5.3.96 (The Lower Haight, San Francisco) Age 21

I’m tired of being tired and I’m tired of hurting and tired of hating myself for things I cannot control. Things I can control. For the little things that nibble away at me like cucumber sandwiches at a Gatsby cocktail party. I’m tired of hoping that I’ll be a writer. I am a writer. I write. I want to say something but the words are not here. They are hiding in crevices, in the nooks and crannies of an english muffin, in every orifice of my body except my mouth.

I am speechless I am thoughtless. I am an empty slate being filled up with so much garbage. I want to scream but the walls are thin. I want my skin to unzip itself inside out so that I will not need these futile words to describe what’s inside me. I will not need this pain it will all fall out and be gone it will all wash out and I will be light and my baggage will be small enough to fit in that box at the airport.

And I won’t need to cry because all of my tears will already have fallen in one satisfying tsunami on the linoleum of my dirty apartment. And I will have no need for social graces and I will never master myself and they will continue to stare and I will learn to laugh about it.

05.19.98 (Lower East Side, New York City) Age 23

I’ve been thinking of Plath and her obsession with blood, babies and carbon monoxide. I don’t get it. Of all the things a poet can obsess about, why carbon monoxide? Because it’s invisible?

Because it kills. Because her fourth and all-consuming obsession was Death, and she wanted to go home.

And in the bathroom I can faintly hear the sounds of a show going on, with a girl singing the way I’ve always wanted to, and never will. I try not to hold it against her.

08.31.98 (East Village) Age 23

I just ran into Richard. We worked together in San Francisco at Escape From New York pizza, and the tired joke is: we didn’t. He lives at 13 St. Marks next to Coney Island High. Somewhere along the way I picked up a book of “Ontario Problem Gambling Helpline” matches, and I’m thoroughly puzzled. Some bodega must stock them.

Traveling solo means that I lose my seat often; going to the bathroom costs me my claim to space. I hide out in the bathroom until someone rattles the door. I walk down Avenue A playing the “What the Fuck Is That Smell?!?” game. I never win because nothing is pure in this city. Even the stench is tainted. Yesterday I was so tired I woke up this morning with blurred vision. I binge on nighttime and dawn. The rest of the day is thrown away.

10.18.98 (Lower East Side)

San Francisco: A Love Poem

I remember the web that the
MUNI hung over our heads.
Suspended entanglements, to make the trains go.

Trains on tracks embedded in asphalt.
Their wires throwing out blue lightning,
sparking up the dark faces of Victorian
houses in a town that has the shakes.

Caught up in ourselves as the
time-lapse photography loop of
plump and luminescent clouds
play overhead, projected onto
the largest silver screen we could find.

Tiny Bethlehem houses in the dark,
glistening on slopes, the fog
softens the view from my
housemate’s window.

Voluptuous hills rise and
fall, some giant’s breasts heaving
beneath my sticky feet.
And here am I, ensnared.

02.12.99 (Upper West Side) Age 24
4:10 a.m.

It’s Anna’s birthday and I’m thinking of the building across the street, the one with the fire escapes set into its face. I am thinking of the light at the top, the one that Anna always mistakes for the moon. It is moon-like, an eerie glowing light seeping outside of the lines, unable to contain itself, with steam pretending to be clouds, sliding across the face of it, a lazy Southern drawl.

On the fourth floor, to the left, is the Jewish family who tries to swindle Shabbat by putting their lights on a timer, so they don’t have to manually turn on the lights on the holy day, when they shouldn’t be using electricity at all. Do they really think Jahweh doesn’t know? I told Anna we should make a banner and hang it off her fire escape: CHEATERS.

St. John’s looks melancholic and almost sinister, its confused architecture darkened by the fumes of a million cars, by the dust kicked up by sixteen million feet, by the exhalation of a city.

The light on top of that building is our own kind of moon, and the shadows it throws are gorgeous.

9.5.99 (Astoria, Queens)

Ache (2)

today i was the sexual
pariah, mentally stalking the cute boy that
i sat next to on the subway, just as i am stalked
by lonely men, whom i find repulsive.

if loneliness
has a taste it is rust and regret.
every wasted second oxidizes, weighs
heavily in our mouths.

on nights like this
you can taste every lost moment. you can
savor every other night like this. the flavor
of it stains you, and your color dims.
damply stamped. tamped down.

01.05.02 (Cobble Hill, Brooklyn) Age 27
2:29 pm

he of the cab and the locked guitar case

[hey c... don't know if you remember me, i met you
at a highspire show a bit ago, forced you to split a cab with me

lalalaa.. anyway, your card was immediately eaten by my desk and i've found it just now, so i thought i'd say hallo.

hallo.]

i didn’t think he’d contact me, my art school drop-out.
he had kissed me goodnight.

he continued to write a bit after he found out i had a beau. he wrote a lot more after he found out we’d broken up.

try not to like him too much. try not to like him too much. try not to like him too much.

9.18.02 (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn)
4:02 am

Entomology

woke with mosquito bumps
on me, methodically
inventory my insults

count three on my face, and one
on my thigh, always under siege
since childhood, maybe before,
who knows

have learned a thing or two
about insects, this futile
war waged, puny artifice
pitted against animal instinct

i believe in its purity
but this is my body

know that mosquitoes hang
upside down, post feeding,
on the cool white wall
to digest you

they are sluggish then
thieves engorged

wake up with bites on
my face, and leg, i search
the walls, find her and

exact a lifetime of revenge

07.23.03 (40th & Madison) Age 28
3:27 pm

hell, thy name is daphne

okay, so the deal with daphne is:

on a good day, she makes me want to kill her.

on a bad day, she makes me want to kill myself.

08.07.03 (Midwood, Brooklyn)
1:38 pm

this morning, some latino guy walks by me and says “good morning sweetheart. me likey chinese.” i ignored him but now i wish i’d said something. i hope i see him again and he says something so i can tell him how hard he should go fuck himself.

anyway, i think shawn was sad that i’m moving out. i will miss him a lot, too. laurie predicted that we would miss each other, regardless of the irritations. it’s actually been a fairly smooth 6 months.

also, i think he’s a tiny bit threatened because max is in a local band, and their music is decent, and my friend went on a date with him. so yes, i feel like i know him better than i know michael. and i think he’s cute and funny. but that’s not going to replace the year and 3 months that i’ve shared with shawn.

i told him i was ready to trim my nails for some guitar lessons. he said, “you’ll be living with someone who plays a lot better than i do” and i said, “but i want you to teach me.”

i’m sending out my change of address forms today.

huzzah!

08.29.03 (East 30th & 1st Ave)
11:33 am

flossing…get it together 1, 2

i saw the dentist yesterday morning. she’s a world-weary eastern european or russian woman. she sounds utterly exhausted by life and its non-flossers.

i really have been flossing pretty regularly because of the food getting stuck in between my molars. but she acted as though i hadn’t flossed in 12 years. she said, with her accent, “you HAF to flahss” and looked all beaten and down-trodden.

then i told her about the food getting stuck, and she said, “where? show me vit your fingernail?” and i did, and she said, “zat’s because you haf a HUGE cavity. HUGE!” so that’s all going to be done next week.

i do not know anyone more cavity prone. i’ve already had two root canals and i think almost all of my teeth have had some kind of work done on them. it sounds like i never, ever floss or brush my teeth but that’s not true! i just have soft enamel. and the braces exacerbated it. i swear.

[did i mention that one of the titanium bolts in my skull has shifted over the years and is now protruding into my gum? and i have to hound kaiser in oakland to dig up my 10 year-old medical records to see which type of hardware they used before anyone can rectify it?

the funny thing is, i had asked dr. o’ryan for an x-ray right after the operation, because i wanted to see all 36 bolts. and if she’d given it to me like she’d promised, it could have precluded my need to call california.]

the disillusioned dentist also showed me on an x-ray how short the roots of my teeth are. the laws of probability stipulate that this increases the chances of them falling out. especially if i get gum disease. so let’s recap:
my teeth are going to fall out.

she definitely knows her stuff though. thank god. she was picking with her hook lightning fast, but efficient and precise.

she totally cleaned the hell out of my teeth.

09.15.03 (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
1:22 pm

nothing happened 9/11/03. i didn’t think anything would but i was apprehensive. bush fucking around will incite terrible things. i saw 11’09”01 – September 11 which had films from over the world, each 11 minutes, 9 seconds, one frame.

there was a really interesting one by ken loach about 9/11/73, when we installed pinochet in chile. when we were the terrorists. this made a big impression on me because, from the eighth grade on, i was writing letters on behalf of political activists that he had disappeared. amnesty international had described his atrocities in great detail. he even perverted the language: that a human being could be “disappeared.”

shawn is sometimes disapproving that i don’t seem to follow current events; that i’m not mindful enough of the terrible things happening. and if anything, the opposite is true. i mind too much and have to staunch the flow of information, lest i be overwhelmed. i’ve had a lifetime of darkness and pain: the world’s and my very own, i have to respect my limits. i know what’s out there.

the most haunting film was from mexico, by alejandro gonzález iñárritu (amores perros, et al.) it begins with a totally black screen and a cacophony of jabbering voices, making aural swirling patterns and rhythms. after a few minutes of blackness, there’s a flash of a picture. all it takes is one brief second and i know exactly what i’ve just seen: a body falling. someone who jumped or fell off the world trade center. i had to leave the room.

nothing about that day horrifies me more. all those abstract, conceptual deaths were neatly hidden in a crumbling structure. but people jumping out of windows, falling from impossible heights, hitting the sidewalk around terrified pedestrians, people leaping into the sky to dodge flames and the air had never been so thin.

humans jump from buildings to kill themselves, but i’m convinced that in some way those humans jumped to live. some subatomic wisp of hope or faith can cause us to leap blindly. that same wisp gives us the will to choose: one kind of death. two kinds of death. it’s more than i can bear. my mind skirts around it, aware of the deeper pain i’m avoiding. such an instant trapdoor to my feelings about that day.

such a button to push.

09.17.03 (Bryant Park)
12:37 pm

musing about this journal in a meta kind of way

i have to stop editing these. what comes out is what comes out. fiddling is dishonest to the moment.

it’s telling that on 9/11 i wrote about how radio music sucks. i wrote about the devastation on 9/15. we can face these things with space around us.

09.24.03 (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
9:18 am

that john mayer song “your body is a wonderland” makes me think of driving around oakland with ben & rosanne during the holidays of 2002. i was rather indifferent to the song before, but now it really takes me back.

“i love you, always forever” (donna lewis) is the summer of 1996, before i left san francisco, because they were always playing it on this radio station that was so new it didn’t have any ads yet. “untouchable face” (ani difranco) is summer 1997 living with bob in astoria, across the hall from tom and mike (who worked on ‘ghost dog’). “kiss me” (sixpence none the richer) is summer 1998, after i had worked at tiffany & co. and was still friends with sherry and bryan.

why do songs so often stick in the summer? does the heat do that?

the biggest exception is “dramamine” (modest mouse). i want to attach it to a summer, but it could have been fall. i was living in williamsburg with alison, near the pourhouse. the song is connected to more of a sense-memory thing than to any concrete recollection.

it’s night time, i have a desk lamp on, i’m at my computer and the bass line comes in, then the distorted guitar chords. i’m aware of the window being open, it’s always open, it’s palpably dark outside and there’s an almost cold trickle of wind coming through the screen.

when i hear the song, it’s not that i remember that era of my life or recall how i felt at the time. what i very clearly remember is how my body felt sitting there.

while maintaining the perspective, emotions and consciousness of right now, when i hear the first chords of “dramamine,” i can sit inside that feeling of stillness, so meticulously preserved from my past, and almost feel the cold air and the light from the desk lamp falling on my skin.

when i first heard that song, that entire album, i hated its abrasiveness and distortion.

and after, i loved it for the same reasons.

12.20.03 (Sacramento, California)
5:40 pm

that absolute picture of tony’s reluctant but sincere smile, pulled out of him, with a discoloration on his incisors swathed in light from a san francisco sun.

and speaking to jarmusch boy, before he was a big star. when i see him it’s the dizzying moment of my avenue a summers, so distinctly summoned. the glitter van. laura. odessa. the library.

just a time in my life, not even a good one. but so concretely recalled it becomes a precious thing. an emotion, a place inside you, frozen there, submerging all of your senses in another lifetime.

i still ache, but now it’s bittersweet. i love that he seems so shy/quiet but i know he isn’t. and i love that he’s a photographer.

my bright little elf. something so warm and elastic between us, unrealized and unreal.