so i went to prospect heights to see ashley talk softly and be kind of pittsburgh working class humble. she's very nice and if i didn't know better i'd condescend horribly to her and sometimes i fear i still kind of do. she has a roommate who's kind of cranky. later when we were talking about their OKcupid profiles she said that when she was herself, was honest in her little self summary no one contacted her. she's snarky and practical. ashley's spectacularly practical. their house is a humble little thing, it smells funny and all the rugs are so sad. they took the tupperwares from my takeout dinner and that made me respect them enormously.

then i biked home and on the way home rasko (sp?) halpern biked up beside me and biked along with me over the brooklyn bridge because he said he didn't have anything better to do. his bike was much too small for him and his t shirt was ripped around the shoulders and he wore a stained hoody around his waist. it all looked like stuff picked indiscriminately from the salvation army. his words got rounded and indistinct with saliva, it sounded like, and initially i thought he was mentally handicapped. so we biked over the bridge and i asked him questions now and then and he was spectacularly laconic, like some fucking flannery o connor character. he was magical. i asked him what the most romantic thing he'd ever done was and he said "bought 'em gold." he never said anything, apart from asking me to buy cigarettes, except if i asked him a question. he mostly responded with yes or no.

he REALLY wanted me to buy him some cigarettes, or give him money for loosies. most everything i know about him and will write is cobbled together from his extremely minimal statements. he said he was the youngest of 4 brothers, each 3 years older than him. he said he'd graduated from high school early, this past winter. he said his parents were physicians assistants. they'd sent him to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with bipolar and prescribed him lithium which he stopped taking because it made him fat. he said his parents were stupid, that they'd done that to him and all his brothers. he said all this with no extra word. and really just amused at the silly stupidity of other people. he said he'd first had sex when he was 10 and first smoked weed when he was 3. he grinned a lot and looked like a fucking idiot with his buzzed hair. but his speech was so guardedly spare. everything was just head-shakingly stupid to him, in afunny way. he liked math. he said he was thirsty as we were biking over the bridge. i asked him if he drank beer and he said yeah, that he'd just drunk 50 minutes ago. and i said how and he said his 30 year old cop friend. and so i bought us a 40 of budweiser at the deli and we drank some of it at hudson river park where i played frisbee everyday in high school.

he said he didn't do anything. he said his parents were retired and didn't do anything. he said he might go to hunter this fall. he wants to be a doctor. he hates doctors because they do everything wrong. they gave him the wrong pills. lithium was wrong, apparently. he's never had a curfew. his parents don't care, but this came off funny. everything came off funny. eventually he left and he just reaffirmed the directions back to the brooklyn bridge and biked off wordlessly. i sat there and finished the 40 and watched this guy sprinting back and forth across the field in the dark, in the dark it looked like his limbs were churning insanely fast, but maybe that's just what the darkness did. then i biked back and passed a guy on his bike singing and a jogger singing in a breaking little voice 'LET'S FLY, FLY FLY AWAY" that frank sinatra song and it was totally surreal. rasko really wanted cigarettes and i didnt get them for him and i kind of regret it. he was such a fucking weird kid. he said he smoked 2 packs a day and claimed to have not eaten in 3 days. but this was all so nonchalant. so nonchalant and funny. how do i express that? that nothing he said was something he would have said if i hadn't asked him. it was all just stuff to feed the meter, if i was the meter my questions the quarters/hour. yo weird as hell.

dogs

at the dog park again. today there were these two black german shepherds with a photographer and a couple other people. theyd been there before like that. another dog walker told me the girl with them, sort of awkward teenager, diffident about ordering the dogs, was the daughter of bruce davis, one of those lawyers advertising on late night tv. they're his dogs, apparently. they're beautiful dogs, so physically masterful. one of them was kept leashed because when they're romping together they team up and it's too much. the leashed one squealed horribly, "the shepherd squeal," i was told. it seemed appropriate to me that it made those horrible noises because i'd been so awed up to that moment at the straight up perfection of the dog. it outran, out-handsomed, jumped, and muscled every other dog. with the ball in its mouth, it would let it fall as it trotted to then nip it back up, elegant as a tennis player using their racket because they can't be bothered to bend over to pick something up. it invented a dashing little game for itself! so of course it whined horribly.



im not excited about anything right now. need something to be excited about.


there was this absolutely horrible woman at the little dog park, shrieking at the cuteness of everything. she had a 9/11 conspiracy t shirt but was otherwise a pretty, super normal looking 5th avenue apartment building type person. she was so, so horrible.

soup kitchen

was walking on 15th btwn 5th and 6th and passed this long line of wretched looking people and asked one what he was waiting for. in the basement of St. something xavier church there's a cavernous, massive room where around 1300 meals get served every sunday around lunch time. it's almost all black people and almost all men. it's kind of upsetting seeing somebody eat that hungrily, somehow way more upsetting than just seeing a horrifically thin, obviously starving person. it's like watching some very intimate medical procedure or, just, seeing someone so totally oblivious and engrossed in the business of staying alive. it feels wrong to see someone that passionately preoccupied.

there was fish on rice and a little salad that no one ate. a nearly presentable woman, given away by the stress in her face and hairless brows with little cuts where the hair should be, went around to trays about to be dumped to shovel their salad into her tupperware. there was a cookie and some juice and ample bread and oranges, most with splotches of green because they weren't really ripe.

it's funny how wearing castoffs one ends up looking like a very badly dressed teenager. lots of sneakers and there was an i [heart] haters hat. people had funny ideas about health: one guy sent me to get him more juice explaining that he had asthma and his doctor told him that juice was good. it was so nice to be helpful, to be thanked. my job was to be a busboy for the hall, grabbing trays when people were finished. the hall smelled quite bad. some people were pretty much passed out over their trays. it was all very matter of fact, it didn't "stink of charity" the way this kind of thing apparently used to back in orwell's day. people were super, super courteous, on the whole.

people loved the juice and cookies. how strange and horrible to see people loving, needing sugar in that most simple way, these adults. and there was socializing, lotta talk about sports, and some people who just really needed to talk, but it was very very weird to have it be all about the food. these people have been made like no one i have ever known by poverty.

hunger by knutty knut hamsun

hunger is about this nightmarishly sensitive, doubting, and impulsive guy. he accosts people on the street with aggressive nonsense and suffers (glories in?) spectacular mood swings. he lives off his writing but he writes feverishly; he's got infrequent streaks of brilliance but mostly it's unpublishable. he's also often freezing and starving to death.

everything is in this guy's head! he's got this "cathedral" of thought and feeling inside of him where outwardly he's just a crazy person, raving alternately with joy and self hate. the amazing thing is that this total lunatic, this guy stricken with a mind he describes as a wound god probes his finger in, is so lucid and reasonable. that might be the ultimate fantasy of the book, that our protagonist could actually chronicle the epic inner dramas of briefly losing his pencil or spending a night in jail in such an orderly way. maybe he could; part of the elegance, the wonder of this story is how spare it is. physically, there's really nothing in it. there are few characters and we never see anybody more than twice, really. there's just his body, his buttons he's trying to pawn, etc. having him be so radically impoverished ends up making that body an exposed nerve, a more direct link to his brain. there's never a full stomach, a warm body to pacify his raving.

he's a "spiritual aristocrat." (the intro.) this book's called the hunger and our guy is often hungry but this is not hunger like down and out in paris and london, this is "anti-social" mania, proud, superior suffering. this book, as isaac bashevis singer pointed out super insightfully, came out in a period of social upheaval in norway and it was about some obscenely wretched guy and his sufferings, but it was NOT a book people who care about the sufferings of poor people could use to advance their cause. this guy is an individual, rising and falling (pretty much always falling) on the wild whims of his soul. this guy is all, all, all alone.