since graduating from college, i have been subject to an ongoing conspiracy to drag me into adulthood. There is talk of jobs, of a worrying lack of work ethic. I canvass for two days. I do hot yoga for two days. I am supposed to have a job. I have been given the responsibility to promote my mom's louise log in social media at the dining room table whenever i want, and i wilt and complain about it. i am damned pathetic. I update this blog with something i wrote and then rewrote once and i think i am amazing.

this hit me toady because i went to the bank to deal with some banking i imagine to be convoluted because i cannot understand it. the woman there, audra, smiled at me as you would an 8 year old when i struggled to recite my freshly memorized social security number. i mixed up one of the digits and she corrected me. i then practiced it a few more times. i am marching into the future. there were questions about credit history, about having a job, about what my family's household income was. This last question really threw me in a funny way, launching me into a wondering mood that is probably rarely seen in the premier accounts relationship cubicle. the household income of the green household has become a kind of mystical figure in my mind. I know we live in an enormous, amazing house, and that my dad has been a professor for many many years. But I don't know the number. I don't know my dad's salary, I don't know the rents our two tenants pay, and I don't know how much our house is worth. I don't know how much electricity costs, or insurance. I don't know how much you need to live off of food that is not canned in your retirement. I am at the stage in my life when i think myself a dashing philanthropist for returning movies to World of Video late so that my fees (my parents' money) might keep them open. And anyway, it's something I half made up to justify my inability to remember to return anything on time. I need to know those numbers so that I can have a little panic and realize that money is real and that I have to have it to putter around the house and be alive. I need to see that money, not thought provoking walks where i congratulate myself for noticing the cement pavement and then remember the movie Mystic River and imagine a sinister formula measuring sidewalks built with children's lives destroyed, not watching fireflies in tompkins square park with the swiss tourists, not be a rentier romantic little shit. there's probably a rougher romance in simply being responsible for my shit, something grounded and excellent in that, and i've got to get to know it. i mean, what a goddamn farce that i love down and out in paris and london so much.

But apparently this kind of behavior can't go on. I've started to look at people who look like they work in amazement at how long they've probably been doing what they do for. That they might not like it particularly, but that their work is a means to the end of fun. I am realizing that the means is what life really is, and I am alarmed. Every single day! Everyone I look at looks like a heroic, bedraggled postman to me, rain or shine. They have the same job! One job! Over and over! And they keep doing it! I have got to get my shit together, this is not going to be cute for much longer.

part of the problem, however, is my creeping contentment. i don't like spending money and family is free, i don't cook because my mom does, my house is beautiful. i am a pleasant person except undeservingly so. teenagers are so difficult because they're insecure. i should be insecure, my self-respect is something i've undeservedly stumbled in to. by what right am i not screaming at everyone, wanting to prove myself? i'm the king of my family dinners, as i ever was, and it makes me disconcertingly content.

in short: i'm realizing that a lot of people spend the vast majority of their waking hours doing stuff they don't really like (working) in order to be able to do other stuff. i've been realizing, getting flabbergasted by the idea that i'm not gonna do what i wanna do always and forever, that these people who work are actually real and what they do is unavoidable. this is heavy shit.

i went over to gc's house, the editor of the local newspaper, who assigned me a job as an investigative reporter. i am to investigate the disappearance of saint vincent's hospital. he has not seen a written word of mine, but he did tell me that i was handsome many, many times. apparently it was bankrupt. there is a difference between urgent care and intensive care. catholic charity will bankrupt you? how did st vincent's get a bad reputation? why did susan sarandon say she wouldn't bring her children there? how did it get to be SO in debt? what are the new ambulance times for people in this neighborhood to the nearest ER?

i've been telling people i want to write, that i do write, and i give them sprawling examples of what i want to write about. i am 22 years old and i have never had anything published and i announce my intention to write treatises on water, or dust, or the bankruptcy and closure of the hospital where i was born. my hilarious luck is having been given that last subject by the Westview, a local newspaper my dad writes for. I was introduced to the newspaper and its editor, was told I was handsome, and dubbed "investigative reporter." It's damningly appropriate that while i'm flailing around in the grandness of my old testament subject matter (water? dust?) i'm told to write about the billion dollar collapse of the hospital of my young life. The assignment smacks of Synecdoche, that awful Charlie Kaufman movie in which the protagonist erects his whole universe on a theater set in order to do justice to the majesty of his miserable little life because he's so attached to all the details. The editor told me i would win a pulitzer after explaining the inadequacy of the New York Times' reporting. I need a smaller frame.


my ambition is sprawling and useless, i lack a frame, as with that diploma of mine, through which to see the world. and that's all that makes anything worthwhile, that which you cut out. anyway, i brought this up because a friend at a bar mentioned that the nytimes was soliciting articles from young people about living with their parents. it's clear that they want stuff about the economic crisis, about the young mired with the old, the young itching to start the future. i don't have that. my parents are great! they're really pushing me out of the nest. i want a deadline. I WANT A DEADLINE

i'm going to be family dinners for life. i'm met with increasing wonderment when i explain how i live at home and don't know what's outside of it. i get depressed, i don't have an itch. i get along far too well with my parents to flee, and so i eat with mom and imperceptibly slide into virginal adulthood, where my parents know my room isn't clean and we have mature disagreements about it. i'm not an adult, i'm a very mature child, depressed at his precociousness. where is my itch? where is my deadline?

Family dinners are an insidious institution in my life. They anchor me to my home, to my beautiful home where the floorboards beneath my seat at the table are worn to splinters. the places in this house where i have bonked my head and stubbed my toes have become dangerously familiar, i am too big a person grown sentimental to the stifling familiarities of my home. I've got to hate the stairs that squeak because they squeak now, not be charmed because they always have. this is difficult in my case because the truth of the matter is that this house in greenwhich village is the best house in the world, so it's all the more important that i cling hatefully to how i can never remember which way the knobs turn on and off in the upstairs bathroom. my growing realization of how desperately i have to get out of here is measurable in the pettiness of my complaints. i have to invent these things. i am domesticated, i am peaceable. my mom tells me i am mature.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSAd3NpDi6Q&feature=related

i have to get away.

I have been complaining about these splinters for a long time

so, what are the essential facts? i want a deadline, i'm a more pleasant, reasonable version of my 16 year old self, complete with a messy room and an uncharted future and steady work babysitting and dogwalking; i get along very well with my parents; i'm more inclined to mope than fight with my family; MY HOUSE IS THE PROBLEM. MY HOUSE STYMIES ME. It is filled with light and comfortable and a hammock swings enticingly and the fridge is full and there is nothing i need to do but what i did when i was 16, the only difference being that i now readily unload the dishwasher. But it's the same chore it's always been. i am filled with ambition so sprawling that i'll never get out of here; i need a frame for my degree; this is not going to be cute for much longer;

write about the alarming envy you felt listening to jerry stahl talking about being a crack head and a heroin addict, about you're insecurities about not having enough memories, about not having lived, and how that lead you to mistake actually wanting to live the "adventure," as you put it, of being a crack head for desperately wanting that memory, to have experiences that rich to draw on. i want things to look back on. i mean, i listened to a story about a guy shitting neon blue robitussun DM in adult diapers and i left thinking that he'd made crack addiction sound dangerously appealing, so intense is my desire to HAVE MEMORIES. i felt so stupid trying to explain to some middle aged woman how that story sounded appealing to me, how i'd heard it as a siren song for crack addiction. what a silly person i am.

alexander mcqueen

Clothing is a hidden hegemon. Cloaked in the rhetoric of comfort and practicality, we've come to squeeze our fat heads through our little collars and believe it's the only way things could ever be. A shirt ends at a waist and so too must pants. But we invented those boundaries; we even invented waists -- and sheepish hips and enthusiastic breasts. We have a very particular and very arbitrary conception of our bodies.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty is dedicated to undoing all of that, about outraging the dogmatic silhouettes of the modern world. There are dresses that poof forward that make women look like they're staggering backward and discreetly boxy tartan dresses, effacing curves into "classical," powerful flatness. There are dresses with hips like boxing gloves. My favorite are the pants and skirts that sit below the nook of one's butt. They're called bumsters -- they show off your butt crack. But it's an erotic rediscovery; it's flesh as flesh as flesh! 

McQueen has a spectacularly irreverent eye for the body and at times it's almost disrespectful. There was a piece centered on a metal box attached to the model's lower thighs and wrists such that she had to step, ever bent, with an eery, crab-like synchrony between her arms and legs; her whole stature was restructured around the implant. But then he also gives, imagining us a more fantastical species. He designed a silvery corset that grasps like ribs and vertebrae that then extends into a tail. McQueen's announcement of his own version of the human spine has unrestraint of childhood and the elegance and expertise of having fit that version around real bones. It's beautiful.

I wish he'd made prosthetics. It would have been unbelievably unethical to set this man on the handicapped, but one can dream. He reinvented the silhouette, the balance and shape of a human being. He gave us grotesque, fabulous and new -- new! -- ways of looking at the world.

the kingdom

man, that was fucked. thanks for recommending that, ari. that was best when it was funny. the progressing horror made it a pretty straightforward thing. but when it was commenting on reality, like bondo and his operation, his love of the cadaver, of cutting people up, or the whole saga with the archives, that stuff was really terrific. leave it to that asshole von trier to end it with a failed abortion, could there be a more upsetting way to end anything? and he calls it a new beginning. that's a worldview.

also the whole commentary with mona; that stuff was appropriately eery, though really, we might do well to humanize the mentally handicapped, even if they're in a vegetative state. as soon as you affix the saliva to the chin, there's no sympathy, only horror. but yeah, there was marvelous stuff with helmer, the worst person in the world and his fanatical hatred of the danes, that was truly excellent.

man, ari i and are really excellent friends for him to have recommended that to me. that is when you're past all the boundaries.

i loved his concluding remarks, i think that's really excellent.

gay gay gay hooray

I think pretty much everyone wishes they were having more sex. Gay marriage was passed in New York state yesterday and everybody is jubilant, especially since today was the gay pride parade. What's interesting is that it becomes an occasion to wear very little clothing. It makes sense because gayness is sexuality, and celebrating it is about celebrating sex. But it's funny how there really isn't symbolism of same sex sex, there's just sex. I've never seen a poster with two men or two women holding hands or doing it or anything else, I've just seen a lot of people in their underwear. It's a blast of indiscriminate crotch and nipple and belly button skin, and nothing about monogamous romance.

this isn't to say that that doesn't exist, just that that's the more refined, restrained version. you see homosexual couples atop wedding cakes at the local michael kors store, and you see the greenwhich village gay gingham'd lovers holding hands, but on a day like today plain old sex is what carries the crowds. this leads to some incongruous imagery, like the men with veils and no pants. this is an awfully irreverent thing when homosexuals are finally celebrating that righteous and puritanical privilege, but it's really just fun, i suppose. i get the impression -- which i hope i state rightly, because i'd hate to perpetuate an untruth -- that swingerdom is more common amongst gay people than straight ones, and that will inevitably shape their contributions to the institution.

But to get back to how everyone wishes they were having more sex, a day like today really reveals how many people are ready to take off their shirts at the slightest provocation. and whether or not they are worthy of the g string, a disconcerting number are clamoring to wear them. we forget this when we and they are clammed up by our lack of a mutual understanding or excuse to put on these g strings, but when we have the opportunity it DOES NOT go wasted. I mean, this isn't to say that it'd be a seven day a week thing, but the sheer volume of these indecently dressed people cannot but indicate that there brazen demographic that would take advantage of this much more often than they're offered the chance. these people could be out in force every sunday morning, redefining that now sleepy, impious morning and our idea of one's "sunday best." this isn't just novelty, this is clearly the expression of a need. i hope everyone's a bit less frustrated tonight.

i went for a walk with my sister to h&h bagels because it's closing this sunday. carla and i unexpectedly walked the whole way there. we'd intended to take the train at 18th street, but that's really a bogus thing. one's reluctant to go down into a subway when one's walking, and a 3 mile hike is a wonderful thing to stumble into, except for the terrible bits between 30th and 50th or so, when there's an unavoidable swath of fast traffic and with basement hatches and the bike locks of messenger boys clanking. Hell's kitchen, or MiMa as developers are trying to rebrand it, is a really hurried place where every restaurant delivers.

carla and i had some serious conversation like we always do. This time we lectured each other on creating stuff, on the significance of being generative. it's topical for me because i want to write and i feel i have to justify and clarify my ambitions. i've clumsily told people that i want to be famous because that's an easy thing to say, but it's also very stupid. i don't want to be famous necessarily, but i want to have the stuff i write exist outside of myself, for it to be a satellite that doesn't rely on me personally for it's vitality. i want to take an empty word document, like a mold in a forge, and pour little bits of myself into it. and i want those bits to harden into something meaningful even in that anonymous forge, where people are sweaty and distracted and wearing welding masks. my ambition is to have those bits prove more durable than they were on my computer screen and my keyboard dirtied with my fingers, i want them to achieve at least the fleeting permanence and stand alone legitimacy of a newspaper article. I want to be more than fragile nostalgia. i want to be in an archive, not a scrapbook.

they're filming a movie on my street, and it's early evening for day. It's funny, when you turn onto the block seeing the klieg lights is a lot like seeing daylight walking out of a matinee. they're dream makers even on their coffee breaks, sitting on my stoop.

I had just come from World of Video, the video rental store teetering delightfully on the edge of bankruptcy. the place smelled strongly of garlic, and pete, the ruddy, slightly paunchy, sad eyed and immensely sweet stalwart, explained that he had finished heating up dinner. talking to pete about movies can seem superficial because one thing goes quickly to the next. when i asked if he had seen virgin spring he had years ago, and spoke briefly about it before mentioning that the last house on the left, "a nasty little horror movie," was a remake of it. but these detours aren't because he isn't deep thinking, his knowledge is simply too vast to not spill into my equally sprawling ignorance. i've been returning movies half a week late there and justifying it by claiming its a roundabout philanthropy; pete wouldn't take my petty contributions but i can sneak something into their rent check this way. but also two days is really much too short to have to watch a movie, what kind of ridiculous, outdated business plan is that? i hope this dinosaur lives forever, the air thick with scents not normally associated with plastic boxes and well scrubbed dvds.

i've just watched Together, a recent swedish movie, that was recommended to me by pete and some other guy at world of video. i really, really hated it. More than boring, more than tacky and unbelievable and trivializing, Together promotes some really alarming bullshit. at the beginning the sister of a guy in the commune is struck by her husband and she leaves with her kids and joins them. the husband spends the movie drinking and being violent. in the last evening in which the movie takes place, he shows up at the door of the commune with presents for the kids and flowers for her. she slams the door in his face and tells him it's over repeatedly, but by the end of the night they have reconciled, the children are happy, the roses have been accepted, everyone plays soccer and the movie ends with them kissing. This is fucked up. nothing has been fixed, this guy just managed to not be an asshole for less than 12 hours and it is on that criminally false note that Together founds its message of togetherness.

some idiots on the internet writing about this movie mentioned the non-commune characters who were also big losers, the husband who struck his wife was a slave to the bottle, and another asshole was characterized as a slave to porn. this was understood to somehow equalize matters, to make it an evenhanded thing between commune and non-commune life. all that actually does is callously and shallowly widen the baseless humiliations moodysson perpetrates on these characters; this movie's either idiotically misanthropic or philanthropic but it's idiotic one way or the other. what a fucking stupid movie, i am so sad that pete recommended this crap.

the movie is really just about ridiculing people. it's about ridiculing homosexuality, vegetarianism, meditating, not watching television and socialism. the acting is terrible, the message is fucked. the first scene, in which they celebrate franco's death, is delightful, and much of the rest is at best hackneyed teen love and at worst the crude, moronic undermining of serious things.

hur gammal ar (trema) du?

jag ar (trema) fem (seven?) ar (super dot)

jag pratar, du pratar
jag pratar engelska, jag pratar inte svenska

jag forstar (trema then superdot) inte

kan du upprepa det?

kan du tala langsammare (superdot)

kan du hjalpa (trema) mig?

ja nej snella (trema) =MAYBE

varsagod (superdot)

ursakta (trema) mig EXCUSE ME

vi ses snart (later)
vi ses imorgan (tomorrow)
hejda(superdot) ache for kira

ha en bra dag

jag ar (trema) ledsen

foraldrar (trema o and a)

cykel

gud god

et kaffe, en stol, et bord, godis, pengar, penna, lampa, en sooooffa,

The city of Koronch has too many people in it. They're a lean citizen body because they're constantly chafing against someone else's ribs. Everyone's clothing is patched from all the rubbing and the few people that have shoes wear those hideous toe sneakers because there isn't any room for bodily extensions. some of the grouchy people carry around scissors with which they trim long hairs and flowing skirts and poke at the flesh of the overweight.

people move down the city's streets like a river; all the streets are one way, and the people twitch when they have to wait at a corner. and where people turn corners the bricks have been rounded off by the thousands of pushing pedestrians; the city is a canyon built of hurrying human hands. you can identify someone from Koronch by the red brick color striped down both sides of their bodies and dusting their hair; they've rubbed off the faded buildings which resume their color at shoulder height. the streets from above look like a lot of wriggling clay.

When it rains they raise their mouths to the sky and their tongues are like red tadpoles, miniature Koronch's inside them.

The city's emblem is the arch.

our internet isn't working unless you sit in a particular spot on carla's bed. my father is bellowing into the phone. the phone is on speaker phone but my father is nonetheless pressing it to his ear. when he was talking to a voice recognition machine, he couldn't hold back the passion in his voice. it's touching to hear a suffering man enunciating so clearly.

now he is raving to a real person with the quavering, articulate power of the righteous and wronged about customer service and demanding unreasonable assurances from a woman so patient that it's hard to believe she's listening to anything he's saying. now he is ending the phone call and demanding to know her name. Rashmad Sanad. I feel like Rashma has some small revenge in having my father, North American that he is, have to ask her to spell it out.

i walked around with dad for a while, past a long block of 4 or 5 silent fire trucks with their lights whirling, talking occasionally and feeling like my dad is someone i'm extremely close to. i'm going to go to bed now but i really dread tomorrow. i really dread putting on that t shirt and becoming a force of irritation and guilt in their lives. i should probably suck it up because it's a great cause, but dear god what an unpleasant thing to have to do. fucking catskills and fucking gas drilling, it's all so personal.

good night

oh and those two idiot girls i worked with today, Y and S, two best friends from UMich, S is from fucking alaska, were the most shamelessly idiotic people i have ever met in my life. i have rarely heard people talk about shit so useless at such length and with such drumming, self-satisfied repetition. the alaskan repeated her shtick about "actively dying" in her unsuccessful canvassing and "swimming" (it was a humid day and this was her creative way of describing it). They both went on about some indescribably dumb shit about how they would "permanently attach" themselves to lady gaga and ke$ha and some other public figures who excite them. their inanity was truly tireless.

i am exhausted. i was out on the street today talking to strange and sometimes hostile people for many, many hours. actually, i just thought of this, being out canvassing to protect the catskills from gas drilling isn't a terribly controversial thing, and many of the most pleasant fly by interactions i had were with people who opposed it, who guiltlessly passed by, swathed in righteousness. the really big assholes are usually the apathetic people, and probably those whose apathy is tinged with guilt. who is more unpleasant than someone cornered? who knows full well what they probably should be doing?

i learned today that standing for long periods of time with flat feet is particularly exhausting and actually painful, which is really interesting and unexpected. the idea that an "arch" makes us more comfortable makes me believe in architecture, that a retreat to cubes, to a primitive focus on square footage (in which the flat footed people have the advantage) will not actually serve us well, makes me love those archetypal arch builders.

i mean REALLY though, what a shitty, exhausting job. i've worked at a phonathon before, but this is an entirely different experience.

i just wrote k an email and now i don't care to write anymore. i need to go to bed. i am pooped.

and now i just watched The Virgin Spring and i'm dumbfounded. it's not a movie you can really talk about without being an idiot.

watching him wrestle with the birch tree was absolutely incredible

who/what is odin?

i'm not different from when i was 12, just twisted from those roots, built on that ground. i'm defined by the structures of those years, by my bent teeth like sinkholes, by my fluctuating friends like population density. but then the city's changed these days.


was looking at the sky before, it's amazing how buildings bite chunks out of it. one doesn't even LOOK at the sky in a city for how fixated we are on buildings, but when you do it all looks like so much tetris, so much gobbling at the precious blue above.

funniest thing in the world: someone came to this blog by searching "my vagaina leeks something" because of the thing i wrote about cooking leeks and seeing the vagina monologues for the first time. oh my god that is so fucking amazing.

since i can't find any books about begging i figure i'll just go ask homeless people what it's like. what do you say? "spare some change?" what about reaching the dollar threshold? is a rattling cup useful or a hand more poignant? are you familiar with the islamic looking people in paris who sit silently with their faces cast down with a simple cup in front of them? dyou think that's an effective tactic? does it make you angry to think that people really don't give a shit about you and your poverty? what do you think of beggars with dogs? have you ever feigned insanity or tried to be elaborately wretched, like fake fake limbs or something? are people more charitable in one season or another? how are tourists? what's the first thing you notice about a person? is someone with a grocery bag apt to give you something from it? have you ever seen some chump counting money as they walked past you? if so, dyou think they gave a shit that their wealth, that the potential for raising you out of abjection here on the street, had been so close at hand and therefore more poignantly denied than usual? is it better to look sad or happy or somewhere in between? i always want to look at beggars, to read their signs and marvel at their misery, but i try to avert my eyes unless i can and do give something, and even then i only allow myself a very short glance. do people ever stare at you without giving? do people stare at you when they do give? does anyone make eye contact with you at all?

i'd just like to marvel at the dynamic between the haves and have nots at its most lopsided and freak show-esque, where fly by sympathy (or is it just guilt, isn't it always just guilt?) is the currency of survival. i guess giving money to beggars is like shaking off sadness, loosing the ballast of not-yet-performed charity to continue on lighter. it's fundamentally something that doesn't stay with you; the ones that give take off in their hot air balloons, gone until their righteousness cools.

even beyond their physical privation, beggars are very unfortunate people, vague relations of the private investigator, because they have too much to do with the private ugliness of the people who interact with them. They're vessels for the things people feel insecure about, like their jealousy over their spouse or their indifference to other people's suffering. We don't like to look at them, so the beggar on his patch of sidewalk or the investigator behind his anonymous door are appropriately disposable, quickly walked past, anchored to their obscure spots. It's irritating when a beggar stakes out a subway entrance because they then intrude regularly and entrench themselves and their guilty implications into your daily schedule, a signpost of your shitty characteristics.

Father's Day

We took my father to Governor's Island for father's day to have a picnic. It was a surprise, so my dad, who likes to be in charge and to know what's happening, was sulking for a while, but he picked up when it came time to march onto the ferry and the secret came out. That was when we started seeing the punk kids. One of them held up the boat for a while getting kicked off for having an open container of alcohol. I think punk kids are pretty rarely better rewarded for their alternative clothes and lifestyles than when i look at them, because i'm mystified and revolted by everything they do, which i think is all they want. I have too much faith in the simple beauty of an individual human being to believe a punk kid could happily exist alone in front of a mirror; it's got to be a choice built on toxic feedback, on their prodding each other in their hideous vacuum.

We arrived a couple minutes later. When we started heading down a path to find a grassy knoll to start making memories there were more punk kids, and then we started hearing the punk music. Governor's Island is a really old fashioned place. Enormous American Elms have been growing there for more than 150 years, as erect and majestic as government monuments. Until the 1960s, the biggest house was the home of the highest ranking military official on the island; the grass is all perfectly mowed. Hearing this punk music was wonderfully discordant. My parents were really unhappy about it. It was too loud, and they also wandered over to take derisive note of the paltry audiences, if passionate.

Father's day is an amusing occasion for a punk show, and one on Father's day amidst the martial charm of Governor's island is truly hilarious. For a subculture that I think has a lot to do with hating The Man, this was a rich occasion for an especially passionate exorcism of the establishment. While we were eating, my mom told a story about living in Williamsburg in the 80s with my dad, who owned a building there at the time. A couple blocks away from the building a punk band had taken up practicing and made a lot of noise. My father, thinking like the truly mischievous landlord he was, suggested sneaking into the building to steal the fuses for the band's apartment, and so they did.

My father, now 74, has slowed down from his days as a punk-silencing secret operative. Still, after lunch, he spent half an hour on the phone with 311 trying to file a noise complaint. It's sort of wack to realize that my youthful distaste may age into short circuiting the parties of the young and fun and loud, but it probably will.

On the ferry back, there was a young man with filthy green hair wearing the standard patchwork of blustery anger. "Nihilist" blared across his back and "fuck" and "you" were written down his respective pant-legs. He was also holding doggedly onto the pinky finger of a young woman who was dressed in a similar style. The punks aren't inhuman, just tasteless. There's hope yet for reconciliation with The Good Old Dad.

last night

I showed up at "The Queen" or "Queens" or whatever it was at 4 yesterday afternoon for c's birthday/graduation celebration. The Queen is a really odd place to be at 4pm because the walls and lighting have a dusty indifference to anything that's happening in the outside world. There was a mirrored wall and dozens of relatives and a lot of drinking and only the blazing sunlight lighting up the front window to remind us of how awfully, awfully early it was. I sat at a "kids" table with C, her boyfriend, and some other people and at first it was really awkward. When you walk into a party there's always a certain adjustment to the mood of the place, but with The Queen, and with the people who had begun to adapt to The Queen there was the timeless awkward restraint that comes with very consciously celebrating something where you feel you should either be clinking a glass for a speech or crawling under the table.

I was sitting across from B and I liked him a great deal, he had a really soft face and his beard made it even friendlier, with hair flowing down the sides of his face till about his ears, but it could have naturally flowed on down to his shoulders. He works with computers. I drank several glasses of prosecco really quickly. There was also j, who speaks very loudly but is really fascinating, and c, who is a difficult person to celebrate if you don't have a parent's zeal for humiliating her.

apparently there were some printers in the mid 1700s who, protesting their working conditions and the relatively plush lives of the cats their bosses kept in their factory, chased down, tried, convicted and hung dozens of them. C has flabbergasting views from her window, a little boy said it looked like the statue of liberty was waving to the sea.

and then we went to char 4, a whiskey bar near c's house on smith, and drank whiskey. it was modern looking and had tons of whiskey and a hilariously hearty menu. i had a couple glasses of kentucky gentleman, which cost a dollar an ounce. there's a real sweetness in having such down at heel offerings in a place for connoisseurs, to appreciation for that gut-turning drink for any budget. some people have a dep wine soul, and it's kind to grant them a place on that broad spectrum of whiskey loving, at any price.

later i deliberately took a convoluted route to where i was going in williamsburg, but the subway made it even more complicated and i got where i was going quite late and it was sold out already. finding obscure parties takes you through so much emotion. there is the initial worry that you aren't going to the right place, that the numbers will skip suddenly, that N Kent should actually be S, that the numbers shouldn't be rising because you're going down and it's all much too quiet, but then it opens up and you start to hear the thumping and the pairs going home together, picking each other up and offering to read their iphone verse. and then the whole herd emerges, leaning sulkily against chainlink fences and smoking many, many cigarettes, desensitized to match the big black bouncers urging them out of the area. i want to say something about how improbable and exciting it is to come across this herd in the wilderness, like a carnivorous party cat sneaking up on wildebeest , the long awaited camp.

taking the train back i was reading, and had been e.b. white's personal essays. they were so silly on the train, when drunk. nothing could have felt stuffier. when you just want to crawl in a crevice, reading someone so articulately lambast the world around them, the adorableness of the volunteer fire department, the overexcitability of the radio's hurricane coverage, it's like that guy who talks too much when you're high. e.b. white doesn't make it look easy.

get a job.

be less complicated! i feel like i've been trying to live and speak in that headspace beyond where i'm smart enough to make sense of my thoughts. i'm constantly grasping at some higher, grander thread for all my feelings and shit and it's really silly and crippling. i can't think straight. was just talking to mom and she gave me the macro version of the "you're either hungry or tired" talk which is that i just graduated from college and have lots of pent up energy and need to get a job and do something with myself, and if i don't i'll continue cannibalizing myself and getting all in my head and over excited. i'm sure she's right. i've had enough of this grandiose malaise anyway, i think i've had a taste of this complicated version of myself i once fantasized about being and i'm pretty sick of it. get a job.

am disgusted, exhausted with this stupid thing i've been writing. it's sprawling, incoherent, wrong. i can't pull it together, i can't make it into anything, and it's really getting me down. it's like a foot on the neck of my dreams, all those stupid sentences, i don't know what i've been trying to say. stupid stupid stupid. i also have a hot pepper flake floating in my throat, it feels like it gusts around whenever i take a breathe before resettling on another piece of flesh at the back of my throat, like a fly that isn't much scared of you anymore but still goes through the motions.

ah what utter shit. i want to go get quite drunk.

bikram

so that nearly killed me. i don't lead a terribly strenuous life and so today, accompanying my mother to some exercise, i didn't expect to come close to losing consciousness and need to sit down for extended periods of time. that was CRAZY.

i strained and slipped and could not hold my body together, i did not remember to breathe for the pain and difficulty of it all, the breathing exercises exhausted me. i really didn't take this thing seriously, hubris is life threatening in that room.

one bizarre thing was the constant folksy patter of the teacher, who had a shaved, brightly dyed strip of hair like a headband. and so, as we were getting in touch with our bodies, with our breathing, with perfect, blank exhaustion, that auctioneering talk carried us through, as if in the depths of my soul were narrated by the selling of old silverware and bad, bad jokes.

dripping, dripping dripping, when we lay down my ears were drowning in salt, the rug, the mat was enormously salty. should eat potato chips.

my mom did great.

i went back again two days after. it was much better, still painful. when we did the pose where you dig your fingers in under your feet and try to push your knees straight, i felt like i was strangling in my leg hair.

it's a place where if you forget to breathe you start yawning, gigantically and involuntarily, in order to gulp it in. the nasal breathing they want from you did not suffice for my whale thirst. you're desperate in there.

and the thing is i don't even know if im doing any of it correctly. i feel like i did better this past time, but it could be that i didn't do what i was supposed to. in bsaeball it was always hard to concentrate on twisting your foot, locking the shoulders, eye on the ball. in this place, the shifting of the weight, the breathing, simply trying to keep my eyes open is gigantically taxing.

good morning

i feel like i could be the groundhog for my house, announcing what kind of day it is, because i lumber out of that room i'm as blind as a mole. it's pure happenstance, and on this fine morning i was convinced that i was lazing the day away at 7:45. so here i am.

i'm going to go to fairway with mom, going to give m a call and hope that i didn't insult him or do wrong, and give the other m a call too because i like her a lot. i may try to get a haircut from l but i'll have to wash my hair before doing that because that would be rude, have to napalm the forest path before she can trim the trees.

can't can't can't wait to be in stockholm.

beginners

beginners is about a bunch of maladjusteds, really. as the protagonist puts it, they're feeling "the sadness our parents didn't have time for." he has a father who came out at 75, after his mother's death, and she, the pretty, magical anna, has a father who frequently calls to tell her about wanting to kill himself.

but it turns out his father is ready to be bandana'd and rainbowed and courageously fun-seeking, and the cord is pulled on the nagging phone calls. and so we're left with the maladjusteds. he's a charmingly mopey graphic designer working on a history of sadness -- slide one is a sketch of a blank sphere: "before sadness was created" -- and she's an actress with a penchant for hotel rooms. they meet, delightfully, at a costume party with him as freud, mopily working the couch and her as a miming laryngitis sufferer. and then they play what a girl, ranting behind my mother and me after the movie, called children's games.

the girl complained that yes, indeed, they like children's games, but WHAT ELSE. and it's a legitimate question. they're acting out the neuroses their parents didn't have time for, and that is charming and sweet and beautiful, and the gay father is a darling and there's a little dog too, and i suppose it's all drawn together as a picturesque malaise, but there really isn't much. ewan magregor's eyes have been drunk with sadness for decades. but it's so sweet!


with alternately twinkling and mopey eyes, distant and playful, two maladjusted lovers deal with the legacy of the well scrubbed lie of happiness in the fifties. one's father just came out at 75 while the other's calls regularly to say he wants to kill himself. they have laconic, peculiar fun, have intimacy and have intimacy issues. there is a jack russel and a stable of lively gay friends. there is a lot of time for "the sadness our parents didn't have time for." it's a picturesque malaise and when it's playful, like the costume party where he plays freud, manning the couch, and she a kind of harpo with laryngitis, it is the most delicate, magical cute.

midnight in paris

what a sweet, sweet movie. it was like inception for romantic comedies, the similarities were actually hilarious: marion cotillard as dream/love interest, paris, deeper deeper deeper into the past, the americans, the happily deluded conclusion. except maybe it was not deluded here, maybe it was real. it's such an optimistic movie, such a sweet thing; i was terrified for a time that the pedantic fellow at the beginning was going to characterize the whole movie, that it'd be another indulgently punitive exercise, but here daylight was just a preposterous interruption -- trotsky, the unbelievable fiancee, cheap is cheap. happy happy thing. i said goodbye to m, which was sweet too.

the recorder birds, little Indian children on their balconies, SO many Indian people how wonderful.

the meaty sky, clouds like pulverized escalope and the rich, dark grey blue like dryer lint, except commingling in the heavens where escalopes leap like mountain goats in spinning dryers, but then everything does turn to lint after a time. all those different blues. and how walking away from that sunset is like that cool guys don´t look at explosions song, that there is so much happening behind you, except, more likely, you´re just indifferent, a heathen.

and the guy at sana, and his brother, probably, who just makes you think it’s a magical place and that you¨re awfully distractable, this man aging and youthing uncannily, but they both wear v neck black t shirts and have the same same same nose, and how the younger one, the warmer one, who hadn´t yet been deadened by how incredibly ugly sana is, as if to prove to everyone and have them prove it to themselves that they+re really just there for the food ++ it cannot be anything but a purely culinary experience in there, those air conditioning fixtures are clearly meant to provoke rather than cool, who gave me such a nice little knowing, older brother nod when my takeout was ready.

and the ballfields on ball street, where the quebecois coaches exorted lehhts go lehhhhhts go

and apparently that area is really poor but its evidently the poor of workers who aren’t well paid for their work, but so many families, the beautiful little girls on the street, like a warmer Hasidim. AHHHHH HOW WONDERFUL THAT PLACE IS.

and the Acadie metro station with the pepsi stuck in between, must have been thrown, stained on the sides. could be in the MLB says uncomprehending passerby

and finally the little sprinkler i thought was a hurricane of cicadas, i was so flush with my senses, with the little things, i was smelling the roses, inventing them

is clint eastwood´s conservatism implicit in his crime filled movies, he sees the world that way and therefore

last night i was gulping air, like i was climbing mountains with every step, like i was a snake unhitching his jaw because he wanted to swallow the world. so much delicious air popping and cracking between my jaws. and singing, i always want to sing when i´m like that, and so i did, please don´t step on the bush, and that southern accent, and really really really finding s hilarious because she did not understand how we felt, though drugged herself. guffawing at the sky by the bus station was not because of montreal´s corrupt construction business juxtaposed with the quebec library, so silly. honestly, all you´d need to do is parachute people into our circumstance, of our wakefulness, into those wee hours of the morning, into that hideous downtown with those holes in the bright sky that hadn´t yet lit up anything beneath it, and you would have a lot of drugged people. and k, k the absolute lunatic, eyes dripping and staggering with mirth, almost frightening, took the risotto away from me in bed, which was cruel, but she was losing it too much to speak, so funny. s was encouraging her to puke, in the middle of van horne, good way to go, i felt so too. i remember her upper jaw seemed detached from her face, raving, and i felt that too.

and stereo! stereo did have amazing sound, it cradled my body like a trillion dots, it buzzed my face like the gentlest dentist instead of the rollicking, bursting noise in a normal club. except there were just so many topless gay men, of all top varieties

miami! this thing is done! DONE!

Starting with the plane’s descent into Miami ruins the whole rotten surprise. The tidiness with which it’s laid out is a fearful premonition. All the buildings fit neatly into the spaces outlined by the roads, and it looks like making those roads so straight was the reason everything else is the way it is; it looks like the roads might be the whole point. Miami is astoundingly full of cement; it makes you notice how human development represses actual ground, of the unnatural falseness of all that gray, of all those right angles.

Miami is also a strangely flat place. Even from the rakish angle of the plane window, nothing sticks out from the ground; its buildings don’t scrape the sky as much as squat beneath it. This isn’t to say there aren’t tall buildings in Miami, only that they don’t reach up. This might be because there’s nothing to fear from the sky in Miami. Because nothing ever falls out of it there’s no reason for the complications of pointiness, of angles not ninety degrees on which snow or rain could accumulate. Rather than soar, these buildings are built to bask. They don’t have that narrowing, accelerating upward movement of something like the Empire State Building, that striving oneupsmanship of trying to be a bit closer to the clouds and the moon. In Miami the third floor often looks like the thirtieth; height is stacking floors until the building is tall enough to appear worldly and urban. Miami is submissively content under its sky, it knows it’s high and wide up there but it doesn’t care to climb up. And you couldn’t climb up anyway: the clouds here, the handholds of sky climbing, are pathetically frayed and malnourished little things. There’s just that coddling, infinite blue. And so it squats.

We came to Miami under the misapprehension that you could walk or take public transportation to get where you wanted to go, under the misapprehension, in a word, that Miami is a city. Miami is not a city, and only its saddest inhabitants don't drive. This sadness is partly because you aren't very well off if you don't have a car, but also because you will have to spend time on the metro, the bus and the sidewalks, all of which encourage you to think about infinity and solitude and whether there is any good in the world. Waiting for public transportation is soul crushing and you can’t not wait.
Miami’s transit system is literally crippling. I like taking buses in cities because, unlike the deserts of sidewalk in Miami, the stops are close enough together to race the bus. Your head start is the time until the next one and you can run looking over your shoulder and catch them as they pull in behind you. Bus racing is silly in that you arrive at the same time, only sweaty, but it’s invigorating to not have to offer up your limbs in sacrifice to the god of public transportation, to not move so that you will, to bind your feet in order to be better carried. In Miami, however, the bus-savior is a laggard and the princesses die virgins in their castles.

The people in the buses and metros behave with a peculiar combination of dreariness and brashness that seems to come from spending time in places that disrespect them by their structural decrepitude, that have society’s neglect of them embedded in the stained linoleum and the yellow fuzz poking out of the sticky seats. Many of these people react to this insulting dinginess by blasting tinny cell phone music into the open air, eyes closed, transported, performing. Their eschewal of headphones seems like part of both a hostile and hopeful fantasy of being on the mic, of aggressively colonizing the wretched public transit system with a purposeful raucousness, of swaggering on the margins of society. In his essay “Entertainment and Utopia,” Richard Dyer wrote about how musicals give audiences the feeling of utopia; the dancing and singing embody the spontaneity and effusiveness and fellowship of a better world. I think the cell phone singers are trying to key into that world, that on some level they hope everybody’ll join in, like in those YouTube videos of food court patrons breaking into song. But transit acoustics aren’t kind; the swagger is slightly schizophrenic.

As the mayor of Paris in the 1860s, Georges-Eugène Haussmann razed a great deal of the city under the pretense of modernizing what had become a dark, crowded, alley-filled and sneaky place, but what some historians have recast as an effort to reshape a city ideal for scrappy uprisings. While Paris, by the standard of other cities, is still rotten through with crannies, Haussmann gave it a few boulevards – with names like Avenue de la Grande Armée (“Great Army”) – on which little people would be littler and soldiers could march more breezily. Miami is the hideous consummation of a Haussmannian project. It is a good place for wind to blow or tanks to roll or, rather, for driving.

Miami is not designed for people but for people in the geometric containers that are cars. To drive is to try to embrace Miami’s dubious, promise, to attempt to be sane on its alien grid. Everyone drives. This is obviously manifest in the traffic, but also, more strikingly, in the mind-blowing number of parking lots. Miami stuffs its bra with them; the need to park cars is a lot of what makes it dense and tall enough to appear to be a city; the first ten floors of many buildings are parking lots and many other buildings simply are parking lots.

This results in a bizarre disjunction between the sidewalk and the buildings in Miami. It’s both mysterious and alienating to stand in front of one of its faceless structures in the way it would be to walk through a toll both and try to coax the metal bar into rising. And though there are sometimes doors through which pedestrians could hypothetically enter, they’re absurd (and locked) gestures, vestiges of building conventions on a new and unsettling planet. I wanted to knock on the walls, to wave my arms; the experience evokes a caveman confronted with a television. Buildings exist here in that they loom and cast shadows, they exist as the walls of a windy canyon. How people actually get into these buildings is something of a mystery, but it definitely has to do with cars.

Math is pure and factual and true because it has nothing to do with the sloppiness of the physical world. Trigonometry, for example, does not care about language or time or death, it will exist, austerely lawful, anywhere and forever. Living in Miami is kind of like trying to make a home in the tents of SOH CAH TOA, as reasonable, as human, as rational as building a house with boards the square root of three feet long. Miami’s urban planning is spectacularly indifferent to the experience of being a human on two feet. Its streets are parallel lines that really won’t ever meet, as if those tacky photos of two people walking side by side on train tracks were, instead of a hokey vision of growing old together, a lament of eternal, irreconcilable solitude. You get confronted by the horizon at the end of every street; there is no refuge in Miami. There are just those palm trees, shaved, naked, humpable. They’re the perfect streetwalkers to line the highways, as organic as global warming.

The inhumanity of Miami’s city planning leads people to avoid walking and leaves the sidewalks strangely bare. I write bare rather than clean because the sidewalks still have pieces of gum and the like, it’s just that they’re like the artifacts left after the apocalypse, like wistful, dusty tumbleweeds for archaeologists to study how we used to live. The trash, in a word, is dead here; it doesn't have the fresh freshness, the offensiveness of something new. If you let your dead cat's vomit sit for a decade it might eventually make you miss your cat and its retching. Miami's litter gives you the same feeling about pedestrians. The only people on the street mumble angrily to themselves and peck at cigarette butts. The ground in Miami is fundamentally unsuitable for things that are alive, you need a car to insulate you the way you need tires in a thunderstorm.

And Miami’s vegetation is organic proof. The grass, for example, is a creeping, itchy weed. In the way that people have imagined islands as the backs of benevolent whales, Miami’s grass makes you feel you’re atop a scratchy reptile. It’s survivor vegetation, clinging fiercely to the ground, conspicuously and gruffly alive amidst so much gray cement. That grass and the cockroaches will keep the world alive after the nuclear winter.

The vaguely horrifying thing, however, is that the weather is so pleasant that the monstrous monoliths and generally apocalyptic scenery don’t matter. It’s like being a frog in the disarmingly warm stew of dehumanization. In Miami, you cannot help being a slob. One day my friend and I had to meet our host, Jorge, an extremely generous and handsome man, at his work near Douglas Road in order to exchange keys with him. He works across from a parking lot building on a street so thoroughly devoid of interest that I realized that streets are a black line in between two gray ones. There was no place for us to sit while we waited, but strangely, my friend and I sank naturally to the ground, sitting at first, but soon sprawled unceremoniously on the sidewalk. This was odd because he and I are reasonably dignified people who would feel self-conscious about lying on ground where dogs pee and gum is spat out. But in Miami you don’t have to reassure yourself that you aren’t a hobo. You debase yourself in the same way that someone about to freeze to death feels warm, your fall is as comfortable and as irresistible as the cozy seduction of death. You’re a chameleon under the Miami sun, and the camouflage that beckons is a flip-flopped savannah of cement.

It’s as if a cosmic potato masher stamped Miami on the earth, as if a buttery oasis was struck by a Martian mesh. Once struck, the butter congealed around the masher and the grease started to get in people’s hair. But people made their homes on that masher and no one noticed they weren’t in the oasis anymore. The sky is still blue in Miami, and the heat is still terrific, and sucking on that tropical pacifier the people learned to be slovenly, to walk on the firm slime of an ugly American suburb.