Yesterday, I watched Citizen Kane and sex, lies, and videotape. In between the two, I pissed on a guy on 34th Street and got a blowjob from him. I was paid a nice chunk of money by him and I left his house more happy than I had been in a long time, since the last time someone paid me. There are two factors at work here that are causing happiness for me lately and I don't like the correlation, but I don't know if I can do anything about it, don't know how to cut those ties or to promote new causes of happiness. The two things that make me happy and that bother me because they make me happy:

1. Someone desiring my body, even if they are a hairy, unattractive person.

2. Getting paid money, having cash in my pocket.

It is funny, the connections, the ties between forms of happiness, how if you are already happy than you can appreciate other things and be made happier by them, some upward spiral. It is hard to get on that progressive happy track, but when you are on it, things are pretty awesome. You, or at least I, watch movies in a different way, a good way. Too often, movies are a way of killing time, of doing something because you are bored and don't like to be alone with yourself. This is what they have been for me lately.

Yesterday, however, a change occurred, and sure, some part of it probably lies with the getting money/being happy connection, but I also think that I watched these movies differently, engaged with them, because the movies were so excellent - that there excellence compelled an engaged viewing.

Welles was 24 when he made Citizen Kane. That blows my mind and I have a year left to compete with him and produce an equally awesome first work. I don't know why I am so wowed by age sometimes, like Zadie Smith publishing White Teeth at the same age. It's yet another way for me create a sense of inadequacy and guilt for myself. It is one of my hobbies. But sex, lies, and videotape, Soderbergh's first feature also, I watched twice, once last night, and again this morning. Everything is so perfect in that movie and the acting amazes me, just watching the facial expressions. James Spader is so amazing in that movie. But yes, both of these movies have got me excited about various cinematic techniques and wondering how similar effects could be achieved, or if they have been achieved in the written form. How do you do things with isolating sounds, carrying them over one scene into the next - how does one do this successfully on the page? Is it even possible?

After Joe and I watched sex, lies, and videotape, we went to the Metropolitan. I was in a good mood, saw various crushes, past and present, and those made me happier also. It's like crossing a stream by hopping from stone to stone, amazed that you are making it across without having to tread through the water and just hoping that you will keep on being able to land on a stone with each step, amazed that you are making it that far, that you keep on catching the stones, and you get giddier and giddier as you near the other side. This is that happiness linked from one thing to the next, the happiness perpetuating itself, aware of it, and giddy because of it, a high wire act and looking at the ground beneath you. But normally, you run out of stones and eventually wade through the creek for one jump or so and that is the problem. I think you have to willfully ignore that upcoming fall and sort of trick yourself with each stone you land on that you are going to make it. It is the only way to make it across.

It is not for a lack of things happening, but I have lost interest in writing about my life lately, and I wish I could claim that it was because I was so happy and so busy all the time that I cannot write here, but it is probably more of the opposite of that, that I really am not that thrilled about anything these days, that I don't do much, that I watch too much television, too many movies, and I have been reading, not reading that Murakami book for what seems like the last two months. My inability to finish that book, to even touch it, discourages me so much. When I see that bookmark only about halfway through it, or when I come across a book I really want to read, and think no, I have to finish that Murakami book before I start anything else, it discourages me so much, and I feel dead and wonder how I got this way, wonder what it is that prevents from finishing this - why it is that right now when I am jobless and have nothing to do, why it is during this period that I have so much time that I am probably accomplishing less than I have ever accomplished in my life. Something about art arising out of adverse conditions, that there have to be other forces pressing on you, and that what you write is a release. Sort of like partying and being jobless.

I never feel like raging lately. There is no desire to cut loose, to get wasted and let it all shake out on the dancefloor. But when I used to be working, every night when I got off, I was ready to cut loose, footloose, to let out everything that had been held for eight or so hours. Without tension and stress there is nothing to release - I am in a constant state of release, deflated, always skirting the line of boredom. No steam in the kettle.

Finding sex work through Craigslist is getting harder and harder and thank god, the Princeton Review starts back up for me on Wednesday. I have twenty three dollars left. My metrocard expired yesterday. I am going to buy one for twenty one dollars today. That will leave me with two dollars cash until I can make some money.

I got stoned last night off of the rest of this joint Niki left here about a week ago. It was awesome. I listened to Gillian Welch and imagined two excellent stories that I am going to write tonight after I go see the Tim Hawkinson show at the pay what you can (a dime?) night at the Whitney. These stories are so awesome and I sketched out the outlines of them last night, real worried that I wouldn't remember them today. I definitely would not have, and I was a little nervous to look at my notes, thinking they would be unintelligible, but I understand what I was thinking and hopefully I can translate those remembered thoughts to paper.

I have fucked myself with one finger before but never two, and a new boundary has been crossed as of an hour ago, and maybe I'll do it with a dildo or even the real thing. Driving straight and fast through roadblock after roadblock, the scraps of wood and roadside signage flying over the hood of my car, me, laughing that way psychos do in movies, pressing harder and harder on the gas, in love with not so much the speed of it all, but the lack of care, the not holding back, farting in public because you are on a busy street, and no one will know, no one will hear it or smell it, and even so, no one will be able to trace the smell, so farting and speeding and stoned, this morning, naked in bed, putting a condom on my fingers, lubing it up, and soon having two fingers up my ass. Because there is that pedal there, and so once you press on the gas pedal, you are not sure that it is you driving yourself forward because you feel the lurch of the engine and feel that forwardness, will trace its source in the car and not yourself, that something else, something outside of yourself is the thing pushing you forward. It is okay to be reckless, someone else is pushing you fast into this moment. You are in the moment and it took no thought, no preparation, no pro con charts to get there, and so then when you are there, are in that moment, you have no footsteps to retrace (perhaps even in diary format), nothing to recall, no a plus b equals c, and suddenly you are on the c side of the equation and you don't know what a was or what b was, and so it was something else, the engine that pushed you forward, not your foot on the gas, but always, something else, otherwise, what would explain why you decide to fuck yourself at one in the afternoon on Sunday, or why you make out with five people at a bar. How do you, or how do I, end up in them? Even how do I end up eating a can of chickpeas as a meal? What spell are we under in boredom; whose control?

I was thinking somewhere along these lines last week when I was getting out of the York Street subway stop to go shoot some porn photos at some man's studio in Dumbo. Their is a tunnel you have to walk through from the subway tracks to the actual street exit. And it is so narrow, sci-fi spaceship like, birth canal like, and long - it is on a slight incline so that when you exit the station, you are ascending to something or away from something, and walking through this tunnel, a group of policeman, all in cinematic swagger were walking toward me, into the station, and they were all in step, so casual, and so looming, elevated as they were from my position in the tunnel. I walked past them, and walking along realized that I was walking to go do jack off photos and I didn't realize when it was that I so easily was able to decide this or to do these things without giving much, giving any thought to them, wondered if there was not some other thing propelling me, if there always isn't this thing. I think to a Cake chorus and it goes "Satan is my motor" and that is not what I am suggesting, but perhaps suggesting that I am a zombie lurching and lurching and never sure why. I wish I could claim it was for anything as noble as the hunger for human brains.

Peter left New York yesterday. I went over to his house in the afternoon, and got some things from him and we said good-bye in front of his apartment on S. 1st Street. We hugged and then he went west to meet his sister in Manhattan and I went east on the street toward my house. I thought of the symbolism of this as soon as we parted, how he is walking west toward California where he is moving. I looked back a couple of times, knowing that I was saying good-bye to a friendship, and though, I will still talk to Peter and will hopefully see him, this part of my life was leaving and I would never be as close to him again. I stood and watched him walk away in his orange coat, his winter cap that used to be mine, tote bag over his shoulder and thought about this same idea of human actions and how we propel ourselves or what it is that propels us, what was the force taking him to California, what was it that made me hop up and down in a bar at the sight of my crush, what was it that makes me stick fingers up my ass, you know? What is the thing? Erotic desire seems to play a part in some of these things, but that is too easy to say, too mid-twentieth century.

I sometimes wonder if it is something else driving us. I think this especially when I am in the middle of an action and don't know what led to it, how I got there.

Each time I start to play music on my computer, I always start with this song, at least since I downloaded it a week or so ago, that has been the case. And then I play it over and over again before it has the chance to get even ten seconds into the next song. It started off with me listening to the song like he was David Cassidy, this boy Charlie, headphones pressed close to my ears, eyes closed, imagining him, him and I, silly scenes with a boy I saw at a bar one time and have never said a word to, but now, the boy, the crush isn't even present when I listen. There are just those perfect noises that make up the harmony and me spacing out for chunks of two minutes and forty seconds before the next song temporarilly brings me back to reality. I do this until I get tired of the song or tired of wasting my time, and then I stop the music and do something else.

Today, I did sit-ups and bought underwear, in anticipation of perhaps having to dance at the Slide tonight. Ron did not call me, so I guess I am not working this evening, and I am mildly sad about that and hope that I will still work there some future weeks. It is probably best that I am not working tonight since it is Peter's last night here before he moves to California. We are going to go out to the Royal Oak and hopefully dance and if it is lame, scary, or obscenely loud, we will be hightailing it to another bar, somewhere close. As of tomorrow, there will be an opening in the friends department, preferably a gay boy who lives close and will be ready to go the Metropolitan at a moment's notice. I might start going there by myself. I have to make friends again. It is hard. I might just rent a lot of DVD's all the time, sad romances and write about how lonely I am everyday.

I walked underneath the Manhattan Bridge on the Brooklyn side and was totally amazed by how massive it seems, by how massive downtown Manhattan looked, how tiny I was at the foot of these gigantic towering supports. The Brooklyn Bridge was just down the river and it looked equally awesome, even minimized as it was by depth perception. The weather while I was doing this was so nice, it was nearing sunset, and it was almost cartoonish how pretty the sky looked against these bridges.

I went and did some photo work at this guy's studio in Dumbo, right on the water, drank some of his tequila, and fucked a plastic sheep for the first time. His studio didn't have any windows. When I left, it was dark outside. I forgot to notice how the bridges looked at night. I am sure they probably looked awesome though.

PS

All right, now I am finding the negative reactions and they all harp on the color. If I had read these oringially, I probably would have enjoyed the Gates more. This comes from the NY Post (Should that bother me? It doesn't.) via Gawker:

It's enough of a sin that "The Gates" overpowers Central Park's soaring, hypnotic beauty. But the color of these bed sheets, plunked down on metal frames every 12 feet throughout the park, is so atrocious that the project's creators ought to be charged with assault.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude claim that the hue of the weirdly pleated cloth is "saffron." But, as any American junior-high-school kid will tell you, the precise shade is "vomit orange."

Also, Christy alerted me to this in The Washington Post.

the gates

It was a nice apartment right in the heart of Chelsea, so it seemed like it could have been possible and so I asked him, "Is this Keith Haring real or is it a print?" He told me it was real and then pointed out other pieces he was proud of, including two gorgeous Warhols. I was a little giddy, never having seen big art names in such a private setting before, in a small apartment, hung in the hall next to the bathroom. I wanted to take more time to look at all the paintings but I could only concentrate so much, as I was about to piss all over his carpet if I did not piss on him soon. I told him such. He knelt in his bathtub and I pissed all over him, so much pee, having held it in for so long, almost wetting myself on the subway ride over to his house.

Afterwards, I stayed and talked with him for about twenty minutes, asking questions, looking at vintage gay magazines, and feeling like a kid in a candy shop getting to touch these old muscle pictorial magazines that I had only read about in histories of the male body. Physique Pictorial! Old copies worth so much, the Athletic Model Guild magazine. Normally, I leave as soon as I am finished, but I sat and talked with this man for about twenty minutes, really comfortable and impressed with him. I enjoyed talking to him so much and that surprised me so much.

It all came so naturally, my interactions with him and with his art. This afternoon, I spent at Central Park checking out Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates," and though I wanted it to, my interactions with it did not go nearly so well. I was glad to see Lauren say she found it "uninspiring." I went because you have to, because it was on the cover of the three big NY dailies yesterday and the Times has been creaming its pants about it in article after article. So I went, hoping to be wowed, and maybe my expectations were built up too much, but I don't think that is the only reason I failed to be wowed, to even connect with it.

This may be a nonreason, but I don't like the orange. And the Gates are orange - they are garish construction cone orange, hazard tape orange, not the natural "saffron" every article refers to the color as. I don't like the color. It seems more appropriate for autumn, not for late winter.

I really wanted to like these, I walked sixty blocks through the park, trying to understand, to connect. But the whole time, I kept on wondering what it was every family, every couple, every one of those many, many people in the park thought. I thought about cases of mass hysteria and wondered if this might not also be one, a public that doesn't care about art, all rushing out to the park to stare slack-jawed and amazed at pieces of fabric hanging from ugly beams, because it is done on such a large scale. Everyone always crowds around the big canvases in museums. The beams occupy too much of your sight, and the fabric, not enough. But that orange, it keeps coming back to that. Honestly, if it was a white or a light blue, I think I would find it a lot easier to join the crowds in cheering this. I walked along the large reservoir while I was in the park, it was frozen except for a spot in the center, far off, where birds were gathered round. The ice had frozen in these really cool patterns, or was melting in these really cool patterns. I am not sure which, but at the edge of the ice, along the shore, there was water, lapping gently against the shore, and this, water against ice, amazed me so much, reminded me of walking around frozen lakes near my grandma's house in Minnesota when I was a kid. This, the natural stuff, conjured more, inspired more, than that orange stuff. It is just too large-scale. And that, of course, is why people like it. And it is, of course, why I don't, because I like the more intimate things, the frozen reservoir that reminds me of Christmases at my grandma's, the art in his living room that I can see while I am naked and ready to wet myself.

Okay, beer and pizza, I like. I know lots of females that do also. Sportscenter, though? Come on, Maureen Dowd. And I happen to love Jane Austen! Where does one rally the spirits to constantly fight such pervasive gender bullshit? This, from an otherwise liberal NY Times columnist, in a fairly messy essay that seems like it wants to say something:

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed not only risky, but the height of presumption to expect someone to devote that many hours to fathoming someone else's psyche. What guy would drag himself away from ESPN's "SportsCenter" to read "Sense and Sensibility" or from beer and pizza to devour "Cakes and Ale"?

What planet do I live on?

washington mutual (sexual) tension

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