I got off the subway this afternoon on the Upper East Side. There was a boy climbing the stairs ahead of me. When he caught sight of what he was stepping into, with awe he said, "New York City!" He repeated it a couple of times and his excitement about where he was recalled to me moments when I shared that same feeling and made clear to me how far from that feeling I have been lately. For a moment today, I saw it with his eyes, remembered how tall and massive these buildings look to small children, how they should look to adults also. Lately though, these tall buildings have been unnoticed, the city has; it has all been blocked out by my own sorrows, thinking about my inertia in this life professionally, artisically, romantically, and pretty much every other front imaginable. Circling all of this and feeding these thoughts is an overwhelming feeling of loneliness, which at times becomes so painful that the only way to deal with it is to be asleep, to not be awake to pick at the scab anymore.

I was uptown to get tested for STDs, was getting tested at one of the two remaining bathhouses in this city. I was doing this instead of attending a group pig play session that I had expressed interest in, had decided against that when I learned that people I knew were going to be there, when they encouraged me to come, my interest in the scene being fed by its earlier anonymity, being able to project imagined things on to these unknown people. Knowing that I would know these people killed my interest, and instead I found myself at the East Side Club getting tested for STDs, thinking about my inability to connect with other human beings.

There were more people at the place than I had imagined for an early Sunday afternoon, older men walking around in towels cruising each other. I passed them all, enjoying the attention, the desire, I enjoyed as the youngest person there, my feelings of isolation, loneliness, and undesirability all temporarily (and how temporarily!) soothed with their eyes, hungry things.

Vials of blood were drawn and things were swabbed with giant Q-tips.

As I walked home from my subway stop, the sun was already nearing the horizon, and the clouds looked full of something that I wanted in the sun's dying light. I watched Chris Rock's Bring the Pain, which was really good, Rock stalking the stage like some large feline, lion or tiger maybe, and owning that crowd. This brightened my mood and made me laugh out loud. I then continued my reading of Mary Gaitskill's Veronica and that brought me back to the place I had been earlier. It is a fantastic book, sad and miserable and beautiful, with writing that I sometimes read twice over, wowed by Gaitskill's ability to so eloquently in the span of a few sentences or paragraphs conjure something so large, so known and unsayable. I go back and try to find out where exactly the thing was said, with what words, but it's not there; it's just in the tone and the things implied. Throughout the book, she says some amazing things about music and our complicated relationship with it.

My music was more private, and I didn't play it loudly. I crouched down by it, sucking it into my ears, tunneling into it at the same time. Daphne sprawled on her bed, reading, and Sara played one of here strange games with miniature animals, talking to herself softly in different animal vocies. Downstairs, my father watched TV or listened to his music while my mother did housework or drew paper clothes for the cardboard paper dolls she still made for us, even though we no longer played with them. I loved them like you love your hand or your liver, without thinking about it or even being able to see it. But my music made that fleshly love feel dull and dumb, deep, slow, and heavy as stone. Come, said the music, to joy and speed and secret endlessness, where everything tumbles together and attachements are not made of sad flesh.

I didn't know it, but my father was doing the same thing sitting in his padded rocking chair, listening to opera or to music from World War II. Except he did not want tumbling or endlessness. He wanted more of the attachment I despised--he just didn't want it with us. My father had been too young to enlist when World War II started; his brother joined the army right away. When my dad was finally old enough to enlist in the navy, he sent his brother a picture of himself in his uniform with a Hawaiian girl on his lap; he wrote, "Interrogating the natives!" on the back. A week before the war ended, it was returned to my father with a letter saying his brother was dead. Thirty years later, he was a husband, father, and administrator in a national tax-office chain. But sometimes when I walked past him sitting in his chair, he would look at me as if I were the cat or a piece of furniture, while inside he searched for his brother. And through his brother, his mother and father. And through them, a world of people and feelings that had ended too abruptly and that had nothing to do with where he was now. He wasn't searching for memories; he already had them. He wanted the physical feel of sitting next to his brother or looking into his eyes, and he was searching for it in the voices of strangers that had sung to them both a long time ago. I was so attached to my father that I felt this. But I felt it without knowing what it was, and I didn't care to think about it. Who wants to think about their liver or their hand? Who wants to know about a world of people who are dead? I was busy following the music, tumbling through my head and out the door. (30-31)


The book was quite good and, typing this, I see that it doesn't show the thing felt when reading this, that as a whole this book works very well, little pieces coming together, earlier referenced things, fitting in perfectly with new things, new themes.

More would be said but I am off to Hell's Kitchen to change the setting, shake up the snowglobe a little bit, hopefully producing new feelings.

When it turned midnight, a year ending and another one beginning, I was on a rooftop in Bushwick surrounded by friends while making out with Diego. Kissing him was fantastic and relieving. The happiness I got from that kiss, that moment, was because there was the knowledge of recent New Year's Eves, all outrageously terrible, and because this one did not seem to be such a thing, was nice, pleasant, and fun, that I wasn't cursed to have a terrible night every year on this night, that I was alive and happy.

Diego soon left for Metropolitan with his friends, telling me that he wanted to sleep over and that I should meet him at Metropolitan. And because apparently I did not learn my lesson a few days ago when I took my sweet time in getting to this exact same bar to meet a boy I liked a lot, I continued to hang out in Bushwick, time passing faster than I realized, my sense of time probably altered by excessive consumption of vodka and some pot smoked.

Around two, I arrived at this bar, and soon after got a text message from Diego saying, "Just left."

All evening I had had the expectation that I was going to end my night with this boy, that I would have sex with him, and that I would then sleep next to him, and this thing to look forward to provided me lots of happiness. When this thing was no longer going to be such a thing, when he had probably just gone home with someone else, that happiness quickly departed. I was feeling pretty glum, New Year's again seeming like this night of outsized importance, that how one starts a year has a symbolism for how that year is to proceed that may or may not be true, but which on New Year's Eve I always think that is so, and so this news, his departure, and how it meant I would be sleeping alone, really brought me down.

It didn't help that I talked to some boy I had met at the Marc Jacobs holiday party, exchanged numbers with there, and had had tentative plans to hang out with, which he never followed through on, never called me back about. He kept apologizing to me as if my feelings should have been hurt by his not calling me, and I didn't care, didn't care at the time, and certainly didn't care last night, my mind on other things other than this boy whose name I could not and still cannot remember.

I drank more. I saw a boy who looked like David, who I thought was. I went up to talk to him thinking he was a person he wasn't. His name was Amit and he said that we were subway buddies, that he always sees me on the L train. I felt his chest and told him that I wished I could play it with more, could be somewhere where his clothes would not be a hindrance to doing so. Diego was on my mind in this moment. Sex with a really attractive person needed to occur, or I thought so then, that that would make me happier, erase the sadness, the feeling of rejection.

Amit and I walked to his house, cutting through McCarren Park, talking about other places, origins. In his bedroom, we listened to music and smoked some pot. We undressed each other and had sex. We lay next to each other talking about our love lifes, it being pretty apparent that this was a one night thing, and so both really comfortable talking about other people, things we wanted, things other people wanted. We had sex again. He mentioned going to get pizza, and I thought this was a cue for me to leave, thought that he didn't want me sleeping over, but this also very well could have been a bit of paranoid thinking induced by being stoned. I was sad about leaving, not only didn't want to have to get back home, but really did want to sleep pressed up against someone, to not wake up alone. His bed was also really comfortable. I got dressed and left, not exchanging numbers.

I woke up this morning hungover and alone, no one else home.

Another year is nearing its close. The curtains are about to come down and I, both audience member and player on the stage, am unsure of what this performance just was. I have been reading over my diary entries from the past year, as has now become a ritual thing for me to do on the last day of the year, and have been realizing that a lot went on this year, a lot I have forgotten about, and also a lot of the same, a lot of things never done.

I quit my copy editing job in the beginning of the year and had a few short-term jobs scattered throughout this year, the BN.com job, being a giant chicken in a store window, being a nutcracker in a store window, that solitary day as a masseur, and the occasional sex work job. Because of this, because I spent so little of the year actually working, it would have seemed that that time freed up would have been put to use writing, but so little of it was, probably less so than when I was steadily employed. The year started with a story of mine being published in Userlands, something that I told myself was going to be a catalyst for me to be more productive, write more stories and submit them to places, but served as no such thing. Obviously this is something that I plan on correcting in this coming year.

I moved out of the apartment I had lived in for four years, moved out of Williamsburg, moved to Bushwick. The move was probably a mistake and is something that I find myself regreting when I am hanging out in Williamsburg, thinking of how I used to live a couple blocks from this bar, or how I used to walk underneath the BQE and it feeling comfortable, a sign of home, whereas now walking under it provokes memories of that past feeling, reminds me that this is no longer my neighborhood. But living here has presented new joys in both a new neighborhood and also in living with Niki, who, aside from occasionally making me crazy in a bad way, makes me really happy with her energy and craziness. My other roommates, the bedbugs, do not make this a pleasant place to live though, and will sometimes inspire the fantasy of burning everything I own and running away.

I had nice trips to Florida, to Chicago, and to San Francisco this year that provided me with joy of a certain kind that seems to only come from excursions away from New York, and which, thinking back on them, make me want to take more little trips, visit more people, look at my life here from a distance that perhaps only a physical distance can provide.

It was in March that I had anal sex for the first time and that opened the gates to what has since been sexual adventure and sexual hunger, heightened forms of the things that I had yet to experience. There were brief things with numerous boys I had forgotten about until rereading over these entries, recalling fondly my experiences with most of these boys. There was that interaction and time spent with the writer, which started out so great and ended in a big ball of terribleness, me running away from his condo and taking a bus to a friend's house in Miami. Thinking back over these boys, I still have warm feelings toward most of them, but it seems to be reflexive, memories of that original warm feeling and not the actual feelings. I am so fascinated by the heart, by human beings, this seeking out of something in others, and the ability to find hints of it in romantic and physical affection. There is something magical about the whole process. There was also some major heartache toward the end of this year about a specific person and specific incidents.

This is becoming boring, the recounting of things already recounted, which may have been boring in that first recounting. So much of I did this and I did that, and la de da, because we all do these things and we all did those things, and the purpose in this is not to say what we did (unless of course we say that very well, which currently I am not doing), but to get at why we did it, why we do any of the things we do, the reasons why these I dids are the I dids they are.

I had a lovely time this year, did lovely things, had nice moments with friends that I think of fondly, but there are also so many things I did not do. I am becoming aware of the reasons for that, have been thinking about them ever since I went home for Christmas, and am going to try to remedy them. I am going to be more productive in every sense of the word. There are never moments when I forget that I am alive; there are however many moments, most moments actually, when I am not as cognizant of what that actually means, the implications, the scariness, and the beauty of that, as well as the duties and obligations incumbent upon someone aware of those things.

Another new year is here, will be very shortly, and there are only so many times that I will be able to say that. Goodbye 2007. Best we go our separate ways.

Tonight could have easily ended in a manner very distinct from how it did end, from me here typing away on the Internet, telling you, the presumed reader (is there such a thing?), about how I fucked up, how I blew chances with a boy I liked a lot, and instead had to come home alone and have ended up on this thing, this Internet, feeling more than a little inept.

I saw There Will Be Blood this afternoon with Niki and the movie was quite good, the type of movie you can say that about, but it was not the type of movie that I am going to be raving about to friends, the type of movie that will inspire thoughts for days, months, or years in me, was more so the type of movie you can recognize as good, rather than the type you want to shout is good. Despite most critics calling it PT Anderson's best work, it is my least favorite of his, his earlier works touching something more in me, saying something I was more able to respond to.

After the movie, Niki and I had Ethan over for martinis and played Scrabble. I won despite a couple of martinis downed and a couple of whippets inhaled, won by a decent amount of points also. Afterward, Ethan and I went to Boysroom where I proceeded to get more drunk and showed my penis to a group of boys who asked to see it, saying that they had heard I had a large penis, a rumor that someone else told me they had heard recently, a silly rumor that is really funny and which also gives me some small source of pleasure.

I had recieved a message from the hot boy from the threesome I engaged in with last week, David, saying that he wanted to meet up tonight and that he was headed to Brooklyn. This is where my stupidity begins to show itself. Rather than drop what I was doing right then and go to meet up with this really attractive boy that wanted to sleep with me, I took my sweet time at Boysroom, and then from there did not even head straight (er, gay) to the place he was at, but rather took an extended detour at Galapagos, assuming that this boy would continue to wait at Metropolitan for me. Unsurprisingly, boy did not continue to wait there, and by the time I finally did arrive there, I recieved a text message from him telling me he was in a cab headed back to Manhattan and that I had been too slow.

When the fault is not your own, when it is for some other reason, or for something more vague, more unclear, it is easier to go on with your night and not feel like you have blown it, but when it is clear that it is your fault, that when the boy you had wanted to sleep with tells you that it is your fault, that you had been too slow (so slow) in meeting up with him, then that is hard to deal with, makes you regret the trajectory of your night and your dilly-dallying ways.

And so rather than sleeping with this boy, who I think may have actually been the hottest boy I have ever slept with, I am instead going to go jerk myself, and probably do so with a bit of self-loathing, probably do so a bit as a chore, and then drift off to sleep, to dreams beyond my control, but which since they are beyond my control may hopefully be something other than this current mental state, may be something hopeful, something sexy, something sweet. There is that possiblity, and then there is the other possibility, the other ones.

Yet another awkard morning this one, though at least it followed an amazing night. I have to leave for work in ten minutes, have to leave to go sit in a giant swan dressed up as a nutcracker and pose for pictures with people for ten hours, and so because of this approaching departure, because of my need to get dressed for this departure, there is the need to be briefer than I would like, the need to note to myself to revisit this subject in long form since it was weird and great.

That cute 20 year old from the suburbs who I had a tea date with a couple of days ago came into the city last night to hang out with me and was going to sleep over at my place. We ended up at Metropolitan, him drunk, drunk in the way that inexperienced drinkers can get, that young people can get, and his youngness became more and more apparent. There was another boy he was talking to, a sexy boy my age, a David, who I started talking to, and who told me he wanted to sleep with me. I told him that the 20 year old was already going to sleep over at my house. He said that was okay.

A threesome ensued at my apartment and the boy I had orignially liked became this boy that I had very little interest in, other than observational, looking at an inexperienced young person. This David boy had a big nose, brown hair, and am amazing body, a lovely dick. He was dirty and fantastic, and I really hope that I can see a lot more of this boy, but even if not, last night was a great experience.

David left early this morning to catch a flight. The 20 year old acted very awkward later this morning when we both woke and got dressed while I was making coffee, asked for directions to the subway, seemed eager to go, seemed perhaps a bit embarrassed about the night before, the sexual guilt of people still young, or perhaps confused about my feelings toward him after seeing me really into this David boy. I wasn't sure, was still too tired, too pre-coffee to pursue it as a line of conversation, to care much. I gave him directions to the subway and kissed him goodbye.

What I am after is the spirit of adventure. I had it a couple of days ago just through conversation with this boy, Taylor, talking to him over tea and as we looked through old clothes at various thrift stores, about life and art and movies. There was a giddiness there, a sense of possibility, of things to come, that brought a lot of joy to me. This was in contrast to my interactions with a boy the night beforehand, in which giddiness was near absent.

Last night, the spirit of adventure took a more literal form as Diego and I wandered through Chelsea drunk with the plan to find someone on the street who would let us have sex in their apartment. The streets were fairly empty, it being kind of late and very cold. There was one person who was into the idea, but who was unable to host us for some unspecified reason, probably because he thought we were potentially crazy, which, last night, might have actually been the case. We decided to go to the Eagle and stopped in a porn store to ask them if they knew where it was. In the porn store, we saw a box of whippits and both started recalling with glee past times with whippits. We bought a box and went into adjoining video booths, being told we couldn't share one, and through the gloryhole would pass the cracker and balloon back and forth, getting high in the back of some random porn store on 8th Avenue. There was something beautifully absurd about the whole thing and Diego's embrace of it made me very happy, made me like him even more.

Passing the whippits back and forth and constantly having to put money into the video booth became too much of a hassle and I convinced Diego that he should come back to my house, despite him saying earlier that he couldn't go out to Bushwick since he had to work in the morning. At my house, we listened to music really loudly, which always makes inhalants and the wa-wa sound effects of them much more fun. I dug out some old crackers and we did them at the same time, collapsing afterwards into laughter on my bed. Laughing, absurdly high, I felt so close to this boy laughing next to me, saw his goodness and prettiness clearer that I had earlier.

We undressed, pushed the whippets to the floor, and had sex. It felt great and something outside of the actual physical sex felt great also; the knowledge of who it was with and the interactions outside of that sex imbuing it with something also contributed to the joy. I felt young, felt like I did some years ago with boys when interactions could be so playful and both seemed to be chasing after new experiences, pushing things. I felt alive.

This morning, I felt a little less than alive. My cold seeming to take hold again, sore throat and runny nose. There were and are pleasant memories though. There are teas and cold medications. There are movies, books, daydreams, recollections.

I am after something, trying to wash something out of me, and have a pretty steady stream of dates lined up for the next few days, nixed two potential ones for tonight to hang out with one boy I like a lot, and plus have other boys I should call and make plans with. I am not sure what I am doing. I know that I do sometimes get lonely and do want someone to spend time with and be physically affectionate with and this is how I am responding to that. I hung out with Diego tonight and soon found myself naked with him at this party. The two of us started a lot of naughtiness and had lots of fun. The best part was that after we came, he didn't have guilt, wasn't no longer into me, and instead kissed me a lot, telling me he liked me , and how much fun he was having. We were outside smoking a cigarette with an Ecuadorean and the two of them spoke in Spanish. I am going to crack open these Spanish books and learn this language. I really want to live in Latin America. The cash and my license were stolen from my wallet while I was pantsless, and yet that hardly bothered me; there were his lips to kiss, lovely lips. We were asked to dance at this New Year's party. He is so beautiful to look at, so pleasant to touch. The memories of these things will lullaby me to sleep.

american nights

For the first time since that terrible New Year's Eve of a couple years ago, I got a psychic reading, this time at the Marc Jacobs Arabian Nights party in the Rainbow Room, a weird setting, loud and distracting, to get a tarot card reading in, but also for that reason, for having to silence that out, to focus my attention and lean in close to hear, a good setting. Plus there was the night skyline of Manhattan to look out onto as this reading was being done. She told me things that I found to be true, or things just vague enough to have broad applications to my life, telling me that there had been changes in the past three months in a close relationship, that I am thinking about moving to somewhere closer to nature (or to live with someone closer to nature, she said), that I am going to get a new job or move after the new year, that I am nearing the end of a nine year cycle (as I will turn 27 in June), and that until that point, for the next six months, I am going to be processing a lot of things and cleaning my emotional house, and that after that point, I am going to fall in love. I enjoyed this reading a lot. There had already been some whiskeys consumed by this point, allowing me to enjoy it even more, to approach it earnestly.

The party was amazing. So much money must have been spent on it. There was the space itself, which must have cost some change, then the full open bar, the buffets, and then all these performers - tarot card readers, sword swallowers, and dancers galore. Everyone was dressed in really amazing, extravagent, and sexy costumes. So many sexy costumes, man oh man. I talked to some store people that I had never talked to and they were really nice. I talked to Adrian and made out with him. I exchanged numbers with this one boy, and who by the time I finally got home had already found me on myspace and written me, and these interactions were nice, were pleasant, and yet were like a lot of my interactions with boys lately, in that they are nice and pleasant, that there are boys that like me and that I exchange numbers with, maybe make out with, but that things never seem to go far beyond that, that I am not giddy enough over these boys to muster the will to hang out with them. But I am thinking about calling some of these boys up that I have met recently and trying to make giddiness.

Later in the evening, Gabriel and I tried to sneak Ben in, which proved quite difficult, but which we did finally succeed in doing, however the process resulted in Gabriel not being allowed back in. So the three of us left there and went to the Kiki and Herb afterparty, were there for a bit, it feeling weird to see all these often seen homos in the swank setting of the National Arts Club. Things seemed more appropriate when the party migrated to Nowhere. I drank more there, hit on more boys, exchanged some bjs with people, and then despite seeming successes with boys went home alone. The last time I slept with a boy, spent the night with one, was weeks ago, was Diego. Right now, I couldn't say what it is that I want, but last night, walking home alone, the thing was to not be walking home alone that I wanted, to not know that I would be sleeping alone.

Last night, after changing out of my nutcracker outfit and getting off work, I went to meet Ben at a house party somewhere on Bleecker street. It was a Jewish party. It was a gay party. There were bottles of booze all over the place, some snacks, and some cute boys, some very cute boys scattered around. Just about every person I talked to made some reference to Jewishness, asked if I was Jewish. The Jew envy I used to have a few years ago would briefly resurface with these questions.

There was this boy in a scarf, always the boys in scarves, that I was attracted to. His name was Eric. Ben, him, and I peed together, squeezing past some religious singing to get into the bathroom. The boy was pee shy. I touched his penis slightly and watched it react, rise a bit. Both Ben and I were hitting on this boy and that made me feel slightly uncomfortable - feelings of competitiveness, insecurity, etc. I started talking to this other boy, Adam, who was very attractive, who shined in his eyes, and who I was having a lovely conversation with before some crazy person stepped between us to start talking to me about spirals. Adam escaped the spiral conversation and I wasn't so lucky, was stuck for a while trying to be polite and listen, meanwhile silently cursing this speaker for ruining the interaction, something sweet and intelligent, that I had been desiring for the past week or so.

I found myself making out with some boy, a yoga instructor, because he wanted to and I thought I needed something that could be got from making out with a stranger, some feeling of desirability. I did so for a bit before I realized it wasn't what I wanted and pulled away from his lips. And there in front of me were Ben and Eric making out, which was a bit of a discouraging sight, though if I were a better human, free of pettiness, envy, and jealousy [cue Joni Mitchell's "All I Want," which addresses this theme perhaps better than any other song], then I would be happy to see my friend happy.

It was time to flee. Yoga instructor was very confused that I was leaving, gave me his card. I wrote my number on some slip of paper found in my bag and gave it to Adam. It was drizzling as I left the party. I tried unsucessfully to read The New Yorker on the train ride home; various predictable strains of thought instead kept on distracting me.

first snowfall

There is an inch, maybe more, of snow on the ground, and the snow continues to fall. It is a beautiful sight, the first snowfall always is, as are normally the second, third, fourth, and fifth ones, but this one is particularly beautiful for its unexpectedness. I had not been paying attention to the weather and was unaware this was to occur and to wake up this morning, look out my window, and see white on roofs, on window ledges, on car roofs, on streets, was such a pleasantly shocking sight.

I haven't been writing here or elsewhere in a long time, haven't been doing so with the same zeal even when I have. I have been going through some changes, am still going through them, and have been unable to write about them because they aren't so much consciously set changes as things that events, time, and perhaps the stars are setting for me, and I am slowly trying to resituate myself in a way that enables happiness and a sense of meaning.

[Redacted]

I am reading Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask right now and it is helping to see some things, to see situations I find myself in and to wonder what ideal situations would be, and also, since ideal situations so rarely occur, how I could find space for happiness in situations that are attainable. The book details the early stages of recognizing homosexuality so well. The main character's experiences and the contours of his frustrated desires are something that I recognize so well. It is always a pleasure to come across experiences that you had forgotten about, the pleasure of watching that tough boy in your gym class for instance, and to come across them written about so intelligently and well! The book, also, is making me excited about reading, and, what I believe its corrolary is when you are really excited about a text, writing.