"empowered by Whitman Blake Rimbaud Ma Rainey & Vivaldi"

Friday night, I worked the elevator at this event, had thought I would be out of there by midnight, already had set in my mind the idea that I was going to have an amazing night filled with dancing and friends and perhaps excessive alcohol consumption, knowing that (as is often not the case) I would not have to be at work Saturday morning at 8, that that time would not be hovering in my mind as some warning to go to bed at a decent hour and not get wasted and not sleep over at some random person's house, to not even attempt for that. And so it was more than with a bit of annoyance and disappointment that I received the news that the party I was working had been extended until 1 and that I would be leaving until around 2.

At 2, I was on the move, my hours of night, of fun while bars are still open and people still at them, drastically cut now. On 14th Street, the entire block was filled with Latino families, all clustered around the Our Lady of Guadalupe church. On the sides of the sidewalk, vendors sold flashing and glowing things, flowers, t-shirts, food items. The atmosphere was insanely festive for the early or late hour and I kept on looking at all the children, wondering if they had woken up early or if they had stayed up this late. I also wondered what the day was being celebrated, wondered a lot, thought about the Virgin of Guadalupe, of seeing that cloak in my time in Mexico City, thought about how it must be to celebrate the day she appeared to that Mexican peasant, whose name I could not remember. I did not seek out confirmation of this, did not pause to ask anyone what the celebration was in celebration of. I had limited time and walked as fast through this crowd as I could to the subway, to a train that would take me to Brooklyn, to Bushwick specifically, Jefferson stop, a bar called Tandem, some gay party, some friends there.

I started pounding back whiskeys, danced a bit, and then filling somewhat of this night, of what Fridays mean to people, I sat at a table with Diego and this guy visiting town, Michael. I wanted to sleep with the both of them and was trying to make this happen, was suggesting that once the bar closed they should come over to my house. This suggestion seemed to be well-recieved and I thought it was going to happen, Michael and I having flirted before, having made out before. I am not exactly sure what occurred to derail these plans. I know that at the end of the bar's night, I made out with Michael, that Diego did not appreciate that, and that Diego, speaking for the both of them, said they were not coming over. Some other friends living not so close wanted to sleep over. I told them that I was perhaps going to be having sex, plans to call the 19 year old already in my head now, him earlier in the night telling him to call him no matter how late it was. They were fine with that and so these three and I walked back to my house and Jacob was already waiting at my door by the time we got there.

We drank vodka and smoked weed and listened to Queen and then people that Last.fm said sounded like Julieta Venegas. We read some Allen Ginsburg. Gage was passed out on my couch, cup of coffee in his hand. The hour was getting later in the night or earlier in the day and I could already see hints of dawn through my curtain. I said it was bedtime, turned off the lights, and the awake people, four of us, climbed into my lofted bed, somehow all fitting into it. I started to make out with Jacob, our underwear came off, and soon we started to give each other head, G and P next to us jerking off, touching each other. The night was a haze of being insanely horny and fucking this boy on and off again all night, doing so, passing out for a bit, and doing it again. There are bits I remember, that I have been recalling when jerking off since then, I recall G sucking Jacob's dick while we were fucking, I recall the shape of hands jerking off barely seen penises in the darkness, and I recall a penis wet with its own semen.

Once I finally cleared my house of the still-tired looking people yesterday afternoon, I met up with Diego, Michael, and Nick around 1 and followed them to some bars where we had some drinks. My body wasn't ready for it yet, wasn't as awake as it thought it was, and I soon headed back home, to lie in my bed and nap, and where I jerked off again and again, occupying physically the site of the memories I was jerking off to. Once I awoke last night, going out again seemed silly, seemed a bit much, since I had done nothing all day really, that to wake up and immediately go out to some bar and dance like a crazy person seemed a bit false, that that dancing should be some release to a day, to things that occurred throughout it, not some morning salutation. And so I read and listened to music and watched Larry David be an asshole to various people. I woke up early today, am feeling quite ready for things though I can't identify what those things are, the clouds outside my window make the day seem less inviting, make today seem like a movies and blankets type of day. Sonny Rollins is coming out of my speakers. Coffee is within reach of my left hand.

you can't start a fire without a spark

We had come back to my house, taken a cab from the East Village. I had promised to roast him some garlic. We got stoned instead and sat in my bed. Diego was going on and on about how he feels weird about how he is beginning to love Lady Gaga, and it's a thing I have heard a few friends say lately, that they are beginning to like this person a lot. Specifically, he was talking about the song "Dancer in the Dark" and how he had listened to it over and over again at the gym. He explained his reading of the song. I told him to play it for me. He played it for me on his phone's speakers. We continued to smoke weed while listening to the song, we were already drunk, having come back from some bar, and the intersection of the substances with the lateness of the evening with the setting of two boys in bed together talking about music made it all quite lovely, made me love this song also, though I wasn't sure I entirely got what the song was trying to say. I asked him if the song held any reference points to Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark." He didn't know.

My phone's speakers now put to use, the Boss playing this song. The song is sentimental, is beautiful, is full of expectation and excitement toward a night ahead, toward what nights mean in a life that is otherwise sad, toward the act of living. I started to kiss Diego in a way that was filled with all of these sentiments, this song and this boy near me making me quite giddy. We continued to kiss and to fool around, touching each other's bodies, as the song switched to another Bruce song and another, me failing to reach for my phone, buried somewhere now in my bed, to turn it off, and I'm not sure I have ever used Bruce as a soundtrack to making out, but it really works quite well, colored the actions I was participating in a mournful and exuberant light.

The temperature has dropped, below freezing last night and this morning, the weather invigorating but more so daunting, me not wanting to venture too far past my doorstep, past the heated comfort of my apartment. Last night, I went to Eastern Bloc, flirted with some boys, wanted to flirt with others and instead just made eyes at them, hoping that that would somehow lead to conversation, to making out, to sex, to holding hands. It didn't. The bar was quite crowded but filled with lots of button-down shirts (which, don't get me wrong, I love if they are fitted and interesting and somehow conveying a sense of dress-up), lots of people that I was not so sure about. The Pixie Harlots were dancing there and I kept chatting with some of them, dancing with some of them, and I realized I could be at a bar where it wasn't just the performers who were interesting, but rather the attendees of the bar and that I should head over to Mattachine. With this intention, I left the bar. Not even half a block away, I was ready to throw in the towel and headed to a pizza place to think about what I really wanted to do while I ate a slice. What I really wanted to do was to be warm and so I headed into a cab again - the subway seeming too far in the cold, Mattachine seeming even further, and yet me still occasionally wondering how I burn through money so quickly - and headed back home. I texted this 19 year old I have been sleeping with off of some silly iPhone app to come over. I started watching people from "The Jersey Shore" talking about themselves on mtv.com because my interest in trashy television that that station is capable of manufacturing has apparently not waned even as I near the age of 30. I was stoned and too drunk and told him I would probably pass out soon, that he should maybe not come over. He said he would be over in 20 minutes. I stayed up and waited a bit, that time limit. This morning I see from texts that he had come back to our neighborhood but that I was asleep by then.

The year is 2009. In a few short weeks (just think of how short these past nine years have been), we will be in another decade. There are technologies that enable me to meet gay men based on their proximity in feet to where I am. I can chat with them and depending on our horniness and our levels of attraction to a random picture we have decided to choose to represent ourselves with on the site, can meet up. Sometimes our horniness will be at such a level that our thresholds for what we consider attractive fall quite a bit. I can talk about music with a boy in my bed and we can mention a specific song and he can hum it for me or just as easily he can pull the thing up on his phone and play it over its speakers. There is coffee that is still brewed in ways my grandmom would be familiar with and the feelings that boys give me seem somehow not dependent upon this particular year, this moment in time. It is quite cold outside and I dress myself in layers, in a scarf, in a hat, and in a jacket, just as my mother taught me to when leaving for school in the morning as a child.

First Snowfall

Some snow fell today, the first of this winter. Normally, this inspires in me some warmth, some awe, some appreciation for the workings of this world and the cyclical nature of seasons. Today, however, because the snow came scattered in between freezing rain and slushy droplets, it was missing some of its magic. My boots were soaked through, my jeans were quite wet, and my umbrella was falling more and more apart. I had wandered around the garment district with Erica this afternoon, looking for fabric, looking for something shiny to make into an outfit for my job's holiday party tomorrow.

Much of my life now seems to be consumed with this, of there being some party coming up that seems quite fun, maybe not even a party, maybe just an opening, a reading, and there being my desire to play dress up, to wear something fun, to assemble an outfit of thrift store finds, out of fabrics from Spandex World, out of constructions Diego has made me for. This, I am beginning to think, may be a bit of a problem, that dressing up is all well and fine, but when it begins to consume so much of your already limited time in this city, then something might be wrong. There are some priorities that be a bit out of whack. It is not infrequent that I wonder what feats I may have accomplished already with writing were I too put something close to the same amount of effort and time into that as I do into looking for clothes, scavenging thrift stores, and getting ready to go out places.

Last night, I went to a masquerade party on a boat for Brian and Schaffer's birthday party. The boat cruised down the East River, pushing off from 23rd Street, floating past the warehouses of the Williamsburg waterfront, underneath various bridges, all quite beautiful looking, to the tip of the island of Manhattan in sight of the Statue of Liberty, and then back up to where we came from. People were quite dressed lovely, the call to play dress-up heeded by everyone - and the refrain "look good, feel good" my de facto response when I think about dressing up, whenever I (or someone else) questions my dressing habits. My relationship with clothing has shifted so much over the years, from being comfortable wearing just about anything, most of it ill fitting stuff that I now think is boring and ugly when I look at pictures of my self from high school and college. There was even a hostility toward people hyper-fashion oriented, to being so obsessed with their self-presentation, with what they wore. Now, though the pleasure of wearing things that make you look good is a pleasure I am more and more drawn to, the comfort of a tight button down shirt, tight jeans, and dress shoes something that gives me not only pleasure, but from that, some confidence of a sort, feeling more at ease in this world, more aware that it's all about playing roles in this world and the quickest way (the laziest maybe?) to convey a character is to dress the part, and I don't know where I am going with this - I was talking about a boat party.

The party was quite fun. I made out with one boy a lot on the dancefloor, kissed another one's chest, this boy I am kind of insanely attracted to, and talked to several of my coworkers who were at this party as well, feeling slightly awkward after I had been rubbing boners with this one boy on the dancefloor, and then turned around to see some coworkers I didn't know that well right there. I got to know these coworkers better though after the party, headed down with them and Ethan and Bob to Eastern Bloc, where I was witness to some making out, and then participant in some making out, doing so with one of my coworkers, this beautiful boy who I have had a slight crush on for months, admiring him but knowing that nothing would come from that admiration as he had a boyfriend. There was some moment last night after lots of talking with each other, after a bit of eye-flirting, that we started to kiss, and it continued, the kissing, to another bar, Nowhere, and we talked about our sexual fetishes, things that turn us on, and made plans to sleep together some future night when not as wasted. I am not sure if that is to happen. I am not sure if anything is to happen in this world. Snow generally does fall every winter - there is certainty in that. That, perhaps, is the joy we get from that first snowfall, a sigh of relief, that things still are to happen at certain times, that we can count on some things.

I slept next to Diego last night, slept in his bed, cuddling with him and kissing him throughout the night, so attracted to this person. I had met up with him at Eastern Bloc earlier in the night and we had had drinks and danced to various songs and at some point talked about things, him telling me that he didn't want to have sex with me anymore because he felt we were too fragile, me telling him that I wanted to continue to have sex with him, that I loved doing so. I talked about my feelings, he talked about his. A better understanding was reached or seemingly so.

We slept together naked and did not have sex despite my best efforts. I was kicked out this morning so he could go to the gym. I went home and we met up a few hours later and went to some sample sale in SoHo and then wandered around town, making our way to the Halloween store so I could purchase a mask. It was a nice and friendly day and night with him, and it has calmed me a great deal, things again feeling comfortable to me. s
Later in the afternoon today, I went to midtown and saw this John who had contacted me. He was staying at a fancy hotel on Madison Avenue. He had a wedding band on. When I was jerking off over him, I saw his shirt buttons, the detailing on them, "Brooks Brothers" engraved into each button, a detail I had never noticed about Brooks Brothers shirts before, me looking at them rather than looking at this man in this face, this man who said he wanted to be my slave and who was a boring lay and who gave me specific guided instructions in how he liked to be jerked off. I followed his instructions and he came pretty quickly. I was out of there early with a nice sum of cash. He rode the elevator down with me because he wanted to go get something to eat and didn't want to pay $25 for two slices of pizza from room service. This man clearly had money to be staying here and to be paying me a pricey sum for half an hour or so just to get off and yet something about the cost of room service irritated this man to the point that he would go outside in midtown to find a pizza place instead. This was about the only thing we talked about. I have no sense of this man, don't know his name, where he's from, anything really, other than how he wants someone to jerk him off and that he is offended by pricey room service.

I headed down to the Lower East Side to go to the "Brother, My Lover" reading series at Envoy. As had been the case every time I have gone, there were some really lovely pieces that I enjoyed. I got quite drunk off the free wine on offer and toward the end of the reading, the guy next to me started rubbing my foot and because I didn't say anything he took that as a sign that he could rub further up my leg and feel my crotch. He then whispered to me that he was going downstairs to the bathroom and that he wanted to see me soon. I said okay, and he left, perhaps thinking I would soon be following him, but I had more room now to stretch out my legs, did so, and enjoyed the last reading, this pro-femme piece about a cult of Trisha - maybe my favorite thing of the evening.

I chatted with some folks outside until I got bored, until I wanted to hear Wilco more than I wanted to hear them, and said bye, put on my headphones and listened to "I'll Fight" as I walked uptown.
___________________________

Tuesday night, I saw Cate Blanchett starring in "A Streetcar Named Desire" at BAM, in a production directed by Liv Ullman. It was a thrilling piece of theater, lit magically, and excellently performed. It was a near-perfect production. I have been seeing a lot of theater lately and none of it really standing out much in my mind. This, however, was fantastic.

And so what a thrill to see another fantastic production last night as well. I saw Manhattan Theater Club's production of "The Royal Family," and liked it perhaps even more than Streetcar. It closes in a week or so and so if you live in New York, I really recommend seeing it. It is loosely based on the Barrymores and is a portrait of this wacky family of actors, the Cavendishes. The love of theater that is woven through the play is really touching, as it is to see this family committed to the craft of acting above all else, even above domestic happiness. It's a big ensemble cast and each member brings something special to the proceedings, everyone allowed to camp it up a bit since they are playing these dramatic personas, stars of the stage when there was such a thing, right as film is taking off as a medium.

So many other things to see! The list of plays I want to see is about as long as it's ever been and this month is probably going to involve a great deal of theater to try to trim this list down a bit.

"our love is all we have; our love is all of god's money"

I was riding the train home from Middletown, New Jersey today, up along the coast of New Jersey, through marshlands, through early suburban development, now rustic looking, through faded industrial cities. The sky was grey and overcast and I was listening to Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," feeling the album in a way that I did seven, eight years ago when I was obsessed by the thing, and was getting quite moved on this train ride, plastic bag full of leftovers by my feet that my mom had sent home with me. I had been in a hurry to get out of that house this morning, was bored and felt uncomfortable. I thought about that, about my distance from my family now, about how much I enjoyed holidays as a kid when they were big extended family affairs, but now they are depressingly quiet, my mom's husband saying all of one sentence to me while I was there, that being if I wanted any more coffee.

And so I felt a bit lonely, leaving that place in New Jersey while the weather was so grey, passing ghost towns of what used to be prosperous cities, trash strewn by the side of the tracks, an unbelievable amount of mattresses, me wondering how they ever got there. I was reading Don DeLillo's "Midnight in Dostoevsky", which is an incredible short story, and which contained series of lines such as this that had me pausing and taking in the scenery passing outside my window while I contemplated the thing I just read:

"At times, abandon meaning to impulse. Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks—to register what was out there, all the scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human noise."

I got home a few hours ago and called Diego, really wanting to see his face, to feel connected to someone strongly after a day just spent wondering about the extent of my connections to anyone, my family even seeming distant. He called me back a couple of hours later and it was pleasant conversation, spirited. I asked him when I was going to see him today. He told me he didn't think he'd see me tonight because he had to get a haircut and hang out with this guy.

I knew what that meant and asked him who his date was with. Some young boy, he said, brushing it off, wanting to move forward with the conversation, past what he feared was a speedbump, what was one. I asked him why he was such a heartbreaker. He asked how my Thanksgiving was. I told him I couldn't talk to him right then and got off the phone.

I called back a minute later, frustrated that every time I try to discuss this thing, the conversation is redirected. We talked about this thing. I told him that I really liked him and that I felt really sad. It was an awkward conversation, was me being sincere about my feelings toward him, instead of the flippancy that normally marks our conversation, a mistake maybe. He had told me a while ago when we again started hanging out that he was incapable of a relationship, that he did not want one. And despite him telling me this, I had hoped that us hanging out often, having sex often, making out often meant something else, that for me there was a great deal of romantic sentiment involved, that I am absolutely crazy about this person. He referred to us as friends and again said that he wasn't available for a relationship. We talked about how to proceed so that I would not be sad. I said I would probably establish distance, should probably not be physically affectionate with him, etc. The conversation had a force of its own, taking me to these conclusions, and him as well reluctantly. Had he not already had plans tonight, I probably would have been able to hang out with him and would not have raised this subject, kicking it further on down the road for some other day.

It's really painful to admit your love to someone and to have them tell you that that's not what they are looking for. I think Wilco may have had something to do with this, but I can't blame Jeff Tweedy for the result. And I don't know. I guess it's time to move on, probably was a long time ago, but I still believe that there is something really lovely that exists between the two of us. And it's the knowledge that that thing there is there that makes me particularly crazy. I have gone on some dates in the past couple months with boys and haven't been invested in them, have had my attentions and hopes still focused on this boy, hoping that it would become something, that I would be able to admit its existence, that he would.

I haven't felt this sickness in a long time, chest suddenly feeling empty, wanting to vomit and cry. I have Wilco on again. The call was ended by him, saying that things were getting too intense, that he just got back into town, and that he would talk to me later. I feel sad, incredibly so, and thank God for this band right now. I know things though and I should acknowledge those things and feel free, feel unburdened by what I had been hoping for, know now to focus my attention elsewhere, to try for love with others. I know that, and yet, yet I still hope that he will call and tell me otherwise. Turn up that stereo and call your friends you haven't seen in a while. Get out of the house.

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.