Missy Elliot - "They Don't Wanna Fuck Wit Me"

I walk down streets littered with memories and associations. The litter blows around the streets. Swirls of memories here and there. I tread through these, newspapers blowing against my face, events from years ago on the front page: Charlie Eats Falafel at Manna After a Sad Night at Metropolitan. There are so many layers of history for me on Grand Street and I peel through them all when walking alone down the street, up the street, headphones on. I get chills, particular moments happening again with just as much force as the first time round, and yet there being the knowledge that those moments are past, gone, things that for whatever reasons you will not experience ever again, save in the form of these pickings at the scabs of nostalgia on lonely walks. Life marches on, short thing that it is. I try to reconcile the desire to hold on as much as possible to these things with the reality of time's forward march. We are going to die. I am. This is the issue we aren't addressing when we scratch at the surface of nostalgia and recall fondly past moments, but this is what we are thinking about by doing so. This is what informs that melancholy in recalling past moments. We are mourning our own future death in these recollections.

The very first apartment I rented in New York was a sublet on Grand and Manhattan. I was there for a month or so, before heading off to another sublet, before finally settling into 424 Grand Street for four years. Those years, I was really broke and I would steal all the time from the Key Food on Grand Street, would buy a few bananas for the pocket change I found around my house while I had my messenger bag stuffed with stolen groceries. Too many nights have been spent walking to Metropolitan from various apartments over these past eleven years, the walk down Grand Street to or from Metropolitan with numerous boys, maybe with a couple of men at some points. There is a restaurant I went to with Jacob. I inhabit all these moments again as I head to Gem True Value in search of a stove-top coffee maker. They apparently no longer carry this item, something I have bought at least twice from this store over the last decade. Their shelves were looking poorly stocked. I can't imagine that Gem's life is going to last much longer and more and more this world I knew eleven years ago disappears.

The Liberty on Grand Street, another massive retail space that I bought super discounted housewares at over the past eleven years in New York, shower curtains every couple months to replace moldy ones, dishwashing soap, mops, stovetop coffee makers - this Liberty is now gone, covered by scaffolding. Some massive and ugly condo complex surely will end up there because this is the march of some idea of economic progress. It's a city tight for space so something is going to get squeezed - the discount homewares stores for instance, along with the population they serve, a population that is being decimated with an unrelenting brutality and speed by the market forces of New York real estate, by rents that become more and more outrageous for anyone not making astronomical incomes.

Yesterday evening, I realized that the Daniela's diner, small, divey thing that I had been to quite a few times, especially in my first few years of New York, was gone. I once had a really awkward first date there over pancakes. I couldn't even place which storefront, which juice bar, was now occupying its former space. Time marches on. Storefronts change and change. Bars close. Some places, thank God, are still there. There is still Gran Morelos on the corner of Graham and Grand, caked in layers and layers of memories, many drunken after-hours spent there sopping up alcohol with their amazing carne enchilada burritos, some of the best, perhaps the best, in the city of New York.

I am so happy in my new apartment. It's a really beautiful and large apartment. It is on the gorgeous street, the gorgeous time capsule of small old houses, that is Powers Street. It is contiguous with these sites of my memories. I am overlapping with moments from these past years in New York each time I walk here or there. I feel at home. I feel alive.

Bob Dylan - "Desolation Row"

I could hear them last night as I tried to fall asleep, a symphony of angry roaches mourning their friend I had killed earlier in the evening.

I had been enjoying a burrito from Mesa Azteca, lamenting the approaching end to our relationship, knowing that in a week I would be outside of this particular Mexican restaurant's delivery zone. There will be a new favorite burrito delivery service certainly. There is always a new love eventually. You forget what you had with that past boyfriend. You have someone new to snuggle with at night. Or you don't, and you cling to memories of how good those burritos used to be. Knowing that there are plenty of good burrito places near my new apartment didn't make the end to this relationship any less sentimental. I looked out my window admiring the view that I would soon no longer see, tried to hold on to it, these Bushwick brick houses, the roofs of which form clean lines running toward horizons, toward far off street corners, the blocks long in this neighborhood.

That's when I saw it out of the corner of my eye, a massive roach, the kind you find in Florida, some holdover from the Jurassic era. The little ones are bad enough, but these big ones produce a terror and disgust beyond reason. I grabbed the roach spray and knocked it the floor in a stream of poisonous chemicals. Cheering on death, chanting it into being, into not-being: die, die, die.

The constant battle against roaches is something I will not miss about this apartment. The roach lying on its back, squealing in pain as it died, quickly brought to an end the mourning I had been doing about what I would leave behind when I left this apartment. I don't think I have ever heard a roach make noise before - that's how big this creature was. It made some audible high-pitched noises as it convulsed. 

And because I had had too much coffee in the evening, I lay awake, weed not putting me to sleep, Benadryl not putting me to sleep, jerking off not putting me to sleep. I heard the sound of crickets or some light squeaking noise coming from somewhere. My mind soon made this sound out to be a chorus of roaches haunting me, squealing around the edge of my bed. 

I woke up this morning to quiet. I walked to the subway. Everything was beautiful, is beautiful.

"I don't know my future after this weekend. And I don't want to."

It's remarkable how much more beauty there is in the world when things are going your way. I was walking down York Street to class a couple nights ago as I do several times a week and noticed for the first time, really noticed, how insanely beautiful the windows were of this old industrial building. I was made giddy by the beauty. Joy was building on joy, scaling higher and higher.

I found out I got this internship this summer that I really wanted. I will be doing copywriting for this awesome ad agency. For months, I have been waiting to hear about this, hoping I would get it. A couple days ago, I received word, an email, saying that I had gotten it. This means that finally after about five years of working in the hotel industry, something that was never planned and was never meant to be a career, there is an end date in sight. Most likely, I will no longer be working in a hotel by June, which makes me so incredibly happy. 

My plan is not definite and nothing is guaranteed. There are a lot of question marks and that feels really good. It has been quite a while since I haven't known what I would be doing in a couple months. I like this uncertainty. There is a thrill to it that I haven't felt in years. I am going to quit this job and work a barely paid internship, living off whatever savings I can accrue in the next couple months, as well as my mom's kindness, who has offered to loan me money if I need it. There is the lack of any job after this internship, of having given up this nice hotel job that works so well with my school schedule. The plan, if something so based on hope can be called a plan, is that I will do this internship this summer, be insanely amazing, and find a job straight from there so that I don't have to go back to school and so that I don't have to ask my job if they might re-hire me. 

I am jumping and it feels great.

The other great news I received this week is that I got the apartment that I really wanted. Diego and I signed the lease today.

Everything in New York looks so fucking beautiful right now is what I am trying to say.

Brooklyn

A couple months ago, my landlord told me he wanted me to move out of the building by April because he wanted to try to sell the building and it would be easier to do so without tenants in it.

Today, I got a voicemail from him:

"Please call me back. I have an apartment for you. Nice apartment for you. On the first floor. Almost the same money. Please call me back. 516-XXX-XXXX. Thank you. This is Spiro."

My brain nearly exploded when I listened to that.

I didn't call him back then because I was too furious. Also I had an apartment that I really wanted to see. It's a dream come true, especially after some of the other stuff we have looked at it. It's huge. It has a backyard. It's on a really cute street. It's two blocks from the Grand Street stop. It has closets. It has a seafoam green kitchen. I paid a deposit on it, but the landlord still has to approve our application.

I didn't yell at my landlord when I called him back, didn't even ask what the hell is going on, just told him I was moving in with a friend elsewhere, that I had already found an apartment

Now, I need this to be true.

Gillian Welch - "I Dream a Highway"

I was in the back of a Jeep and I watched his hands grasp the wheel, steer me, guide me. They were nice hands, fingernails trimmed, fingers of a nice long length.

Earlier, I had found myself standing up straighter when I met him, this tall, handsome guy. I was instantly smitten in a way I haven't felt in a while. It was weird.

He was the guy showing us apartments.

Diego and I started our hunt for apartments today, an exercise that has so far made me very depressed about moving and about finding something nice. I called this ad on Craigslist about this two bedroom off the Montrose stop, the stop both of had been hoping to live off of, but which is seeming far and far less likely to happen, that it is seeming very likely that we will be perhaps living somewhere off the J train instead.

Anyways, I am getting distracted here from what I originally started writing about, the realtor that showed us this apartment off the Montrose stop, Jacob. I thought it was weird to be calling a person named Jacob to inquire about an apartment off the Montrose stop, given that I lived with my ex-boyfriend Jacob off the Montrose stop - there seemed to be too much symmetry of some sorts in that.

He's so beautiful. I felt nervous, awkward, not beautiful. I was nursing this never-dying cold that has been roiling at a slow boil for the past week now, making me feel vaguely disgusting 24/7. I was also lugging around a backpack full of stuff from work for ad school that I had been doing earlier in the morning. What I am trying to say is that I was not feeling real cute, not at all.

The apartment he showed us was really cute, or at least I thought so. It was on a vibrant stretch of Graham Avenue by the J train. Diego was not having it though. Nope, he said, I think after maybe ten seconds. The bedrooms were tiny, tiny things and Diego is looking for a huge, huge room to make costumes in. Luckily, our dreamboat realtor, had a car and wanted to show us another place.

I sat in the backseat, cause I again I was not feeling real cute, and watched this guy's hands hold the wheel, listened to him talk about his job, about New York, about apartments, about the winter weather.

He showed us another apartment that Diego didn't like. And then we had an appointment with someone else to be shown another apartment. It was time to part with Jacob. I just wanted him to show us anything, even the apartment he wanted to show us off the Gates J stop. If he was selling it, I was buying it.

He told us he would hang around the neighborhood and grab a bite to eat while his other colleague showed us this apartment we had already made an appointment to see, that he could show us this Gates apartment after, just to text him and let him know. For some reason, exhaustion, sickness, and the admitting to each other that we didn't want to live off the Gates stop, we texted him back and told him we were going to pass on checking out the other apartment.

He texted me a couple times later asking if railroads are totally out of the picture and saying that if he found anything else he would contact us. And I stood on the street, giddy that a realtor was texting me about apartments, imagining that it could potentially mean something more than that, me saying, yes, please, if you hear of anything let us know. Telling him it was nice meeting him. Losing my mind outside the Associated (or as I like to call it Ass O' CIA Ted), I looked at my phone and thought about how I might ever get to be with this person, whether that would ever happen, whether any feeling that this is some charming, friendly likable person might not instead just be a work persona, what he does to close sales, that this person might actually totally hate me.

I want to get over my sickness. I want Jacob to find some apartments that both Diego and I like. I want to lie in bed with Jacob eventually in this new apartment and look at his face and lace my fingers in those I saw steering us around Brooklyn today.

Yonce

The choreographed dance moves of pop stars, a type of poetry that seems uniquely American. Watching Beyonce videos as I float through space, unmoored in some ways to conventional modes of experiencing being.

A fog of Benadryl. French people telling me they didn’t drink the wine.

Cup of coffee number two, something to counterbalance, attempt to counterbalance at least, and failing miserably in that, the somnolent effects of antihistamines.

What does it mean to watch a group of ladies move in sync with one another, blocked in neat lines? What is the source of the joy we get from such a thing? We witness humans, things we know to be imprecise, be, for the span of a pop song, precise things. The joy of pop songs, which really is the joy of life, its most magical manic moments, finds physical manifestation. We all turn on the exact same beat, no one’s timing off.

The Shangri-Las - "The Train from Kansas City"

One of the coldest lines in any song ever: "I'll be back in the time it takes to break a heart."

_______

I did some work for school with a classmate this morning, from a Dumbo classroom overlooking the skyline of Manhattan. I saw wet trains glowing in the sun, these golden streaks of light moving over the bridge. The sky was a blue that made me slightly delirious; it was some form of happiness that took you in its big blue arms and shook you around. I stepped out of the house today into blue. It was after the tornado, as you walked out your door and you crossed over from your black and white world straight into that of Oz. The world was in technicolor today. Weeks of snow and freezing temperatures had rendered the world in just grays and whites. I forgot about these other colors, these other modes of feeling, the brightness to it all.

______

On a stoop somewhere in the Lower East Side, sun shining on me, the sky so blue, still so overwhelmed with these feelings brought on by a blue sky and temperatures above freezing, I ate a chicken burrito from Mission Cantina. Beans spilling all over me. Everyone was out today, the weather bringing out all of the beautiful humans in beautiful clothes enjoying what it is to live in New York City and walk around on days like today after being cocooned inside for so long and seeing all of this beauty - people, blue sky, sunlit streets, smiles on face. A sense of leisure to it all - that one didn't need to race from indoor point to indoor point today just to escape the cold. There was a lot of strolling. I walked around the city. I looked at some galleries in Chelsea. I saw many future potential husbands gallery hopping as well. I fell in love so many times today.

There was woman on 11th Avenue outside of a building, smoking, leaning against the brick wall. The scene held the light of the sun that was beginning its descent over New Jersey. Everything was gold, glowed from within, the woman, the brick wall behind her, the sidewalk we both were on. There wasn't much oncoming traffic to ruin the scene.

There were so many beautiful unphotographed photographs today.
_________

"The Train from Kansas City" is such a sad story, which, really, I guess is any Shangri-Las song. It's a story of doomed romance, of bad boys, of broken hearts. The singer addresses the song to her fiancé, telling him about her ex, how he had moved out of town but how he thought they were still together and sent her letters all the time. She says he is coming into the train station to see her. She tells her fiancé to wait, just wait, while she runs to the train station to break this guy's heart, that she will be "back in the time it takes to break a heart." Then there is the repeated and quickening chorus of "here comes the train, here comes the train" as the train and this guy approach, the chorus sounding more and more uncertain about what that means, about whether the singer is actually going to break up with the guy from Kansas City, whether she is going to have an affair with him, or whether she might actually be planning to get on train with him and run away to Kansas City. Who knows? She is a shady heartbreaker. I want to know how the story ends. Everything about the song is so great, particularly since pop songs usually don't build up a story just to end before coming to any resolution. Instead, it ends right there, right at the build-up, refusing to indulge your need for closure.

"Put 'em on, put 'em on, put 'em on me"

I was watching this porn last night on my phone as I was in bed, falling asleep, jerking off. It was of a guy fucking a girl from behind. He grabbed her back as he was fucking her. For a couple frames, there was a clear shot of his hands on her back. They were beautiful things and turned me on so much.

I paused the video and played the brief second again and again, imaginging those hands and what it meant for a person to be in possession of such things, about what their hands said about them. There are guys that I have liked based soley on their hands. There are other guys, attractive and nice, that I have not had any interest in because their hands were quite far from some ideal I have of hands.

On the train, early this morning, sometime before 7am, everyone groggy and wanting to still be in bed, there was a man standing in front of me. He looked like a Southern college baseball player, vaguely like Channing Tatum. He was a beautiful hunk of man, not normally what I am used to seeing on my early morning commutes to work. But what really drew me to him were his hands. I couldn't quit staring at them and was getting so turned on by thoughts of what he did with those hands, places they have been. They were big, muscular hands. I wanted them on me.

The seat opened up next to me and, because sometimes dreams come true, or at least some watered down version of them does, he sat down next to me in the small seat opening, his shoulder pressed against mine.

I kept glancing at his hands in his lap, at his fingers, the mass of his arms pressing in against mine. I never wanted the train ride to end, but train rides, much like dreams, evenutally do.

"I'm willing to let your child wither and die inside of you if that's what's required."

Though I am fine with the cold, I am quite excited about being able to walk again at a normal gait, even a fast one. Soon, I will no longer have to take baby steps in my neighborhood. Right now, the sidewalks are a thick layer of ice that have nearly sent me crashing to the ground several times. The forecast for later this week is finally above the freezing mark. All of this ice will melt soon. I think there is a metaphor in there, one I don’t feel like unspooling.

I went to the gym this weekend. That was the only time I left my house this weekend, a few hours. The rest of the time was spent on my couch, not doing many of the things that I had intended to do this weekend, instead just binge-watching the entire new season of House of Cards.

I really don’t like the way that Netflix releases its series - all at once - because I am not a temperate person. Nothing is ever in moderation with me. I will watch the entire series as soon as possible. I want to beat the spoilers that friends or critics will let drop. I assume Netflix does this not solely for the reason they claim, to let viewers binge watch entire series, but rather to have people watching the series like this, everyone at different points, so as not to overload and crash their servers with everyone trying to watch the same episode at the same time. But the result of their dropping the entire series at once is that the conversation that happens around Netflix series is different than what happens around other series, that there is not the same weekly discourse that cultural commentators and viewers can all engage in, going through episode by episode. Instead, because everyone is at different points in the series, if they have even started it all, there is very little conversation about specifics, rather just broad gushing generalizations about how the show is “so good,” and there is not the same in-depth conversations that occur around Netflix series as, say, Girls or Mad Men.

And so as not be that asshole that gives away plot points, I’ll just also say it’s so good. I’ll also say that Robin Wright’s character, Claire Underwood, is so amazing. There is a lot to explore in why we, as audiences, love villains so much, why it is we take such pleasure in their wicked deeds. Perhaps it is to see our own repressed impulses given free reign; perhaps we are all bloodthirsty villains as well but have conformed to the rules of propriety, decency, and morality, and for a moment, the brief span of a tv show or film, we can delight in someone so unbound by the things that we are.I am captivated every time she is on the screen. She is so poised, elegant, and ruthless, such an amazing screen presence.

There is some not small part of me that wants to be her.

Sun Kil Moon - "Dogs"

There are things that you can't control and then there are things that you can control. More and more, I am realizing that most things belong to the latter, that you can control most things. You can stand up straight, for one. I am trying to remember to do this, to exercise more control in how I present myself, for it to be what I would like it to be. You can dislike your job but you can also do things to change it. You can be a happy person. You can be friendly and polite. These are things you can easily control.

This is all such simple stuff, but also so easily forgotten as one moves through life day-to-day, letting exterior forces determine one's mood or posture or whatever other thing it might be. It's just a process of continuing to make ourselves more conscious of our own existence in this world and to exercise a little more authority against the winds that blow against us.

I should also mention that I am writing this after not leaving the house all day, now a little stoned. I am now feeling ready to tackle the things I put off all day. I had planned to do homework, to read, to work on my portfolio, to go the gym, and to go see River of Fundament. I did none of these things. It was another snowy day and there were all of these new episodes of House of Cards to watch. And so I sat on my couch and ordered Mexican food and watched way too many of these episodes. And that was okay. It was a decision I made and I am happy with it. There is a productivity in downtime. Tomorrow, I will be productive in more easily quantifiable ways.

I am at some point soon going to get dressed for the first time today, nearly 11pm, to head out to the city to a friend's goodbye party, someone moving to LA. I really though, much as I like this person, would rather just curl on my couch and watch more of Frank and Claire Underwood be deliciously sinister. Living in New York now for ten years, I have gone to so many of these goodbye parties, sometimes several of them for the same people separated by years. People come and go in this city all the time. And so I really don't care that much about goodbyes, about these rituals that people construct to have people wave them off from this city, however I should add that I think most parties people arrange for themselves for some occasion are always weird, suspect - maybe because it's so anathema to my own nature.

And so I will go and say goodbye, will put on boots to go through these streets to do so.

Frank and Claire will still be here, waiting for me when I get home. This is the company I keep - this devious couple, memories of exes, porn Tumblrs, dirty Vines, burritos, marijuana, and the idea that there might somewhere be a person out there.