The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

It’s 1:35 a.m.

I’ve been studying my Spanish and painting for hours. The painting is being dried by the fan in the other room, I’m not sure if I want to look at it. I was ambivalent with how it came out, but hopefully by morning it’ll be dry enough to work on the areas that I feel need to be touched up.

I have my novel by my side, but I can’t seem to want to pick it up.

I got a tremendous amount of bureaucratic crap done today. Filled out some paperwork for the college, did some work on the magazine’s website. I have this folder full of articles they sent me to edit, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I’m going to tackle that Sunday.

I went to the B&H on 34th St. today, hoping to get some awesome headphones, but it was Revenge of Rosh Hashanah…they were closed for the holiday. The universe is set to deprive me of headphones.

I did manage to score a (used? I forget) copy of High-Rise on Amazon. I can’t believe that it’s out of print. I felt like it was one of his strongest works. Terry is so sending me that copy I lent him before I moved. I adore that edition with the 1960s style cine-camera. Is “cine-camera” a British-ism or a Ballard-ism? Not sure.

Oh, last night was so incredibly fun. Went to Mondo the first time last night with Jonathan.

I walk in to the venue and they’re playing “Playgirl.” I was on cloud nine. The rest of the night they played Elastica, Electrelane, Iggy Pop, The Smiths, Phoenix, The Breeders and even Le Tigre! Needless to say, Jon and I danced for hours.

Tomorrow I feel like I have a thousand things to do.

1. Get an estimate on data recovery on my mom’s dead hard drive (it’s going to be a fuckton of money, I can tell)
2. Get groceries at either the natural foods co-op in Chelsea or Whole Foods if the co-op sucks. Isn’t there a Farmer’s Market on Sunday? I forget
3. Get BEER. I need to drink at least one night with my roomies, but I’m always so damn busy.

I was listening to Elastica and feeling rather morose at the fact that they broke up. I just can’t imagine the soulful, earnest face of Justine Frischmann smoking heroin. Damon Albarn even wrote a song about how addicted she was. And then she married some college professor in Colorado. How shitty is that.

Flew too high and burned the wings.

I guess I should write about why I didn’t write for over a month. I think that after Sacramento I learned that I had to keep everything bottled up or I would get stabbed in the back. While that’s certainly still true, I don’t have any of my old enemies here. Well, I wouldn’t go as far as enemies—one hates most the qualities they see in themselves but amplified to grotesquerie in another.

It’s bad when you can’t even remember the screen names of old friends you’ve blocked. I guess I’m being a bit melodramatic, I do still talk to those that I love in California, it just seems like there is an insurmountable void that will only grow with every passing month. If I would have considered that six months ago, I would have probably said that for the most part, that’s a good thing.

I’ve been toying with the idea of coming back to visit during winter break, but I really really doubt I’ll have the money. I’m spiraling into debt headfirst.

Will I make the same mistakes I made in San Francisco and Sacramento here? I think that’s the question I’ve been too afraid to ask myself. I feel like everyone I know and everyone I’ve loved is far away, a half-dozen would-be boyfriends in far-away cities. It’s the tyranny of distance.

I want to write my short story about something closer to my heart, whatever that means. As terrible as that day with Grammie was, I still hated her. It will just come off flat and stilted, like 500 Days of Summer. Maybe a better idea would be to write about the last Christmas, with Kelly and I.

I wonder if I wrote a blog post about that? That would be…December ’08. Hm, I did write about it: “please tell me this is the last christmas at my grandma’s house.”

Hm, I had a Nails reference in that post too. Must have been in a similar mood. I think I want to convey abject despair at one’s situation in my story. Must do some pre-writing next week.

My amazing Last.fm friend Suzanne invited me to see Black Devil Disco Club at Webster Hall next week. I’m terribly excited, because I’ve never met her IRL (although I think we were both at the Junior Boys show last month).

Wow, Jonathan just sent me this fantastic podcast by Joyce Carol Oates about Shirley Jackson and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Damn it, now I must subscribe to the New York Review of Books. :P

It’s so late, and I have much to do in the morning (let’s be honest, afternoon) so I should get to sleep. But, before I do, I should post a picture of my work on the Firefox painting.

I’m not sure what level of realism I’m going for…but I need to get more into the habit of painting and then painting over what’s there before. My major stumbling block is being unhappy with something and giving up instead of just waiting for it to dry and then repainting it to my satisfaction. Now that I think about it, I should have used a square canvas for this.

Also, my mom holding the pepper we grew in our organic garden (we picked it last week):