The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

So tonight, like every night I spend at home, I’m watching an adult movie before I hit the hay. I’m watching the action, but I have this niggling feeling that there’s something familiar about this. Haven’t seen this dick before. Green—it’s green. The siding on the wall is a specific shade of green. I’ve seen this siding somewhere. He’s sitting on a bench the same color.

The Powerhouse. This porno is being filmed in the back room of the Powerhouse. I smirk.

Later, I tried to get to sleep. I closed my eyes, try to think of nothing. Blackness. It’s a time when I think of a lot of things I want to write about but never do. Specifically, this one image that would always be the last thing I would remember before sleeping. It was an imaginary view of a crag of rock, looking up to see another planet above. I would always think about that view, with the sound of wind whistling by, and gaze at the planet above until I fell asleep. It seems odd, but it always worked.

Another technique I read about was this thought exercise where you imagine yourself in a guillotine. Your head is cut off, but instead of blood, all your problems fall out and float away. You wouldn’t believe the things that come out: my boss, diplomas, the Word documents I need to do the next day, tricky PHP issues, etc.

None of the traditional methods are working tonight. It always happens that I set my alarm, and I actually have enough time to wake up at a non-insane hour (I got up at 3:30pm today). Then I lie there. I try to visualize different places—how I imagine them through the thousands of tourist photos my magazine has published. What all the people I wish I were in better contact with (or despise entirely) are doing.

Sometimes I think of that Margaret Cho skit where she talks about her mom astral projecting. It’s almost unsettling to be alone with your thoughts with no record. When writing, you can always stop and think. You can reread the entire blob. You can edit it for high diction, low diction. But abandoned to the vagaries of my unimpeded thoughts, it ends up being this battle to stop whatever song is playing in my head. Not that it’s a bad song usually. Last night’s 3 a.m. battle (that I really didn’t have my whole heart in) was to try to stop “Jaimie, My Intentions Are Bass,” from the new Chk Chk Chk album.

Tonight, it will probably be “Walk in the Park” or something similar from the new Beach House album. What an ironic lyric, in context: “in a matter of time / it would slip from my mind[.]” I realize what I don’t like about this album is that Victoria’s vocals are swallowed by the songs. I want her voice to be front and center, like on “Some Things Last a Long Time,” where it takes about a minute of nearly-silent white noise to reach the first lyric, pregnant with sadness, “Your picture / is still / on my wall[.]” I’ve been loth to listen to Devotion ever since I played it nearly nonstop on the car leg of my vacation.

My teacher that I recapitulated Molly’s Intro to Lit class with was at best a hack and at worst a failure, but she did teach me one thing that I always come back to thinking about. It was the etymology of “nostalgia.” And, I’ve just learned, according to Merriam-Webster, what she said wasn’t true. She really was good for nothing. For the record, “nostalgia” is from Latin and Greek words meaning “to return home” or “to return.”

I want there to not be this cacophony every time I shut my eyes and try to sleep. It’s especially annoying because once I am asleep I can sleep for a long time. I’ll turn my alarms off and sleep way in because it’s so relaxing that I don’t want to wake up. I can see why people are on uppers and downers. I have always wanted to try sleeping pills, but that old Christian Science aversion to pills that was drummed into my head as a child refuses to let me. My dad, even though he does not practice that religion and ridicules religion in general, brags that he hasn’t been to a doctor in the past ten years. What’s really going to happen is he’s going to discover he has advanced prostate cancer and he has six months to live. I hope he reconsiders.

I think the thing that I am most cognizant of in my half-waking hours is how the room I’m in isn’t mine. In that vein, I just don’t feel grown up when I’m not in my own house that I’ve paid for. I think that’s why I’m excited to move back into the apartments in the university—it’s a place I can call mine. I’ve signed the lease and paid the rent. I think Jorge and I are going to go all out decorating. It will be wonderful. My home away from civilization.

I got my Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center tickets in the mail today, which I’m excited about. I want to go see a performance with Matt or my mom, but I don’t want the responsibility of hoping that my companion is enjoying the performance. If I go see something solo and it’s completely uninteresting, I have only wasted my time. If I drag someone else, then I feel guilty for wasting both of our time. I may bite the bullet and go see this violin performance by this famous violinist, but I really have no money. I’m soon to run up against the actual limit of my credit card. I just cannot afford my lifestyle any more. I can’t eat out all the time when I’m at Matt’s. I can’t afford to drink in bars. I can’t afford my monthly MetroCard. Some of this is that Josh hasn’t sent me a bunch of checks for my work for him (he’s like four months behind) but still, those checks would bring me to just breaking even.

Still, when left to choose between my amazing vacation and two grand knocked off of my credit card, I’ll choose my vacation 10 times out of 10.

I don’t know where the summer went. I barely used my gym membership or my pool membership (I don’t think I’m joining either this coming summer). I was more of a homebody last summer, working during the day and taking breaks to go jog and such. Matt lives so far away that it feels like an entire day is sacrificed in transit.

I want to write that the summer was amazing and flawless, but a lot of things happened that I wasn’t thrilled about: Grandma had two surgeries that she still hasn’t recovered from (she still has no appetite at all). I did start talking to Kelly again, which was something I wouldn’t have imagined happening. Grammie died, which, apparently, is just the beginning of some kind of legal battle between my dad and Kathleen (Kelly’s mom).

Josh told me that it would take an act of god to subpoena me to testify in California. Inheritances, he says, are a matter for state courts, not federal courts who have the ability to subpoena and extradite across state lines. That’s good to hear. I don’t care if I get nothing at all—those people are fucked up and I refuse to be a part of it.

I suppose my dad is buying me off by paying for my tuition, but hey, he needs to pay the piper for all those years of awful parenting.

I feel like the more autobiographical this blog is the less I’ll be able to take it seriously ten years from now. Hell, even five. Hm. That’s not actually true. I read this one post that really touched me, about driving past an ex’s house.

I couldn’t help myself but drive by Ripley’s house. I don’t know what I was expecting… perhaps his abusive boyfriend leering out the window with a carving knife… but there was nothing. All the time I was up there I was half waiting for my friends to call me wanting to do something. It’s 1 AM. Nothing.

[later that week]

He seems like such a nice person, I don’t know why his boyfriend beats up on him. I guess things like that don’t really make any sense. I wish I could make that guy be nice to him. I hate people that only hang around others because they want to change them, but I must admit I really do want to change him. [...]

I’m going to go to sleep and unwillingly have dreams about cuddling with Ripley. Accursed subconscious. I should have been expecting this, yet I was totally unprepared. Why do I have to be me?

As much as I’d like to think that I’m at home in this exurban clusterfuck (Jersey) / Locus of capitalism (NYC). There’s a lot of that lonely small town guy who would drive around at night to ease the loneliness. Even the thought of it is comforting. Driving through forests is very calming. You always feel like you’re going somewhere when you drive, even if you aren’t. There’s this sense of purpose. I remember one of the most fun things I’d do with my friends would be to select a road at random and see how far into the wilderness it went. This one time, we ended up on this road with gigantic potholes that was so narrow I couldn’t make a U-turn. We put some creepy music on the stereo and jumped at everything that could have been anyone with an axe or chainsaw until we got to the very end. There was a giant, spooky-looking house (maintained by the Parks Service, oddly enough).

Sometimes I miss the ability to be alone with my thoughts. I’d drive down to the beach, and if it was low tide, I’d crawl through that special crevice in that big seastack that faced Pebble Beach. Sitting on the cliff face, I could see the puddle-jumper plane of the day coming in to land at our tiny airstrip. Perhaps there would be one person on the beach. I never discovered another soul in my little nook above the beach where someone had installed a bench.

I need a change of scenery once I graduate. But still, when Matt and I went upstate, being in a rural area didn’t seem real. There is no real way to get to that kind of rural-ness that I was used to, the 8-hours-from-civilization rural. Perhaps it doesn’t even exist any more. I don’t think I could relate to it even if I went back to it.

One of the arguments of that book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, is that by living in cities, or otherwise nearly 100% man-made surroundings, we completely lose the ability to sense nature. I’m not sure if that is good or bad.

So I laid here in the bed, vaguely thinking about the Powerhouse and all the good memories Sam and I (and a rotating cast of characters) had there. I miss that. I miss so many things, but we have to forge ahead. Taylor was talking about moving to L.A., which would be so sad, as I’d probably never see him again.

Heck, there are people here that I never see.

I don’t know what I’m doing these last few months. I can’t seem to get anything done. I never went to the New Museum, I never saw the Basquiat movie. You know what? I need to go to the Film Forum and see that Antononi movie, Le Amiche, that’s playing this week. Probably not. It’s 6 a.m. It’s going to get light soon.

This is a good sample of all the thoughts that swirl around when I’m trying to sleep. Is it better to write them down? I have no idea. I need to try to snooze again.

Ever have one of those weeks go by where it seems like all of this great stuff to write about it happening and going by, but you don’t actually seem to have the time to sit down and write about it?

I have had the time though, in spades. I’ve just been wasting it in rather stupid ways. I fired up this old computer game that I used to play in high school and before I knew it was 5 AM. That was last night. Tonight hasn’t been as unproductive, but I don’t have a whole lot to show for it, considering that it’s almost 4 AM tonight.

What did I do in the past seven days? Let’s see… I went to see !!! at the Williamsburg waterfront. It was a really fun show, although it was threatening to rain the entire time.

Javelin + JD Samson

I went down to meet Matt at the Soho Grand after work last week to see Javelin again. We thought there was going to be this huge line, but we ended up walking into this little area of Astroturf with the members of Javelin (who we talked to briefly) and J.D. Samson (formerly of Le Tigre, who was to DJ that night) looking like she had the biggest dick in the room.

There was this circle of hip looking lesbians that were subtly orbiting her, wishing that she would talk to them, but they were out of luck. She was untouchable. Even the guy from Javelin gave up his seat when she came back from the bar with a drink. The regulars started to file in (you know, those people you see at a bunch of shows but never know in real life). Matt has such a gift for recognizing celebrities—the guy from Blonde Redhead was a few rows behind us when the show started.

After the band played, the crew arrived (Hannah, Steven, Anthony, Bianca, etc.) I was out of cash and there was a limit on credit cards, so I ended up double fisting my third and fourth of these extremely strong frozen margaritas, which got me fucked up beyond reason. I normally wouldn’t have done so, but I was with Matt, so I knew I wouldn’t end up in a gutter somewhere.

UPDATE: We got onto one of the nightlife blogs.

Word to the wise: tequila is not my drink. We stumbled back to his apartment and basically didn’t leave other than to get food for the next day or two. Quotidian as it is, I think the most important thing in a relationship is to just be able to get along with the other person for long periods of time without getting on each other’s nerves. I think we’ve all been in the situation in dating where we feel like we are kind of putting on an act and that the mask is getting a bit stuffy. I never have to have a mask on, which is good.

The Rue Morgue, Rainstorms

Sunday was one of those days where I should’ve just stayed home, although I knew that I did have to leave the house at some point. I had made plans to go see one of those 50s 3-D movies that the Film Forum is showing, but there was all this drama with the Q train, so I had to take the Shuttle and catch the C at Franklin Ave., which made me about twenty minutes late. I always find it very unsettling when they say there is an “incident.” An incident could be trash on the tracks or a chemical weapon attack. Can we have some kind of color-coded danger level system?

I ran into Yevgeny outside the movie theater, and we walked over to the Amy’s Bread on Bleecker. We had gone in there a few other times, having a slice of great carrot cake and sitting at the small bar that looks out onto the street. He told me of his exciting date with the new guy, and I shared about the goings-on that week. We watched the rain come down and all the well-dressed people flitting to and fro on Bleecker until it was time to head back to the Forum.

The movie we saw, The Phantom of the Rue Morgue, was about this trained ape that would kill people. However, the thing that made it a hilarious movie (in a bad way) was that the main character of the inspector, who is supposed to be solving the crimes, is a complete idiot. It wasn’t just the inspector’s character that was wooden and unbelievable… certain snippets of dialogue, like “it was an animal—no—an animal with hands!” were so cringe-worthy that the audience would erupt in laughter.

Ape-sized hole for the Inspector to puzzle over

I think everyone in that theater was happy for the movie to be over. Also, the 3-D presentation kept giving me this really uncomfortable feeling behind my eyes. It was like a headache, but whenever I would take the glasses off it would dissipate. As to the effect of 3-D in the movie, the times that it was most noticeable were kind of lame in that they emphasized the cheapness of a lot of the sets.

Yevgeny and I parted ways at 14th St, but I still had to go over to Union Square and get some groceries. I had just gotten off of the F, and was thinking I’d walk the few avenues over to Whole Foods. As I wearily climbed up the stairs, I heard the dull roar of a torrential downpour echoing through the air vents and the entrances.

Thinking that it would be a short walk, I used my jacket as a makeshift umbrella and started down 14th St. It was about 8 PM on a Sunday, which wouldn’t be terribly populated anyway, but the streets were empty. Save for the occasional person hunched in a doorway waiting for a taxi, my walk was solo. As I approached 5th Ave, some guy walked past me, struggling with his shirt. He eventually got it off and started walking quickly parallel to my course on the other side of the street. It seemed like a nascent music video shoot, but he continued out of sight. The first block or two I was very glad that I wore my boots, but as I approached 4th Avenue, I realized that my socks were wet and my (non-waterproof) jacket was beginning to saturate with rain.

Drenched, I tried to shake out (and wring out) my jacket in the entrance to Whole Foods. Picking up a basket, I went around on my normal shopping visit: challah, peaches, apples, oranges, carrots. The subway entrance is right in front of the store, so I immediately went down to the L platform. “8th Ave—28 Minutes”, the sign read. Ridiculous! I went back up and caught the R five minutes later.

I was so glad to get home and get out of my wet clothes. Despite the ordeal, I felt satisfied that I’d left the house and made something of the day. The next day, I felt rather ill and drank a bunch of tea. I think I feel all right now. We’ll see in the morning.

Long Distance

I called Christen tonight, which of course means we had a 3+ hour conversation. My long-distance friends are strange. Sam and I will have a few five-minute conversations throughout the week, where Christen and I build up all sorts of things to tell each other for a month or two, then let it all out in this epic conversation.

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I went out to visit Patrick. His life must’ve changed. I never hear from him when he is in a relationship.

I did write a card to someone I’ve never written one to today. I need to go put it out in the mailbox tomorrow. One of the things I hate about living in a city is that the mailman doesn’t pick up your letters at your house.

Amanda, baby.

I forgot to mention the most important thing of the past week: I met Amanda Lepore. Matt and I had always meant to go to this night she hosts, called Carnival, above this bowling alley off of Union Sq.

So this Wednesday we just decided to get it over with and go. We got there rather early, and had an expensive drink or two waiting for the action to start. Everything started to get going at about midnight. We walked by Michael Musto on the way to the bar, surveying the crowd. There were mostly-naked carnival barkers operating the strength test game with the mallet, and nerdier stock tending the booths with the ring toss and such. This man in leather kept walking around on stilts, but never seemed to be going anywhere. Another waif-like (but horrendously ugly) guy specialized in semi-erotic hula-hooping.

I was getting to the point where I really didn’t want to bother Amanda like everyone else was with their request to take pictures with her, but Matt decided to just go through with it. The picture came out well, I think. I didn’t realize she was so short.

Belinda, Belinda

The most kitschy thing I did all week was to go see the B-52s at Coney Island. Matt and I weren’t really sure whether we were going to go all week, but when the day rolled around we decided that we should. I had lived in the area a year and still hadn’t been to Coney Island (near where Matt grew up).

Right after we got off the subway, we ran into Bianca and a friend of hers, who told us to meet them after they got back from picking up some food. We walked up to the boardwalk for a little bit, got some ice cream, and then found a place to sit. Bianca and the friend graciously shared their blanket with us as we waited through the terrible performance of the opener, Belinda Carlyle (with no backing band). It was “Heaven is a Place on Earth” karaoke edition.

The B52s actually put on a rather fun show, but I think the thing that was most fun was watching the crowd around us react. Some people were diehard B-52s fans but for the most part the audience had just come out because it was free. We danced 60s dances to “Rock Lobster,” and all headed home.

Have you ever felt like a place that you used to feel was your neighborhood is suddenly not your neighborhood?

After I got out of the movie we took the F uptown, and I walked through the gauntlet of black people that is 42nd Street to the Port Authority, Google mapping my bus home. To my surprise, on a Friday night (well, technically it was Saturday night, as it was 2 a.m.) I could take buses until about 3:30 in the morning, and then there was nothing until six o’clock in the morning.

I was a bit flabbergasted, because all last summer I stayed out as late as I wanted and there was always a bus at least every 45 minutes, if not every hour. This must be the result of the service cuts that New Jersey Transit passed this year. I may not say this a lot, but I certainly think it a lot:

Fuck New Jersey. New Jersey is the most mismanaged, wasteful, complacent hodgepodge of suburban idiots I have ever known.

So apparently my whole shtick for living here, 24-hour bus service to New York City, has gone the way of the Dodo. I hope this is only for weekends, but even if so, it used to only be Sunday where there was a big gap in service (which makes sense, who goes out on Sunday night?). But still, I feel trapped with the fare back and forth from the university being around $9 each way.

On an unrelated note, I was musing that my blog is nearing its 10-year anniversary next year. That is so hard to believe. I need to steel myself to edit and annotate a bound edition of the most poignant posts of these last ten years. Perhaps two volumes.

Here’s a bonus video of Javelin performing my favorite song, “Moscow 1980″ (with Matt and I singing along).

UPDATE: I tried to do it. I set up an InDesign document. I opened up my first post. And I just can’t do it. Most of them are so ephemeral and awful. Perhaps I should start with a more recent year. 2006? *shudder* These posts are just awful—and I barely remember what was going on then. I was raving in January of 2006 about this awful guy named Brian who was lying to me the whole time. I think I should start when I moved to Sacramento. I think that was mid-2006.

Okay, this post is kind of hilarious.

Until I meet Adrian on July 1. Writing about the past has a way of breathing life into things that are dead. Perhaps it’s best just to leave my archives as they are: fragmented, flawed, fundamentally incomplete. Full of unintentional alliteration.

Do you want to know the most bewitching thing? On many of these posts, I’m writing obliquely about people I know, but in 2010 I have no idea who these people are or what we were doing.

These archives are as alien to me as those of a stranger. Being excited at going to my first gay bar. Writing quixotic defenses of my beau’s indefensible behavior.

I feel like I have to mine my archives for some substance for fiction—grind them bare for the benefit of literature—but I fear the fact is that, unlike the ultra-morose Beach House lyric, I don’t got a lot of jokes to tell. I’m sick of the David Sedarises and Dave Eggers’ of the world, whitewashing a morally and intellectually bankrupt society in a thin veneer of humorless kitsch.

I fear this is becoming much like À la recherche—an epic novel about being unsure that one is writing an epic novel. Perhaps I should go back and strip out everything quotidian out of the first year. Everything about where I am or what I am doing and only leave anything abstract. Something like this. Lists of people I love. Names and numbers enough to make it all real.

I found it! The rant I wrote scant hours after Jon broke up with me. That’s what I wanted to read again. It resonates with me still, but with a tinge of a chill. Ideas growing stale. The organic universe that created them cooling, tasting like dried-up highlighters, collapsed into a hazy landscape of lost meaning.

I’m listening to the new Blonde Redhead album. I’m not sure what to make of it. Dream pop? Fuzz house? Glo-fi?

Sometimes we’re beyond words. That’s why I appreciate theater of the absurd so much—words cannot express the majority of what we think and feel. The problem is that we are bound up with a language that has us hostage. We can only think of things that already have words. Sure, we can invent “new” words, but those depend on other words for meaning. It’s this complex web of meaning that we can only sometimes escape through art. There’s this very small vestibule at the Whitney that you can get to by this staircase from the second floor. It leads you to this room where there’s a long display case with memorabilia about this black actress in the Fifties. You read all the press clippings, look at photos of her with big-name Fifties actresses, pictures of her as a child. Then you reach the end of the case, and it has printouts of the casting call, credits of everyone who fabricated the photos, the real name of the woman who posed for all the shots. The absurd permeates that installation.

It’s 7 a.m. now. I’m supposed to hang out with Jorge tonight. We’re going to go to the New Museum and then, theoretically, to Glasslands to see Nite Jewel (they are kind of awful live but Glasslands has cheap drinks and a fun atmosphere). We may go to Eastern Bloc instead, but their drinks are really pricy for a supposedly divey bar. I keep reading all these texts on the “slippery” nature of language—how it is impossible to fix one “meaning” to a text. We almost need a meta-language to talk about language. The book is talking about how throughout history people have been arguing about whether writing is just a neutered form of speaking or vice versa. I prefer writing, because although I am a prolific talker (mixed metaphor?), my ideas run over each other in speech.

Writing is precise.

Clarity.

Ordered regularity.

Which is why it is so compelling.

Meanings ebbing and flowing.

A multifaceted dance of signs, ideas, meaning—full of opposition and interplay.

I may as well give up on writing fiction.

I would have that same rattletrap attempt at dry wit just like that legion all imitating Amy Hempel.

Amy Hempel as a gay man (Palahniuk). Amy Hempel as a bougie San Franciscan (Eggers).

But Hempel is good because of her brevity, not in spite of it. There is no fat to be trimmed. It is, for lack of a better word, perfect.

Jaimie Lee Curtis would approve.

I had so much fun tonight, but I just got home. It’s 4 a.m. and my fingers feel too tired to type. So it’s a good thing that I have voice recognition software. I just fired it up for the first time in quite a while.

The first thing that I did tonight was go with Matt to the Whitney Museum to see Javelin and Warpaint. Both bands put on a really great show, and I got some adorable pictures of the main guy from Javelin.

Javelin

Warpaint

After that, Matt and I went down to the Whole Foods at Union Square to have a snack and for me to pick up some groceries. I was to meet Yevgeny at French Roast around 10:40, to catch some dinner (we ended up just having dessert and lots of coffee) before seeing the kitschfest that was Perfect.

I’m forced to agree with Jason’s assertion that the script, in and of itself, isn’t half bad. There are some moments in the script that have a certain poignancy to them: about body image, dating in the 80s, etc. However, any moments intended to have any sort of gravitas to them are drowned out by Jaimie Lee Curtis’ wooden delivery of the lines. There is this part in the middle of the movie where Jamie Lee Curtis is completely absent, and this secondary character who is obsessed with finding a husband is put into full view. There is actually an emotional moment that doesn’t ring false where, after talking to John Travolta’s character about how she plans to get extensive plastic surgery, she breaks into tears of desperation upon hearing that her friend is getting engaged.

There is this fragility to Jamie Lee Curtis’s character that is obviously in the script, but is completely absent from her performance. Also, the entire plot hinges on John Travolta being so sexually entranced by Jamie Lee Curtis that he gives up his job at Rolling Stone and any sort of career just to be with her. Now I don’t know what planet you’re from, but I wouldn’t give up a stick of gum from a full pack to be in the same room with a woman that looked like Jamie Lee Curtis, let alone flush my career down the toilet.

There are moments in the movie where Jamie Lee is supposed to be having an emotional experience, but her face is so absolutely blank that Jason and I ended up inventing dialogue to match her expression: “I wonder if there is a bagel in the kitchen… I bet there’s only poppy seed. Maybe I could have an English muffin instead?” [End scene] Those scenes ring so hollow that the sound is deafening, which is almost the film’s greatest selling point. It’s like a two-hour screen test for bad actors and actresses.

However, the movie shines (I don’t think I’ve ever said this before) in scenes where no acting takes place at all—those being the ultra-extended scenes in the fitness club, where Curtis’ character exhorts an army of preternaturally American Apparel-wearing (the movie came out in 1981) health club devotees to ever-more-sexually-suggestive aerobic workouts. There is this one (five-minute, but felt like five-hour) extended scene of the workout taking place. We were in stitches at the awkward contortions—you can see up to Curtis’ cervix in her tight leotard.

It was a strange and hilarious romp in spandex, which I can recommend only with the caveat that you are seeing what bad casting and bad acting can do to butcher a prosaic but acceptable script.

Last night, I think, was the gayest night ever. Matt, Steven, Santiago, and I went to see Fischerspooner at Highline Ballroom. It was this free corporate show put on by Amstel Light, which I didn’t realize is not actually beer but a brand of carbonated dish soap. I had ten of those one after the other and didn’t feel anything. It’s the perfect beer for lightweights, I guess.

The show was, for lack of a better word, fabulous. The crazy costumes, the ridiculous choreographed dances, the wigs—it was out of control. In photos:

Afterwards, Steven, Matt, and I went to Eastern Bloc, where Cazwell was DJing. We got drinks and then started @replying Cazwell to play Sleigh Bells. After he mashed his own song up (Ice Cream Truck vs. Pon De Floor), he put on Crown on the Ground. We rocked out to Sleigh Bells and then headed home.

So in this week’s New Yorker, they featured that awesome band that Matt booked for his boat show, Javelin, in an illustration in the Night Life section. It was amusing, to say the least. I used to read about things in the New Yorker and go to them, now it’s the other way around.

The wedding was actually really fun. Free booze, free food—what’s not to like? We also drove back with this really cool guy and girl. It was fun taking a road trip, as those are one of the things I miss most about California.

Did I mention I went out with Jorge to Nacotheque last Friday? We had a few beers upstairs at Fontana’s and talked university gossip before going downstairs to the performance space. It took a few hours for the downstairs to get filled up, but there was a crowd by the time the band came on. The act consisted of an electro beat with this guy and girl rapping crazily over it, which seems kind of schticky, but it worked really well. By the time the show was over, Jorge had to take the train home. It was a fun night.

Did I mention we went to a fabric store this week? I got some felt to make my stuffed typewriter. Now I just need some good buttons for the keys.

Tonight after work I’m going to see a midnight movie, Perfect, this so-bad-it’s-good movie from the 80s starring John Travolta and Jaimie Lee Curtis.

I’ve been wanting and not wanting to write about a certain event that happened right before I met up with Jorge. Astute readers may notice the setting, but nonetheless.

I’d put on my best suit to go to Nacotheque (for maximum irony), and took the C downtown one stop from the Port Authority. After exiting Penn Station, the labyrinth of tunnels that attempt in vain to be a navigable transportation hub, I walked over to the Borders above the station. I rode the escalator up to the coffee shop and waited in line to get my iced coffee. Walking past the aisles of books, I decided I might as well try to find a book (even though I didn’t have my backpack so I couldn’t actually buy anything). After a bit of brainstorming, I decided to look for Petronius’ Satyricon. I finally located it in the classical literature aisle. Pleased, I took the book and sat down at the end of the aisle (where everyone sits as the café seating is always full). I scanned the peritext and introduction; it wasn’t until I’d finished the “Note on Translation” that I realized it.

This was the same aisle I first met Jon in.

I had taken New York for granted: her refreshing lack of emotional loci. But sitting there, nothing felt right. I could feel the presence of the big stuffed tiger I’d been carrying when I met him—the nondescript diner in Chelsea where we ended up ordering far too much food—our parting for him to go to the Chelsea NYSC (which, I learned much later, was beyond cruisy). His oblique mention of his plans to sleep with a ton of Germans when he went to Düsseldorf. His well-off Zionist filmmaker roommates. Sundays poring over the paper copy of the Times in his cozy kitchen. The odd but sustained ritual of snacking on full-size carrots that he would make a show of peeling over the sink. My angry, unreasoned rant at the existential breakup (that, for some reason, I can’t find in my archives).

New York is coming alive with emotional resonances that I can’t foresee. Even last night on the way to Eastern Bloc I walked by this vegetarian restaurant I went on an awful date at. Still, I am happy here. The best decision I ever made was to leave Sacramento.