I was riding the train home from Middletown, New Jersey today, up along the coast of New Jersey, through marshlands, through early suburban development, now rustic looking, through faded industrial cities. The sky was grey and overcast and I was listening to Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," feeling the album in a way that I did seven, eight years ago when I was obsessed by the thing, and was getting quite moved on this train ride, plastic bag full of leftovers by my feet that my mom had sent home with me. I had been in a hurry to get out of that house this morning, was bored and felt uncomfortable. I thought about that, about my distance from my family now, about how much I enjoyed holidays as a kid when they were big extended family affairs, but now they are depressingly quiet, my mom's husband saying all of one sentence to me while I was there, that being if I wanted any more coffee.

And so I felt a bit lonely, leaving that place in New Jersey while the weather was so grey, passing ghost towns of what used to be prosperous cities, trash strewn by the side of the tracks, an unbelievable amount of mattresses, me wondering how they ever got there. I was reading Don DeLillo's "Midnight in Dostoevsky", which is an incredible short story, and which contained series of lines such as this that had me pausing and taking in the scenery passing outside my window while I contemplated the thing I just read:

"At times, abandon meaning to impulse. Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks—to register what was out there, all the scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human noise."

I got home a few hours ago and called Diego, really wanting to see his face, to feel connected to someone strongly after a day just spent wondering about the extent of my connections to anyone, my family even seeming distant. He called me back a couple of hours later and it was pleasant conversation, spirited. I asked him when I was going to see him today. He told me he didn't think he'd see me tonight because he had to get a haircut and hang out with this guy.

I knew what that meant and asked him who his date was with. Some young boy, he said, brushing it off, wanting to move forward with the conversation, past what he feared was a speedbump, what was one. I asked him why he was such a heartbreaker. He asked how my Thanksgiving was. I told him I couldn't talk to him right then and got off the phone.

I called back a minute later, frustrated that every time I try to discuss this thing, the conversation is redirected. We talked about this thing. I told him that I really liked him and that I felt really sad. It was an awkward conversation, was me being sincere about my feelings toward him, instead of the flippancy that normally marks our conversation, a mistake maybe. He had told me a while ago when we again started hanging out that he was incapable of a relationship, that he did not want one. And despite him telling me this, I had hoped that us hanging out often, having sex often, making out often meant something else, that for me there was a great deal of romantic sentiment involved, that I am absolutely crazy about this person. He referred to us as friends and again said that he wasn't available for a relationship. We talked about how to proceed so that I would not be sad. I said I would probably establish distance, should probably not be physically affectionate with him, etc. The conversation had a force of its own, taking me to these conclusions, and him as well reluctantly. Had he not already had plans tonight, I probably would have been able to hang out with him and would not have raised this subject, kicking it further on down the road for some other day.

It's really painful to admit your love to someone and to have them tell you that that's not what they are looking for. I think Wilco may have had something to do with this, but I can't blame Jeff Tweedy for the result. And I don't know. I guess it's time to move on, probably was a long time ago, but I still believe that there is something really lovely that exists between the two of us. And it's the knowledge that that thing there is there that makes me particularly crazy. I have gone on some dates in the past couple months with boys and haven't been invested in them, have had my attentions and hopes still focused on this boy, hoping that it would become something, that I would be able to admit its existence, that he would.

I haven't felt this sickness in a long time, chest suddenly feeling empty, wanting to vomit and cry. I have Wilco on again. The call was ended by him, saying that things were getting too intense, that he just got back into town, and that he would talk to me later. I feel sad, incredibly so, and thank God for this band right now. I know things though and I should acknowledge those things and feel free, feel unburdened by what I had been hoping for, know now to focus my attention elsewhere, to try for love with others. I know that, and yet, yet I still hope that he will call and tell me otherwise. Turn up that stereo and call your friends you haven't seen in a while. Get out of the house.

There has been an absence from the world of diarying for the past month or so not by a choice and not by what usually happens - the indifference of a drunk and often rudderless late twenty something - but rather by the death of my last laptop. A new one has been purchased and today Time Warner has come to my place of residence and installed high-speed Internet, now a thing I need to pay for each month, my neighbors with unlocked networks apparently deciding to lock theirs in that time I was sans computer, sans some device to write on this world wide web the slights and joys I have had over these past few weeks, and they have been numerous, though perhaps not abnormally so, that they are always numerous in any given span of weeks, that that is what life is, and we are continually surprised by the myriad ways in which joy and sadness can present themselves, all the wildly varying recipes, recipes calling for totally different ingredients, totally different methods of baking, and yet still producing a pie that tastes the same.

And so with this Internet now being streamed into my house, I am writing to say I am still here, that I am going to get back into this habit, that perhaps it will not start in depth tonight as I have to wake up in five hours to work on Thanksgiving morning before racing up to Penn Station and catching an NJ Transit train out to my mother's house where I will try to be thankful and probably in fact will be. And so there is this, the world of diaries which I am happy to have Internet for. And there is also online porn. I have jerked off far too many times today, so excited to again be able to watch dirty videos online and to be able to do so on this fancy new computer and with a high speed connection. Sadly, XTube was down, but YouPorn, itsallgay, and various other dirty video sites were up and running, and I ran along with them, unable to sate my appetite for this stuff. And there are two other things that this www has provided to me and really this is why I had originally logged on, just to gush about these two products, enabled by two things about the Internet I am so excited about.

So, first of all, there is YouTube. Today, I heard Wilco's "I'll Fight," and because there is this thing called YouTube, I have been playing it over and over again for the past several hours, unable to get enough of this song, thinking hard about life while listening to it, and the song somehow giving life the narrative I want it to have right now, its sense of determination and its clear statements, no modifying adjectives to diminish their assertive nature. I am listening to it now as I write this and it is informing and probably distorting everything I had wanted to say.

Second of all is that because I now have a decent Internet connection and a decent computer, I can now stream this vast library of old Netflix movies. I just watched Paul Morrissey's Flesh and, holy shit, what a beautiful film. Joe Dallesandro is captured so lovingly as this beautiful ideal, this beautiful hustler, cocky, aware of what he has, horny. I don't know how I had yet to see this movie, but I am so glad that I finally did. Some great scenes between hustlers and johns made me think a lot about sex work. Some lovely shots and quick cuts made me think of life, of boys, of desiring a particular body so much and what both the cause and the effects of a decision to worship a body are.

And there is YouTube, a jukebox that was heaven sent, playing any song you want to hear at any time, and here is Wilco's "I'll Fight":

A weekend for me started on Thursday night, the idea of a weekend did, the idea of some contrast to what had seemed like a boring week wherein all I really did was work. The weekend would be committed to the idea of reckless fun, of overconsumption of substances, and of having casual sex. That was the idea. We are still in the midst of this weekend, halfway through.

That first night of this idea I went to Eastern Bloc where I consumed numerous whiskey cocktails, where I smoked a spliff outside, and where I expounded on my ideas about place and cycles and loneliness and all sorts of nonsense to a patient Adrian. When I went outside to smoke this weed, I soon found myself too overwhelmed with emotions, with an inability to be able to translate these things to other people, found myself anxious about going back into a bar and having to be social and so I went on a walk, circled the block, west on 6th Street, north on A, east on 7th, and during this walk, this time to collect myself before heading back into conversation and a bar, a place where there are expectations of being able to hold a conversation and where it is generally not okay to just be a stoned awkward person in a corner - during this time I began to think a lot about Halloween, this day that it currently is, but at which time was still approaching and I felt tremendous grief in the presence of ghosts. I began to think about the past year, about where I was last Halloween and about the things that have died since that time. I thought about Niki and about Gabriel, whose birthday it is on this day, and about Diego. It was a year ago that Niki kicked me out of our home on Suydam Street and which put into motion my year of feeling homeless and lonely, really just the beginning of what would be many losses. I would soon stop talking to Diego, and then a few months later, stop talking to Gabriel. These were the ghosts that were haunting me on this walk, thinking through all these things, these changes that have occurred in the last year and I thought about that terrible gay boardinghouse that I lived in on 7th Street between B and C.

I was approaching the place. It was past the circumference of the circle I had intended to make and the idea of continuing east on 7th past Avenue B really frightened me. I knew that I should confront the place, view this place, see if for what it is, what it may have been, and to show myself that I didn’t live there anymore, to know that I had moved on, grown, become better. And I hesitated on the corner of 7 and B for a long time, not sure if I wanted to continue, not sure if I could handle seeing the house. I was stoned, okay, and so the house was taking on a perhaps outsized significance in my thoughts about grief and life, mine, and of Halloween. A haunted house.

I finally crossed the street and made my way to in front of the house, looked up to the fourth floor window that used to be my bedroom, tiny thing, wondered about who was now residing there and was so happy it was not me. There was a great deal of grief about my life at that time and the things that led to me being there. I felt better though, seeing it, staring it down, and being able to walk away. I rejoined the circle I was making and looped around back into Eastern Bloc, where I told these thoughts to the bewildered Adrian, who really only seemed to be interested in making out with me and not my depressing stories about lost friends and gay boardinghouses. Matt, at some point, cut me off from drinking more. I left. I had to stay committed to the project, enact the idea.

I went to the Hose where I could order more drinks and flirt with unknown boys, boys without history, without names. Street Hero performed and I danced like a crazy person – the idea of the weekend enacted, lost in dance. After their show, these two boys touched me, told me they liked my moves, asked my name. I told them my name, asked them theirs. I was outside smoking a cigarette with one of them, the one I was least attracted to. He told me they were a couple, a threesome was discussed, whose apartment we should go to was discussed. He mentioned something about how there’s no such thing as new music, how it all sounds like earlier stuff. I didn’t like this statement, its jadedness, its failure to approach things freshly. I was also belligerently drunk and easily annoyed. I started to kiss him. We talked more. I kissed him again because I was done with talking and wanted to get this threesome on the road. He said no when I kissed him this next time, said it had to come from something we were both feeling. I was wasted, said okay, and made motions to leave this conversation, to seek out other people. I imagine now that my moves were not suave as drunk as I was, as cigarette and pizza and whiskey smelling as my breath must have been. He asked if I wanted to exchange numbers so we could all hang out, coded talk I believe for having a threesome, but I was annoyed about his no, about his comments about music, and about how really I would just rather have sex with his boyfriend, and I said No, I don’t. I left and talked to other smokers, these people that hang outside of bars. His boyfriend came out and asked him what happened and they left. I got a BLT at the corner deli, a candy bar of some kind, and got into a cab home.

Yesterday, the weekend continued, this idea refusing to die. I went over to Diego’s in the daytime and he made my costume for me, this beautiful harlequin outfit that I cannot wait to put on shortly. We had sex afterwards in his bed, collapsing afterwards on top of each other, semen smearing between our bellies, a pleasant mess. I went home, napped off some of the hangover I was still feeling from my attempt at a weekend the night before. I woke up and was ready to continue the narrative, met up with Bob and went to some gay bowling party with an open bar and free bowling and too much dry ice. The open bar ended and we moved on to another one, cattle grazing, moving from field to field once one is exhausted. We went to the Hose and I am really starting to get sick of that bar, of every party being there, of the feeling that there is this one gay bar for some reason in this large city we live in. But there was free booze and I drank some it before that was over and I realized that the party really sucked. The fog machine could not hide this fact.

I left and went to Eastern Bloc, the same sites revisited again and again, pagan rituals performed on these altars, Halloween practices. There I started talking to this sexy gentleman, Jed, who had felt up my spandex-clad legs, had had flirty conversation with him, sexually charged from the get-go with his feeling of my legs. He said he was going to go pee on the street. I told him he should pee on my face instead. He went out on the street to pee.

There was this other person there, nameless last night, despite his name somewhere in my phone, who I have made out with at bars before, who looks like Diego, and who I made out with last night. He kept biting my lip though, this vampire, biting it really hard in a way that was not at all sexy, that would continually kill whatever feelings of sexiness I was feeling. I screamed each time he did so, afraid he was going to bite off my lip, and he would whether I liked that. I would tell him no, that I did not like that, and minutes later again it would occur, this terrible kissing habit of his. At some point, I had enough, and slipped out from under him into the crowd. I found Jed. He commented on my smeared makeup, joked that everyone wanted to make out with me. I was that slut. At that moment, on cue, some intoxicated lady came up to kiss me. Proof of his statement.

He, this Jed fellow, asked me where I lived. I told him and he curled his face at how far Bushwick sounded. I asked him where he lived. He lives in the West Village. He said he likes to take boys home there and fuck them. I was turned on by this, ready to leave with him. He told me though that he doesn’t take home boys with makeup on and that I needed to wipe my face, that it was all smeared. I told him no, turned off by the pushiness of the demand, that probably I would have washed the zebra stripes off my face at his apartment, but to tell me to do so here, at this bar, as a condition of going home with him, was something my belligerent self was not going to tolerate. He tried to hand me cocktail napkins to wipe it off. I turned away.

I had to leave, had to escape the vampire kisser and also the presence of this makeup hater, this person trying to wipe me clean, erase something about me. I fled, got some pizza and got into a cab, wanted to be home quickly, to some idea of home, running from one projected idea to the next.

There were really ambitious goals for this weekend. They involved writing in my diary these things I have been mentally composing on subways about town. I am going through some things I was excited about writing. Additionally, I was going to move old entries from two online diaries to one new one, to a domain I purchased. I was going to work on the HTML code for this site, making it quite pretty. My computer, old Dell laptop, has come under assault though by pop up ads and pop up virus scans every two seconds. It is quite difficult to get ahead of this problem, to even identify it to remove it. So now I have to put these projects on hold for a bit, writing this from my phone. I need to buy a new computer, which I will do once I pay my rent and raise some funds through the generosity of older gentlemen looking for things they think I may be able to offer. Going to see Gena Rowlands introduce a screening of A Woman Under the Influence at MoMA, listening to CCR, waiting on Thai food, gray weather.

The weather is cold, the sky gray, and the air moist. It all feels too soon, the coldness. I awoke this morning in Jeffery's bed in Hell's Kitchen, cuddling with him, looking at him, thinking how cute this boy was and wondering about the circumstances of life that will align to produce these mornings. Throughout the night, he would pull my arm around him, encourage closeness, encourage cuddling. This was nice, very nice, since the last person I spent so long sleeping with did not do this, would pass out when he fell asleep, out for good and had no interest in cuddling.

We saw an early matinee screening of Where The Wild Things Are surrounded by a big school group, McDonald's breakfast sandwiches stashed in Jeffery's bag. The movie was really beautiful and the mediocre reviews of it I had read really helped me love this film, no insanely high expectations to fall short of. There are such beautiful moments in this movie. There is this moment where all the wild things form a giant cuddle pile, that their preferred method of sleeping is for everyone to sleep all lumped together, bodies on top of bodies. They bounce on to this pile, bodies flying through the air to join this mass. That was one of my favorite images in the film, the goat monster being flung through the air by one of the other monsters who said, "Go ahead, get on there."

The monster embrace Max as their king when they first encounter him and tell him they don't want any more loneliness, that they want happiness. Carol, voiced by James Gandolfini, is this sad lump of a monster, much like Max, prone to fits of rage as a method of dealing with his loneliness, his unhappiness. His eyes are filled with sorrow and Gandolfini's voice is the perfect match for this character. I was terribly moved by Carol. I want to get really stoned and see this movie a couple more times. It touches on a lot in very subdued ways, presents moments of beauty and sadness and joy, showing what fragile things we are.

I came home incredibly happy about the evening and the morning I had had and then read some sad news on the internet, a friend from work in the hospital from a car accident, and things seemed even more fragile, this life more precious, these moments of joy more worth it, and me filled with so much love toward this person injured, toward pretty much everyone, these bodies populating this city with me, these cities elsewhere.

And now I need to get dressed to go hang out with co-workers and probably be sad, but we all bought tickets to this haunted house a while ago and had made plans to get drunk at Dallas BBQ, and now I am not feeling it, don't really want to go. The sky is gray and I am listening to sad music and want to continue to, want to keep lying on my couch and read and drink coffee and think about boys and life and monsters and whatever other subjects my caffeinated mind will jump to, but plans have been made, tickets bought, and it feels like an obligation, is one.

I am listening to early jazz, am quite stoned, and am thinking of Woody Allen, feeling a bit that this, me in this city, his, and listening to these jazz standards with blaring brass is some scene from a seventies work of his, this the soundtrack. I think to movies a lot, framing particular moments of my life as scenes from movies, that the movies I love shaped so much of my perceptions about what friendship and love and joy could be. A great deal of how I live my life, or how I would like to, I am increasingly coming to realize has been informed by movies, that I want that same intensity, that same feeling depicted on screen, that longing for some achingly great connection with some other person, thinking of Annie Hall and of Manhattan especially. And maybe, maybe, to try to push my life closer to that cinematic ideal of life, I add these touches to it, will play this music to achieve the effect, to follow the same staging techniques.

Perhaps pretty clear evidence of this is that I watched Away We Go this evening, felt fairly sentimental about life afterwards, and then punched in Sufjan Stevens into Pandora, and soon had my house filled with the same indie folk that had earlier served as the soundtrack to this film which had me thinking about love and family, that to continue these thoughts, the feelings, I needed the same soundtrack.

Where I am going with this, I have totally forgotten, don’t think I ever actually knew. I really had just meant to start this off, this act of diarying that I have fallen out of practice with and which I intend to get back in the habit of doing near daily, that what I had meant to say, what I had intended, was to provide some setting to this current entry. I was going to have myself make some mention of the fact that I was listening to this jazz, perhaps to even discuss how just moments before I had concluded what had been an epic ballet staged solely for the benefit of myself to many of these numbers, how the moves that this dancer performed, oh man, you should have seen.

And there, again, I go, off and running after some tangent which I don’t even know what I would do with were I to catch it.

I spent today doing laundry and editing my co-worker’s story. As payment for this, he offered me a ticket to go see Oleanna last night. The production wasn’t that good, Julia Stiles and Bill Pullman, both being a bit bad and neither one of them engaging the other. Aside from that, the play is pretty obnoxious in its disdain for some vague notion of feminism. The play makes Carol seem wicked, seem awful, and since she is made to represent “the group” whose goals she refers to – not a particular organization mind you, but a broad “the group,” leaving you to project on to that all manner of devious feminist groups - since she is made to represent “the group,” this group, these ideals, must also be wicked, awful, ridiculous, that things have gone too far for the women’s movement if this honorable professor trying to help a student loses his job because of it, is even accused of rape, that things have approached the ridiculous. That message is one that for reasons I might hope you would understand rankles me a bit, makes me slightly uncomfortable.

I think that After Miss Julie also contained some pretty blatant disdain for “uppity” women in its text. Miss Julie, the terror of the play, is a bit of a looney toon, playing sexual power games with a couple in the employ of her house. And then when we get her back story, we learn that her mother was liberated and slept around, and clearly this is the source of Miss Julie’s emotional unstableness, her inappropriateness, that she her and mom were too loose, did not conform to how a lady should act. They are playing three blocks away from each other, two Broadway stages showing these works about the wicked ways of free women, and I wonder what it is about this particular moment. But I guess it’s a story we like to tell a lot, like to hear a lot. I am starting to get bored of it though.

Today, I really missed Washington Mutual. Chase, my new home now through the mechanisms of mergers and acquisitions, does not have overdraft usage. At WaMu, I could overdraw my account my bank account by up to $900. This was a thing that I did continually and really saved my life more than a few times throughout these past years in New York. Surely not a good thing to do since you still incur overdraft fees and yes I should manage my money better than I do, but I don’t and that’s not the point here - the point is that Chase no longer does this, so for instance right now when I have three dollars on my person and only three in my bank account, I cannot do what I would normally do, which I did as recently as a couple weeks ago, cannot still take out a bunch of cash from the ATM to make me able to continue to live recklessly until my next paycheck arrives. And I get paid on Friday and surely it is not the end of the world to live within my means for two days, but it was a major blow today to go to the ATM machine and discover that this was no longer allowed. I called Chase to inquire about this and was told straight up by the guy on the phone, a Chase employee now, that Chase does not have that and that WaMu had more benefits and that he misses WaMu too. It was a nice moment of reality with a person in a call center, something so rare to encounter when talking with customer service people on the phone.

I have had more than a few such nice encounters today, all with strangers, some really nice brief exchanges with people on the street. People are feeling it today. I certainly am. I’ve got a very well-selected soundtrack.

I just spent a long while writing this entry about last night and today, using recent events and conversations that have occurred to take some broader look at my life. In short, it involved recounting some strife with Diego, meeting this lovely boy, Jeffery, and helping him paint his apartment today. My computer froze up and there is not even enough free memory on computer for Word to do AutoSave, and so it was going to be lost, unsaved document that it was. I took a picture of it and all that is there is the bright happy ending. Maybe that's how it should be, maybe I don't need to show all my cards, that maybe sometimes it is good to be quiet, that detailing things is a way of prolonging their lives. Still, I was a bit sad for the thing to be lost despite whatever potential blessings it may be providing. The desire is gone now to recount the same events again - I have gotten my release. I wrote it down, thought through some things I needed to give time to, and am at a better understanding of what my feelings are and what situations actually are. Here is the end of it:

I woke up this morning and looked at the text messages I sent out last night, kind of fearing that they were too much, and fears proved correct, proved prescient. I don't know what happened. I went to go have a couple of drinks at Eastern Bloc after getting off work and I consumed them quite quickly, leaving shortly thereafter to go home. I am now Facebook boyfriends with Matt. I sent a text to a co-worker I had been flirting with all night at work and who I was supposed to have drinks with but who had to stay at work later, flirting back and forth via text, eventually me suggesting he come over to my house. I sent out another invite to some person I have been flirting with on Grindr forever, suggesting he come over and get stoned with me. And all of those are a bit much, but the real kicker is the text I sent to Diego. It's long and self-pitying and in which I declare my love for him, lament its lack of return, and say that I am going to seek out new loves.

Things have been working themselves up to this text for a while. We have been hanging out often, sleeping together often, being quite affectionate, and I have become attached or think I have, and regardless there has been me making more and more pronounced the extent to which I like him and there has been him stepping away emotionally from me, trying to make distance from these comments that try to step closer. I just finished reading this book, A Vindication of Love, essentially a defense of crazy, impassioned love in an age that the author, Cristina Nehring, believes is too focused on concepts of "healthy" relationships, of neutered affections, of equal and reciprocal feelings. She argues, using the canon of Western literature as her examples, that for most of time love has been something that has made people crazy, that it will leave you scars, perhaps kill you, and that all of that if fine, great even, that that is what makes a life a life. And the book is all right, flawed in many ways, but still that is the thing I had been reading and surely that had some effect on me, caused me to become a bit more crazy about this boy I dated a while ago and who now at this point in time I am supposed to be friends with.

The intensity of my affection and regard for this person move it into some realm other than friendship. We saw Brighton Beach Memoirs on Monday night and it was sentimental Americana, but I loved it regardless, nearly cried a few times thinking of my own family and of my own relationships with people. Watching Laurie Metcalfe act on stage was a great pleasure. A greater pleasure though was watching it next to this boy, his leg pressed against mine and him continually falling asleep throughout the first act. After the play, we went to Metropolitan and had some drinks and we talked about things, about emotional distance, about how I am in love with him, and we also didn't talk. It was awkward and I was sad and unable to express things and hurt that things weren't what I wanted them to be, that I wasn't sure if they would be. The thing I have with him is great and yet it also falls short of something I want. I find myself even here unable to properly say things, there are pauses in between each of these sentences, and I am sure the thing reads terribly - that I don't know how to go about saying it, perhaps don't want to.

The implication of what I have been told though comes down to this: he is still hung-up on his ex-boyfriend, cannot be the person I am looking for, that I should probably be trying to find these things in someone else, and yet I don't want to, don't see these qualities in other people. So, a problem. But we'll see. I guess I should step back, read books not about passionate love, and start to seek out new faces, new eyes to flirt with. The weather is amazing. Fall’s onset has really invigorated me in just about every sense and I feel well poised for change, for things I want to happen, things I don’t want to, and things I am going to make happen, things I want to do with myself, goals, and dreams.

Last night I felt like I was in a night I had lived in some years ago, that there was some incongruity, that perhaps I was trying to make it like that, that perhaps I was too old to be wasted at some East Village gay bar, quite high and drunk, having gone there by myself after a friend's performance in the Lower East Side, and having run into this boy that I have had a crush on for a while and who I have only ever briefly talked to before, to suddenly be outside sharing a cigarette with him and the two of us exchanging a look signaling, asking, whether the other person wanted it as well. I started to kiss him against the hood of a parked car on East 6th Street and we didn't stop for some time, until he had to pee so bad that he had to go back inside. I went back inside as well to pee, the moment seemingly passing. He said he had to go, had to wake up early, and we started to make out again, inside the bar now. There was some self-awareness of what a drunk slut I must have appeared to be, but that self-awareness was slight and my attraction to this boy was greater, far greater, than any concerns I may have had about social propriety. He did go home and shortly after he left, I did as well, only wanting that boy, the other ones in the bar holding little appeal, my night indeed over. I got some pizza on my way to the train and listened to the music coming through my headphones, feeling pretty ecstatic about that makeout encounter I had just had with such a cute boy, wondering if it was at all likely that it would repeat itself, hoping it would, but thinking it may have just been that thing there.

This morning, after waking up, I got a text from the John on 96th Street I used to see often but who I haven't seen in probably close to a year. I am convinced this meant something, but I am not sure what. The reason I have this conviction is because yesterday I inserted this man, 96th Street guy, into a story I am working on for this reading on Wednesday. It is incredibly weird to me that I would write this guy who hasn't been in my life in a year or so into a story and then the very next day I would hear from him. I don't know what this says about writing, coincidence, human beings, or life, but it did give me a great deal of faith that I need to continue writing.

I was asked to participate in this reading by Robert and I am very grateful to him for that, that it has really inspired to come home and work on writing pretty much everyday after work. I am going to be reading with some really good performance artists and so I do feel a bit weird and slightly insecure about my presence on the bill since I haven't read or performed before and all these folks have. And so since agreeing to read, I have had incentive to write, reason to, and for that I am really happy. If you are in New York and want to come, below is the flier:

Feeling some significant gap between what my actual age is and how I find myself reacting emotionally to a boy, that this all seems so what is supposed to be teenage, so not supposed to be late-twenties, almost thirty, and yet here I am alone in my apartment, a Tuesday night, quite drunk, thinking about my interactions with a boy and how I am repeating certain patterns I have tended to. I am thinking about Diego, who I am supposed to be "friends" with (read: nonromantic) and yet am finding myself thinking about him often, feeling slighted when he sleeps with other people, and getting into silly fights with him. I am quite in love with this boy and does it really take rejection for me to feel this way? Is this actual rejection or just perceived?

I am not sure how things are going to play out, wish I had some more self-control emotionally, but at this point see two options, one clearly more desirable, the other one involving a break, a not talking, a getting myself sorted and attracted to other people. And, yes, I will admit that it is weird to like someone you have already dated, someone you stopped seeing a year or so ago, someone, someone that still seems to be hung up on their ex-boyfriend, that these things should be left in the past, and maybe I can do that, but right now I am drunk and it seems quite difficult, me instead thinking about how much I like this person and how I wish they reciprocated this feeling, then extrapolating from that thinking about the patterns of my liking people and wishing that any of the people I had ever been crazy about had felt similar about me. There is also this disjuncture - these parts don't match up, someone feeling one and the other another, and one day I am convinced that the pieces will fit, that things will be what stories tell me they can be.

I am lonely for other reasons and maybe just focusing too much on this boy, on Diego, for these reasons, that because I am not hanging out with the people I used to, that I am now more dependent upon his time, perhaps too much so. And I am going to hop into my bed and fall asleep to the sound of my fan and will swat away the mosquitoes that bite me in the night.