each week, deposits into my bank account each Friday morning, it there by the time I wake up and check my account balance online.

And I want to be doing something else, but really it is very likely that any other job I might get would be another boring job, low-level, that would probably require little of my brain, would require less of my soul, and would have a set of minuses, that though different, would probably be just as annoying as the current set that I stew about sometimes. These days I wonder if at some point, and at what point that is, a person, myself say, essentially throws in the towel, spaces out, and forgets about these things, embraces life as it is rather than stressing that it is not what you thought it would be, not what you believe that it should be.

I have been doing the same job now for over two years. It is a really mindless thing that only involves my ability to tell various people things they want to hear, knowing the right things to say. And at this point, it has become rote. I can hear the full questions from the first words, a question I have heard asked in some many ways so many times before, and I say the answer and transfer them here or bring them this or that, and it is so boring. The problem however is that most jobs are boring. Most jobs do kind of suck. I have worked a lot of them and they have all had big minuses attached to them. And really when I think in the context of past jobs, this one far and away beats them all. It pays nearly twice as much as my last job I had doing copy editing for a magazine.

And it is that, the pay, which is the thing keeping my bound, keeping me in check. That this guest services job in hospitality pays so much more than many of these jobs I see online that interest me really troubles me. There are these jobs doing copy editing and assistant editorial work that I would love to do even though they are usually for boring scientific or medical publishing companies, and I even apply to them despite my doubt about taking a large pay cut, because it is at least something involving words and language and the arranging of text, and yet even these jobs I never hear back from.

These thoughts have really started to intensify in this past week, a lot of factors at play here, all colliding to create an existential crisis, a pre-mid life crisis for your narrator here, a one Mr. Charlie Q. A lot of factors involve time and its quick passing: that a new year just occurred and yet is already almost gone, that time for a new start running out, and that I also have worked at this job for over two years now, the time for changing already long past for a job that I don't want to be doing when I am old. There is also the factor of changing personal relationships, that in the past two months so many of the people I worked with since the hotel opened have all left, that I am feeling left behind and am now working with a large amount of new, younger faces. And more to the point, the thing that brought it all to a head this week, the sense that a change needs to occur now, is that two of the jobs I had applied for within the hotel, both did not work out. One because the position had been eliminated, which was stressful and sad news because it was a job I would have really enjoyed, and the other one because it went to one of my friends who is certainly more qualified for it.

After hearing this news, I had two very lovely talks at work. One of the HR people asked me how I felt about this news and I was really honest with her and we had a nice heart-to-heart talk where I talked about my concerns about adulthood, about falling into a career that you don't necessarily care about, and about life. It was actually amazing and she relayed that she went through much of the same stuff, that she didn't plan on her job, that she still isn't sure what she wants to be doing. It was a really nice human moment and she is going to help me with my resume because I told her that I have to change my life, that I just can't keep doing this same job because it pays well, that I need to be challenging myself and doing something new at least. I am really grateful that she is going to help me with my resume, something that is way beyond the call of her job and actually may even be counter to what her job might be considered to be. It was really nice, almost motherly, advice. She also told me not to leave just for any job, that I should take my time, use this opportunity I have now of an easy, well-paying job to think about what I would like to be doing and to do it, rather than taking any job that comes along, just because it's a new job. She told me to make sure I only left for a job I wanted and a job that paid me well.

The next day my boss wanted to talk with me. He is friends with this lady and she had relayed the gist of our talk to him. I was worried that he would be upset that I had talked openly about wanting to leave and get a new job elsewhere. We walked into this room behind our office and I was a bit tense about what he was going to say, but also happy that I had put this truth out there into the world, that I now needed to make it happen. Instead of a tense talk, I had another really beautiful human moment, so not what I would have expected from this man. I told him the gist of what I had told this other lady. He told me that I shouldn't leave just because I didn't get this one job. He complimented me a lot, which was nice to hear and surprising. I assured him that that was not why I wanted to leave, that I had never intended to work in hospitality, that I needed to do something else. And he told me about his life. He is 36 and told me that it was never what he intended either, that it just happened, telling me the events in his life that brought about his current life, that life just takes you places. And he told me that he didn't love it but that it does pay well. And he said it's a job. You come to work and then you go live your life. I'm not doing justice to either of these moments, but it was the first time I connected with either one of these people in so human a way, where I really got them, saw them as close to me, realized that life is a fucking weird thing, that just because you are not a paid writer, or a professional actor, or in a touring band, that your life is not any less lived, that life is about these themes, about coming to terms with these things, about disappointment, that that's what true art should be about. I mean, surely the narrative we would all like for ourselves is a wildly successful and glamorous one, but when that one doesn't work out, you become more aware that just about getting by, living your life, coming home to someone you love, eating well, delighting in the senses of your body, and enjoying your friends.

The show Party Down really articulated these themes beautifully for me. I am amazed by that show because though it is a really funny show, there is also this undertone of slow-motion tragedy to the thing, because you see these characters who are so much like yourself and they are working in the service industry just like you and just like you are somewhere around the age of 30 and they are at that point in their life where they are having to perhaps resign themselves to not making it, to moving up the catering ladder. There is disappointment and the readjusting of reality. That these caterers all are aiming for success in various artistic fields, are poor now, and all are working parties for the rich and successful in LA just throw this them about success and the desire to make it into stark relief. That this life is filled with images of glitz, of LA and NY, and money and Fake Housewives, and it is expected, these lives for some reason, is what adds to the small little heartbreaks that occur when people readjust their dreams, modify them, put them on hold, to work, to live.

I don't even know! I was supposed to work on my resume this evening to bring in this week to show this lady but instead watched the Jets game and ate Mexican delivery. I am going to LA in a week and I cannot wait to escape this city for a short while and see it from a distance, see it for the small speck it is.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Prince

After Sharon Jones' opening set and after an interlude with the house lights up, Madison Square Garden again went dark, the house lights turned off, some small equipment lights glowing on stage and smoke drifting through those lights, the night about to really kick off. The arena was full of shrieking and yelling, everyone insanely excited about seeing this man come out on stage. His stage suddenly lit up, a ring of colored lights lining the perimeter of it, the stage in the shape of his symbol. A DJ started teasing the crowd, mixing small snippets of many of his songs, just enough for you to recognize it and scream your head off that you are about to see the man responsible for all these amazing hooks and riffs take the stage. The stage pulsated with the beats of the song, the lights choreographed amazingly with the music.

I was really stoned and sitting in the upper rafters with Jacob. The stage was a spaceship that had landed and was hovering there, the sightlines and energy that Madison Square Garden has are much better than at IZOD Center, where I saw him play a month ago for the first show of this tour. It seemed that they had really improved the staging and lighting for this show, or maybe it was just that I was high. The set list was also quite different than the IZOD Center show I had seen. I need to see this man play again. I want to go to his February show as well but really cannot try to buy tickets right now because I need to be saving money for my upcoming trip to LA. If I have money when I get back, I am definitely going to try to purchase myself more tickets to see this man. What he does to me is something really special. I love this man and his music so much. To see him dance and sing and play guitar is all I could ask for.

The legendary Maceo Parker guested with Prince on a couple of songs. After his first appearance on a song, doing amazing sax work, the crowd politely applauded, meaning barely applauded. You could see the disappointment in Prince's face. Rather than continuing with the song, he had to pause to put the audience in check, saying something along the lines, "Do you know who that was?" And a large number of people may not have known, but this is a man that has had such an important role in the history of funk and soul music that the crowd should have gone absolutely bananas. And I love that Prince understood that and told the audience what's what.

I was really hoping that Sharon Jones would do an amazing duet with him, and though she did guest on one of his encores, singing "A Love Bizarre," I wanted something else, something slower. But that's a minor quibble in what was otherwise an amazing two hour plus performance from Prince that included a gorgeous, gorgeous version of "Adore" that had me swooning. He played "She's Always in My Hair," one of my favorites, and he absolutely killed me with "If I Was Your Girlfriend," another one of my favorite Prince songs and which was sang so beautifully. I swooned, I danced, I saw one of my idols, and I want to do it again and again.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

after

After getting off of work yesterday, I headed to the dermatologist to get this cyst on my neck looked at, hopefully removed somehow. It appeared about two weeks ago and did not seem to be going down in size at all, this large hump on the back of my neck that made it difficult to sink into a comfortable position while sleeping, this bump on my neck forcing me to sleep on my side. Aside from the physical discomfort of it, there was of course the fact that it simply is not cute to have a large cyst on the back of your neck. Luckily, it occurred in winter, the thing easily hidden behind collared shirts. The dermatologist stuck a needle in me and drained the thing. It hurt so much and I loved it, loved the pain, the piercing, localized nature of it, that it was so pleasant to experience such an intense sensation and to be able to control my mind's fearful reaction, to recognize it as only a specific part of my body and to distance my mind from that, or to try to, the pain being successful, the way great sex is, in at least momentarily collapsing that divide between body and mind, that your body's feelings overwhelm your mind's thoughts, merge with them. It ended, it was brief, him pinching out the last of the gunk from the cyst, it hurting like hell, and despite that pain and how some part of me, the sensible and orderly part of it, wanted it to end, another part of me was sad that it had to, that it did, wanted that intensity to continue, that surge of feeling to last.

After liquids were released from my body, I paid his receptionist, I left.

After getting off of work today, I headed to the guy on 96th Street that I see every so often. There was this couple nearby on the subway ride up there. It was a really crowded train, the kind where people have waited so long for the train that they just push their way on to it even though there is no more room, that everyone is already bunched up against each other and angry about waiting, but you are even angrier about how long you have had to wait for a train at the end of your day and you are not going to wait just as long for the next one to come and so you push yourself on to the crowded train - that type of train. And this couple that was next to me the entire way uptown really irked me in some inexplicable fashion. The guy was really sexy and I was right next to him. His girlfriend stood behind him, her holding on to him, her arm around his chest. And for the entire time I rode uptown, I felt like this girl's chubby fingers rubbing up and down her boyfriend's chest were somehow done to annoy me. Or they did annoy me just because I was being irrational, and I didn't understand why. I tried to tell myself I should be celebrating this display of sexuality, but something about it struck me as presumptuous, as an offense. I didn't know where to put my eyes. I was both turned on and filled with loathing by the sight of this dumpy girl (so I told myself, this and worst, while I mentally thought through this on the train, angry) and her ugly hands caressing this incredibly sexy man, that there was something pathetic in her display, something weird, and maybe I was jealous, jealous of this guy, of wanting to be able to be this physically affectionate with my lover on a crowded train at rush hour. I was also getting really horny, hard at their touching, hard at my anger and awkwardness I was feeling. I couldn't wait until I got off the train, until I could see this guy and piss down his throat, fuck his face until he gagged, until he spit all over my dick and stomach and caught his breath before I shoved my dick just as hard again down his throat, not caring that he just choked on it, twisting his nipples hard, and taking pleasure in this abuse. I undressed right away and quickly made these thoughts reality, enacted the sex I had just pictured walking to his house from the train. He had some piss video playing on his television and I was alive while I fucked this guy's throat, that the pleasure I took in his submissive embrace of my body, of the feel of my body, of another body, of stroking my dick lubed up by his spit until I was ready to come and then lifting his mouth up from my balls in order to shoot my come down his throat, doing so even though some part of me wanted to prolong it. The other part, the logical part, knew there were other things that needed to get done today by me and that he wouldn't call me as often as he does if I were nicer, that he likes my distance, that that is what attracts him. And the part of me dueling that part loved this intensity of feeling and wanted to prolong these moments, to always reside in such moments, for these surges of feeling to last.

After liquids were released from my body, he paid me, I left.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Things I Love This Week

Lil Wayne's "Six Foot Seven Foot"
So it has been a couple of weeks since I first heard this song, the first single from The Carter IV, and at that time I was blown away, could not get enough, played it really loud over and over again. The track is produced by Bangladesh, the same producer who created the amazing "A Milli," which this track is very similar to in that both utilize heavy bass, crazy samples, and lack a traditional chorus. For whatever reasons, ones I am not going to complain about because it actually is prolonging the enjoyment I am getting from this song, it's not getting too much radio play. I occasionally will hear it on Hot 97, but not as often as they play Drake and Nicki, who are played just about every other song. This is the most amazing pop song out there right now and that it's not played on every station every chance they get is very weird to me, but again it means that a couple weeks later I still have not tired of this song. When it does come on the radio that I listen to in our work office, I go a little bit crazy, blast the song, and tell everyone in the room how amazing it is. The song is an on switch, a cue to dance, to lose your mind. They lyrics are the product of a mind on fire, in love with plays on words, and verbal slights of hands. For instance:

"Life is the bitch, and death is her sister /
sleep is the cousin, what a fuckin’ family picture /
You know father time, we all know mother nature /
It’'s all in the family, but I am of no relation."




Jersey Shore
The show has started back up again, the cast back in Seaside Heights, and I could not be happier. Early on in my relationship with Jacob, we would get drunk and watch the new episode each week when it appeared online together, a thing that we would look forward to. There are certainly reasons why I enjoy this show so much, though they are vague, complicated, and perhaps even conflicting. Watch this episode online and enjoy this beautiful train wreck of a show. Also on this list of favorite things from this week, closely tied to this, would be Brian Moylan's lengthy recap of this week's episode for Gawker. You can tell that he has a lot of fun writing the recap and he produces some beautiful moments of writing that seem a bit out of place on Gawker, given it's extended length (at least for Gawker), but it is a really fun, even beautiful read. One of my favorite bits from it is this paragraph:

"Just like New Egypt, with its developments of cookie-cutter homes and just barely above average public schools tries to outshine the seat of the pharaohs, so does Deena try to outshine all the other members of her house. She is the drunkest, sluttiest, fightingest bitch of the bunch. She is exactly what she thinks she is supposed to be. She is a construct created out of high expectations and watching the previous installments of this show. That said, she sure is a lot of fun. She claims to be a "walking holiday." But which holiday is she? Christmas with its promise of presents and inevitable disappointments? July 4th with its boozy picnics, regrettable hookups, and a whole ton of fireworks? Arbor Day, with all its good intentions and seeds that never take root? Administrative Assistants Day, with its vague entitlements and unruly underlings? We don't quite know yet, but we think she's going to be all of those holidays rolled into one."

Black Spark
I discovered this artist after seeing links to his videos on Fleshbot. It's a bit of a mystery as to who he is, which is certainly part of the appeal. He is utilizing his Facebook account to tease fans as to the identity of Black Spark, at one point claiming that Black Spark is not one person, but that there are many Black Sparks. He has also said that he is working on a blog and more videos. It's a pleasure to not only get to see these pieces of art, but to see him hint at future projects on his Facebook account. Today, he just posted another video to XTube and it is another beautiful video with hot sex, hot men, haunting music, and something more than what you would normally find in online porn, that this is porn that definitely aspires to be more, that it is shooting for art, and does so successfully. The only off mark with the videos is that the pop songs will eventually become tired to hear and the superimposed text that whooshes on and off the screen looks too lo-fi and amateurish considering the otherwise high quality of production values.

But it is filmed beautifully and really well-edited. Clearly whoever is behind the camera knows what they are doing and has a lot of talent. The men on screen, often masked and bathed in odd lighting effects that reveal and call attention to bits of their body, are gorgeous and insanely cut. They have abs that I probably never will have. They are the standard ideal of beauty and perhaps that should be problematic, but Black Spark addresses this in this video through text, admits it, proudly claims it. Over a shot of a male doing ab exercises, text appears that says, "I train my body to fight for what I believe in. Monsters Exist I have seen them. I am Addicted to Sex."

I have been going to the gym fairly regularly lately and working out harder and harder, getting into lifting weights, really trying to shape my body, specifically my stomach, into a certain thing, this same thing, an instrument of sex.

This video has a clear "Billy Jean" reference occurring (saying what though, I have no clue) and it should be absurd, but this video and its haunting music really get at eroticism, that a great deal of sex is the desire to not be alone, to connect with someone else, and this video really hits on that point, how humans don't want to be alone, that we need these physical connections to make us feel that we are not, but that even with them we probably still are. This is a gorgeous, gorgeous video that is inspiring me. And, yes, I jerk off to these videos and they make me hard, but there is also something else going on with them. They are also giving me thoughts and ideas and inspiration.


Party Down
I recently watched the second season of this show and fell in love. Next week, the first season will be back on Netflix Instant Viewing and at that point, I intend to write more about it, having watched all of the episodes of the series. But for now, I will say that at certain moments in your life you will encounter art that specifically seems made for where you are at in your life at that moment, that had I encountered this show at the age of 18 or so, I would have thought it was funny, but I wouldn't have related to it as much I do now at the age of 29. This show really has me thinking about my own life and that of some of my peers, how we work these service industry jobs and think of ourselves as artists, that these jobs are only temporary, but the show brilliantly portrays what is really occurring, that most likely that is not and will not be the case, that you will just get more and more cemented in these career roles we think of as temporary. This show is so insanely good. I am kind of bummed that I am only now discovering this, now that it has been canceled. But it is still there for the viewing and still with a lot to say. Perhaps I was waiting until the appropriate time, this particular moment in my life where I am having thoughts that are barely formed with regard to this subject, that this show spotlights and throws into stark relief, makes painfully clear.

Cheap Beer and Shot Combos

Friday, January 7, 2011

hot like fire

I went to an open call yesterday for a job at a new hotel that is about to open up, or I tried to. I had gotten dressed up cute, printed out my resume, and headed up to the location right after getting out of work. The line stretched two blocks long. The temperature was a little below the freezing mark. I waited about twenty minutes to see how quickly the line did or did not move. It did not move very quickly. I had progressed about ten feet during those twenty minutes, and realized it would be hours spent in the cold to attend this open call. I gave up, feeling bad not only for myself since I really wanted to work at this hotel, but even more so for the hundreds of people that were going to continue to wait in this line. I walked away angry at this hotel for overreaching and extending info about this open call to far too many people, that there was something sadistic about making potential employees do a test of endurance to even apply to work there and wait for hours in the freezing cold just to be seen. That so many people participated in this, endured this poor treatment because they needed a job, made me really sad and visually brought home the competitiveness of the job market and the difficulty in finding a job.

One of my resolutions for this new year is to get a new job and it is one that I am pretty serious about. There is the goal of getting out of the hotel industry, which is proving a bit difficult, and at the same time there is a desire to do something else in the hotel industry until that moment arrives at which a job in whatever field becomes available to me. I do worry though that the longer I continue to do hotel work, the more difficult it is ever going to be hired in another industry, say the world of publishing. This afternoon, I interviewed for another position at the hotel I work with, a position which I really hope I get because it would be normal office hours and would also be a job that would help me get a future job elsewhere. It's weird to think of a job in this way, as a chess move, that you have to pretend you really want a certain job, but only really want it because it will help you get another job elsewhere. Before my interview today, I spoke with the HR lady at my company for a bit, who was really helpful and friendly and gave me quality advice that I had never thought of. It was a bit like reading a story for a workshop or a class and receiving good feedback afterwards that allow you to see how the thing is actually received. The HR woman asked me all of the types of questions that I was going to be asked later by the person interviewing me and then evaluated my answers, told me not to say certain things and told me why, told me what answers make you sound better for the job. And it was an "Oh, Duh" moment, wherein I realized that I had been doing the same errors in every cover letter I have been sending out to jobs lately, that this was probably why I wasn't ever hearing back from any jobs I applied to.

From her position, she explained to me what it is employers want to hear and things that are red flags to them, that while one can mention a desire to change jobs, it should not be the main thing mentioned, that instead one needs to emphasize why one wants a particular job. It's pretty obvious but I wasn't aware of how I had been presenting myself and how I needed to be until this constructive feedback from the HR woman. I then went into my actual interview fairly confident, followed the advice of this woman, and it went pretty smashingly.

I came home and took a nap since I got so little sleep last night, instead hung out at Wreck Room with Erica talking about life and work and boys - you know, I lived my life.

There is a new episode of Jersey Shore available for the viewing online and Jacob is on his way home from work and we have a date with Snooki and our bong. I have a lock on my window now, it only taking two months of harassing my landlord. Aaliyah is still awesome to listen to. Birds are dropping from the sky. It's 2011.

Monday, January 3, 2011

The King's Speech

I was high and had gotten off at the 28th and Park stop on the 6 train. I was listening to Erykah Badu and on my way to a matinee screening of The King's Speech at Kips Bay. Walking down 28th Street brought back a flood of memories. Diego used to live around the corner from this train stop, lived on Lexington, while we were dating and I had spent so many nights at his apartment, had walked to this subway stop so many times, walked back to it messy and hungover and probably with dried cum somewhere on my body. The block was littered with these memories that I kept tripping over. That time in my life I kept reliving, brief and very detailed memories of some moment coming hurtling across the front of my consciousness.

I've eaten at that McDonald's, bought lube at the Duane Read with Diego the first night I went home with him, and bought bags of chips and candy bars so many evenings after coming home from a bar at Little Michael. It was still kind of early in the morning, the sun was slanted just so, bathing everything in a certain type of lighting, the type apparently really conducive to fostering fits of nostalgia.

I miss Diego and I miss Matt and I miss Gabriel and I miss Andrew and I miss Sean, and surely many other names that at one point I had some romantic feeling for. To live in this world and age and go through love affairs is really something. The past often doesn't know its place, or your memory confuses it, and the jewelry box opens when you walk down a certain street, 28th in this case, and the ballerina starts to twirl to that mechanical bit of music played, a tune you recognize but hadn't heard in a long while. It is really something, all of the things that we carry with us. That we function and live in the present and continue to move forward and are not continually grieving all the things we no longer have in this world is really amazing. We are humans and our drive is to live. Our minds and bodies keep going, breathing, loving new things, new people

Dating Jacob and living with him provides me a great deal of happiness. I absolutely love the curl of his cold feet against mine when we spoon in bed. And yet, walking this street today, I realized that I had said goodbye to certain experiences. Now that I live with my boyfriend, I no longer have that experience of getting dressed to go over to a boy's house, that tussle about who's house to spend the night at, or, what really struck me today, the morning after walk back home - wearing clothes that smell like smoke and sex and booze and your eyes still crusty with sleep, thinking about your night and that boy as you spend some time alone, one of the most beautiful moments of contemplation a person can have, looking at all the morning commuters wondering if their lives bring them as much joy as you're feeling.

breakfast

Saturday, January 1, 2011

2011

Twenty eleven is upon us. It's a new day, a new year. The sun is shining brightly outside my kitchen window, throwing long shafts of light across my black and white checkered kitchen floor. I am listening to old Motown songs on the radio and wishing that I could let go. New Years' Eve was what it always seems to be for me, an event that caused unnecessary stress as I attempted to find myself something so super fun to do, something that might live up to the outsized expectations that so many people put on the night. It ended with me waking up hungover, but not the good kind where you think about how amazing the night before was, but the kind where you begrudge the hangover, that you wonder why your body must feel this way when there wasn't even the fun payoff that should normally precede the nausea.

I went to Erica's with Jacob, had some drinks there, took some Adderall, and then Jacob and I left for Easy Street at Dixon Place. The space was overwhelming and the Adderall was making me too self-aware, canceling out all the benefits I acquire from alcohol, an ease, a slouched happiness, things blurred, happily so. Instead, everything had clear edges, was sharp. Jacob was soon insanely wasted somehow. We went to Eastern Bloc, a bit bored at Dixon Place. I was already basically propping Jacob up at this point in the night, holding him up as he veered around the sidewalk. I really dislike nights like this, where the person you are hanging out with gets so wasted that you become their caretaker, that so much of your night instead of having fun, letting go, is spent constantly watching some other person.

At Eastern Bloc, someone apparently bought him shots to celebrate his birthday while I was doing my best to avoid this gay writer that I went to Miami with once and ended up running away from his condo in the midst of my stay, taking the bus to my friends house, my bag in my lap. I kept thinking about this man, not pleased that he was there, not pleased that I was becoming more and more aware, watching out for this writer out of one eye. Out of the other, making sure that Jacob wasn't falling or dropping glasses.

I went out for a smoke and saw Jacob showing off his cracked iPhone to someone. I expressed concern about his still functioning phone and he then threw it really hard against the sidewalk, making it now a non-functioning phone. Clearly, sadly, it was time to end my night, to take this mess home at one something in the morning, despite that I had been looking forward to a night of hard partying, of staying out til six or seven and eating some diner food in the morning, that I had not had one of those nights in forever, that I just wanted to be out among human beings.

Instead, I held up Jacob on the subway the entire way home, held him up as we walked home, and then slept next to his passed out body. I tried kissing his neck, horny, hoping he would wake up and want to have sex. He was dead passed out and I jerked myself off on my side of the bed, disappointed and annoyed. It's just another night and there shouldn't be reason to read the end of the world because of the events of one night, but it's fraught with a symbolism that I buy, a lit major, a fan of narratives, that the opening scene sets the tone for the book, for the movie, that it's thought out, a way of showing us what is about to come.

I did however in the course of writing this encounter a really lovely song on the radio, the Pointer Sisters' "Yes We Can Can."


What a beautiful song and message. I am going to try. I have to let things go. Anger is your insides tightening up. I need to relax them. I want to get high. I am going to some things in this year. I am going to do more physical activity, perhaps in the form of capoiera classes. I am going to write more, but I say that every year, every month. But I am going to. I am going to try to get out of this country at least once this year. I am going to get a new job. I am going to be alive and am going to try to be nicer, try to relax, let things breathe naturally.