maybe if I stopped reading about manditory sex parties, or looking at pictures of Obama riding a unicorn, or looking up things like “octopus bras”, I’d write something interesting on here

But for now, I’m just going to write a list of things that I will write about. Later. When it’s not 5:34am and I’m not sick in bed next to my boyfriend who has been snoring since 3am. Granted, he’s sick too, and it’s that snoring that isn’t really snoring. I can just hear the snot move around in his nose when he breathes.

Now he’s grinding his teeth.

Can he tell I’m blogging about him?

Also CAN NOBODY ELSE SMELL THE INSIDE OF THEIR NOSE WHEN THEY’RE SICK? And doesn’t it smell like mucus? And isn’t that comforting?

Also, when I brought this up the other day, he told me to talk about mucus less often. And that I sound like a crazy person most of the time. And that’s when I mentioned that I want a coat made out of live cats.

Also, DXM DOES make you high. No wonder kids robotrip.

OH YEAH. The list. Things I will write about:

Hotornot.com: rating everyone either a 1 or a 10. Also, why I got mad at Guy when he said I’m a 10.

My cats watch me sleep. I’m really careful about filling their food dish now because I’m pretty sure they’re sizing me up. Do cats attack? Like while you’re sleeping?

I KEEP HAVING DREAMS ABOUT HITLER.

So I have these new friends. And they have AIDS.

My boyfriend just sleep-punched me.

destroed my a dereict president riding a unicron, naked, apparently fighting for socialized (communbizied!) medicine and supporting the use of unicorn horn dildos.

 

When I was sixteen, I once saw myself as a widow by suicide in a cinereal cobblestone city… When it is too cold for September and autumn threatens to be gone before I have forgotten summer, that image reappears, singed into my temporal lobe.

 

Was New York City a mistake?

I can already feel this place sucking the energy out of me.

The streets throb.

I need to spend some time sitting on the Brooklyn bridge and remembering why I came here but I haven’t the time.

 

There was a girl.

Or perhaps we shouldn’t start there.

The subway ran right outside the bedroom window. Every seven minutes the ungainly JMZ would rattle the panes, leaden paint chips fluttered away from the edges of the sill. Sometimes she was still in bed with droplets of last night’s sex on her belly when she came to, but more often she was already at the basin washing her hands. She looked like powder in the mirror. Colorless cheeks. Full lips that were frothy, white in the corners. Her eyes were almost too big for her face, but dark and wet. She was beauty if beauty fell sick. She was the last perfect morning before death. The last bubble of energy that serves more to show that the end is here than as to indicate a recovery. Luminescent only in comparison of what was and what will come.

The holes of her eyes stared the rest over in the mirror above the basin. When had the morning come?

She dressed slowly. Her limbs pulled through layers of gauzy clothes- a knee-length grey skirt, a few faded shirts, a mossy sweater. Shoes slipped themselves on her feet and she pattered down the four stories to street level and the door slammed in her wake.

The morning was cold. No sky was visible, only vast hills of grey and somewhere, the glow of a hiding sun. The tension of rain unfallen tinged the air, but she was already too far into the subway tunnel to notice.

Always the third car from the end, second to last seat against the far wall. Always. She sat with all her weight, but still seemed to the others in the car as if she might float away.

She read for the duration of the 23 minute trip.

She got off at 25th St and 5th Ave and walked four and a half blocks until the cemetery’s flesh-fueled green was visible among the car washes and Dunk’n Donuts of industrial Park Slope. She blew through the ironwork entrance and ran for a moment until she fell as the base of The Tree and sat, pulling at her hair and shaking, wet eyes towards the carcass of the sun, and cried as she did every morning that she woke up unremembering.

 

wrote this last November

When I was little I was afraid of everything.

As I got older the list narrowed down to spiders, dust, dirt, the number 7, broken dishes, strangers, friends, talking on the telephone, pants, mismatched socks, counting, school, breathing, not breathing, and pudding.

The term obsessive-compulsive has such a stigma.

I was pretty normal.

I didn’t start washing my hands 36 times a day until I was 16.

I used to get stuck in doorways. The doorway in my bedroom was especially tricky. I would sit on my bed, tense and pallid and prep myself for the battle I was about to face. While I knew, logically that the doorway could not do anything to me, the disorder that was wracking my sixteen-year-old brain told me that if I didn’t cross the border just right, my mom would appear from her room in a rage. The fact that she would often unpredictabley do just that for, seemingly no reason, did not help me remind myself that this was completely and utterly irrational.

I would approach the doorway. A shiver shot down my spine. I would try to rush through the space because perhaps if I crossed it fast enough, my brain wouldn’t notice what I was doing. As soon as I crossed the threshold in my illegal hurry, my heart threatened to beat its way out of my chest. I would run back into the threshold and attempt multiple times to cross. This manifested itself in me rocking my body back and forth in a clumsy dance with the imaginary lines of inside the doorway and out. Eventually, I would break through. Sometimes it took minutes, sometimes hours. Sometimes, the only thing that broke me from my compulsions was my mom’s voice actually calling me.

I felt like I was falling apart. Days were filled with little black pockets and buzzing electricity. Everything was bigger, and smaller than reality.

That feeling is the only constant in my life.

Everything is overwhelming. Do other people stare at the view from their window and want to cry because the clay-colored sidewalk is so perfectly aligned with the deep grass and the canary leaves resting on top of the blades are so random? Sitting at the bare kitchen table in the fourth place I have lived this year, I can’t bear to tear my eyes away from the skyline, from the treeline, from the Victorian houses, from the hordes of strangers and strange ones who are walking along the sidewalk.

Everything is unbearably beautiful.

And excruciatingly sad.

The sun is setting. It’s 4:25 pm. November is a dark month. The sky is lavender and the buildings are in orange shawls of gloamy light.

 

I sat down to write about laundromat social theory, but nothing will come of it

How does one write about New York City? I am hit over and over with the overwhelming feeling that this is It. This is the beginning of the rest of the whole of whatever it was that I have anxiously wanted to be a part of ever since I had any concept of a school as an something to describe a group of intellectuals or crazy people who do what they do because they need to purge their systems of some thing that both fuels and corrodes their ability to wake up the next morning and continue to exist. My first inkling of such a school was during my school of the impressionists phase in middle school. Then it was the school of realists. Then The American Authors. The French New Wave, beat poets, and the beginning of punk rock.

 

Burroughs’ Junk (well, the fiftieth anniversary edition reconstructed to supposedly be his exact, original first work, now labeled Junky) is getting under my skin like the habits he wrote about. My (not so) little neurotic ideas that shoot out, as if visible (or rather, they seem as though they must be visible, perhaps as surges of unwarranted, useless electrical energy emanating from my skull), scream that I will never be able to write about, painting about, or satisfy this perverse obsession with the community of drug culture, beat culture, and generally, subculture unless you immerse yourself in it. In ways I want to. I think every writer has had the desire, at one point or another, to live in a meth lab.

 

But where do I find that? 103rd and Broadway is no longer Burroughs’ 103rd&BroadwayJunkCentral. I’m sick that St. Mark’s Place is gentrified and that the Dom is now some oriental market and there is a Rite Aid within walking distance. I’m sick of pretention. Sick of seeing it in art. In music. Sick of seeing the pretention that was originally meant to poke fun at that very thing twisted, or morph into the original thing that it barreled against. I hate these tourist-attracting punk rock stores that sell homemade looking tee-shirts (you’re supposed to make those at home when you’re sitting around exhausted after an acid trip with five other people making music with pots and pans and that thing someone found on the street and there’s a dog [with fleas] and someone’s cooking something inexpensive and compulsively writing is more important that washing your hair regularly) and shoes that I want to want but can’t help grimacing when a girl with uninspired tattoos and black hair and red lipstick buy the very same ones. I’m sick of being excited about these scenes and then finding them to be all scene and no substance. Where is the real New York? (You’ve only been here three weeks, relax. You found a bit of Real New York last weekend. Yes, that was wonderful, and a start, but it’s difficult to rely on one old-acquaintance/new-friend whose company you appreciate far too much to be the only gateway to something this big. It’s difficult to allow myself to find any gateway. None of this feels real yet. I find myself staring at the river or going glassy-eyed in the subway because it is just too much. As an artist, or a writer, or a human, I feel as if I am supposed to be able to take it in, all of it and process it and produce something that is like it but more illusive and finessed. I feel like I ought to be a windmill: take the obvious, the wind, harness it into something magical, strange, and important: energy. I should be able to filter the world into art instead of becoming paralyzed with the feeling that it is all there but only for a split-second because then it is different, even minutely and it is all so transient, but at the same time, always, always going to be there.)

 

Artists nowadays are into these lab-created drugs and pixilated art and perhaps this only seems so because my generation came too late for my sensibilities, but I’d rather be a (generally) sober artist among the junked-out and cracked-up artists than a (generally) sober artist surrounded by the pretentious and polystyrened art (and maybe I’m bitter because they are born out of trust funds or their mother never beat them or I perhaps this is all the anxiety that comes from never knowing a real art world- from making my living off of paintings of houses and other people children and dogs and FUCK THAT) that is being produced by our wired era. I am drawn to lost artists who are absorbed in their struggle or addiction or obsessions, or so out of touch with the greater world that they can portray their tiny corner of it with such tangible grit that it becomes a portrait for the human condition, and therefore an accurate, wrenching rendition of something so human that it cannot help but to be worldly.

 

What the fuck do I know anyway? I haven’t discovered “The Art World”, but I’m not going to look where the other artists are. I am going to find it in the laundromat, on the streets of the Bronx, not Williamsburg, I will find the crack addicts and whores and the alleyways covered in old graffiti and maybe bloodstains and the leakage from trash that piles up because there are so many of us, and there I will paint the beautiful ugly things because without all of this, the trust funds, Starbucks, and Art in capital letters with all the hype and funding and roundabout artists statements about color fields and fiber optics would not fucking exist.

 

3:00something on the train ride home

you say I’ve eyes like falling stars,

the moon,

the inside of your mother’s womb

from time before you knew

the darker things,

the allegory,

timeless things,

the things that pull and capture

all the capsized

and the fallen face.

and those things, too

of everything and yesterday

and tomorrow’s day,

the sun.

the stars, the stars, the stars,

their violet infamy

of sailors shorn ashore.

of all things seen

and half-reflected.

a trick,

a ruse.

a soft disguise

of quiet-calm

and curve of waist

and all things femme

and strong.

 

the skin I pull from the backs of my heels

makes rose petals

thin and ivory

round edges curled

stained cadmium

broken from my feet by vinyl shoes

the only ones left without holes

 

your hair might be a bit passe

Dear Cormac McCarthy, I think I love you.

I woke up this morning on someone else’s couch because I was out in Brooklyn until 5am visiting with high school acquaintances who were in a band then, and still are, only now they live in Bushwick in a loft apartment building with a basement big enough for underground, literally, shows with free beer and people who used to major in art or philosophy dancing like they don’t know how to walk and carrying cameras with all sorts of different lenses around their birdlike necks and at one point I wandered into one of the apartments upstairs (where the show had spilled over into a party- the kind where people sit around and look at each other and drink tea and smoke cigarettes and a few of the more social ones walk around drunk and overly affectionate) and everyone looked like actors or Andy Warhol and the girls wore vintage dresses and American Graffiti was playing on the wall via projector.  But I like them.

It was raining last night. It was raining this morning, but barely spitting and the sky was pale gray and bright and everything felt like a mild winter day in D.C. and I got on the subway, which was above ground for many stops (I was in Bay Ridge at this point) and began to read The Road.

An hour long subway ride in and out of tunnels, traversing over graffiti covered blocks of buildings with the air conditioning too cold and the sky spitting rain through textureless clouds while my throat is cracked and gritty from last nights sing-alongs and smoke is the perfect time to begin that novel. This morning I woke up and felt quiet, finally, after over a week of tension and electricity. I am terribly excited to have made friends and found one of the artsy, musicy, often pretentious, but good-for-people-watching scenes, but I am not brimming over with the sort of anxious energy that comes with being overly excited over things that one ought to know by now, simply are not that exciting, or for that matter, terribly important.

So I began.

Quiet, cold, and calm in the train and dim sunlight, to read what only 45 pages in, promises to be another 7-times read book.

 

Day four.

Well, my first few days in New York City have been up and down. (P.S. It’s diffucult to figure out how to write this sans cliche.) When I first arrived, I was overwhelmed by the bite of the Bronx at night. I had a panic attack in the pizza-by-the-slice shop when a cop walked in and I realized that I was glad to see him.

Over the next couple of days I was more overwhelmed by the lonliness that accompanies the feeling of being surrounded by so many strangers.

I wandered aroud Manhattan. Saw Bacchae for free in Central Park. Saw “A Woman is a Woman” in the Museum of Art and Design for $11… the same as it costs to buy a pack of cigarettes.

I would ride the subway aimlessly for hours holding back tears of unbelievable alone-ness to pass the time until I could reasonably try to sleep. Except that for my first three nights here, I couldn’t sleep. I vowed to buy sleeping pills. I doesed myself with Benadryl, but nothing seemed to carry me past that “I’m sleepy, but I CAN STILL FREAK OUT” phase of pre-sleep.

Then on the third day, I got a job and suddenly, I could sleep. I was still unbearably lonely and more aware than ever that I used social interactions to hide from time alone with my own thoughts. I went from constantly overengaged and stretched to thin between social outings to pay attention to my anxieties 98% of the time, to suddenly and completely alone in a new city. A huge city. Fucking New York City.

I had been calling my boyfriend, who has spent some time in New York, multiple times a day, and sometimes in tears. “I’m lost on the subway.” “I was wandering around near my bank and ended up in Times Square. Help!” “WHAT’S ‘MIDTOWN’?” “How do you say ‘Stop touching my thigh.’ in Spanish?” But today, something else changed. I spent the whole morning in bed, realized that I caught athlete’s foot (ew), my cat threw up on my throw rug, found out that my neighborhood bodegas do not have anti-fungal cream (obviously a wide-ranging conspiracy to infect the new-comers  and drive them away OR they are all a bunch of fungal zombies now immune to the effects of athlete’s foot because they have athlete’s body), and by the end of all that realized that I hadn’t cried once today. It started raining and I called my boyfriend and asked where a good coffeeshop was so I could spend the rest of the evening exploring a neighborhood (people watching), drinking tea, reading, and writing.

He sent me to someplace whose name begins with an “F” on the corner of N 5th and Bedford in Williamsburg. As soon as I transferred to the L from the D, I realized that I was now in the New York that I had stereotyped. The New York that I had dreamed of as a child, naive and too eager. This wasn’t my hispanic neighborhood, or the too-polished grandeur of midtown Manhattan or the blinding excess of activity in Times Square. This was the New York full of failed art students and skinny girls who wear this week’s fashions no matter how ugly they are. This is the New York of record shops and fixed-gears. Tis si the New York where I am sitting in a coffeeshop drinking tea and pounding out my first novel as cliche, and as happy. and as alone as I could be.