While it was honestly not my favorite bookstore, I am still terribly sad about the news that Coliseum Books is closing. New York, I am worried for you. I am worried because I even see my friends occasionally with bags from Barnes & Noble. I could go on and on with this train of thought, lamenting changes in New York, lamenting the tendency of everything to turn into a mall, lamenting the decline of independent booksellers, on and on, but you know it all, and I need to get ready for work.

Headache city, I have arrived. My head is throbbing because I drank too much last night, every night, because I did not get much sleep, and work is going to be pretty painful today I imagine. But, hopefully, the memories of penises and boys recalled throughout the day will be able to entertain me and keep me awake. The downstairs of the Cock was open last night, and if you were there, you probably know that I was a bit slutty. There was that sluttiness with several people and then there was also more G-rated making out with a couple of crushes. And all of this would be so much better recalled in bed, or recalled in the crazy logic of dreams, but instead, I am awake and running on empty, dreading the day that lies ahead.

people in motion

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

It makes you move slow, the sand, and you cannot walk too fast on it, but the joy I get from it under my feet, the joy I am convinced everyone does, makes me occasionally think, yesterday for instance, that the world should be nothing but sand and we should all be barefoot. I went to Sandy Hook with my mom and sister yesterday and it was so outrageously gorgeous. We went and looked at abandoned officers' houses and walked along the beach.

It was so lovely outside yesterday afternoon and we drove around, had some soft serve ice cream at a roadside stand and I played a Bruce Springsteen CD I found in the car.

Later in the day, we went out to Red Bank to eat Thai food and on the way, this song was playing and I lost my mind. How fucking good is this song?

Then I went and saw David Sedaris read some humorous stories, and then rode the train home, sleeping the whole way home - lovely, lovely exhausted sleep.

The opening paragraph of Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife:

"She was completely nude, lying on her stomach in the desert sand, her legs spread wide, her long hair flowing in the wind, her head tilted back with her eyes closed. She seemed lost in private thoughts, remote from the world, reclining on this wind-swept dune in California near the Mexican border, adorned by nothing but her natural beauty. She wore no jewelry, no flowers in her hair; there were no footprints in the sand, nothing dated the day or spoiled the perfection of the photograph except the moist fingers of the seventeen-year-old schoolboy who held it and looked at it was adolescent longing and lust."

That paragraph is so good. That shift in focus that occurs at the end of that paragraph totally surprised me. I was all ready to read a narrtive about this woman sunbathing, only to be suckerpunched by this being a photograph some boy is using as jackoff fodder.

I picked up this book yesterday along with four others that I am totally excited about at Housing Works Used Book Cafe's outdoor book sale, all for a dollar each. I watched The Science of Sleep later on in the day. It was a pretty lovely day, all the lovelier because I was asleep in bed by eleven (the first time in how long?), this book at my side.

I am about to head off to New Jersey to hang out and eat with my family, and then, with my sister, to see David Sedaris read.

Echinacea, ibuprofen, Sudafed, multivitamin, and then while I was trying to swallow this Vitamin C pill, that's what got caught in my throat. I gagged and started coughing. Coughing led to dry heaving, which led to me running to my toilet. And thankfully, I did not throw up the breakfast I had just ate. Instead, I threw up a bunch of snot that had been in the back of my throat and seemed like it would never go away. Thank fuck!

Why do I feel so good? I was so sure last night while smoking pot, while getting drunk, while dancing, while smoking cigarettes, while getting further drunk, that I was bound to wake up painfully ill and even more sick than I was yesterday. The night before last I coddled this cold, sleeping a lot, drinking a lot of juice, and what happens? I just felt even worse. But last night, treating my body like shit, ignoring the symptoms I had had just a short while earlier, by doing that, I am able to wake up today on four hours of sleep feeling totally amazing. I don't understand. Feist is playing in my ears. That could be a reason.

i keep forgettin'

Not until yesterday, in the McKibbin loft, playing Michael McDonald's "I Keep Forgettin'" over and over on YouTube, did I realize that this song, McDonald's, is where the sample from Warren G's "Regulate" comes from. This morning in the shower, the two were in my head together, layered one on top of the next, seeming like an important manifestation of unities in this world - the same path a riverbed takes found in your vein structure, found in the path tree branches grow and split along.

There is something in these songs. I don't know what and I am not sure, with even a lifetime of listening, I would ever be able to get at what that thing is, aside from the slight intimations of that thing I get when I am really drunk and/or really caffeinated. The world and all its loveliness are in these two songs, I am convinced.

I love certain human beings a lot. Things can be so good, I can't handle it. This, and other things, I thought about last night after being with friends and then being alone with a cheeseburger from La Bonita, a cheeseburger that went down my throat like some elixir out of a fairytale, so yummy that burger, so good that, other things, life.

Giovanni's Room

I read The Fire Next Time a couple of years ago and can barely remember anything about it - really nothing at all - but I do remember that, at the time, I loved it. And I don't know what this means, my inability to recall in detail much of what I have read. I read a lot and love the stuff I do read, but a year or two later, ask me to tell you about that thing, and you will not get much out of my mouth, aside from me telling you this same thing, that I don't retain the details. For me, reading is something else. It's not done for, in later days, being able to recall the details of books with someone or having said I have read it. Rather, it is time away from the world, or perhaps actually time in the world - time away from things that are not the world and which I mistake for it. It's a nice little contemplative time to myself where I can marvel at the abilities of other people to encapsulate nice thoughts in even nicer sentences. I am reading Giovanni's Room right now, and really like it, partly because the narrator is such a catty, hateful person at times. This second quote below is such a good example of that. I just read it and marvelled at what a demolishing zinger this is. Both of these have such a nice rhythmic usage of commas:

That was how I met Giovanni. I think we connected the instant we met. And remain connected still, in spit of our later separation de corps, despite the fact that Giovanni will be rotting soon in unhallowed ground near Paris. Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head. (59)


Giovanni was far from me, drinking marc between an old man, who looked like a receptacle of all the world’s dirt and disease, and a young boy, a redhead, who would look like that man one day, if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future. (73)

**********************************

Last night, I went to Rawhide finally. I got pretty trashed because the bartender was thankfully serving me really stiff drinks. I tried to hit on a couple of older men, none of whom had any interest in me. A rather disappointing night. I then ate two tamales smothered in hot sauce right before I climbed into bed. In the night, those tamales did a little jig on top of my stomach in stilettos, and I woke up with the worst stomachache I have had in recent memory.

the view from the bar of a roof on delancey overlooking the williamsburg bridge

And yet, despite loving several things last night, I would be hard pressed to tell you what stuff I saw and who by. I remember a Matthew Richie. That's about it. But there was nice stuff. I really need to go back to Chelsea this weekend and look at all of the stuff, relook at all the stuff, sober and with perhaps more of my critical faculties about me.

I was pretty shitfaced by eight o'clock and wanted PENIS, kept on shouting about how we should find it, tried to mobilize the party I was with to go to Rawhide - but there is that tried there because the attempt was unsuccesful. Rawhide did not happen, nor penis. I told a waiter on 23rd Street that I loved him. He smiled, having heard me. I told the same to several other people, but either they didn't hear or pretended not to, or maybe - probably - I just never wanted them to hear me, wanted to play love, pretend it was something I was after, but only in a ritualistic sense, something that would allow me to mourn its lack of occurence. But that's all maybe. And had I more energy or more optimism that something may come of it, and that, even if it did, I would want that thing, I might post a Missed Connection about the boy - but, really, what are you going to build on the humoring smile of a stranger? The world! The goddamn motherfucking world! That's what. But there is my lack of luck with the world of Missed Connections lately and also my desire to listen to more Hall and Oates on my headphones and to read more of Giovanni's Room and to never again in my life think that the Internet, this www, is capable of providing me the things I can find, and occasionally do, out on those streets of this city.

everything is free now

Today, hungover, I thought about the choices I make everyday and how living one life prevents me from living others - specifically that there are these choices to be made between notions of adulthood garnered from some unknown source (parents, an old movie, a book - God knows!) and between its seeming opposite, that of reckless abandon, of, for lack of a better term, the rock and roll lifestyle. I had a really good time last night and because I did, because I had such a good time and stayed out so late and imbibed so many substances, I was unable to fulfill my other life today. I called in sick to work today, the first time I have done so at this job for reasons of being hungover and tired. Luckily, this is during a down period at my job. Yesterday, there was about an hour's worth of work to do, and today seemed like it would be the same, so I didn't leave anyone stranded with tons of work, but, still, I couldn't help but feel guilty in the shower about my inability to go to work this afternoon, that I should have, and I thought to the choices we have to make in this life between one thing and other things.

Will I never again get to live that rock and roll lifestyle? Working at the Strand, and the period after that when I was unemployed, was close to this lifestyle in some ways, in that I could get smashed every night and not worry about the consequences of sleeping in until two in the afternoon or showing up brain-dead for work. And I waved goodbye to that in the shower, knowing that that period, or one like that, was never going to happen again. And this is good, obviously - that a body can't sustain that abuse for so long, nor can a mind expand too much enacting the same scenarios so often. It is good to switch things up. But what joy there is in those moments!

So the question I was posing to myself in the shower, the question that I am finding myself asking often is essentially this: How do I balance these competing lives and my desire to live both of them? I do like having this job even though it does bore me silly sometimes. But in doing this, what all am I missing? Anything? And how do I go about experiencing those things while still holding down a job and being in tip-top shape in the morning at this job? Do I need another job?

I hung out with the Florida boys at their house, watched them paint, and drank beer, then gin. And that is what I love, the company of these people, and I don't like that I have to limit that, to at some point say Goodnight and go home so I can wake up in the morning. There was no Goodnight said last night. We went out to the Cock and were bought some drinks by these two men, Marcos and David.

And perhaps it was because I was drunk, but it is also likely that I would have done it sober, I approached one of my crushes, David (a different one), and there might have been some words, but not many, before we were making out. He was chewing this minty gum, and his lips had the flavor of it. The gum ended up in my mouth. He said he wanted it back, and so I kissed him again, returning the gum. I basically told him I wanted to have sex with him. He said Not Tonight, and gave me his card, telling me to email him, something I just did, and something to which I am not necessarily expecting a response.

And here, again, another perfect opportunity to call it a night, to say goodbye, and get to bed and wake up hungover for work, but still at least wake up. But to say goodbye, to end your night when you know the nights of others are still going, that those courses are still being plotted and that yours may intersect, align, or even diverge with them - the thought of that is thrilling and the desire to see how things play out, to see what else might happen, the desire not to die essentially, to be alive and in the company of friends, of human beings, will keep you, or at least kept me, out way into the night, not wanting it to end, not ready for bed.

Marcos took the three of us back to his apartment in SoHo and we got naked and did poppers as Marcos played with our bodies. Even under the haze of poppers and numerous drinks, there was still an aspect to this that was weird, but the amazingness, and the closeness of it, outweighed that. At some point, some coke was snorted as we all sat around his glass dining room table, everyone's nakedness visible through the glass. It was really a lovely moment, a lovely moment in a night of them - and when you think about it, a lifetime of them, and that knowledge is so thrilling. There was talking and cigarettes, Parliaments, smoked on his couch. Behind us on this couch were two Marilyn prints by Warhol. On this couch, he again played with our bodies as we sat on his couch, him sucking our cocks - this under the eyes of two Marilyns, neither one of which seemed to be fazed in the least.

He gave us a ride out to Williamsburg on his way to the airport, dropping us off right after the Williamsburg Bridge. Walking toward home with these two, the sun was starting to come up, dawn cracking through the sky, and at this point, past six in the am, I was still trying to convince myself that I could wake up at eight. And these are the tradeoffs I am talking about, the things I fear that I allow myself to miss because of the necessity of work – that had I been the good boy, not gone out, and been in bed early for work the next day, I would not have had that night, nor the end of it – would not have seen the gorgeous pink of a just breaking day. It is balancing these desires and these obligations that I really need to figure out.