This morning, two men from Time Warner came to my apartment and installed internet, and since that moment, I have done nothing but reconnect with my lost love, the internet. Oh, how I have missed you and wasted afternoons reading every web publication I love, every one that I mildy like, reading online diaries, doing stupid google seaches, and doing all of this to the soundtrack of newly downloaded mp3s.

I did all of this today, pretty much all day long, interupted only for a quick trip to the grocery store and a shower. I did this on the day before Halloween, instead of going into the city to try to find something to wear tomorrow on Halloween. I love how people that live in the outer boroughs talk like they live in the suburbs or something, referring to Manhattan as The City. This is one of the things that amuses me a lot about the customs of this area. The only other localspeak that still sounds odd to my ears is the habit of saying "Let's get a slice," as opposed to saying "Let's get some pizza."

But yes, it will soon be Halloween, and I can think of the weather around Halloweens in Florida, can recall it fairly easily, and can also recall even more easily the weather of high school Halloweens that preceeded those college years, adolescent Halloweens, elementary school Halloweens all spent in northern Virginia, and I can recall this even easier because this weather that I am experiencing right now in New York is something I have experienced before, back in Virginia, and everytime I walk down a still wet from the rain street, and see a puddle in the gutter with fallen leaves in it, submerged under the rainwater, I am shocked, continually shocked by how beautiful fallen leaves look submerged in water, and I am perhaps more shocked because at each viewing of one of these puddle of leaves sight, a flash of recollections sprints past my consciouness quickly before receding back into my long term memorey, only to emerge again for another sprint before my eyes the next time I walk past a puddle of submerged leaves. The Smashing Pumpkins are recalled, the walk over the creek home from the busstop after school, the lonely afternoons after school, the crisp air, guilty masturbation, locked bedrooms, making food in the microwaves, dad sleeping on the green and white couch, tv always on, cold tile floor of the porch, and the lonelier days at school, the dark wood varnish on the dinner table my mom, sister, and I sat around, laconic conversations that would occasionly erupt into teenage rage, working out boundaries of space, trying to declare some, declaring some with a car, early mornings with my sister driving to school.

And everytime now, at a good healthy 22 years old, that I see some wet leaves, these memories are evoked, and I finger them gently, nostalgic and missing those moments now that time has allowed distance from them.

Back then, I had something I wanted to escape. I think that is what I miss so much in moments like those, having a good outlet to direct your rage at (sorry mom), knowing that soon, just a couple more years and you would be in college and wouldn't have to live here, there anymore. The other day at work, I was trying to describe this to Keith and Will, neither of whom cared to hear it really, both of whom have reached their threshold for tolerating my excited revelations and my happiness about boys or music, or whatever it is that provokes my fancy on any particular day. But I had just heard Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen" played over the radio in the pizza place I ate lunch in, and there's that part where she wails over and over "Run away, run away, run away." And I was way caught up in the song, back in that sixteen year old mental state where everything seemed okay as long I had the option that I could occasionlly entertain whenever things got bad enough of just running away, when that sill seemed like a plausible idea, before the effects of rationality fully sunk in when the idea is now dismissed with a I could never... I have to do this and this and pay this and this...

But the point that I was trying to make was everyting seemed simpler then because the option of escape was always possible. At eighteen you would be free and could do whatever you fucking wanted. Parents be damned. Even in college, there was the post-collegiate life to look forward to as running away, doing whatever you wanted, moving wherever you chose.

And I moved wherever I chose, I am here in New York, not doing what I wanted except seeing lots of good rock and roll and reading good books, but other than that, working a fairly crappy job, failing to make any close meaningful relationships, not falling in love with one of the many New York gay boys, and most importantly, not making art, any art. And somedays, especially now that the weather is that perfect for brooding fall weather, I think about these things, think about how much better I would like my life to be and then I get sad, sometimes terribly so, thinking about this, and how there's not really that much I can do, how now I have no place else to go, no plans of running away. I am an adult now, I say, and convince myself that I have to live my life, do something meaningful. And I am going to try. I really am. Now that I have internet, I am going to spend lots of time job hunting and sending out resumes for a job I would consider meaningful. So, I am not going to run away, I am going to fucking run towards it, tackle it, and scream like a fucking mad man. Look out world.

Last night. CMJ. I smooched Hunx from Gravy Train!!!! The Gossip were totally amazing, and I am going to try to see them play again tonight. Perhaps the best live performance I have ever seen. I am at work, updating livejournal. That is sad. But tonight, rock and roll hopefully - to redeem this, to redeem everything.

it hurts sooo good

I just attended a union meeting for my bookstore that was held at of all places, the gay bar I frequent way too much, the Phoenix. Not that many people showed up, and I even questioned whether I should bother to attend or not since I hope to God that I will have found a new source of employment by the time a new contract is negotiated for the union (next summer). But being part of a union is such an appealing concept to me, as a leftist raised in the suburbs, in Virginia, in a "right to work" state (which you should all hopefully know means "anti-union").

Not much got addressed, but I did offer up my two cents and other people did too - it was a session of collective griping, a chance to see what this talk about democracy and the people is all about, and I liked it, I really liked being with other workers and talking about our rights, about how we needed to demand certain things from our employers in the next contract, and seeing how this whole process works.

In other news: It is colder than a polar bear's toenail, to quote Outkast. I am an idiot, and spent from 10 am to 2 pm waiting for the cable guy to come and install internet in my apartment, until at 2:30, pissed that the guy didn't come, and searching for the piece of paper that I had written the confirmation number on, I realized that the appointment is actually for next Thursday. I watched Keith's movie today at Megan's house. It's cold, I am mildy drunk, and have to pee so insanely bad right now and am thinking of where the closest bathroom must be. But tomorrow night, tomorrow night my friends and foes, tomorrow night I will be in attendance with some of my fellow co-workers, none of whom made it to the union meeting tonight, but will be with them anyways watching and dancing to some good rock and roll, to Hella, Gravy Train, and the motherfucking Gossip. Did I mention that I am so excited? And that it is cold out? So cold? And that I have have to pee? So fucking bad?

go-go is my role model

In Times Square yet again, hopefully for the last time at this internet place, since Dara and I are beginning to take seriously the project of our house. We have painted our living room an orange that I altertanely like and dislike, we have hung up lights, hung up pictures and polka albums, placed a bathmat on our bathroom floor. I now have a working electric outlet in my bedroom, and soon, very soon, like today, we are going to call and schedule an appointment to get some internet flowing through our little home. I want to have lots of people over soon, something involving food.

Yesterday my mom was here for a few short hours, and left me with a computer, and some old kitchen knick-knacks of hers, including: a breadmaker, an espresso maker, and an electric wok. Beki and Stephanie are here now, staying with me for a few days and are out shopping. I couldn't deal with it, I left them, and will meet back up again to cruise some galleries and consume some free booze.

Last night, I had an awesome time at Phoenix. I am spending far too much time there. It really is becoming my bar, in the Cheers sense. Last week, Joe and I figured we were there three times. That is probably not good, but I am getting to talk to people, nice people, and so right now, it is enough. Soon, I will get bored though, no doubt, it always occurs, but now, I am in that space of time when there is a self-awareness of impending boredom without any actual boredom present, a high before the comedown, if you will pardon the overused drug reference.

I want to be in school. I am going to go the Hunter offices after my time expires here and see if it is to late for the spring.

I need to connect more with my body. I don't dance enough. I rarely masturbate. Let's not enough talk about how long it has been since I have had sex. I am the sedentary duck that was in that Voice comic this week. I need to do something besides eat.

Shit... Open Bar at Triple Crown, so many vodka tonics consumed, then Tainted Lady Lounge, already too wasted for belief. And oh yeah, remember how I told you earlier this week I made the easiest money ever, well scratch that - because tonight man, also less than fifteen minutes while watching MTV - businessmen rock! What did I ever use to say about capitalism? Um, then we ran into the worst drug dealer ever - who sold me ten dollars worth of weed - um, what? In New York? And yeah, he gave me so much weed - and then proceeded to smoke Jillian and me out. Fuck yeah! Got pretty fucking stoned, then went to Capone's, ate pizza, smoked, and danced to Montel Jordan! Then a party on Grand Street where I ran into an old straight crush from the Strand (Joe, you know who!), Liam, and talked to him for so long. Tonight equals fucking awesome.

For the past week or so, I have been eagerly anticipating last night, Monday night, the Cock, hoping to run into Craig, the NC alum I met there last week, that told me he would be there again this week. And so, I went there with Joe after downing rum and cokes with him in my kitchen, found Craig, talked to him, and was told by yet another crush that he's seeing someone.

It was shortly after this utterance by him that the peaking excitment of the past week looking forward to Monday quickly came to a halt. In fact, took a nose dive. The self-esteem that had been building in me for reasons that whatever sick notions of being liked by someone will foster, quickly fizzled, and how fragile our egos are. Our moods can change from one second to the next. Yes, that's very obvious, but fascinating to me nonetheless, that there is no real stable identity, stable feeling, that our emotional constituions are constantly at the whims of things outside ourselves.

At this point, I was ready to go home. Craig's friend gave me a blinking taillight for my bike before they all biked off home. I could find some symbolism in this. I will try not to.

I rode the subway home, with a nice Southern boy, a boy who introduced himself as Christopher (not Chris, mind you). He had brown hair and brown eyes, and had that same shy, overwhelmed look in his eyes that Sam G had. He was nice and I was glad to meet him, had no interest in pursuing it any further, and wished him a good night as I got off the train.

I am not doing so well on the boy front, but on the home front, I am doing excellent. Today at 7:30, I am hopefully going to go sign a lease for a three bedroom off the Lorimer stop to live with Dara and a girl I met at a bar, Jessica, in a room that I will be paying 400 a month for. Then, I will have the stability of a home for a year and can then devote my energies to finding additional forms of stability.

The skin on the roof of my mouth is all mangled and soft. I just ate a really hot piece of cheese pizza, should have let it cooled, but man, there are few things better than warm cheese, and it was so worth it.

Went to the Cock again last night, because really, I don't think there has been a Monday in two months that I haven't. And this boy that I had a crush on was there, I had seen him dancing at the Traci and the Plastics show. And I talked to him, finding out that he also went to New College, that the world is way too small. He said he would make out with me next Monday. I hope so.

Looking for an apartment with Niki. Trying to move by Sept. 1. And maybe, I'll get another slice of pizza. Entries of depth coming soon, once I get a disk to save my laptop writings on and upload them here, for the cost of ten cents a minute.

I sprayed my mom's bike chain in WD-40 this afternoon, pumped the tires full of air, did this in our backyard, in the sunshine. The sun beaming, making everything brighter, more brilliant. The noticably (after being in a towering city) gigantic blue sky and the white clouds floating through it were made especially brilliant by the intensity of the light.

This little light of mine, I am going to let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

The chain already is looking a lot better than the rusty state it was in earlier today, and now the bike is in the backseat of my mom's car, waiting for the car ride we will embark on tomorrow. You have to leave or lose something to fully (or, at least more so) appreciate the absent object. Distance allows for either objectivity or nostalgia. A weird mixture of both, with nostalgia being the really flavorful ingredient in the mix, the cinammon you know was thrown in there. And there are things about urban life I miss, and I am already preparing to miss the breezy indolence that being in Northern Virginia allows. I appreciate them all, am grateful for each setting, and with each shift in location, I know that the slight fit of nostalgia felt for the departed place, the ebullient sadness is a sadness felt not only for the just left place but a sadness steeped in premonitions, the awareness that there will be more left places, that all of these are just preparations, ways of getting ready for when at some point there will be a leaving of all places, a residing in no places. And this is there always in departures, and so I take joy in the fact that I can will my departures, know the results of them, get on a bus and in four or five hours time end up in a place I know, a place I wanted to go back to, and that I can just as easily leave that place (at least, physically) for another place. Leaving a psychic space though is another matter and that too, is part of the joy in shifting around through physical spaces, learning that you can shift from place to place and yet will still occupy the same psychic space - and this, this seeming permanence of thought, is the source of joy in departures, that maybe there is a permanence to it all.

total participation excludes self-doubt

And I am home in Virginia. I took the Chinatown bus, got an aisle to myself, looked down into other cars, saw fields, factories, and rivers, got really excited about the rivers especially, passing over bridges, and water underneath, so much of it, empty space, a big shining strip of it. America, America, America - I saw you today, and fuck, so beautiful, so so beautiul. To the right across the aisle, I saw the sunset. I understood the line: "Purple mountain's majesty. The purple and pink of the sky, looking so otherworldy after having spent months in the city, or actually looking so of this world, so worldy, and for that reason, so beautiful.

I ate a Snickers and a bag of Combos on the bus, kept on wishing that they would turn off the A/C, and finished reading Nabakov's Speak, Memory, the last chapter of which can be read alone, and perhaps should be, since the writing is about time and memory, a topic which would already give the writing weight, but Nabakov sets off the "veral pyrotechnics" (a phrase Dimino once said about Faulkner) and says some sentences that will either awe you or make you jealous, depending on your confidence in your on writing.

I took the Metro from the bus to my neighborhood, and looking at the Metro map trying to figure out how to get home, I realized that we deal with what we are given. That, today, this Metro map which never seemed so easy and so tiny, looked like a map of a pretend city. The New York subway map has about eight million stops on it, and you have to run your finger along the map on the platforms to help with the sense of where exactly you are or are going, trace it with your finger, let the sense of touch try to help, make it seem more there, that you can touch it. But the Metro, this evening, looked as if it had maybe ten stops when I was looking at the map. And I have never noticed its puniness, have always thought it adequate, more so - but now, I know something else, I have even become accustomed to it, and I am not sure. The streets are emptier here, there was one other person on my Metro car.

I came home, so happy to see my mom and sister, and went off into a tirade about Bush's deception about Iraq, provoked by what, now I am not sure, and my sister told me that living in "the city" (that's what she called it, that's what lots of people call it, the city), that living in the city was making me neurotic, that I needed to spend time in the country, but it's not the city, shit, it is Bush, it is being lied to, it is our collective complacency, our unacted upon discontent that makes me neurotic. When the whole Niger lie first dropped, I was sick for days with a sore throat, and I was a little convinced that my personal sickness was a more localized version of a national sickness setting in, a "malaise" if we want to reapply Carter's term of a post-Watergate nation for whatever this one will be. And it really does make my blood boil, such things. Someone needs a good shaking. Democratic leaders in Congress, for one, who are failing to exercise leadership on this issue. Conservatives, for all I disagree with them, exercise leadership when they feel wronged, when they want to take someone down, and they do it fearlessly. And shockingly enough, Fox News, from my watching of the cable news networks tonight is being the toughest on Bush about this, cranking up the heat.

All of this makes me seriously mad. That's an expression that people use, and so you may think that I am doing the same, but my appreciation for this country and its institutions of government is a heartfelt, sincere one - and reconciling that with a willful deception by these instituitions really is the source of a deep pang whenever I walk by a newstand.

I am here in Virgina tonight, and I will sleep in my old bed, here in one of these fifty states, and I passed through a few today, and Saturday, I am going back to New York, driving there with my Mom. Last night in Brooklyn with Rebecca, I saw Traci and the Plastics, which moved me by its excellence and really inspired me to, if not create art, then to at least live more artfully. One of her personas in the video show, read some poem/song, one line in which was: "Total participation excludes self-doubt."

And that is my current motto: Total participation excludes self-doubt.

With that knowledge, I totatlly participated in the dancing festivities that followed at Luxx, I danced and danced and danced, and my heart beat like a fucking drum, something about velocity in Nabakov today, human's desire for it, his son's particularly. My legs felt like jelly when I got home. And this morning, I went to the Fela Kuti tribute/exhibit at the New Museum which was also inspiring. And then I left New York, left Rebecca, came to our nation's captiol with too much on my mind, and will hopefully leave here with even more on it, because I love it, the thoughts, the living.

Maggie Ray! Of all people to run into, of all the people that I have been hoping to run into, I run into Maggie Ray right around the corner from my house. She is flying out today, but is moving here for good in three weeks, and this makes me so happy.

In other news, my job threatened to fire my yesterday, my toilet is in pieces all over my kitchen as plumbers try to fix the running water, and in an hour or so, I am leaving for Coney Island to rock and roll to bands I have never heard at the Siren Music Festival. And Cake is singing, "And sometimes for music that you haven't even heard of!" But, it's a free show, that's how I afford my rock n' roll lifestyle. Thursday, I did however, pay ten dollars to see the High Strung and Mates of State, both of whom were quite excellent.