Friday, July 30, 2004

I noted the moon hanging above the brownstone backdrop looking down Amsterdam. It was big and bright but appeared ponderous and glum.

Some girl talked about her roommate getting hit on by gay guys and she was picking out tunes on the jukebox, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I went over to help her select. She was bursting out of her halter top. Then there was the predictable back and forth but then we left.

Thursday, July 29, 2004

Optimized charging – optimized charging – optimized charging.



I spent the first part of the week in the grip of a subtle and infernal nausea – never quite so bad that it made me vomit but not mild enough to ignore. It started on Sunday when I was sort of hung over I suppose and what did I do the night before... what did I do... Oh I went out with Stephanie and I fucked her and we slept a long long time and then I got up at eleven or so and went home, went to the gym all late and everything, only time for a draining schwitz. And then empty and dehydrated I met Geoff and Claudia at that Brazilian place on Houston and Claudia said the rice and beans are great, really great, she went on at some length about the deliciousness of it and of the hearts of palm they put on top and the boiled bitter-green leafy things on the side. She described it all with the extravagant effusiveness of certain kinds of vegetarians, who, like anorexics, veil their anxious disappetite by claiming that they love a particular thing they happen to tolerate a great deal because it's so delicious.

So I ordered it.

And it seemed OK but really bland and I tried in vain to make eye contact with that sexy beautymarked waitress so she could rescue me with Tabasco. So I gamely forked it all in the old foodhole. And what's more Claudia went on about the chocolate bread pudding and how delicious and she was going to have one and before you know it Geoff and I were ordering it too. And it came and it was about half a cup of melted butter mixed with custard and buttersaturated bread. And I ate it all.

The memory of the gummy, mealy mouthfuls and the heavy, bland tastes repulses me still and provokes in me the visceral dread of a food-poisoning sufferer.

Friday, July 23, 2004

Played chess with George in the heavy air outside the chess club on Thompson with air conditioner raindrops falling on the board. I won an early advantage but he clambered back for a draw. The carnage  was complete: only our kings remained. As we walked away we talked about how it's good to get our heads in that space; we can't think straight most times, can't read without our minds flitting about like butterflies – and chess sharpens the attention, forces it upon the abstract pieces and the black-and-white. We agreed we needed practice thinking like that.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

M. rode in on a gust and ordered a martini and before she sat down she accused me of a strange mood and she was right. I had intended to pose as circumspect, aloof, but had succeeded only in appearing abstracted. We talked about how she passed the bar exam and how that was and what a mindfuck and everything. We wandered out into the Chinatown cold and she stopped to buy handfuls of bootleg CDs and DVDs from a Chinese girl at a table, REM and "Finding Nemo."

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

The Meer seeps with scum, I can smell it as I cross Fifth Ave. I walk down the path past the kid on her scooter and a boy with his dog and the school group with all the same t-shirts that say something. Park employees in carts and pickup trucks navigate the path gingerly, giving a bump of the horn if you don't know they're coming.

The odor clogs the nostrils, like wheat grass or echinacea. It smells of life in its awfulest fecundity, teeming and unbound.

There's some kind of boat in the corner of the Meer, something like a Louisiana swamp boat, and there are two park employees in it, a man and a woman. There's a slanted conveyor belt dredging algae from a hole in the bottom and depositing it in great wet clumps at the fore. She sits beside it on a chair perched ludicrously high, like an African river queen athrone. I pass another worker on the path, shouting to the woman on the boat: "That all you want? A hot chocolate? HOT CHOCOLATE?"

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Just at the time that on the far track, from uptown, was the sad sound of an arriving train I could not take, someone peered down our tunnel and I figured it couldn't be, he's manifesting my most hopeless wishes, a light shone and it was the train come to get me.

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Yet another incredibly beautiful woman on the subway the other day: a young thing with a practically shaved head, dark hair and olive skin, a wisp of feathery hair along her arms. She wore a pouting, faintly feral expression; the righteous insolence of emancipated urban youth. Her shirt bared a bit of convex brown belly, a gooseflesh expanse humming with sensuality and hinting at her hips and pelvis. She had a mole on her right cheek that Boticelli might have painted.

She was standing above me.