Teddy Wilson - "Rose Room"

I am listening to early jazz, am quite stoned, and am thinking of Woody Allen, feeling a bit that this, me in this city, his, and listening to these jazz standards with blaring brass is some scene from a seventies work of his, this the soundtrack. I think to movies a lot, framing particular moments of my life as scenes from movies, that the movies I love shaped so much of my perceptions about what friendship and love and joy could be. A great deal of how I live my life, or how I would like to, I am increasingly coming to realize has been informed by movies, that I want that same intensity, that same feeling depicted on screen, that longing for some achingly great connection with some other person, thinking of Annie Hall and of Manhattan especially. And maybe, maybe, to try to push my life closer to that cinematic ideal of life, I add these touches to it, will play this music to achieve the effect, to follow the same staging techniques.

Perhaps pretty clear evidence of this is that I watched Away We Go this evening, felt fairly sentimental about life afterwards, and then punched in Sufjan Stevens into Pandora, and soon had my house filled with the same indie folk that had earlier served as the soundtrack to this film which had me thinking about love and family, that to continue these thoughts, the feelings, I needed the same soundtrack.

Where I am going with this, I have totally forgotten, don’t think I ever actually knew. I really had just meant to start this off, this act of diarying that I have fallen out of practice with and which I intend to get back in the habit of doing near daily, that what I had meant to say, what I had intended, was to provide some setting to this current entry. I was going to have myself make some mention of the fact that I was listening to this jazz, perhaps to even discuss how just moments before I had concluded what had been an epic ballet staged solely for the benefit of myself to many of these numbers, how the moves that this dancer performed, oh man, you should have seen.

And there, again, I go, off and running after some tangent which I don’t even know what I would do with were I to catch it.

I spent today doing laundry and editing my co-worker’s story. As payment for this, he offered me a ticket to go see Oleanna last night. The production wasn’t that good, Julia Stiles and Bill Pullman, both being a bit bad and neither one of them engaging the other. Aside from that, the play is pretty obnoxious in its disdain for some vague notion of feminism. The play makes Carol seem wicked, seem awful, and since she is made to represent “the group” whose goals she refers to – not a particular organization mind you, but a broad “the group,” leaving you to project on to that all manner of devious feminist groups - since she is made to represent “the group,” this group, these ideals, must also be wicked, awful, ridiculous, that things have gone too far for the women’s movement if this honorable professor trying to help a student loses his job because of it, is even accused of rape, that things have approached the ridiculous. That message is one that for reasons I might hope you would understand rankles me a bit, makes me slightly uncomfortable.

I think that After Miss Julie also contained some pretty blatant disdain for “uppity” women in its text. Miss Julie, the terror of the play, is a bit of a looney toon, playing sexual power games with a couple in the employ of her house. And then when we get her back story, we learn that her mother was liberated and slept around, and clearly this is the source of Miss Julie’s emotional unstableness, her inappropriateness, that she her and mom were too loose, did not conform to how a lady should act. They are playing three blocks away from each other, two Broadway stages showing these works about the wicked ways of free women, and I wonder what it is about this particular moment. But I guess it’s a story we like to tell a lot, like to hear a lot. I am starting to get bored of it though.

Today, I really missed Washington Mutual. Chase, my new home now through the mechanisms of mergers and acquisitions, does not have overdraft usage. At WaMu, I could overdraw my account my bank account by up to $900. This was a thing that I did continually and really saved my life more than a few times throughout these past years in New York. Surely not a good thing to do since you still incur overdraft fees and yes I should manage my money better than I do, but I don’t and that’s not the point here - the point is that Chase no longer does this, so for instance right now when I have three dollars on my person and only three in my bank account, I cannot do what I would normally do, which I did as recently as a couple weeks ago, cannot still take out a bunch of cash from the ATM to make me able to continue to live recklessly until my next paycheck arrives. And I get paid on Friday and surely it is not the end of the world to live within my means for two days, but it was a major blow today to go to the ATM machine and discover that this was no longer allowed. I called Chase to inquire about this and was told straight up by the guy on the phone, a Chase employee now, that Chase does not have that and that WaMu had more benefits and that he misses WaMu too. It was a nice moment of reality with a person in a call center, something so rare to encounter when talking with customer service people on the phone.

I have had more than a few such nice encounters today, all with strangers, some really nice brief exchanges with people on the street. People are feeling it today. I certainly am. I’ve got a very well-selected soundtrack.

P-Funk playing on the radio, a sunny fall day

I woke up this morning and looked at the text messages I sent out last night, kind of fearing that they were too much, and fears proved correct, proved prescient. I don't know what happened. I went to go have a couple of drinks at Eastern Bloc after getting off work and I consumed them quite quickly, leaving shortly thereafter to go home. I am now Facebook boyfriends with Matt. I sent a text to a co-worker I had been flirting with all night at work and who I was supposed to have drinks with but who had to stay at work later, flirting back and forth via text, eventually me suggesting he come over to my house. I sent out another invite to some person I have been flirting with on Grindr forever, suggesting he come over and get stoned with me. And all of those are a bit much, but the real kicker is the text I sent to Diego. It's long and self-pitying and in which I declare my love for him, lament its lack of return, and say that I am going to seek out new loves.

Things have been working themselves up to this text for a while. We have been hanging out often, sleeping together often, being quite affectionate, and I have become attached or think I have, and regardless there has been me making more and more pronounced the extent to which I like him and there has been him stepping away emotionally from me, trying to make distance from these comments that try to step closer. I just finished reading this book, A Vindication of Love, essentially a defense of crazy, impassioned love in an age that the author, Cristina Nehring, believes is too focused on concepts of "healthy" relationships, of neutered affections, of equal and reciprocal feelings. She argues, using the canon of Western literature as her examples, that for most of time love has been something that has made people crazy, that it will leave you scars, perhaps kill you, and that all of that if fine, great even, that that is what makes a life a life. And the book is all right, flawed in many ways, but still that is the thing I had been reading and surely that had some effect on me, caused me to become a bit more crazy about this boy I dated a while ago and who now at this point in time I am supposed to be friends with.

The intensity of my affection and regard for this person move it into some realm other than friendship. We saw Brighton Beach Memoirs on Monday night and it was sentimental Americana, but I loved it regardless, nearly cried a few times thinking of my own family and of my own relationships with people. Watching Laurie Metcalfe act on stage was a great pleasure. A greater pleasure though was watching it next to this boy, his leg pressed against mine and him continually falling asleep throughout the first act. After the play, we went to Metropolitan and had some drinks and we talked about things, about emotional distance, about how I am in love with him, and we also didn't talk. It was awkward and I was sad and unable to express things and hurt that things weren't what I wanted them to be, that I wasn't sure if they would be. The thing I have with him is great and yet it also falls short of something I want. I find myself even here unable to properly say things, there are pauses in between each of these sentences, and I am sure the thing reads terribly - that I don't know how to go about saying it, perhaps don't want to.

The implication of what I have been told though comes down to this: he is still hung-up on his ex-boyfriend, cannot be the person I am looking for, that I should probably be trying to find these things in someone else, and yet I don't want to, don't see these qualities in other people. So, a problem. But we'll see. I guess I should step back, read books not about passionate love, and start to seek out new faces, new eyes to flirt with. The weather is amazing. Fall’s onset has really invigorated me in just about every sense and I feel well poised for change, for things I want to happen, things I don’t want to, and things I am going to make happen, things I want to do with myself, goals, and dreams.

brother, my lover

Last night I felt like I was in a night I had lived in some years ago, that there was some incongruity, that perhaps I was trying to make it like that, that perhaps I was too old to be wasted at some East Village gay bar, quite high and drunk, having gone there by myself after a friend's performance in the Lower East Side, and having run into this boy that I have had a crush on for a while and who I have only ever briefly talked to before, to suddenly be outside sharing a cigarette with him and the two of us exchanging a look signaling, asking, whether the other person wanted it as well. I started to kiss him against the hood of a parked car on East 6th Street and we didn't stop for some time, until he had to pee so bad that he had to go back inside. I went back inside as well to pee, the moment seemingly passing. He said he had to go, had to wake up early, and we started to make out again, inside the bar now. There was some self-awareness of what a drunk slut I must have appeared to be, but that self-awareness was slight and my attraction to this boy was greater, far greater, than any concerns I may have had about social propriety. He did go home and shortly after he left, I did as well, only wanting that boy, the other ones in the bar holding little appeal, my night indeed over. I got some pizza on my way to the train and listened to the music coming through my headphones, feeling pretty ecstatic about that makeout encounter I had just had with such a cute boy, wondering if it was at all likely that it would repeat itself, hoping it would, but thinking it may have just been that thing there.

This morning, after waking up, I got a text from the John on 96th Street I used to see often but who I haven't seen in probably close to a year. I am convinced this meant something, but I am not sure what. The reason I have this conviction is because yesterday I inserted this man, 96th Street guy, into a story I am working on for this reading on Wednesday. It is incredibly weird to me that I would write this guy who hasn't been in my life in a year or so into a story and then the very next day I would hear from him. I don't know what this says about writing, coincidence, human beings, or life, but it did give me a great deal of faith that I need to continue writing.

I was asked to participate in this reading by Robert and I am very grateful to him for that, that it has really inspired to come home and work on writing pretty much everyday after work. I am going to be reading with some really good performance artists and so I do feel a bit weird and slightly insecure about my presence on the bill since I haven't read or performed before and all these folks have. And so since agreeing to read, I have had incentive to write, reason to, and for that I am really happy. If you are in New York and want to come, below is the flier:

Sissyboy Washes Up

Last night, after a lovely day at the beach, what I assume to perhaps be my last hurrah of the summer, the last warm day on the upcoming calendar that I had off, the last day perhaps where I could lie in the sun and splash around in the water all day, after this lovely day, I went to Dixon Place to see "Sissyboy Washes Up," a theater piece by Sissyboy, a Portland-based queer performance group clearly heavily indebted to the Cockettes.

I had heard nothing but good things about this group and was really prepared to enjoy this performance, but I have not disliked a piece of theater in so long. Five minutes into the thing, once the Pixie Harlots had finished their piece, I was ready to go, did not like what I saw at all, but stayed put because I was with friends there, stayed put also because I thought that the work would have more to say, would somehow piece itself together as the show went on, that maybe the amateurishness of the beginning would be just that, a stage piece, an opening with which the rest of the performance would dissect, would somehow show as a play within a play. Sadly, I wasn't going to get anything so meta from this group, and yet the show's conceit had so much potential.

The premise of the show is Sissyboy leaving Portland, Oregon to become A-list performance artists in New York with a Justin Bond caricature standing in for A-list NYC performance artists. The Justin Bond imitator was pathetically lacking and I wouldn't have known that's who they were trying to send up if they didn't constantly refer to the character to as Justin Gold-Bond. I was a bit confused why Bond had been chosen by this group as their target, but even more so was sad that the imitation was so lacking, that Bond has very distinctive attributes that the person failed to get. He wasn't even close to the throaty, dramatic singing that seems pretty easy to imitate.

And so that was the plot, a good idea with lots of meat that they completely failed to run with. There is so much to be said about the provincialness and insularity of the New York art world, about how for whatever reasons the New York art world is privileged in its recognition in a way that areas in the rest of the country are not, about how little notice is given to art movements that do not take place in this city. There is so much to be said about this and yet instead the audience got people in drag running around and screaming and emema jokes and a performance that seemed slapdash past the point of intention, to the point where it seemed amateur, unintentional. There were more than a few points at which I thought maybe there is something better about the New York art world, that stuff like this doesn't fly here, that we are used to better, that maybe this group is big in Portland because that city is lacking, that this group has epically failed in their ambition to be A-list New York performance artists and needs to head back on their cardboard cutout boat to the West Coast.

Their references in the show to Divine and Justin Bond didn't help their cause, just made everyone more aware of would good transgressive art is, showed what the difference was between that and a gay club act. The program made big claims for the show about breaking down gender barriers, about queerness, about some other things, claims far too big. They have big dreams and seemingly lofty goals for their work and yet realized the work falls so far short of those.

The two most touching moments to my time in this theater were when Q Lazzarus's "Goodbye Horses" was played, a song I had never heard but fell so hard for, a thing of beauty and restraint and sadness, things I wanted from my evening, things I'll always be glad to take from a work of art. Second moment was leaving the urinal and seeing this boy I had not seen in a year or so whom I had a long flirtation on Manhunt with, with him and his boyfriend, often talking about having a threesome with them. It never happened. I am still filled with desire toward this boy and to see him and to exchange smiles with him and to be filled with nervousness and horniness and memories of the past and hopes for future memories filled me with a spinning, dizzy feeling, overwhelmed with this life.

I left that place, walked up to the new Mr. Black's, drank a tall boy of Coors Light along the way. It was a full moon, there were lots of people out, and I was feeling really present in a way I had not in a while. I could also say here that the new Mr. Black's is terrible, is in the old Room Service space, a small bar that was designed for bottle service. The dancefloor is a small thing compared to its size in previous incarnations of this club, which might be okay if the music wasn't so terrible, bad remixes of tired songs. The door people there are also insanely intimidating and intense. Despite wearing insanely tight jeans in which everything could be seen, I was still patted down and frisked by some brutish man. I am not sure why they have such intense door staff working at a gay dance club but it really turned me off from the venue even before I had made it all the way in. So I didn't stay too long and left and walked back down to the L with a friend and listened to him tell him about his intense sex life, the night still there, and so too those feelings of being present, of being alive.

Every day I come home and set to work killing the flies in my apartment. Every day I kill every last one of them, the task of chasing them down, slowly stalking them, and banging them with a rolled up magazine giving me far too much pleasure - some demonstrable sense of completion, a task I set to myself done, a goal completed - my stated goals of writing however don't ask about. And every day, thinking I have successfully killed off these flies that swarm around my house, that there should be no more left to spawn more, I still find a few flying around the next day when I get home from work. I am convinced that shortly my efforts will be successful and that I will come home to a house free of flies.

I am eating lots of chickpeas and using olive oil to cook just about everything I eat. I just finished reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and am trying to alter my diet and food buying habits. I have been eating more plants, buying more of them, and trying to buy minimally processed foods. After reading some of his other work and that of many other food crusaders, the book wasn't revelatory, the argument having been made before in other venues, other articles and books, about the negative effects of industrialized food, and yet the book was still affecting, reminded me of things and explained others in interesting ways, laying out a cogent argument against the culture of nutritionism and showing how the ideology underlying it allows food processors to continually market new products containing some hyped nutrient.

Fall arrived on Thursday. I called in sick to work on Wednesday and went to the beach, the weather forecast scaring me that it may have been the last warm day of summer, certainly the last warm day of August. And perhaps it was, the air quite chilly now at night, the days having some scent of fall, an autumn breeze seeping in, feelings of nostalgia and loneliness and lovesickness all colliding in a way that they tend to with the onset of fall for me. I want to put on the Belle and Sebastian and wear long sleeve collared shirts that I can shelter my neck in from the wind bringing about these melancholy feelings. This week I have been consuming things: alcohol, lots of cigarettes, Britney Spears at MSG, Gloria Trevi, Paulina Rubio, Juanes, and Enrique Iglesias also at MSG, The September Issue, the already mentioned Pollan book, Didion's After Henry, and countless (mostly pointless) magazine articles. I am looking for distractions. I live by myself and sometimes find I don't know what to do with myself. Increasingly, I find myself longing for some sort of boyfriend figure, someone to hang out with and sleep next to often. I am killing flies.

It was while I was on the LIRR this afternoon headed to a town I had never been to before to wrestle a stranger, a man who contacted me and wanted to pay me money to wrestle him and pin him and scissor him and taunt him, that I noticed my iPhone no longer worked. This was and was not great timing. This was not great timing because my bank account is running a bit low after blowing through money in P-Town and after just purchasing tickets to see Gloria Trevi and a bunch of other Latin acts on Friday. This was not great timing because I really did not want to have to pay my overdue phone bill, quite large at this point, so I could get a stupid upgrade, and in addition to those costs there still being the cost of purchasing a new iPhone, of having to buy the more expensive 3G data plan, and on and on, a litany of costs I was beginning to add up as I futilely tried to get the touch screen to respond to my touch, it refusing, it no longer turned on by me, these the delayed effects of me cracking the screen a couple months ago. This was not great timing because I had no clue how I was going to contact this man once I got off the train since my phone did not work, since I couldn't even slide the screen to answer an incoming call, and since this person's info was stored in my phone. The only way in which this could have been considered good timing was that assuming I was somehow able to still meet up with this guy, I would have all this cash to pay my phone bill and to purchase a new phone, the thrill of the money no longer so thrilling, no longer this supplemental income to spend willy-nilly, now it was to be used for specific purchases, phone bills and such, and not say a weekend trip to Key West.

I got off the train, worried that I would be unable to find this person without being able to call him, that my trip out there had been in vain, and that I would not have enough money in my bank account tomorrow to purchase a new phone, would be incommunicado for a while, would be unable to call a boy I like say, the real consequence I was thinking of with regard to not having a phone. I walked past the line of cars waiting outside the train station hoping that this person would be waiting there, would recognize me, and would call out to me. Check, check, check. Things worked out as they seemingly do often and the guy waved at me. I hopped into his car and we were off to his suburban house.

He put on ESPN and talked to me about the Yankees.

We wrestled on his bed, a picture of a teenage boy across the room taped to his dresser mirror, looking like the photograph of a son, me imagining this as someone's dad. I was kicking this man's ass and taking some pleasure in being able to outwrestle this man about twice my size, to have him pinned so easily again and again. When we tired out we would lay on our backs, the tv talking in the background, and him asking me questions about my life, and me with just a few fibs here and there, answered him honestly, talked about my life in more articulate and sincere ways than I am able to talk about it with people I actually know. I have this ability to charm certain people, generally older men, and this man was charmed my verbal nonsense I could tell. Most of the two hours I spent with him was the two of us on our backs talking about life and me trying to work out some theory of seasonal weather being necessary for one's mental health, holding up all the crazies that come out of Florida as an example.

I took the train back home, falling asleep along the way, bored and annoyed with the talk of the people ahead of me, and waking up in Penn Station. I walked across the street and bought a travel alarm clock at Duane Reade, my phone dead to my fingers and that having served as my alarm.

There is so much going on and I am feeling more and more the desire to get it down but my time is limited that I have to do so. Work is taking up too much of my time but paying me well so that I can live in an apartment by myself and make silly purchases and eat out and go on weekend adventures. I really do want to write and really, really am determined to figure out a way to balance the two, to not lose and be past a certain point, one past this already late one, without commencing on this thing that I believe I can do very well and can bring something special to. I am inspired by the drive of some of the younger people I have met lately that are just doing doing doing it. A man on Friday night at 4 am at the Bedford stop chastised me a lot, read me in a really rude way. The conversation started off with him telling me I was sexy and I had my headphones in and wanted to keep them in, me not into him, not into anyone save for the idea of sleep and the voice of Lou Reed coming through my headphones. The man thought himself something deep and started to talk about what we do with our lives, how much we underutilize them, how I am dressed in a pretty and color-coordinated outfit and how that is what concerns me, how that is hardly enough, the wearing of cute, monochromatic outfits. All of this gleaned from me trying to ignore him and saying little. His accusations weren't entirely off and after a good ten minutes of his drunken prophecies I put in my headphones again and told him I had had enough, drew a line, declaring my own mental space, and defended myself against his accusations that I was rude to put in my headphones while he was talking to me, had to explain how it was rude of him to talk to me while I had my headphones in, that just because my interests did not align with his need for social interaction that that did not make me rude. It was an insane interaction, one that I want to sketch out more. I have been thinking about it a lot since its occurrence, thinking, like I too often do without actually doing it, how I need to change my life, to do this and that and less of that and that.

the absence of a couch, the presence of other things

I get it now, get why so many people make the trip up to Provincetown, why people like the place so much. This past weekend I went with Diego to Boston, spent a day and a half there, quickly seeing some old friends, some art, and the physical sites where this or that happened, seeing the graves of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere's house, pretty parks, and the amazing bookstores of Cambridge. From there, we took the ferry to Provincetown and spent a couple of nights there at this slutty gay guesthouse, The Ranch, sharing a twin bed and a fan. I got giddy as soon as the boat approached the dock, the masts of sailboats in the harbor foregrounding the onset of dusk over this cute little town, the site gorgeous, new, and something that stirred something in me.

Every aspect of this town was beautiful and charming, the place continually feeling like some movie set, some place too cute to be real. There is a lovely beach that one has to hike to through a long stretch of sand dunes and salt flats, clam shells, little crabs, and sea birds present. There are lots of fun bars to go to. There are happy hours with dollar oysters. There were amazingly friendly people. There is the most outrageous public sex site I have ever seen, probably some hundred or so men underneath a dock on the beach after the bars close, all jerking off together. We extended our ferry departure time, neither of us wanting to leave yet, wanting to milk as much from the town as possible before leaving back for home. After already checking out of our room, we wanted to have sex with some boy, Eric, but had no place to. We asked, quite drunkenly and high on sunshine and the fun spirit of the place, if we could use someone's room, told them they could watch. That was absurd and turned into a group sex session hurried by the limits of time, by the fact that the last ferry was leaving in half an hour and we had a brief amount of time to get off together before dashing to the ferry, passing out on it, and then dashing to the bus once back in Boston, getting home around three am yesterday.

I got about two hours of sleep before rushing off to a 16 hour workday yesterday, which was also amazing despite me being quite tired, despite being at work so long, and that is because the second half of that day was spent serving food at a fancy party. At this party I saw two of my artistic idols, Tar*ntino and Rushd*e. It was pretty exhilarating to be in such close physical proximity to these people, to brush past all these big names as I pushed through the packed crowd carrying around trays of fancy finger foods. And last night again, I got two hours of sleep before again having to be at work and that was okay, it was all okay, the not sleeping for days, because those days were filled with sights and beautiful beaches and a boy who I love a great deal in a blurry way and there is work again in not too many hours and then there isn't for a few days and I still don't have a couch and don't know when I am getting one. The energy that I had when I first moved into this apartment has dissipated to this heat and to my desire to burn through money going here or there and being out and seeing that person, this person, or going to the beach and trying to read a book but really just starting at people and daydreaming and swimming. And summer only has a few more weeks left to it and the couch will probably have to wait.

August 1

Diego’s head popping out of the ocean, hair and face wet with sunlight, the day the warmest and brightest one in too long, this summer not yet entirely feeling like one in the way they normally do, the weather and its coolness and its oft cloudiness somehow affecting my perceptions of summer, that something seems a bit off, but today, this afternoon, in the Atlantic Ocean on the shores of New Jersey, a fairy ride away from this city I reside in, New York that is, today, oh, the day felt so right, so summer. Perhaps it felt like last summer, to be with this boy going off on some gay adventure together, to the nude beach in NJ, that that made it feel like summer, his company, like some memory of some summer not too far back. Maybe, but why assign reasons or try to trace things back to their source and feel guilty about the well you are drawing these sentiments from, that that water made you sick once before, that you should know better, and blah blah blah – why, why do that, when the feeling is so nice? And so I submitted to it, to what it was, enjoying it for what it is and what it is not, that this affectionate friendship we have is nice, that we are friends and neither bound by standard ideas about sex, and can have this thing, and sometimes there are hurt feelings, more so on my part, but lots of times there are not, lots of times this thing is just what I need at this moment in my life, that I need something.

The sight, to mention it again because it is something that struck me so much then and has again in recalled memory a few times since the image manifested itself: We were fooling around in the water, kissing, hugging, rubbing our penises against each other hidden somewhat by water, surrounded by gays, and after a wave would crash over us, there would be this smiling face of someone I care a lot about in my face, goofy looking, so cute, that some beauty not always as readily apparent was brought out by him being wet, that I am not sure why people look better when they are wet, something innocent about us revealed, that you see the little kid splashing in a pool, so fucking happy, some lovely life. The bright sunshine and the salt water in my eyes made the image often under-exposed, the horizon darker that it should appear and yet the light on his hair and face in droplets of water, of ocean, making it seem so beautiful. I told him he looked so cute when he was wet.

He said, “Great, so I look ugly when I’m dry? I only look cute when I’m wet?”

“Yep.Uh-huh.”

We drank vodka and lemonade drinks we made from our beach bags and laid in the sun and looked at all the various types of dicks, talked often about ones we desired.

I called in sick today to work. I needed it after the past few days, which I had had off but which were spent doing the process of moving from one apartment to another. The process by this point has become hardly emotional at all, it becoming so common this past year. But I feel settled and at home in a way I haven’t since Niki kicked me out of our Bushwick apartment. I don’t really talk about it too much, but when I think about life late at night and how it’s been going lately, I see that moment as a big one that set me off on some nomadic quest for the past year, feeling a bit unmoored and lonely, kicked out of a place I thought was home. I still have a lot of anger towards Niki about that and all the more so now that I have realized how much crazier that has made me, how awkward I have felt in the past couple places I lived, unsettled.

I am living by myself in a studio apartment off the Morgan stop. It feels so great and I feel so at ease, so at home, so excited about the prospect of making this a home, of having one that I feel tied to and whatever subconscious feelings of security and happiness that having one provides a person. I have painted the walls, built bookshelves, painted tables and chairs, and it is not yet there yet, but it’s well on its way. I jerked off into all these various paints I used, me feeling like it was some ritual to make this place home, to imbue it with something, these walls and this wood furniture. I believe that things are going to be really good here. I am going to buy groceries and cook as much as possible. I am going to buy a good radio that picks up the public radio stations at the bottom of the dial, specifically 91.5 and I am going to listen to the radio and sit at this cute little kitchen table that I painted yellow and type missives to the world, and I am going to get a sofa, but maybe the radio first, and I am going to be so much happier.

His name was Sonny and he was Dutch, from Amsterdam, here for a few months doing work. I found out this information, the only information I really know about him, on the couple block walk from the Bedford L stop to his apartment.

I worked for 15 hours yesterday, the last portion of that working at an event doing coat check with this other cute boy, who I flirted with, sometimes the two of us finding some reason to brush against each other while going back into the coat check area. We exchanged numbers and lots of goofy smiles. This was followed by me heading to some goodbye party for friends moving back to Europe at Brass Monkey, where I consumed some drinks quickly, needing the feeling provided by those drinks after a day of working, after hours spent working at a party watching people drink for hours. This time spent at this bar was time I was supposed to be spending with this really attractive Mexican boy, Ali, I met on Sunday and who I was supposed to hang out with when I got off work at ten. I missed my chance to hang out with him and instead went to eat with Brian and some other people. At this restaurant, I flirted with the waiter, exchanging numbers with him, and was told I could wait an hour at the bar for him to get off work and then to go out with him somewhere. I declined the offer, not wanting to sit at some straight restaurant bar for an hour.

I was still quite horny though after this day of flirtations, of thoughts of boys, and wondered as I got on to the train if I had made the right decision, was thinking about going back to this restaurant to wait for this boy to get off work, his name Dom. I sat on the train, put on my headphones, and rocked out to Little Boots, which I have been doing pretty much every time I have been drunk or high for the last two months, me in love with this pop music every time I am a bit tipsy and all I want to listen to.

At Union Square, this boy sat across from me on the train, and I thought that it was Ali, the boy I was supposed to hang out with earlier, even though he had told me he was already home in Astoria. I kept looking at him, trying to figure out if this was him or not, and if it was him why he was not saying hi to me. I soon realized that it was not him, just someone dressed like him and that resembled him physically. This knowledge that it was not the person I thought it was did not stop me from looking at him. He caught me a few times and did not seem annoyed by it; rather he seemed amused by it, into it. My staring became a bit more lustful and we would hold a stare for long stretches, an intense stare eventually broken up with a smile. This happened until the Bedford stop, where we both got off. I pulled out my headphones at this point and said hello, asked him what his name was. This is when I found it was Sonny. Outside the station, he asked me where I was going. I said home and pointed in that direction. He said something along the lines of, "No, you're not. You're coming home with me," and I followed him in the opposite direction. In his apartment, we undressed and had really hot sex, me pretty much in heat after such a day, such an intense subway flirtation somehow so quickly transformed into something more, into me in this person's bedroom naked, the two of us sucking each other's dicks, his ass sitting on top of my face.

After we came, I put on my underwear and shorts, ready to head home. I woke up sometime early this morning being spooned by someone and seeing an unfamiliar apartment. I wondered where the hell I was, thought to myself that I had went home last night afterwards, but realized I must have passed out in his bed while getting ready to go back home. I realized whose bed I was in, not some regret, but someone beautiful and sexy. My brief moment of discomfort and feeling of disorientation gave way to comfort in his arms, to where I was. I slept a bit more, we cuddled, got naked again, and had sex again this morning. His cat kept trying to hop into bed with us and I kept shooing it out.

I got dressed this morning successfully and I left his house, not exchanging numbers, but saying that I hoped I ran into him again, pretty certain that I would, and that if not, then knowing that it doesn't matter. Things are going to happen or they are not, and the exchange of numbers would have only made me think otherwise, that a certain something should happen. It was really beautiful and as he opened his door for me, we kissed goodbye, the polite kind of goodbye kiss, but knowing that this may have been it, that polite kiss turned into something else. He closed his door and we made out intensely against his wall for a few minutes. I said goodbye again, stumbled home against the crowd, the morning stream of people heading toward the subway, to their jobs, me heading in some other direction. Recently I find myself wondering what direction that is.

July Sixth

The age of 28 arrived a couple of weeks ago. It feels a lot like 27, though I was happier to receive this gift, feeling more and more comfortable with these increasing numbers, my shift into adult-age sounding numbers, less and less of a fear of no longer being part of these early and mid-twenties, of becoming old.

I am torn lately between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, thinking through the appeals of both and trying to decide between them – my life for the most part some Dionysian orgy, an extravagance of fun, release, and energy, but new options being both thought about and presented to me. This conflict is chiefly embodied in a boy with an oceanic name beginning with P. I met him several Sundays ago at the Metropolitan BBQ, which I plan on heading to shortly, no food in my house and being quite hungry. There was some connection that was more intense than a normal flirtation. I was really attracted to this boy and he apparently to me as well, and so when he jokingly or not said we were going to get married and have a dog called Horatio, I was quite seriously imagining that future, quite into the idea of it.

I went home with him that night, talking about my love of the Late Night line of Doritos along the way, stopping in bodegas hoping to find these rarely stocked Doritos to let him experience it as well as to satisfy my drunken fixation on them, my hunger for the things, perceived in that moment to be just the thing my stomach needed, the only thing that would satisfy it. On his bedroom wall were lots of pictures of Marilyn Monroe; I think these were the only things on his wall, photographs of Monroe in various stages of her career. This made me even more smitten. I overslept for work the next morning, not really caring, quite happy to have met this boy, the potential trouble worth it and more.

We have hung out a few times since, the conversations sometimes going off down the trail of relationships, of what an ideal one would be. His ideal one is monogamous and mine is not; we discussed the different philosophies informing our view of why this or that is better, the two sides a bit irreconcilable. I know that if things were to go any further with this boy, cute, adorable, and smart, then I would need to make some changes, to basically quit being such a slut. And so lately I have been thinking about the two sides presented here – this debauched carefree life that I have been living for the past few years, one which for me really does have philosophical groundings in the sexual nature of man, a belief that the body is something really magical and not wanting to see that hampered down by morality, possessiveness, or the fragile underpinnings of human egos. I feel like in some ways I would be compromising something I believe in to satisfy someone else’s belief system. But I am also thinking that maybe that is okay, that changes are okay, and that I do like this person quite a great deal and should maybe let it play out by normal rules and see how things go.

A few days ago, I did however sleep with Diego, and that threw into doubt many of these thoughts, that it was fun and a really nice experience, that it was the type of hungry sex, of instincts being gratified, that I find really fulfilling and enriching, something that gives me a great deal of happiness, and something that I would potentially be losing. There are many forms of happiness though, and so, saying what I say quite often in these confused and directionless days, I don’t know. I may meet up with this boy later tonight and we’ll see if that happens and if that is ever followed with anything. He loves Muriel’s Wedding, which him kind of perfect.

This past week, I have been working the graveyard shifts at my job and I really do not enjoy it at all, have been sleeping away the day, getting even less accomplished than the little I do on days with a somewhat normal sleep schedule.

It is Father’s Day and I have been thinking about my father some on this day, some music provoking the thoughts more than an awareness of what day it is. It was only after I followed a trail of thoughts that I realized what day it was. But there are things that I think I should get from his sister while I am still able to, bits of information and dates that I would like to have and that I don’t. There are thoughts about some fictional project tied to this desire to collect data, to get details rights.

After Gay Pride next weekend, things are really going to have to change. I am going to start being more frugal because I am going to be going out far less. I am letting life get past me, am working a great deal and partying probably an equally great deal, getting very little sleep and having zero time for reflection, the absence of diary entries here lately proof of that. There are so many things that I would like to get done but which I never do. There are things that need to be written and I am going to have to figure out how to work that into my schedule. I also am feeling a bit restless in my current job, do love the amount I get paid, but don’t really want to be doing this for the rest of my life, and so really need to think long and hard before more of these birthdays appear and I find myself saying similar things, need to think long and hard about what life I want to be leading and to make that a reality, to pursue things I want to, to make things, to perhaps find a job requiring a bit more of my brain.

And these diary entries are so often a forum for me to say this and this and this is wrong, to point out these flaws in myself, to show you my banged-up knee in the hopes that you will kiss it and make it better, but to be clear, to add a bit more flesh to this skeleton of what my life is lately, things are really good despite the normal doubts that come now and again about everything. The week leading up to my birthday, I got to eat amazingly decadent meals each day for free in this restaurant that is opening in the hotel tomorrow. I have friends that really entertain me and care about me and add a lot of joy to this thing, this time here on Earth. There is a boy who makes me kind of insanely giddy and he doesn’t have any of the baggage that everyone I have really liked over the past few years has had; it’s a healthy start for once with someone. I have been in the habit of reading more, of getting stoned, and listening to pretty music on my new headphones with clear sound, no longer the tinny effect of my busted ones I had been using for months. The difference and its effects on my well-being are striking.