la di da di.

i can actually hear the forty ounce of old english sitting in my fridge, buzzering like a secret guitar string that only my poor sober heart and certain alcoholic dogs can hear. shut up already, you delicious whore! remind me not that the good lord made you the perfect combination of malt and liquor, brimming with golden condensation and mocking me: "i, perfect, malt and liquor. you, evan, girlchested tetrajew, bespectacled and scared of vegetables. you are but a squiggly little inchworm in the shadow of my magnificent, gothically-scripted superlove. drink me and be the power! sicken me no more with you earthly cowardice! come. come!"

hold on a second. i have to go to the kitchen.

ahhh. there you are, sweet bravery. somewhere in your foggy, pearshaped figure lie two ounces of pure alcohol. only twentyfive badtasting minutes to go. only twentyfive badtasting minutes to go.

last night i tried papi's medicine. it was all i had hoped for and/or. in my pumpkin-carriage of upsidedownness, motion became my bitter enemy, stringcheese my friend. pillows and pillows of pillows! i slept like twin fetuses. and today i awoke to insane amounts of work to do, which, for the first time in my laughable life, i did with secret glee. everything i do with glee i do with secret glee. is that spelled correctly? it looks weird. fuck it.

normally i would go back and spellcheck at this point. but i don't think this entry is something i can afford to relive. and: a lesson i had forgotten from my teenage years: dryhumping destroys your pelvis!

harlem nocturne.

i told someone today that i'm building giant things with tiny tools. i am, and i meant it literally of course, but they took it metaphorically. i thought: might as well.

which reminds me.

__________________________________________
scorpions

the sand in which I lie
reminds me of her hair
and i tell her
i am covered in scorpions.

i had cut the cactus wrong
and the water spilled into the sand.

she asks is that metaphor.
she turns the lantern on in the tent.

the sky looks big as the sky,
minus the parts the stars take up.

i say no it is not a metaphor,
i wouldn't metaphor
about something like that.

she says i do not see any scorpions.

that is because you are in the tent, i say,
and i am outside of it.
come see, they cover me like stars.

like stars, she says, that is a simile.
__________________________________________

god, i used to be a much better miscommunicator. i dreamt that we couldn't wait for my girlfriend to leave the house so we could play hide the doctor. but she was being so incredibly and likely intentionally slow. in fact, she didn't leave until she'd invited two friends to babysit. well, they invited friends and they invited friends. pretty soon there was a huge party, and the place was wall-to-wall peopled. so i had to settle for a blowjob in the shower, just outside of which we could hear people we hate dancing. but it was so good that it probably gave me real herpes.

ni le beurre ni l'argent du beurre.

maybe i'm too proud to deal with any of it.

it rains. it rains overground. it rains underground. it rains from the ground. up. it rains like firecrackers on my ceiling room windows. it rains on a random cafe in gramercy where a blonde waitress with an indistinguishable accent adjusts her top in the window where the raindrop shadows make lovely pockscars on her face.

"how are you?" she says.

"do you really want to know?" i say.

"that bad?" she says.

"yes," i say.

"no," she says.

"how are you?" i say.

pause.

"do you really want to know?" she says.

"yes."

and she says, but she doesn't have to say. thank my luck for wandering into the only bar in town whose forlorn waitress's ipod shuffle function reads everyone's mind and plays nothing but the smiths, the cure, and cat power. i think the rain was djing. from the ground up; from like firecrackers.

"tell me what's killing you," she says as i leave.

i say: "when I want to tell someone, i know where you work."

it all began here: five hours of nearly hungover on a bus. i say nearly because i can't, unfortunately, blame the whiskey this time. it was gray all around the windows. couldn't see for six feet out. she had black hair. black eyes. black wool coat. i didn't know until i breathed on her neck and grabbed her wrist that she didn't have a wrist. her arm just tapered off to a dull point. she did have a right hand, but i didn't hold it. why did i feel like i knew it all so well?

after the storm she said "i will never love you."

"i will never love you, too," i said, like a reflex.

everyone tells me everything, and yet i tell them nothing. how can i have so little shame and all this embarrassment?

and then my heart is insulted from so far away. à quoi ça sert d'aimer?

ha.

and then they kiss.

(the following was originally intended as a letter to someone. as a result, some of it might not makes sense to some of you. not as a result, some of this might not make sense to some of you.)

remember all those sunflower seeds i ate on (superbowl) sunday? well i think that was largely the cause of my mouth/throat/head soreness yesterday. and today, an even stranger result: my tongue is peeling! it's as if i had sunburnt it. imagine me lying on the roof with one of those aluminum sunflectors on my chest, my tongue hanging out of my mouth. or, even stranger: imagine me eating so many fucking sunflower seeds!

yesterday i searched for "salt poisoning" on the internet. obviously eating salty stuff until your mouth hurts doesn't qualify, but i did find some strange things. people who want babies dead can poison them to death quite simply and without traces of poison; all it takes is about two teaspoons of salt. for an adult, it would take forty teaspoons, which (i used an online converter) is a little more than four fifths of a cup. four shots of salt. mmmm.

(unrelated note: i recommend that if we ever write a song about new york, we title it "the big rock candy apple." on another unrelated note, we need to build a much better bar-trivia team. i'm afraid you're getting the cut, darling; you and i know all the same stuff. time to diversify.)

remember in the first scene of that severence film when those girls were speaking romanian or magyar and we had to keep playing it over and over because we thought it might just be english with a really thick irish accent? well, i need not comment on our mental shortcomings, but the "severence effect" is alive and in full effect here in the city that never sleeps. on the train this morning i was sitting by two chicks (butter pecan rican, perhaps) who seemed to be babbling absolute nonsense. after about eight straight minutes of listening intently to their conversation, the world seemed to pull itself instantaneously back together (image: exploding head, slow motion, reverse) to uncover the horrifying truth: they were speaking english!

upon rereading, that was a stupid story. but i'm going to leave it in so that this paragraph makes sense. this is the last sentence of this paragraph.

anyone who knows how to do the shing-a-ling, the skate, the boogaloo, or the philly please get in touch with me. also if you have night terrors and want to tell me what that's like. i think i've been dancing in my sleep. this is at least what my hair, sheets, tent, bedside lamp, and reliable eyewitnesses seem to be implying. for those of you in birmingham: that town needs a volcano. i just found an article i wrote at some point in my rememberless life that says exactly why. provided upon request.

it's been in the teens every morrning this week, and that's before accounting for the wind. i like how the bitter cold makes normal humans moody and unpredictable. (i'm immune since i don't have feelings.) watching coworkers, roommates, and people on the streets see-saw between angry sensitivity and hopeless malaise has become my great pleasure. another is watching sleeping people wake up at a stop on the train and frantically try to figure out, in their sleepish daze, whether or not they have missed their stop. here's an example from this morning that combines the two:

a man is sleeping on the train. he wakes up at the chambers stop and it takes him a full minute of looking in all the wrong directions to realize that he has missed his stop. he looks at the man sitting beside him, whom he apparently doesn't know, and says "why didn't you wake me up?"

"what? i'm not your daddy," the guy beside him says.

"well you sure look like my daddy. that horrific tweed getup. and you're both dead, too."

"that doesn't even make sense," says unsuspecting man as he gets up to move away.

"oh, yeah," says angry guy, standing to meet him, "neither does this."

and then they kiss.

faut pas faire pleurer les filles!

it's one-thirty in the a.m. i just made some pasta for mo and me. it was delicious, but, like the alcohol we drank, it comes with a price. we are almost guaranteed to be ill. we will wake puking. but it will have been worth it.

ingredients:

creme fraiche (open, expired)
gruyere (long open, very old)
prosciutto (unopened, very old)
pesto (open, almost empty, of mysterious origin, clearly ancient)
pappardelle (nontoxic pasta balls, safe bet)
parmigiano (open, probably nontoxic)

the odds are against us. but my bright college years as a slop-chef resulted in a tasty, drunken meal. in the end, we will be able to blame the alcohol anyway. moral of the story: maureen needs to snap out of her sulky summer depression and clean out the fucking refrigerator. where is megan? where have all the maids gone?

in other news, i will be back in the states on tuesday. all of you should call me as soon as i have a phone. if you are in france and haven't been invited to my costume picnic on sunday, you should call me, and then come.

dorothy got a new home today. she will be missed, though probably not by her true owner who completely abandoned her. in case you don't know, her name is elizabeth and her negligence is legendary.

carmen sandiego is hot.

i'm a bit tipsy in a café i dont recognize with some people i dont recognize. they're talking about films i don't recognize and making esoteric references that end in a hearty, echoing laughter i can barely stomach. the lighting is sick and yellowish, reflecting off brass banisters and in huge, brass-framed mirrors. the dull bright has me feeling trapped in one of those going-crazy van goghs, so i grab the girlie by the wrist and we ditch these fucking potato-eaters for a starry night. but what to do?

thankfully, my folks are in town for some reason, staying at some ritzy hotel in a neighborhood full of post-game celebrating spaniards. we run up the spiral staircase to the hotel room. knock. no dice. but there's some free tour bus about to leave from the lobby, so we hop on in and move to the side-by-side twin beds in the back of this triple-wide monster. i lay on my back and watch basketball on the giant ceiling-mounted plasma screen. she gives me head as i watch the playoffs, all the while trying to hide my mounting anxiety that the tour is about to end as a robot-voice announces all our stops: "république...châtelet...grands boulevards." crazy fucking trajectory but whatever. my tour, orgasm, and basketball game end in a well-synchronized fashion, and as we make out way out the double doors i get a phone call.

it's jason, who is apparently now working out of his apartment in paris as some kind of state-sponsored rocket scientist. his parents are in town also, supposedly to help him clean up his room, which had blown up like a chemistry lab in a high-school comedy because his alpha-phase rocket detonated while he was lighting a cigarette. we headed over to his apartment to meet his parents. the place was all gray and in shambles and his marvin-the-martian-looking rocket was on the floor behind his computer chair, peeled like a banana. his parents offered to take us to dinner, and we graciously accepted. however, their car couldn't fit five people, so, naturally, we had to follow them on top of a train.

the top of the train is made of chicken wire, so it sort of hurts to hold on, but we manage. as we crawl along it like trench warfare we find a little glass box like a carrying case for a small pet. we look inside. it's a tiny french restaurant with little people inside!

so, we decide to say fuck it to dinner with jason's parents and find a way to make ourselves small enough to go to the baby resto. we hop off the train and start watching the little waiters serve the little breads. when the train passes, there is a police car waiting on the other side of the tracks (the wrong side). apparently it's illegal to have in your possession a tiny glass restaurant box. so the fuckers take us into custody. fucking pigs, man.

you got what i need.

grève générale:

thanks to someone's less than completely justified desire to skip school and throw half-empty bottles of eau de vie at police barricades, it took me almost two hours to go twenty minutes. the bus stop at bastille had a sign that i believe translates "fuck off," so i obediently took the one-line to châtelet, where fiftythousand people had been waiting fiftythousand minutes for a train train that wasn't fiftythousand coming. resignedly enough, i decided to climb to ground level and catch the trusty thirtyeight, which was so nonexistant that it didn't even bother to leave me a (kind) fuck off: bonne journée. so i walked home. and it was tuesday. so it was pissing like a raining cow. (CPE: cow qui pisse sur evan.)

rêve général:

i'm in the lobby of the hilton next to the big metal thing looking to pick up a girl, maybe the daughter of a businessman here on vacation, interested in an exciting weekend but too timid to make one for herself. i'll know her because she'll smoke incessantly and probably dye her hair black. as it were, i find not the daughter but the wife, and no sooner do we find a bit a shade than her hand is looking for something in my pants. an almost frightening amount of desire. i chase something with a shot of whiskey and then wake up in that big apartment on rue de rivoli that i vaguely remember breakdancing in, but this time i remember nothing. i hear mumbled chatter in the adjacent room, interspersed with laughter and a few mispronunciations of my name. a girl comes in to clean my bloody knees and to tell me that i jumped off the bridge onto the boat. "you can't say i didn't warn you." like the night before in non-dream world, i grabbed her arm to pull her in to kiss me, but she was too annoyed that i'd grabbed her arm for me to be able to go throught with it. six times in one dream i woke up to no memory but the stories i heard from other people. when I finally woke-up woke up, i remembered everything from the previous night but convinced myself that i'd dreamt it.