I just got back tonight and will write about it soon. Here however are pics.

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.

John Updike

John Updike, though you are someone that sometimes riled me, saying somewhat annoying things, you have always said them well, sometimes incredibly so. Reading Rabbit, Run was a thrill and made me get why people said your name with weight, an astoundingly awesome work. Rabbit Redux, though quite good, started to verge into some weird big statements about race that came off as patronizing and ill-thought out from a person as white as yourself. But I will admit that despite that and despite some sometimes smarmy book reviews in The New Yorker lately, you are an incredible writer - were, I guess; death bringing about the past tense now - that made me envious and also hungry, made me realize what beautiful poetry could be done in prose and some things about rhythm. And so we have lost something today, and we lose stuff everyday, big and small and small pieces of big things, big pieces of small things, and yet this loss is one I am sad for, perhaps this loss and my ability to feel it as such provoking feelings of sadness for losses I have been unable and unwilling to grieve for as of yet.

We all are headed to that same place too, and hardly any of us with the talent Updike had, and so it is a sorry excuse that we all have, thinking we should be granted a stay.

I listened to Jesus and Mary Chain on my way to work. After work, I went to the gym and had sex in the steamroom with some hot man, long hair, me with this thing for long hair. I ran into Diego and his boyfriend afterward on my way to the subway, always the two of them together all the time every time I see one, and that brought me down somewhat. But then I put on Pavement and felt better, felt pretty awesome in fact, stopped at Zargoza after getting off the train, the place reminding me of Bushwick, of something a bit more real than the unreality that is Manhattan. I ate the burrito and then went to Eastern Bloc, had some drinks, and ended up taking Alan home with me for a brief fuck, the two of us setting a time limit beforehand, him having to write a paper and me telling him he couldn't stay long because of that, though really I wanted the bed to myself after, just wanted to get off and for him to go, wanted to be able to sit here and type these things, meaningless words provoked somehow by the news of the death of someone far more capable, thoughts about writing, about life, about friendships and loneliness, provoked by his death. And bon voyage sir!

the waste land

I sometimes say that I cannot wait for summer, imagine how will I sit in parks for hours in warm weather and relax outdoors, and then there are other moments, this evening around 10pm for instance, when I think how much I love this cold weather, how there is something really stimulating about such cold weather, and I will decide to take a long walk crosstown from Chelsea back to my apartment in the East Village. The weather makes me emotional and allows me to think about things a bit less distractedly than in warmer weather, the cold weather keeping most people off the street.

I am thinking about friendships still and about how I have been spending my time these past few years and who I have been spending it with, wondering what the future holds, whether I will be friends with these same people that I spend long walks thinking about, thinking whether they harm me or do me good.

Circuit City is going out of business, the one in Union Square where I once jerked off with a stranger in the bathroom. The crappy convenience store on 3rd and 14th has just closed and I fear it will be replaced with a neat, clean chain convenience store, another Rite Aid probably. The city changes constantly and I wonder how this economic downturn will affect that, whether stupid shit will go away or whether this will be its chance to make a bigger foothold.

I went to rehearsal this evening for a performance I am doing on Saturday. Rehearsal was quite fun. I met some new people, met a cute boy, a Micah, who I have a gigantic crush on, and who I fear has a boyfriend who I also met this evening, a Barrak. It is really lovely to meet new people in these days especially when I am feeling generally down and sour on the idea of human relations, that these sparks of newness make me forget all that, and make me realize that things can be nice and exciting.

A friend the other day, after I had detailed my troubles to him, told me that life is hard, that it's not easy, that am I for real, that friendships are like relationships and end, that I am young and have it easy, that I need to imagine what shit and what heartbreak 80 year olds have seen and gone through in their lives. Looking at old people lately I have really been taking his advice to heart and it somehow makes me feel so much better to look at them and know that they have probably also experienced so much heartache in their lives and yet are still going, still walking down the street, doing errands, buying groceries, whatever it is we all do with our feet, our hands, our time.

Anyways, that digression aside, rehearsal was really stimulating for numerous reasons, among them the company of strangers, some cute boys, having to perform, and hearing this poetry read in new ways. The performance is a theatrical reading of The Waste Land, followed by a reading of the months and days of the year, followed by a dance and me dancing with pom-poms, followed by an Elizabeth Bishop poem. I really like the director a lot and am inspired by his visions, but more importantly by his bringing them into being, by his staging this odd reading of poetry because he wants to. I think it will be a beautiful thing. It is this Saturday at 7 if you want to see it.

a new year

Dear Diary,

It's been a while since we have done this thing, you and I talking. It's a new year. It's 2009 and that really astounds me when I say the year sometimes and contemplate what that means, the passage of time and the quickness with which it occurs, my failure to really move at a pace equal (or even close to) that of the passing of time. My life is a mess and I am in transition. Towards what though, I am unsure of, and it is that question mark that concerns me.

The year started off quite terribly, Gabriel and I getting into a gigantic fight on New Year's Eve, me going home shortly after midnight, angry, depressed, and alone. We made up, having a nice discussion about our friendship, me telling him how he is my family and how important he is to me, the two of us agreeing to quit fucking things up, to put our grievances behind us, and to be nice, to be what friends are supposed to be.

I helped some of my friends throw a really amazing dance party at the Hose, Judy, which went off fantastically and which I had a great time at. Afterwards, we discussed the future of Judy and the frequency with which we wanted to have it, as well as ideas for things we would like to do with the party. This project filled my time well and was something that I was really excited about. Two days ago, I talked to Gabriel and he told me that he did not want me involved with Judy.

Our friendship has been fucked up for a long while, both of us being shitty to each other fairly often, but I was really excited about this agreement we had made to be nice, to be loving. This was not loving, was mean and unfriendly. I told him this, told him that this hurt my feelings a great deal. We talked for a long while about friendships, about ours, talking in circles, him having done something terrible and mean and something that will be on my mind when I think of him. And so there is that.

What is really troubling though is that this was my last really strong emotional connection to someone here in New York. A few months ago, Niki and I had a gigantic falling out, us not having talked since and probably never going to again, and that was, despite all our fighting, someone that knew me well, that I had some really strong bond to emotionally, something more than hanging out every so often and catching up on our lives. A month or so ago, Diego and I stopped talking altogether, it being too confusing and sad for me to do so. And now the last thread tying me to something, making me feel connected in a human way with someone, has been if not cut, nearly so.

I went to a play by myself this evening, The American Plan, really quite boring and stale, and thought about these things, me being there by myself allowing me to feel more lonely, to think about the issues more, about loneliness and friends and about the life I want to be living and about love, about wanting it.

It's a fine time for this change, there being no leaves on the tress, patches of ice on the ground, and highs of twenty degrees. And there is that, those things, and they do consume my thoughts from time to time, but not always. There are intense moments of happiness to be had also, these incredible swings between feeling defeated and feeling alive. My job is going well. I somehow got the schedule I wanted despite the hours of most people being cut. I have seen some good films lately, particularly noteworthy among them The Wrestler. I spent some time with David, though sadly most of it overshadowed by drama with Gabriel. There is still coffee to be had, bodegas selling the pleasure for a pittance, Dusty Springfield's amazing voice to comfort me, and conversations with strangers, new friends.

Judy

This Thursday at the Hose on B and 13. Party time. See you there.