There has been an absence from the world of diarying for the past month or so not by a choice and not by what usually happens - the indifference of a drunk and often rudderless late twenty something - but rather by the death of my last laptop. A new one has been purchased and today Time Warner has come to my place of residence and installed high-speed Internet, now a thing I need to pay for each month, my neighbors with unlocked networks apparently deciding to lock theirs in that time I was sans computer, sans some device to write on this world wide web the slights and joys I have had over these past few weeks, and they have been numerous, though perhaps not abnormally so, that they are always numerous in any given span of weeks, that that is what life is, and we are continually surprised by the myriad ways in which joy and sadness can present themselves, all the wildly varying recipes, recipes calling for totally different ingredients, totally different methods of baking, and yet still producing a pie that tastes the same.

And so with this Internet now being streamed into my house, I am writing to say I am still here, that I am going to get back into this habit, that perhaps it will not start in depth tonight as I have to wake up in five hours to work on Thanksgiving morning before racing up to Penn Station and catching an NJ Transit train out to my mother's house where I will try to be thankful and probably in fact will be. And so there is this, the world of diaries which I am happy to have Internet for. And there is also online porn. I have jerked off far too many times today, so excited to again be able to watch dirty videos online and to be able to do so on this fancy new computer and with a high speed connection. Sadly, XTube was down, but YouPorn, itsallgay, and various other dirty video sites were up and running, and I ran along with them, unable to sate my appetite for this stuff. And there are two other things that this www has provided to me and really this is why I had originally logged on, just to gush about these two products, enabled by two things about the Internet I am so excited about.

So, first of all, there is YouTube. Today, I heard Wilco's "I'll Fight," and because there is this thing called YouTube, I have been playing it over and over again for the past several hours, unable to get enough of this song, thinking hard about life while listening to it, and the song somehow giving life the narrative I want it to have right now, its sense of determination and its clear statements, no modifying adjectives to diminish their assertive nature. I am listening to it now as I write this and it is informing and probably distorting everything I had wanted to say.

Second of all is that because I now have a decent Internet connection and a decent computer, I can now stream this vast library of old Netflix movies. I just watched Paul Morrissey's Flesh and, holy shit, what a beautiful film. Joe Dallesandro is captured so lovingly as this beautiful ideal, this beautiful hustler, cocky, aware of what he has, horny. I don't know how I had yet to see this movie, but I am so glad that I finally did. Some great scenes between hustlers and johns made me think a lot about sex work. Some lovely shots and quick cuts made me think of life, of boys, of desiring a particular body so much and what both the cause and the effects of a decision to worship a body are.

And there is YouTube, a jukebox that was heaven sent, playing any song you want to hear at any time, and here is Wilco's "I'll Fight":

haunted houses

A weekend for me started on Thursday night, the idea of a weekend did, the idea of some contrast to what had seemed like a boring week wherein all I really did was work. The weekend would be committed to the idea of reckless fun, of overconsumption of substances, and of having casual sex. That was the idea. We are still in the midst of this weekend, halfway through.

That first night of this idea I went to Eastern Bloc where I consumed numerous whiskey cocktails, where I smoked a spliff outside, and where I expounded on my ideas about place and cycles and loneliness and all sorts of nonsense to a patient Adrian. When I went outside to smoke this weed, I soon found myself too overwhelmed with emotions, with an inability to be able to translate these things to other people, found myself anxious about going back into a bar and having to be social and so I went on a walk, circled the block, west on 6th Street, north on A, east on 7th, and during this walk, this time to collect myself before heading back into conversation and a bar, a place where there are expectations of being able to hold a conversation and where it is generally not okay to just be a stoned awkward person in a corner - during this time I began to think a lot about Halloween, this day that it currently is, but at which time was still approaching and I felt tremendous grief in the presence of ghosts. I began to think about the past year, about where I was last Halloween and about the things that have died since that time. I thought about Niki and about Gabriel, whose birthday it is on this day, and about Diego. It was a year ago that Niki kicked me out of our home on Suydam Street and which put into motion my year of feeling homeless and lonely, really just the beginning of what would be many losses. I would soon stop talking to Diego, and then a few months later, stop talking to Gabriel. These were the ghosts that were haunting me on this walk, thinking through all these things, these changes that have occurred in the last year and I thought about that terrible gay boardinghouse that I lived in on 7th Street between B and C.

I was approaching the place. It was past the circumference of the circle I had intended to make and the idea of continuing east on 7th past Avenue B really frightened me. I knew that I should confront the place, view this place, see if for what it is, what it may have been, and to show myself that I didn’t live there anymore, to know that I had moved on, grown, become better. And I hesitated on the corner of 7 and B for a long time, not sure if I wanted to continue, not sure if I could handle seeing the house. I was stoned, okay, and so the house was taking on a perhaps outsized significance in my thoughts about grief and life, mine, and of Halloween. A haunted house.

I finally crossed the street and made my way to in front of the house, looked up to the fourth floor window that used to be my bedroom, tiny thing, wondered about who was now residing there and was so happy it was not me. There was a great deal of grief about my life at that time and the things that led to me being there. I felt better though, seeing it, staring it down, and being able to walk away. I rejoined the circle I was making and looped around back into Eastern Bloc, where I told these thoughts to the bewildered Adrian, who really only seemed to be interested in making out with me and not my depressing stories about lost friends and gay boardinghouses. Matt, at some point, cut me off from drinking more. I left. I had to stay committed to the project, enact the idea.

I went to the Hose where I could order more drinks and flirt with unknown boys, boys without history, without names. Street Hero performed and I danced like a crazy person – the idea of the weekend enacted, lost in dance. After their show, these two boys touched me, told me they liked my moves, asked my name. I told them my name, asked them theirs. I was outside smoking a cigarette with one of them, the one I was least attracted to. He told me they were a couple, a threesome was discussed, whose apartment we should go to was discussed. He mentioned something about how there’s no such thing as new music, how it all sounds like earlier stuff. I didn’t like this statement, its jadedness, its failure to approach things freshly. I was also belligerently drunk and easily annoyed. I started to kiss him. We talked more. I kissed him again because I was done with talking and wanted to get this threesome on the road. He said no when I kissed him this next time, said it had to come from something we were both feeling. I was wasted, said okay, and made motions to leave this conversation, to seek out other people. I imagine now that my moves were not suave as drunk as I was, as cigarette and pizza and whiskey smelling as my breath must have been. He asked if I wanted to exchange numbers so we could all hang out, coded talk I believe for having a threesome, but I was annoyed about his no, about his comments about music, and about how really I would just rather have sex with his boyfriend, and I said No, I don’t. I left and talked to other smokers, these people that hang outside of bars. His boyfriend came out and asked him what happened and they left. I got a BLT at the corner deli, a candy bar of some kind, and got into a cab home.

Yesterday, the weekend continued, this idea refusing to die. I went over to Diego’s in the daytime and he made my costume for me, this beautiful harlequin outfit that I cannot wait to put on shortly. We had sex afterwards in his bed, collapsing afterwards on top of each other, semen smearing between our bellies, a pleasant mess. I went home, napped off some of the hangover I was still feeling from my attempt at a weekend the night before. I woke up and was ready to continue the narrative, met up with Bob and went to some gay bowling party with an open bar and free bowling and too much dry ice. The open bar ended and we moved on to another one, cattle grazing, moving from field to field once one is exhausted. We went to the Hose and I am really starting to get sick of that bar, of every party being there, of the feeling that there is this one gay bar for some reason in this large city we live in. But there was free booze and I drank some it before that was over and I realized that the party really sucked. The fog machine could not hide this fact.

I left and went to Eastern Bloc, the same sites revisited again and again, pagan rituals performed on these altars, Halloween practices. There I started talking to this sexy gentleman, Jed, who had felt up my spandex-clad legs, had had flirty conversation with him, sexually charged from the get-go with his feeling of my legs. He said he was going to go pee on the street. I told him he should pee on my face instead. He went out on the street to pee.

There was this other person there, nameless last night, despite his name somewhere in my phone, who I have made out with at bars before, who looks like Diego, and who I made out with last night. He kept biting my lip though, this vampire, biting it really hard in a way that was not at all sexy, that would continually kill whatever feelings of sexiness I was feeling. I screamed each time he did so, afraid he was going to bite off my lip, and he would whether I liked that. I would tell him no, that I did not like that, and minutes later again it would occur, this terrible kissing habit of his. At some point, I had enough, and slipped out from under him into the crowd. I found Jed. He commented on my smeared makeup, joked that everyone wanted to make out with me. I was that slut. At that moment, on cue, some intoxicated lady came up to kiss me. Proof of his statement.

He, this Jed fellow, asked me where I lived. I told him and he curled his face at how far Bushwick sounded. I asked him where he lived. He lives in the West Village. He said he likes to take boys home there and fuck them. I was turned on by this, ready to leave with him. He told me though that he doesn’t take home boys with makeup on and that I needed to wipe my face, that it was all smeared. I told him no, turned off by the pushiness of the demand, that probably I would have washed the zebra stripes off my face at his apartment, but to tell me to do so here, at this bar, as a condition of going home with him, was something my belligerent self was not going to tolerate. He tried to hand me cocktail napkins to wipe it off. I turned away.

I had to leave, had to escape the vampire kisser and also the presence of this makeup hater, this person trying to wipe me clean, erase something about me. I fled, got some pizza and got into a cab, wanted to be home quickly, to some idea of home, running from one projected idea to the next.

There were really ambitious goals for this weekend. They involved writing in my diary these things I have been mentally composing on subways about town. I am going through some things I was excited about writing. Additionally, I was going to move old entries from two online diaries to one new one, to a domain I purchased. I was going to work on the HTML code for this site, making it quite pretty. My computer, old Dell laptop, has come under assault though by pop up ads and pop up virus scans every two seconds. It is quite difficult to get ahead of this problem, to even identify it to remove it. So now I have to put these projects on hold for a bit, writing this from my phone. I need to buy a new computer, which I will do once I pay my rent and raise some funds through the generosity of older gentlemen looking for things they think I may be able to offer. Going to see Gena Rowlands introduce a screening of A Woman Under the Influence at MoMA, listening to CCR, waiting on Thai food, gray weather.

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.