he's got style for a gentile.

bigness

i’m taking in the black bigness
of the sky from a manhattan roof.

stars are breaking through it,
more than i imagined i’d see in the city.

i remember reading of some galactic
car crash, milky ways and andromedas.

millions of particles collide:
my fingers, her hair.

how many windows do you think
are in this city? she says.

unknowable, i say, still looking
up. something moves or doesn’t.

millions of particles collide:
the wind, my arms.

this isn’t how i imagined living
on an island would be, i say.

you want chinese? she says,
looking over the edge

where two rails meet at a corner,
her face lit with the street below.

millions of particles collide:
my mouth, her neck.

i wrap myself around her
like the black around the stars.

yes, i say, i’m hungry. i peer
over the rails and take in the neon.

the chinese place downstairs
is called good advice. we go there.

the daytripper.

last week i fell in love with new york and today paris is my mistress.

it was the weekend to end all weeks: dirty tea and dirty non-tea, to say the least. everything was punctuated with an overwhelming sense of goodness, affection, and community like some sort of homosocialist paradise. it's hard to say if i was ever really awake or asleep, but i compensated for at least one of those on two flights brought to me by icelandair, old granddad, and a gay polo team (redundancy check). not even the sound of your fat child eating starburst could spoil my mood. i don't know what year it is in iceland, but neither the richard gere vehicle first knight nor the ancient and grossly overlauded stand by me could bring me down. i was on an airplane! how impossible are airplanes! on arrival:

"bonjour."
"bonjour. vous connaissez alexandra qui habitait en face...?"
"je la connais."
"elle vous a laissé ses clés?"
"oui. votre prénom et le code secret."
"evan."
"et...le code?"
"j'en sais rien."

smartass. i'm gonna go slam a noisette and then roll around in some liquor like a dog scratching his back.

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.