pranks against psychiatry.

so, the other day i get a call from a cousin of mine to whom i hadn't spoken in about eight years. word, as heard through the family grapevine, was that she was in clearwater training to be some sort of scientology priestess. i didn't know whether it would make her uncomfortable or not to bring this up, so we didn't talk about it on the phone. we exchanged news and the proverbial pleasantries (i don't know which proverb that comes from), and she sounded like a normal twentysomething who was doing a lot of traveling and enjoying herself. weird, yes: it was out of the blue. scientology-weird, no: an unspoken presence, maybe; the only thing a little odd about her was that i realized (as we concluded our chat by exchanging emails) that she had never heard of gmail. oh, also, "exchange" was misused there. i gave her my email. she didn't have one.

she wrote me today. not from her own email address, but from someone else's. (maybe she has to be supervised?) naturally, i googled his name. now, i've googled a lot of names in my day, and normally i expect to learn that a friend of mine shares his name with an australian soap star or college track and field champ. but this time i hit the jackpot. this guy testified in the lisa mcpherson trial. he was, according to the case file, the security guard stationed outside her door to keep her inside. at one point, he even had to hold her down while she was injected with sedatives. no doctors were present. if you don't remember this case, you should definitely read up on it. here are some tv segments as a refresher.

in other, less creepy news, the bank next door is begging me to commit vandalism. their enormous sign advertising "interest bearing" in human-sized letters makes me wish upon our very many stars for some scissors (i could probably find these at a store, also) and invisibility salve. a couple of minutes with these two things and i could redecorate park avenue with the words "interesting bear." this would make, at least, my day.

also, this morning i saw a woman fall victim to the marilyn monroe vent thing. a train went by under us and hot air shot through the streetholes. unlike marilyn, she made no effort to keep her skirt from flying up to her shoulders. also she was the fattest woman in new york.

i have other stuff to say, but alas.

jingles.

it's reasonable to assume that when i was ten i was more susceptible to advertising than i am today. a catchy jingle, some near epileptic-fit-inducing images or some genius boobs might send me running to mother with a refrain of "want" and "need." these days, an ad for taco bell's new cheesy, beefy melt almost induces vomiting. i think the difference, though, is more than just the slow erosion of my naïveté: advertisements were actually better back then. they were much less conceptual, and often trimmed down (especially ads aimed at children) to nothing but other people having a great time and yelling "awesome" while using whatever absurdist contraption they were trying to peddle. these days, you have to be the fucking duke of irony to understand any ad for car insurance. it requires at least a bachelor's degree in pop culture to "get" the commercials for what i think is some sort of keyboarded wireless device. see? i don't even know what the fucking product is! will we ever revert to this time of simplicity? is the nature of advertising cyclical or only downward-spiraling?

here is one of my favorite childhood commercials. it succeeded in doing something that not a ton of advertisements are capable of: it made me desire a product that truly, truly sucked.



you can actually witness the slow but sure gaying up of this ad over the course of a couple of years:



note: these videos are meant for entertainment purposes only. in know way are they intended to help "prove" a "point." i have a job, you know, and i don't really have all day to find fucking video links that show the gradual faggening of my entire television experience. professional bloggers do. also, they like to use fancy words like "caveat" and "ostensible" and "laconic" and "quaff" and "queaf" and they can eat poop like streetflies and sprain their face. but i digress.

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.