Dear Hiary

gutted

2009-09-06T11:13:00.000-07:00

sticky stalagmites picked like fish bones
tissue pulled, blood drained,
discarded.

rounded membranes scraped,
wiped down and
tucked back in

your eyes in pictures
pluck heart and intestine,
i spin, m., first into you
the elastic length of guts roping around my waist
tight on each side like hands

then spinning away,
unravelling
guts on the floor, heart hanging by a sticky clot
you retract into the wall
sucking my innards to a place i cannot see

oh m.,
you will discard it, this i know,
but if, on the way to the bottom of the pail,
it grazes your skin

i will gladly go empty
i will gladly live
without.

quantify

2009-07-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

very little reading or writing. some cooking, some socializing, some excercise. tons of work. tons of worrying, ruminating, replaying, analyzing, beginning and ending and repeating. lots of sweating. not enough sleeping.

heartbreak: heavy. crying: limited. deep sighs: frequently. eye rolls: constant. glorified memories: hourly.

friends: some. progress: some. money: none.

/

i am so angry that you are so content in your confusion. it's not to the point where i hate you but to where i want to hurt you and see results. you are shallow, bull headed, entirely self absorbed, immature, controlling, and severe. i didn't choose to love you, and if i could rewind the tape i'd pull myself away before it had the chance to develop.

this is harder than i'm allowing it to be. i don't want to admit anything. i wish you were easier. i wish you cared about how much i care. it's only getting worse and im worried about the nightmares.

sadly,

2009-07-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

been here before. everything feels like shit and i just need to find my way out. right now the situation is inconclusive and so there is waiting and worrying and nail biting and when there is sleep, which there is rarely, bad dreams follow.

oh, i just don't know sometimes. i get frazzled and uncomfortable and lose my words and sensibility. am left with jumbled, crowded thoughts like walking through times square at five o'clock on a friday evening. what i want is not is not a possibility, and it is not a possibility because it does not exist. really, it doesn't. and it's strange to think that one day it might, due to potential and change and maybe a well needed miracle.

it's easier now then it's been before because of relative stability in other areas; friends, work, family, health are all positives and so it's a simple thing to remind myself that the world isn't falling apart.

but....

it does suck. and i am sad. and i will miss whatever was there, real and imagined.

everything and nothing

2009-06-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

it rains through june. things are different but i am no different and this makes no sense, thrown into bad beleifs and comfortable beds and cunning arms and unwelcome mornings; i said no but i felt guilty so it happened and i felt torn apart and emptied out.

there is someone i love who does not, or will not, love me and this i am trying to overcome, push past, rise above. it's a slow pain, like warts pushing up through the skin and breaking surface. my mind tells me about irony and her sister misfortune, my minds tells me that the earth can only be unfair and that i will get what i want precisely when i stop wanting it. but i keep wanting.

i continue to shrink sizes, throwing out old pants that slide and settle below my belly, dresses whose sides balloon and no longer touch my sides. it is no good--i am guilt ridden for arbitrary purposes, for items i deem one day good and one day bad. it's a problem and maybe i don't care. maybe i just don't give a shit right now.

back to love..

i have to imagine that one day in the future i will forget about these days.

in which living feels pleasant and not excessive

2009-05-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

nostalgia for the island where i grew up, longing for the quiet sense of urgency found along the train tracks of oakdale, inside the connetquot library near closing time, and on the cold winter shores of montaulk.

it is so unfair when wanting and wishing have no baring on the world around us; it is so inconceivably unfair that these things are gone for good.

wanting back a boy whom has all but disappeared from the radar, a forgotten ghost who may still be alive in body but is truly deceased in spirit.

i want a home with a basement and a back yard. i want the option of spending my days in one of several rooms, soft rug under my feet, a staircase that allows for dramatic exits, and a living room in which living feels pleasant and not excessive.

i want warm arms, clean sheets, curtains that pull together to block every last strand of light, easy wind, small garden, quiet dusk in summer.

i have been writing a lot about the quiet--not silence, this is different and assumes more pathology--most likely because the various voices in my life have started their slow fade.

i used to be so afraid of losing people that i would push them away first, giving myself the benefit of controlling the outcome before it happened spontaneously. "and what do we know about mentally ill people? that they always do better in situations where they are able to predict the outcomes. a direct quote from a clinician i work with.

now, i am better, but i have still retained some questionably borderline traits. i know this and i know that i've probably come as far as i'm going to go in that department. scrapping them permanently would mean uprooting my whole personality; digging through the whole haystack to seriously find one small needle.

my fear of losing people has boiled itself into a hearty dose of avoidance; walking away from things that hurt me. surely this isnt a new theory--the equivalent of singing "LA LA LA!" when someone else is talking.

all i can say is that it's working and i'm feeling better about certain situations. because i'm feeling nothing and nothing is better than a combination of any of the negative emotions i was feeling.

i have no insight to how this all will play out. all i have is wanting and wishing and here's hoping that life turns out like a murakami book.

to thine own self be true

2009-05-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

a path is emerging, cleared by my goals and ambitions, and something unknown is hustling me towards it.

as an outsider i can see the paths of others with clarity and correlate their direction with the forces influencing them. i will tell you, with great sadness, the omnipotent force: money.

money in everything, even the suggestion of money, like the rounded shape of cupcakes underneath foil. fame, power, beauty: all these things suggest money and vice versa money suggests them as well. people i know covet these things, these subjective abstracts that can quickly and efficiently be converted into concrete $$$$ dollars and then measured. and then calculated into a net worth and that translated into a self-worth.

you will be the big person with little people underneath you. you will have trampled and clawed and torn your way to the top of your career ladder. you will stand next to the right people to stand next to, but never the wrong people. wrong people are like slime in the sewer and you will sneer at them. you will gather bits and pieces about us, and then you will learn about them, and you will eagerly perpetuate the mind blowing exclusivity that corporate enterprise jerks itself off to.

i feel like i am hallucinating or dissociating. i feel like the world around me is unreal, or at best a fragile facade. i feel like i am the only person who can tell the king has no clothes. i feel like i have seen a man crawling through hallucinogenic puddles and a man strapped all limbs tied down and mouth stuffed with cotton strapped to a bed a woman with a self inflicted gunshot wound to her stomach suicidal rage rape when she was five years old forgot how to speak her mother wouldn't believe her so she drank bleach and forgot how to speak. a man in the bathroom sees his own eyes a second later his brother is dead gunshot wound to the head his baby brother's in his arms with blood and brains pouring out on to both their shirts.

i feel like i have seen all this and you have seen: an expense report. a stack of memos re: conference with so-and-so company? several date books and a blinking light on the telephone.

and we don't and we won't understand each other. and not only are our paths diverging but they weren't one to begin with, no if your path was to the sky than mine was to the sea.

my life is going to be lonely for a while.

it's now the four year mark

2009-05-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

Summer/2007

Dear. M:

We are quickly approaching the the two year mark, two years since we have spoken, two years since you've seen me. I have seen you--last Christmas, perhaps the one before I don't remember. I made out your shape in the dark as C. pulled around the bend where Karshick meets Locust. In the gas station window, I spread my eyes wide looking for you and then you were actually there, reclined with your legs kicked up at first. Then, almost as if you saw through the blackness of midnight, the glass door opened and you exited the small office.

I can't remember how I felt. Probably my heart was ready to lurch from my chest and grab hold of your throat. Probably C. didn't catch on to my explanation of why we should take an alternative route home (had I told her you were working @ the Sylvio Brothers station?) and so I watched you alone, silently.

Now it is summer. The quiet coldness has receded and yet I still dream of you every night. They are fantastic adventures that take to the sky, to the swarmy jungles of Africa, the crowded halls and cluttered lockers of Connetquot, the ins and outs of every place we've ever or never been.

You are with me all the time, and in this way, time has slowed and these two years seize to create a chasm between us.

it's only now that i can re-read these things without the ache returning. returning in full force, anyway.

brooklyn nights

2009-05-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

pondering the consipiracy of computers. having two hour conversations, hot speaker pressed against your ear bit of drool in between your cheek and the receiever, a possibly radiohead song is the next played, possibly off o.k computer but maybe kid a, sister reading in the bedroom wooden table sticky under your elevated leg, bong still smoky.

ambiguous colors in the background upon closer look an anthropomorphized rabbit and beads around someone's neck, hot screen ahead heavy on your legs, lighter fluid is low and the matches are gone. someone must have taken the matches.

earlier: what a weird story! two mason jars of green bagged and weighed ready for sale he told the story with a visible shake, it made me nervous and i got paranoid too when the cop car blared down the street and we ducked into the house. and the sun went down and the possibly radiohead song came on again, reminding me of driving over hills in seattle.

on sadness

2009-05-13T17:02:00.001-07:00

few emotions are as useless as sadness. anger and jealousy are motivators, and depression, although not useful can at least be latent for long enough periods where it goes undetected. heartbreak is pretty bad but i think of sadness as a major symptom of heartbreak anyway.

sometimes i wish i spoke in only medical jargon. this is, upon closer examination, yet another way to streamline my affect and discard any lingering feelings. i like to do this sometimes, numb my responses to things. it's like that particular theory that pits response induced emotion and emotion induced response against one another, this is to say you are sad because you're crying, because the emotive reaction to the perceived sensation (the sadness derived from the observation that you are crying) is the reason for the crying. whereas many of us many believe that the sadness first induces the crying.

so if my reactions are tapered, that must mean the things themselves are no big whoop. why would one nod and shrug at something that was overwhelming and life changing? perhaps that is relying too much on cultural norms but i don't think so.

it is strange to think like this when i am intoxicated; like a computer. like exactly what i'm doing is what i said i wanted to do: streamline my affect. when all i should be writing about is caramel popcorn and salty potato chips, maybe watching television or out on a walk, i am sitting here contemplating theories from a textbook? this by far outnerds even those dungeons and dragons guys.

there is a rising sense of despair. of doom. could be from the never ending rain, the job, the stress, the recent setback in a literary endeavor...but where is summer? and where is luck, and where is coincidence? i just realized that i just summed up my definition of god: luck and coincidence. that is fucking awesome, those words just floated to my head at the same time the thought struck that if i believed in god i would be holding him responsible right now, not poor luck.

every time it evolves a little; it evolves with me. as i get older and more complex so does this sadness. it grows new layers, becomes a bit more durable, weathers more opposition. or maybe not, after all i'm speculation, maybe each time it is just more acute, concentrated by time, poisoned a little by memory. or maybe it's not as bad. how can i know myself so little?

as long life gets longer, awful gets softer but it feels pretty soft to me.

deary hiary, indeed

2009-05-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

i am happy to report that today is the first time in several months my hiary truly becomes a place for semi-lucid thoughts. i am having 3 and a half right now.

first off, i forgot what happens to time when you are really, really busy. each hour becomes compounded into a tiny slice of a day sandwich. my brain is like a goldfish. everything is ephemeral. i cant remember taking the train this morning, or the first leg of my journey home. that was only an hour ago.

i love the brain, becomes its so fucking ahead of us. any one of us! the brain says, all right listen, you're stressed, your cortisol levels are mad high, i know your schedule for the rest of the week and in order for you to carry it out, i need to start erasing or combining memories to make more space. i need to delete things that are completely unimportant, like the name of the city your first client was born in, the unremarkable subway rides you take every day--these can be combined into a composite so you think the guys breakdancing and the guys playing bongos happened on the same trip home but really it was two separate trips and one of them was on a weekend)--what color straw you picked with your latte, i need to delete these things to make space for the more significant things coming. and how does your brain know more significant things are coming? because it's the most highly evolved computer ever in creation and it is able to make a composite, computing like four hundred million bits of information per second, of your near future.

woah. does any of this make sense? maybe i am a genius from outer space. strawberry ice cream is good.

apparently marinol is synthetic thc given in pills to cancer patients and those who are terminally ill. i didn't know that. both patients and doctors report that marinol comes no where close to mimicking the sedative effects of actual thc, but the state doesn't care. actual cancer patients are telling them what works best and they don't care! people are so fucking dumb. synthetic thc completely underscores the whole argument that weed is natural and legal drugs (ritalin, alcohol, nicotine) are produced in labratories.

all of a sudden i can feel my teeth. my heart is beating fast. i think footstep outside is the police. i want to make chocolate ganash frosting. kim doesn't like chocolate chocolate and i was thinking of making her a welcome cake with white chocolate ganash. i dont know if the white chocolate chips would melt the same, though.

i'm supposed to be making ziti for the mother's day potluck for the clients tomorrow. i sort of am. in small steps. like the ziti is boiled but it's been on the sink for about an hour. i will make it eventually.

fake break ups and mistaking make ups

2009-04-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

Oh! If you could compact your conscience
and sell it save it for another time
you might have to use it.

sometimes, whatever hides behind my eyes becomes scrambled, like television during a hurricane. so i walk around for a few days, with difficulty, navigating the flashes of clarity but mostly sucked into the fizzy black and white. i am, after years of this, the most prepared i will ever be, and when that descending slope approaches in the distance i have a period of severe uneasiness. i don't want to dip into insanity for several days. i'm not reaaa-dy.

i always feel guilty when the storm settles; i look around and the assess the damage i have done, and i feel genuinely bad for rousing emotions and provoking shit. especially because once it's over i rarely am able to, or even want to, summon the powerful emotions that previously bathed my brain in madness. i don't know where they go; do they settle back into my bones, quietly awaiting next month's resurgence?

i am on the tail end right now; confused but with insight, angry but able to imagine it won't always be this way. i'm feeling unsteady on my feet and hesitant about my every move; it's an uncomfortable and lonely place to be.

summer is here and that means nothing. the city takes a turn from one insufferable extreme to another. i don't care because i want to be somewhere else, or rather, i dont care where i am as long as i can drop the feeling of wanting to be somewhere else.

what i love most is the journey; getting there is rarely as satisfying as thinking about getting there. there is more to say about that but i am tired and suddenly nothing sounds as good as hiding underneath my covers in the dark.

The malls are the soon to be ghost towns
so long, farewell, good-bye
And the telephone goes off
pick to receiver up, try to meet ends
and find out the beginning, the end and the best of it

Excerpt

2009-04-21T12:33:00.002-07:00

Shortly, the static is gone. He strolls to the couch and allows his heart rate to slow. Baba calls goodbye from the front door, where she is leaving for her night shift at the Russian travel agency where she works part time.

Work, just another thing people do to distract themselves from the inevitable void that will always be. Find a career. Spend thousands of dollars and creep deeper into debt with each acquired degree. Hold more complicated titles but do less work as you climb up the ladder. Change careers only to find the same experience in a different office with a different brand of fax machine. Painstakingly plan family events that appear flippant and stress free such as A picnic in the park. Nothing more than packing a blanket, a fruit salad and a book. The blanket will become soaked with moisture from the grass and be of no use, the fruit salad will be eaten within the first five minutes, and the book will be boring. It will be transplanting your boredom to a new location in order to feel productive, to feel that at least you "got out."

Window shop. Spend hours, if you can bare it, seeking out things you will never be able to own. Examine and comment on them, make them part of your thoughts, bring them into your daily life even if it pains you, so that you will at least be focusing on something other than your continuous trajectory towards death. Eat slowly. Spread your meal out among courses, each plate a tiny nibble that will barely fill a cavity, no less a hungry stomach. Order strange things to impress your dining colleagues, act like you know the difference between wines, bring up controversial issues and take the side of whomever seems most educated.

Get your nails done. Take a bath. Exfoliate. Elongating daily grooming habits. Things that should be afterthoughts, not main events.

There is not much on television, but television bores him. Perhaps if he were spineless and gullible, the media would intrigue him and he would find himself addicted to entertainment television and the news. He clicks it off.

We Say Goodbye

2009-04-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

The last few days of our trip were some of the the best. We really hit our traveling sweet spot--over the hump of culture shock, finally adjusting to the food and really improving on my Spanish. The last drop of homesickness had evaporated days before and was replaced with a constant zest for what was next.

Leaving is sad. Leaving means that the bubble is bursting and what will soon remain is only the colorless residue of memory. I'll make gratuitous changes in lifestyle and my life will be lived not for enjoyment but for profit. I'll go to bed at a reasonable hour, exchange cheese filled empanadas for steamed vegetables and whole grains, and my brain will, after two weeks of overuse and daily intoxication, return to its resting potential.

Vern and I spent our last night apart--it was the only time we were apart for the whole vacation and I think it gave me the chance to absorb the last of the city on my own. To resurrect all of the faces I am leaving behind. The places have taken a definite backseat to the faces, and I don't know how or where to direct all of the absolute awesomeness I've encountered here. I feel like I fell in love every day. There's no time to focus on people's bad qualities when you only have a day or week with them. You skip the introductory bullshit and jump ahead to thoughts on religion, traumatic teenage experiences, things that several years later I'm still learning about some of my closest friends. Fostering these immediate bonds is a sense of intoxication, each person catching like a velcro hook.

It supplied the freedom I had set out to find when I decided on South America as the destination. Freedom from the constraint of adult responsibilities, yes, but also from judgment, stagnation, and the comfortable boredom that begins to form between old friends. What I know of those people I will never see again is all I will ever know. They will be frozen in time and place, with no opportunity to sour. Over time I'll idolize them further, through memory and conversation, until they reach complete perfection in retrospect.

Despite the circumstances and despite myself, I was consistently impressed with the people I met. People are amazing. The things we do, choose not to do, are capable of. There is such magic in subtlety.

I feel like I was given the golden ticket to a different world. In a way, I kind of was. Leaving is very real, but so is the possibility of coming back.

We Travel

2009-04-13T11:56:00.000-07:00

Vern´s birthday was quite underwhelming due to La Semana de los Santos, the most religious week of the year for Argentinians and I believe most of South America. Everything in Mendoza was shut down, aside from a small heladeria and several resturaunts in the Plaza. I wasn´t even able to find a cake or cupcake for her, but a cold bottle of Quilmes, the national beer, seemed to suffice quite well. We went to a disgusting dinner of pineapple, olive, egg, and hearts of palm pizza, and later on I conducted a hostel-wide singing of "Happy Birthday," followed by a Nas marathon that Vern requested from a Brit named James.

Our time in Mendoza was colored by complete boredom. The town was ugly, everything was closed, and the people in the hostel were largly exclusive and drama filled. We had been lucky to integrate ourselves into most of the groups of new friends we´ve met along the way, but suddenly we were pushed aside by the self appointed popular kids and made to feel unwelcome. The wine tasting tour turned out to be a bust, like everything else in Mendoza, and we hopped on a bus to Cordoba a day early. The only good thing to come from it was meeting our friend Lucy, who will be meeting us back in BA on Tuesday, and staying several months in NY this summer.

Once in Cordoba, exhausted from a ten hour busride complete with a ten hour Tina Turner marathon, a crying baby, and a broken heater blasting 100 degree heat on to my already sweaty face, our hostel tells us that they never recieved our reservation and due to being entirely full to capacity, we´ll have to find another room. We leave our bags and wander around town a bit, finding nothing. Upon returning to the hostel, they tell us space has freed up, and would we mind sleeping together in private room with air conditioning? We nod wearily and pass out for several hours in quite possibly the only air conditioned hostel room in the existence of the world.

We decide to get out of the city and take a long bus ride to a tiny town called Cuesta Blanca, along the Rio Cuarto. There, we´re dropped off in the middle of the road and given precise instructions. "Climb the mountain, cross a bridge, walk for an hour or so, and you´ll see Playa de Los Hippies. It´s cool." We shrug and start walking up the mountain and across the bridge, where we are totally stunned by the sight. The river runs through the mountains, creating tiny pockets of rocky beaches. We climb down the steep cliff and settle ourselves in a five foot patch of sand and rocks. I wade into the river and Vern suns herself like a lizard on top of a huge rock.

We hang out for a few hours and trekk back to the busstop, or what we imagine to be the busstop. One of our navigational challenges here has been the complete lack of street signs and busstop indicators, so we feel very lucky when the Fono Bus does indeed show up half an hour later. Back in Cordoba, we attempt to cook our first meal. Hilarity does not ensue: The vegetables are either rotten or not yet ripe, the boxed tomato sauce tastes like chlorine, and the stove we had planned to use will not get hot enough to fully boil the rice. We eat some carrots and peppers and join the group on the roof patio who are having an asado, the Argentinian word for a large BBQ with lots and lots of meat. Every hostel we´ve been to has had an asado, and we usually just sit lamely at the end of the table and drink our cerveza.

Some Israelis, who are keeping Kosher for Passover and so not drinking beer or eating bread yet smoking tons of weed and eating tons of non-kosher meat, invite us to a casino. We think why not, and agree to go with them. They linger, however, at the asado, and finally we pass out in bed, in the gloriously cool air.

No one sleeps that night. It´s Easter Sunday, apparently a huge party night down here, and the music and festivities continue till and probably past 5 am. We have to be up at 10 am for check out, so we groggily roll out of bed, eat some yogurt that we´d sought out for hours the previous day, and leave our things with the hostel as we explore the city of Cordoba.

Vern Gets a Brazilian

2009-04-10T05:02:00.001-07:00

After a day spend on the outskirts of BA,Vern and I return to El Centro exhausted. We´d stumbled upon a free rose garden, a giant park, and a four story shopping mall, and were looking forward to spending the night in. We get a few cans of Quilmes, the local beer here, and chat up some of our friends from the hostel.

A British guy, we´ll call him D. for confidentiality purposes, is pretty adamant about Vern and I accompanying them to the disco at night. We have a flight the next afternoon, and don´t want to be wrecked since we have to get up early. The ticket´s only 20 pesos, and it is our last night in BA, so we agree and around 11 pm we catch a cab with D.

The club has every sentiment of Eurotrash we are hoping to avoid: covered in disco balls, playing shitty, impossible to dance to techno, and from the second floor the club is collectively one giant cloud of cigarette smoke, hair gel, and diamond stud earrings. When we attempt to push through to the bar, even though I´m holding D.´s hand and Vern is holding mine, we get pulled into the crowd by various men. Once actually stabding at the bar, with D. in the middle of us as to communicate that we are spoken for, both of my hands are grabbed and my backside is immediately grinded upon.What I said before, about not minding being hassled? I take it back.

We get some drinks, push through the crowd once more, try to stay on track as different hands tug on my own, and meet up with the people from our hostel. I´m not drunk enough for this music. Some people leave, in search of higher intoxication, and Vern and I split off with individual dance partners. Mine is D., the previously mentioned Brit, and Vern´s is Brazillian Man. Through the course of the night, no one finds out this guy´s name, even Vern, after she has showered with the guy. *

Things with D. and I get a bit humpy and bumpy and there´s some sweaty groping business, which along with the booze, dancing, and wet cloud of smoke hanging over my head, adds to my exhasution. Everyone else is gone, and Vern and Brazillian Man are making out, so I seize the opportunity to push in between them and threaten him with a baseball bat if he tries anything with my sister. He doesn´t understand basic English, though, ("I will kill you" is pretty universal, no?) so I repeat it to him in gesture. I point to Vern, point to him, make a humping motion, point back to him, then repeatedly make the motion of hitting him in the head with a bat. He nods.

We all share a cab back to the hostel, and Vern and BM immedietly dissapear. D. and I goto the roof, where I make the mistake of asking him how old he is. Well, it turns out my date for the evening is barely out of high school. Not much older than Vern. This probably explains the following exchange:

Me: I´m really tired. I need to go to bed.
D: But what about...?
Me: What about what?
D: (Points,with both hands, to his junk) You know?
Me: Do I know what????
D: You know what I´m talking about right? (Looks at me, looks down at his junk, looks up at me again) What comes after kissing, you know?
Me: We are not doing that.

I suppose this is what happens when one makes out with a child.

Day 7:

The flight to Mendoza is cool and the weather is sunny, about 85 degrees. We´re able to see snow capped mountains from the airport. The town is completely empty, because as we find out later, at the time we arrive everyone is taking siesta. Out hostel has a picture of Jesus on the door.

We´re in a mixed room with an attractive, but loudly snoring man, and a girl from California whose been travelling with four Brits she met in Brazil. Brits aren´t friendly people and I´m kind of sick of them. I soften up a little when one suggests we throw a big party tomorrow for Vern´s birthday.

This hostel has a backyard with hammocks and two pet dogs, Astor and Bambina. Astor has epilepsy and likes to play a game with a stick, where he drops it in front of you and waits for you to grab it, upon which he grabs it first, does a little turn of victory, and then repeats the game one million times or until you get up to leave.

We walk to Plaza Espana, where there´s some street performers and a few resturaunts. The food here is really grating on me. I feel as if I´ve been hungry for a week. In seven days, we were able to find vegetables exactly once. Ithought I would blow up from constantly eating bread and butter, crossants, and crackers all day every day, but instead I´m so uninspired I barely feel like eating any of this junk.

I´m starting to get a feel for my emotional barometer on this trip. The locals gawk at us like we´re aliens and sometimes it feels easier to stay on the couch here and watch Major League. Most of the travellers we´ve befriended have been on the road for three to four months, and plan to continue for another year or so, bussing it to different countries and flying to new contintents at will. Scraping and saving and majorly sacrificing for years in order to be free of society for months. You can tell them apart from casual travellers like us; Anywhere you´re going, they´ve already been. Anywhere you´ve been but they haven´t, they act like doesn´t exist. They are habitually disintered. They stopped carrying guide books long ago because they don´t really care what they see, as long as they´re somewhere far from home. It´s escapism masquerading as wanderlust, and I swallow their arrogance down because I understand it´s actually life disatisfaction and who am I to talk.

Before bed, we drink beer and play a very stupid card game with the Brits. They have been travelling together for almost a month and we have the sensation of being the new kids in town. We decline their invitation to go clubbing and fall asleep, woken up a few hours later when our Californian roomate returns to her bed with one of the Brits in tow and they start touching each other on the bottom bunk.

Day 8: Vern´s birthday! Today we´re looking to get some sun (I´ve caught a bit of a tan, believe it or not) and ride bikes through the country side and the various wineries around here. We´re thinking of leaving Mendoza a day early so we can either spend extra time in Cordoba or arrive early to BA and have an extra day there.

*Kevin, you called this one. Vern immedietly found, and hooked up with the darkest guy in the hostel. Later, she said, "It was because he looked Dominican!"

We Observe

2009-04-08T06:39:00.000-07:00

Here, like most places save for Siberian labor camps, our whiteness astounds the locals. One man actually stopped midstep to exclaim, "You are just so white!" In fact, we have recieved a fair amount of harrassment from the men here, however, unlike their New York counterparts, the harrassers tend be fairly sexy. Modesty aside, I think I've gotten the ol' horny eye from some serious hotties.

We spend our second day in the city visiting San Telmo and Palermo Soho. San Telmo is the historical district, and the only barrio we're able to find actual fresh, non buttered or fried vegetables. I've never been so grateful for a bowl of plain spinach. We hang around there until about 3--we dont have watches/phones and have been approximating time by whenever we get hungry/start drinking--and head over to Plaza de Italia, where we're supposed to meet up with our Dutch friends.

What happens next is that we overshoot Palermo Soho by about three miles and spend the next two hours walking along the highway, stopping at gas stations to ask directions. To say Vern is annoyed with me is generous; to say she threatens me with death every few blocks is accurate. Finally, after five different people give us five different directions we hop in a cab and find out we were actually IN the neighborhood we wanted to be in, save for one wrong turn.

I don't love Palermo Soho. All the garmets look like they have been specifically tailored for paisley loving midgets. The prices are way too high, and the neighborhood itself, like we are gradually beginning to notice, lacks something.

We head back to Plaza de Italia, hopeful yet doubtful that our friends will show up. Vern dissapears for a few minutes and when she returns, Kamiel and Roel are in tow. Yay!! These guys are so rad, and not just because they're the only people we know in the country. We start spouting off possible plans for the evening, and they just shrug. While Vern and I look through our guidebooks for ideas, Kamiel searches through his camera for the highlight of their time here: A picture of Roel, passed out drunk, with a sign pinned to his chest that reads, "VERY GAY." Turns out they haven't left their hostel once in the three days they've been here, and are open to anything.

We take the taxi driver's suggestion to go to Recoleta for some booze. We eat in an Italian resturaunt--aside from jamon con queso, pizza and pasta are big here due to the Italian influence--and pigeons and wild dogs roam around the tables. We head over to some shitty pool hall. To give you an idea how shitty, the bartender, upon hearing my request for toilet paper in the lady's room, chucks a roll of paper towels at me and goes on his way. We drink Coronas and get our ass beat first in pool, then in foozeball. It's America vs. Holland and we get killed in both. We then consult the jukebox, which Kamiel incorrectly refers to as a "Jew Box", as if a Jew will pop out each time a quarter is deposited, and choose two lovely songs by an Argentinian band: "Shit Shit Money Money" and "Porn Shop."

Vern and I pretty much love these guys by this point. They are well-educated, funny as hell, good conversationalists, and best of all really interested in us. At one point they actually accuse us of not sharing enough. Us?? Not sharing enough? They were just that interested, which mostly no one ever is. I develop a moderate to large crush on one of them, which sucks a lot when we have to say goodbye. They're heading up North to Iguazu Falls and we're going west to Mendoza.

Our feelings on B.A. are very similar. Now, let's get this out of the way right now: My only two goals for this trip were to stay alive and make no comparisons between B.A and NYC. Well, I've already failed at one. Within the first few hours we were referring to our neighborhood as Midtown, and walking towards a neighborhood we would come to call the Upper East Side. Aside from NYC, B.A has elements of Rome, Paris, and Mexico as well, which makes perfect sense as they were colonized by Europeans and populated by Latin Americans. But...there's something missing.

The Dutch agree with us on this point. There is not a definite vibe. I don't want to call this city soulless, but in a way it's the most accurate description. Argentinian food is Italian food. Argentinian architecture is European architecture. Most music we hear in stores is either Michael Jackson, Ace of Base, or Madonna. Staying in hostels has introduced us to more people from other continents than this one, and I think we've enjoyed that more than the actual city.

The neighborhoods are so spread out, and because of the massive gaps in between it's not a major walking city. The public transportation is inefficient, smelly, and overcrowded. The actual districts, the main tourist ones anyway, comprise maybe five blocks surrounded by cheap bodegas and hotdog stands. It's kind of like an entire Midtown peppered with congested Soho's. It's not funky, it's not controversial, it's not unique. At dinner, Kamiel says, "It's like I could be in Barcelona or Madrid or anywhere in Western Europe." We feel the same.

We're dissapointed but not. We've been having a blast and the weather has been great, and now we're on the move and heading across the country to Mendoza, the wine tasting capital of South America. Our last day is spent chilling around the hostel, watching VH1 Classic, and contemplating hitting up a discoteca at night with some of our roomates here.

We arrive

2009-04-07T06:09:00.000-07:00

Day 3--

Wake up. Look outside, it's cloudy. Tell the cleaning lady we scheduled a late check out, although we didnt. She still comes back twice. Watch Beverly Hillbillies and some local commercials. Breakfast is coffee and a mint Vern finds in her pocket. We share the shuttle with fourteen Chinese ladies chattering loudly and arguing. I haven't lost it yet but I'm about ready to.
From the airport, the main hub of Atlanta transportation, we take the train to a shopping mall. We eat a big lunch since we probably won't eat again for 12-24 hours. We tire of the mall and wander around the highway, finding a hotel lobby to shelter us from the rain. We spend the next 6 hours sitting.

At the airpoty, there's some interesting news. Our luggage has made it to Buenos Aires without us. Where, specifically, they don't know. We don't even bother figuring this one out. The flight is awful and uncomfortable and ten hours later, we arrive in Buenos Aires. There is little hassle, something is finally going right for us, and our luggage is where it's supposed to be, our hostel has saved us beds, this party is finally getting started.

We try to find lunch but are..perplexed by the food choices. Without actually having read so, we had assumed a rich abundancy of choices. Not so. Later confirmed by other visitors, to BA, our initial impression is correct: the food here blows. Everything is made of either bread or chocolate, and is topped with ham or cheese. This sounds cool for maybe a day, but when you havent taken a dump all weekend and need some serious roughage stat, this is NOT what you want to be ordering. I'm just saying.

Our hostel is in a crap neighborhood, the business district, so we walk to Recoleta, where there is high class shopping and the cemetary where Eva Peron is buried. We lay down in the sun and I'm hoping to have my "ahhh," moment, my "we finally made it" moment, but it doesn't come. I think I'm so exhausted that I can't enjoy this yet.

We go back to the hostel and nap. I know that I could sleep through the night an wake up tomorrow refreshed, but it's our first night and most of the hostel is going to a drum show across town. I don't exactly know what a drum show is, but it's only 15 pesos--5 dollars--and seems super popular. We get dressed and wander over to the metro. I will rant more on this later but HOLY GOD. We can't get on to the first train because it's so full, finally pack ourselves tightly into a non-air conditioned car on the second train, and spend the next 15 min trying to keep ourselved breathing/boner free. Pretty sure I got to second base by just standing there. Not that I'm complaining.

There's a huge ass line for the drum show. Everyone's drinking in the street, and B.A's entire lot of dreadlocked hippies and their mother's seemed to have turned up for this show. And not just B.A--we talk to some Frenchies and inside, meet some super cute Irishmen, Brian and Ibar, which is pronounced similar to Gay Bar, which is, coincidentally what Brian instructs us to call him.

Drum show? Totally sick!! I don't know why they dont have shit like this back home. There about 15 different muscians playing all sorts of percussion instruments, and each round there's a new conducter who does all sorts of fun things like jump around and shake his fists and do in-air splits. The Argentinians are going nuts. The music has a tribal feel and dreadlocks are a-flying. Every few feet you can see massive puffs of weed rising into the air. This is when I have my moment. The drums are thumping, I'm covered in beer, the air is warm, I think, "ahhh. I'm here." We leave early, invited back by the Irish gents to their hostel.

Their hostel is way cooler than ours, they have a bar AND a resturaunt, and we start drinking while Bob Marley croons away. Bob Marley, universal stoner music, which fits because everyone here does drugs. Gay Bar just took E yesterday, and the boys have been buying weed from the bartender since they got here. Brian is coming from Bolivia, and Gay Bar is off to Australia the following day. It's a weird dynamic, the friendship that develops during a window of randomness. The conversation is really good, shooting the shit about almost everything--Brian is concerned that most of his one night stands have failed to administer bj's, Gay Bar tells us about his impressions of travellers in other countries--and we talk until midnight, when this sudden boom of the most insane techno I've ever heard shakes the place into an immediate dance party.
People are bringing it--the Argentinians do a fast Salsa, the Irish start raving, the frat guys from Connecticut take their shirts off and start chest thumping. Wait--why do Americans have a bad rep??

I get more beer spilled on me during an impromptu rave, and we leave soon after. The guys invite us to a futbol game the following night, but no contact info is exchanged so we probably won't go. Back home, we chaneg into our pj's and chat with our roomates, two Canadians from Alberta.

They're cool chicks. One starts telling me about some book she's reading concerning moon dust and karma. Really sounds like a load of hippie trash to me so I steer the conversation towards more familiar topics, namely pooping and dessert foods. We have a pretty funny conversation about distributing mass amounts of Viagra and Ecstasy in Hungary to increase the population.
Right before bed I check my e-mail to see that our Dutch friends, Kamiel and Roel, have e-mailed and want to meet us teh following night at the Plaza de Italia in Palermo. I write back that we'll be there, then climb to my top bunk and pass out almost immediately.

First night in South America: Check plus!

Unbe-fucking-lievable

2009-04-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

Day 1:

Fog delays our departure once, twice, three times. Five hours later, we have befriended two dutch boys who produce a set of cards. We sit, barefoot on the airport floor, playing round after round of rummy, bullshit, and a dutch game called "tuchol" which seems to combine elements of of war, poker, and complete nonsense. When bored of this, we take out Vern's colored pencils and play drawing games.

The boys have a good, sarcastic sense of humor, and the four of us get along well. At eight o'clock our plane, which has been re-routed to Philly, from Rome, arrives. We leave the airport six hours after the intended departure. The connecting flight to Buenos Aires has left before we have left New York--we are told there is only one flight that leaves Atlanta per day, and we will be re-booked for the following evening. Upon boarding, we realize the boys-Kamil and Roel--are seated in our row, 38. They fall asleep quickly but later tell us they heard our loud American giggles through their ear plugs the whole flight.

We arrive at the Atlanta airport and wait on one of the longest lines I've ever seen. We reach the desk, and expect to be placed on the flight the following day. The woman looks at us point blank and says, "The flight is booked. You're going to have to wait until Sunday." I look back at her and say, "No." Next to us, our friends make the Saturday flight.

We are now going to be spending forty eight hours in Atlanta, Georgia. Our trip has been cut short two days because of a batch of fog. They won't give us our baggage, and we have no clothes with us. We choose a hotel and recieve a voucher from Delta; our friends choose the same hotel and we board the shuttle. The Days Inn--the cheapest option available--is a dead ringer for the motel in "No Country For Old Men" and our buddy Kamil lets us know this right away. Shit is SCARY--in the middle of no where. By now it's 1 am, we haven't eaten for twelve hours, and we are all dying for a beer. Everything is closed, deliveries stopped an hour ago, and Kamil and Roel don't have electricity in their room.

They come into our room and we laugh about how bad this all is and watch a televangelist preacher on tv. In a last ditch effort, I call Dominoes and beg for a pizza delivery. It's 2 am, and the person on the other end of the line calls me sweetheart and baby and offers to specially deliver it to our room. I mention beer (as if Dominoes has beer?) and he offers to drive out of the county to pick us up a six pack. What??? He calls out to one of his employees that he's leaving to go get "some hot girl drunk," and this is when I panic. I realize that I've given him the hotel address and room number and he may be a psycho who packs a gun inside his pizza box. The boys say they will stay with us and answer the door.

An hour and a half comes. We are all beat. We realize the ominous Pizza Man isn't going to show and the boys go to their room to sleep. Twenty minutes later, there's a knock at the door. Vern and I freeze. We are pantsless and defenseless. She looks through the peep hole and there's a fat man with a Dominoes box. Hunger wins out over reason. I open the door and the pizza man introduces himself and we strike up a pleasant chat. He doesn't kill us. I give him a $20 tip.

The boys, hearing the exchange and smelling pizza, bound out of their room and spring into ours. Pizza Man has included a special box of cinnamon sugar bread and some icing. We eat that, plus a large pizza, plus a bottle of Coke, in 2.5 minutes max. We have some more laughs and make plans to meet downstairs for breakfast.

I don't sleep. Vern is sick, I am worried about the flight, this place is fucking creepy, I'm worried about Javier Bardem killing me with a blow gun thing, and the bed is like sleeping on cactus needles. The room is hot and I sweat through my only set of clothes.

Day 2:

Begins optimistically enough. We sleep past breakfast but find out our friends have saved us blueberry muffins. We are very touched. I call the airline and find out that since yesterday, our place on the standby list has moved up from number 27 to number 3. The woman says things are looking good, and we'll probably get on the flight.

Atlanta sucks but the day is great. Kamil and Roel are awesome dudes who are super intelligent and funny and don't get offended when we repeat back everything they say as "Hoogen Doogen Dorfen Borgen", impersonate the Swedish Chef, and call their language "silly." They then start talking about us in Dutch and we pretend they are talking about all the great gay sex they had the night before. We tell them so.

We take the shuttle to the airport, try to get our baggage, and are denied again. Kamil is checked in but Roel isn't, so there's a lot of lines and red tape to jump. Finally, they find out that not only are they booked on tonight's flight, but that they made business class. Business class! When I call the hotline, they tell me we're still number 3 on standby, and that there are two Business class seats left, available at the bargain price of $3,300. Each.

We leave the airport and check out the city. It is two streets. There is an Express, an American Eagle, and a movie theater. The weather is warm and we drink beer in the sun. We walk and find a Target--the boys have never been into a Target. They marvel at everything--the Easter candy, the supermarket, the multitude of vitamins offered. Vern is getting sicker and we're getting broker, spending money on food and transportation.

Outside of Target there's a sitting area with benches. We take our shoes off and engage in one of the best conversations I've had lately. By the time it's over I feel prepared to give a book report on Public Policy in the Netherlands. These guys are really educated and it's impressive. They certainly show Vern and I up on political knowledge of our own country. It's getting later so we head back to the airport--our third time in twenty-four hours.

We get boarding passes and head to the gate. There, we reunite with some Argentinians in the same situation as us. We get good news, because one of the boys tell us he heard that there's 28 people on standby and 29 seats. They chose not to get a hotel room and and have been in the airport all night. I hover near the computer screen and watch the numbers of unconfirmed and unclaimed seats drop. It's looking good though, by the last half hour there's still thirty empty seats. Moral is high and our friends are optimistic. We exchange e-mails and the Argentinians give us their address in Santa Fe, a town about 250 miles North of Buenos Aires. Everyone is so friendly. Finally, it's time for the dutchies to board. We get big hugs and kisses goodbye and there's lots of jokes about the cavier and champagne they will soon be getting in Business class.

We tell them not to worry, we'll probably see them in a few minutes when we get called for standby. Until the last ten minutes, there's 26 seats open. Of the Argentinians, there is only one who didn't make the flight. He's #1 on standby, we're numbers 2 and 3. Everyone has boarded. We're anxiously waiting to board with our friends. The screen suddenly shows that there's only 4 seats left. It's departure time; the screen shows 4, then 2, then a final 0. The screen flashes blue: FLIGHT DISCHARGED. We are told to go home.

Three hours later, we wait for another shuttle for another hotel we don't really want to pay for.

It is now 11:20 PM. I have been in Atlanta for 36 hours. I have been wearing the same clothes since Friday morning, and will wear them until Monday night. I don't know where my baggage is. I smell like shit. I have spent all my casg, I am tired and discouraged, I miss my new friends.

I AM IN THE WRONG FUCKING COUNTRY.

melancholy & the infinite sadness

2009-04-03T08:21:00.001-07:00

t-minus one hour, everything is ready except for me. my suitcase sits quietly packed, the apartment is swept and tidied and the bed, for once, is made. my voicemail message has been updated to reflect my absence, and now my phone is turned off.

two strange dreams:

1. visiting michigan to see a friend. the first thing she showed me was her new car, a bright yellow mega-suv whose trunk unfolded in pannels to reveal a home movie theater inside. we moved inside her apartment complex, which was a factory converted into what really amounted to a giant, giant hostel with colorful mattresses endlessly pushed against the wall. each room, sprawling sqares of one hundred feet, housed maybe twenty mattresses, and the only storage was giant slats of wood mounted thirty feet above ground. i asked my friend how anyone was able to get up there, and she shrugged.

2. a nightmare. i don't remember this one, only the masses of people and my subsequent fright. at the end i said, "tune my guitar!"

mixed emotions about leaving. it's always bittersweet, and i can never shake the sense that i am going very, very far away from what i am used to. a family friend once said i tend to be a "creature of habit," which at the time i took offense to (preferring, at 17, to be described as spontaneous or crazy-wild-party-child, i suppose), but we all like what we know best. and we return to it time and time again, regardless of consequence.

i am most excited to break the structure, to be high on adventure. living in a large city for several years errodes one's sense of novelty, and senses dull when they are consistently overwhelmed, hence the pervasive aloofness here. i am excited to sit and write and feel and be free. of time, of place, of mind, of attachment, of technology. even free of language. i will then, i'm sure, consider the inverse, the frighetening constraint of being alone in a strange country.

i am excited for sunlight and for a whole plane of newness. when we become familiar with each place is when we will leave. so that in our minds it is preserved forever, or until we return, just as we first saw it. i am not taking a microscope to argentina the way i do to my own city.

it will be hours until any of that. right now, an umbrella, a rain jacket, a three hour journey underground, a frazzled check-in line, an eleven hour flight with a connection in georgia.

in form

2009-03-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

me wanting to hold
on, and you wanting someone
else entirely.

press rewind. press play. move lips in time.

2009-03-12T18:06:00.000-07:00

layers of processing like a goddamn human lasagna
psychosocial psychosexual biopsychosocialsexual
some mental taco pie rings of a redwood drill into me and
count the layers to my core/

i want to remove my brain and heart place them side by side
yes this is a formal investigation the faster you cooperate the faster we can all go home
want to be at my own funeral and rate and observe on a scale from one to five who is saddest and then i jumpstart
back to life just kidding guys/

under green under gray under hot
pink cobalt blue black roots and a pointy yellow mohawk
on an island made of strip malls cigarettes and parking lots:
a red telephone shaped like ladies lips black winters voices made of straight gravel
a bathtub full of skin and blood floors packed tight with dirt three month only dairy,

my name everywhere with lines through it crumpled in her love notes to you your heart
assigned priority on her grocery list sex EVERYWHERE
used condoms filled with your come still sticky months later
tiny nightmare balloons laying next to her tampax brand applicator on the stripped
and stained mattress

my diaries gone never returned
i expected this when a gypsy stole my bag at the fontana di trevi in rome
later the italian embassy: guards with rifles and police more dangerous than thiefs

three months spent abroad stealing toilet paper hiding under an umbrella sleeping fifteen hours a night
newly thin too bored and beat to feed myself

come home to the life i lost when you lost your mind,
then months and years some experimentation some hallucinations and some sweaty boys whose names i honestly forget

some winters some summers one drive in the dark past your house where a light burned in your bedroom i remember everything the blowfish hanging from a hook you called him hootie.

i can't stop that feeling...

2009-03-07T15:22:00.000-08:00

like it's the sweltering belly of summer and i'm a runaway and no one will find me here, contemplating infinity (what comes after space and the stars?). inhaling the skyline, crushing buildings between my thumb and forefinger, like i could swim across the river and be there shortly.

like i've smoked my last cigarette and thrown the butt into a trashcan fire on a cold late night out East. like i can see through everyone but i myself am a ghost. all the walls have come down and now i am simply existing. the sky lowers itself over concrete and i write with pink wrists.

bird like perfect shadows collide and become one group, reverse flight, and fly home together. skateboard trucks hit and roll cars coming towards and speeding away the doppler effect in red and blue.

zingy yellow caffiene starting to make sense and deep blue exhales of nicotine sticky tar stay awake burns the throat i've got the black lung, captain, the black lung. the heaviest thought (it is like meditation so it peaks in a flash and then i go back to existing): is that right now i am no longer a marionette of some absent god.

past the orange crane broken windows blue smoke empty lot clumps of dirt wild dog barbed wire dark doorway there is a dead end. the sky comes lower cars speed away the doppler effect in red and blue ziny yellow caffiene starting to make sense there is a dead end that is simple enough.

oh, stay stay stay

2009-03-02T16:43:00.001-08:00

only three colors red black and orange, fire breaking off into chunks like hot chalk
falling into tin, just missing leg skin
i am going to be burroughs just this once
chop it up and a dream machine
alone and sick with murder

beyond the body a screen with color
shows rapid beauty behind smoke
a million times and each time different
you are as far away as fantasy

from the center of the flower five points convene into a rodeo star into an elongated five point tunnel
comes apart quickly it is a star again then bursts
into rainbow static

then convenes then bursts a million times and each time different
then the finale
right before waking
black and white light, i am punctured from behind
a stake of it through the heart and i burst into dust

and there are only two colors
red and black
and i am burroughs at the clinic
punctured from behind
a stake of it through the heart
quickly it is a star again
then bursts

so it goes.

2009-03-01T11:49:00.001-08:00

no longer a need for complete thoughts or sentences; the days are like this. scrambling to fill the time, just to fill the time.

idleness allows for obsessions to brew, like yeast in an altered environment. slowly they spring up and then multiply, contained under layers of processing. pops up in dreams. there is a general sense of falling.

seeing through tired eyes. not the satisfied exhaustion of living a fast life but the degenerate middle finger of chronic boredom. young and i don’t care in new york city, nothing is sacred. i want inspiration and i want to be adjective, i want words that explode like ginsberg and beautifully confuse like burroughs.

transcendence, excitement, acute immediacy and sudden implosion, dynamic repetition, rush of emotion, all night tidal wave, cant-eat-cant-sleep-cant-breath without it.

where are you?

here & now: skies graying in preparation for a snow storm. a trash can filled with paper and rotting cantaloupe. several songs playing at once and the click of keys.

The Day Your Life Changed Forever, In No Discernible Way

2009-02-26T21:33:00.001-08:00

You wake before the alarm and this pleases you, affords you an extra fifty seconds to reach over and de-activate the clock/radio before alarm number three--Murderous Heifer Shriek--sounds in your left ear. The other choices--Pulsating Shriek and Raucous, Banging Shriek--have, in the past, failed to lift you from slumber. Caused you to skip breakfast and spend the rest of the morning sluggish and empty bellied.

It begins casually enough. You peer through the blinds to discern the weather, and note that it must finally be spring, the way the light seems to split apart into individual rays that feel soft as double sided strips of suede. You exhale a loud breathe and as your lips return together you have the sensation of sliding two smooth bars of butter back and forth against their smooth, buttery backs. You are quite turned on by this.

As soon as your feet touch the ground, the gliding begins. The morning routine is poetry, each tiny step a thread in the bountiful quilt of your life. You spend at least a minute brushing each tooth individually, allowing the vibrations of your Oral-B Pulsar to penetrate and chase away the deepest cavity of every crevice. Your shower is epic, a Tahitian waterfall during wartime, your morning commute is an Italian bakery full of colorful jackets and warm, crusty breakfast smells.

Your spinny chair waits loyally, a throne empty without it's King. You approach your desk and your heart beats Glo-ry, Glo-ry, Glo-ry. Paper Mate and White Out look on as you conduct your second morning routine as if mandated by Heaven. The coat is placed on the back of the chair, the seat is filled, the receiver is lifted and the first words of the morning are spoken: MetroPlus Life Insurance, How may I direct your call?

The day does not just pass but weaves through a complex series of near-orgasmic peaks. Opening up the cap on a new highlighter is cause for celebration, sharpening a pencil is Christmas. You snack on a piece of cinnamon gum whose sweet odor reminds you of a sultury, belly dancing Indian woman you once met in Bombay Bar and Grill in Garden City, Long Island. Lunch comes just as your stomach begins to rumble with desire. The elevator ride is a cultural buffet, offering fine dishes in Puerto Rican and Mexican cuisine.

Outside the streets are buzzing like the moonlit markets of Marrakesh. People pass with smiles and outstretched hands, depositing gifts of golden elephants and antique copper jugs into your hands and pockets. The world is like a giant pulsing heart, spilling forth with hundreds of new friends. A dog urinates on your foot and you reach down to rub your palm along the bony ridge of his back. Everyone is smiling! The sun is pouring down and the world is golden! The Nuts for Nuts man embraces you and feeds you a single, sugary cashew.

You eat a perfectly spiced piece of buffalo chicken pizza and drink a diet Coke that tastes as perfect as a regular Coke. Back at work, you check each of your thirteen messages and deliver prompt service to thirteen eager clients. Their voices funnel through the phone in high-definition, it is like having a front row seat to a frenzied and energetic orchestra. The clock on the wall no longer counts down your remaining doom. By the time it's hands align at six you are about to burst of satisfaction and throw your coat on with excitement for what is next. The elevator ride down is, again, a sensory smorgasboard, filling the deepest regions of your brain with CK1 Cologne and bad coffee breath. Your nose picks up the delicate scents of hazelnut and vanilla, able to discern the slight bout of halitosis emenating from the teeth of the tall man in pink.

The days have gotten longer and you are now able to catch the tail end of daylight. The sunset is like a splash of fruit punch, shaded in juicy orange and bright pink and bright dark pink. Spring has certainly come and the streets are alive with the music of life. Techni-color birds sing from cartoon cut-out trees and violinists denote somber breakups and joyous reunions. You slip on a banana peel and indulge in hysterical laughter, opening your mouth wide and braying up to Heaven; no sooner are three different sets of hands outstretched to help you up. You slap each hand a high five and pick yourself up, dust off the knees of your pants, do a little jig and take a bow, extending a black fedora towards the crowd. Where did you get a fedora?

You approach the corner of Ninth and Forty second, New York's own Skid Row, the apex of poverty and crime underneath Port Authority Bus Terminal. The air is like boiled urine and the palms of your hands turn black with immediate grime. You grimace and cross the street where it is worse. You are in disbelief of where your feet are taking you; your heart is beating so fast that it threatens to fly out of your mouth and on to the floor like a fish flopping for air. Your immunity to the homeless and deranged has shattered and been replaced with a desperate curiosity. You walk past three men crouched and smoking a suspicious pipe. By the time they look up at you you are gone, fully engaged as an audience member watching a gang fight. Two men are battering what appears to be a very fat woman and her lesbian lover, knocking them over relentlessly, only to help them up and knock them down again. The urine is like a thick mist that scents your skin and follows you through the darkness.

A woman holds a baby and rocks her arms back and forth singing, Shh, baby, shh, baby, shh, over and over. You realize she is not the birth mother, and you love her deeply for the protection she will offer this child. A group of toothless elders sings and warms their hands over a flaming trashcan full of newspaper. You are cold and stop momentarily to warm yourself. A man squints at you in the flickering light and asks, Do you have a beer? You say, No, sorry. He says, It's all right. I'm trying to quit. You leave the garbage can crew and keep walking down the alley of New York's forgotten. People kiss and scream and shit and the smell of piss wanes and sometimes mixes with cigarette smoke and crack cocaine. You are no longer aware that you are an intruder. You feel as they feel: the pangs of hunger deep in your stomach as if eating their way to your spine, the filth cracking into your pale skin. You keep walking under the moon and soon you have left skid row, you are staring down Broadway's throat into the heart of Times Square. You are at the center of the world, and a flutter of Rockettes gather around merrily and the six of them--three on each side--dance you down 42nd, lifting you high into the sky and setting you back down to continue your journey home.

Once at home you treat your eyes to the virtual carnival that is television. You switch from channel to channel and, like a lucky driver who seems to will red lights to green, you manage to avoid a single commercial. You laugh when you are prompted to laugh and you cry when the music descrescendos and the screen becomes full of shadows. Watching television is like re-living a thousand lives.

You fall into the velvety arms of sleep and wake the next morning, grimacing as Murderous Heifer Shriek blares in your left ear. You de-activate the alarm and peer out the window. Gray but not raining.

Your life has been changed and maybe it is for the better. Maybe your brain has strengthened it's old channels and paved out new ones, hundreds more than even the average Harvard grad, and you are somehow a super-sensory genius. Maybe you will waltz through your remaining days in pure ecstasy and boredom will forever be bliss; Maybe you will live a life of poetry and adjective.

Maybe it's for the worse. Maybe yesterday was the gateway conciousness that will spur a lifelong exploration of cocktails, all trial and all error until that final mix of cocaine, rubbing alcohol, and birth control pills that places your body under the wheels of a bus full of grandmas heading for Quebec City. Maybe you will lose your job, your home, your family, and your last cent to the eternal quest for the bliss you once had; maybe you will die a mangled failure. Maybe yesterday will be the dragon you chase into drug aftermath and the neon flourescence of Heaven. Maybe it will float alone in a saline jar of the rest of your life.

But maybe not. Maybe you're going to be ok.

oh, well. here it comes.

2009-02-24T18:11:00.000-08:00

the best is to be prepared as soon as one thing goes wrong, because the rest is certainly going to follow. the world is like this--everyone talks in shades of gray but when it matters it falls to one end. we all have that friend who is waiting, ready to cloak you with the irrelevant blanket of bullshit. everything happens for a reason. it was meant to be. god wouldn't give you any more than you can handle. a bored yawn and polite excuse to hang up will do, thank you.

an interesting side effect of unemployment is that it has allowed me to really develop my weaknesses. just today i realized that i am no good at painting, will probably never be able to keep my apartment dust free, and really only possess two marketable job skills: running groups and talking to sick people. perhaps i can be an a professional charades leader. maybe run a 24/7 red light, green light, 1-2-3 game for chronic schizophrenics.

a bowl of rocky road for dinner. the same pair of pajamas pants. no curtains on the windows, sleep as soon as the sky turns dark. it's almost march and so my lungs don't work, which subtracts excercise from the shrinking pool of possible ways to entertain myself. and the rocky road is half gone.

playlist for boredom:

maps::::::::::::::::::::::yeah yeah yeah's
baby blue sedan:::::::modest mouse
here it comes::::::::::modest mouse
electric feel::::::::::::mgmt
dream come true::::rakim ft. dr. dre
just like heaven::::::gatsby's american dream
molly's lips::::::::::::nirvana
all i'm losing is me::saves the day

try this trick and spin it, yeah.

2009-02-22T19:37:00.001-08:00

the absence of feeling is a feeling. emptiness is defined as nothing but is something. black is not a color?

emotion replicates intoxication; dopamine and that finicky seratonin. i am ok with being abstract.

if it's not one thing it's the next. is this what defines life? moving forward only because there are still more things to achieve? what about simple existence for it's own sake. a type of vegetative-state, but nothing artificial or induced. just existence, removed from obligation, separate from luxury. separate from need; what about living because unless we die, we will keep on living. an object in motion stays in motion, etc.

sickness has been slowing me down, and i have more time to contemplate. the problem with contemplation is that it rarely materializes into anything that feels as groundbreaking as the thoughts themselves. and these thoughts, each tiny like an individual thread, are frail and subject to forgetfulness unless a writing utensil and piece of paper/cardboard/bare skin are near. and once they are written down, they make little sense as a collaboration. i don't see how i'm supposed to be organized in my professional life while i am like this, abstract in thought like this.

i am trying to nail down what i enjoy, or more specifically what types of things and events i enjoy. i think that this is a form of organization; narrowing, arranging, choosing, attending. but things i like and connect with don't necessarily have the same subject matter, just the same general sense of self-awareness. i loved the movie i saw on friday--funeral parade of roses @ the japanese society--because it was un-apologetically weird. while sexy, stimulating, and at parts beautiful and gruesome, it was weird. but not trying to be weird. every part of you could tell how much this movie meant to the entire field of film-making; i know nothing about film but when i later found out that kubrick's "a clockwork orange" was directly inspired by funeral parade of roses, i wasn't surprised. how to create something truly new--is it even a matter of choice? can you just decide to do something new one day and do it? is it luck or fate or even accident? these are the thoughts that interfere with structure.

now i am listening to nirvana and thinking of kurt cobain. kurt has become corny, over the years, and i resent that in the way aged fans of bob marley might cringe each time a white, suburban high schooler buys a "buffalo soldier" t-shirt from hot topic. the live at mtv album is so good, though. i can remember that mtv used to be the place to go for new music/video debuts. last night, a friend and i watched conan o'brien's final episode from new york and had trouble digesting the fact that his set was sixteen years old. that we have been watching conan for sixteen years. that sixteen years ago i was seven and a half. my mother's voice: you are a baby! you have your whole life ahead of you! it still feels heavy.

i like to think i am making moves. south america is quickly approaching, and maybe by fall i will be a student again. soon i will have a new job and i will be thinking of a new place to live. soon i will leave this city.