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.