4/26/11

Other Day

It didn’t even occur to me that it had been two weeks since I updated this blog! This might be the longest I have ever gone without updating it. I want to say that it is because nothing exciting has been happening in the last two weeks. That would be a lie. Probably lots of exciting things did happen, but every time I thought to record something, for posterity’s sake, I found a reason not to.

And Mercury has been retrograde.


These dogs are vegetarians. These vegetarian dogs are also in love.

And I’ve been actually doing this familiar ostrich yoga pose of denying any negative thoughts by not recording them. Like, not updating this dumb blog because I’ve been to bummed out and would like to be able to skip over it, these couple of weeks.

Have you ever seen those bumper stickers which say something to the effect of “God is the writer, producer, director, and star of my life”? Maybe the stickers are about Jesus. I’ve been thinking a lot about this bumper sticker in the last 24 hours.

For one thing, shouldn’t you be the star of your own life? Then I think that if you felt like the star of your own life you probably don’t believe in God. Then the whole “movie version of your life” way of thinking. Who would play God? Is it okay to be selfish enough to want to star in the movie version of your own life?

Maybe this is one of those things where it’s like, everybody actually all the time together already knows they want to star in the movie versions of their lives, but the articulation of this desire is what makes one person (the one who articulates it) an asshole and the other (who does not think to articulate it) blissful, ignorant. Is that okay? We’re okay.


This is the soda machine in the impaneling room at the Brooklyn courthouse.

ME: I love this lemon.
YOU: You do?
ME: Yes, I love lemons.
YOU: I love lemons, too actually.
ME: Oh yeah?
YOU: Yeah, I loved them since I was a kid.
ME: Cool.
YOU: Yeah, when I was a kid I was like obsessed with lemons. I only wore yellow and nobody liked lemons more than me. They’re my favorite fruit.
ME: Yeah. Me too. They’re hella old, actually. I think they came from China.
YOU: Actually, lemons first grew in India.
ME: Oh, I didn’t know.
YOU: Yeah.

Like, we’re not really talking about lemons. You know? I mean ‘lemon’ is an example here. Often, we’re talking about boys we both know, or bands we both like, or artists, or movies, or colors, or current events, or something.

I feel like sometimes you use the world as a way to express to me that you know more about it/something than I do. And it used to really hurt my feelings. Like “Damn can’t we both just like lemons?” But I feel like maybe this isn’t about the subject. This is about you wanting me to know that you are different, that your enjoyment of lemons is totally discrete from any experience I could ever have with them. That you are deeper/smarter/more into lemons. I don’t know, actually, what you are trying to tell me. But I know that instead of proving your rightful claim to citrus, that we could instead be drinking a glass of lemonade together.

Makes it more complicated when we’re not talking about lemons, but talking instead about some cool hip art fag who we both know but who thinks I’m really lame. (But is maybe too scared to say so). See? Everybody’s got something they’re scared of. Probably more than one thing.



ONE VISION we had this weekend was, on our way to PLD’s birthday party at CLUMP at Beauty Bar, we (PLD + Boogers + Me) had an idea for an alternate ending to the night. Instead of going to CLUMP, we’d go to Honolulu. We kept making jokes, as the J train hissed into rainy ole Bushwick, that we’d just make a quick detour to Hawaii. I have never been to a volcano. I have never eaten poi. I want to. Really fucking badly. I mean, I know: Hawaii is like the #1 vacation spot in the world. Maybe it’s because of growing up on the west coast though. It felt cruelly possible. Like it wasn’t thousands of miles into the Pacific. I have always wanted to go.

Once in high school my friend Becky and I went to Yoyo-a-Gogo in Olympia, staying at the rustic Golden Gavel Inn. A pack of riot grrrls (and adorable riot boy) stayed in our hotel with us. None of us were over 20, I don’t think. I think my friend Steve was 19, which made him “the grown-up”. I was 16. Anyway these kids were in Olympia to see Bratmobile, to see the Gossip. To see Thrones and Unwound and Sleater-Kinney and Dub Narcotic (Calvin Johnson rubbed his polyester-clad butt and rapped: “The girls, they wanna be me. The boys? They wanna do me.”) But these kids were from HAWAII. It blew my mind that they’d come all the way around the world to go to Olympia. They gave me a CD of their bands. In 2001 it was a thing to have a CD of yourself; it meant you had a nice computer. The girls were in a really cutesy twee band that sang about the sunsets in the tropics, and they wrote zines about difficult feelings and storming out of parties because nobody understood. The boy had an electroclash band (before that was a word). Later, the cute boy from the hotel room moved to SF, though by that point I had moved to New York for college. Now he lives in NYC and writes a really cool blog. Mahalo.


Paul Thek, Compassion

Poor Paul Thek, lost to history. Poor Paul Thek lost to history, whom even in retrospect is the missing link. Constantly disappearing, ephemeral, invisible. Dead and gone.
Unlike the rest of us.


STYLE ICON.

1 comment:

Manhattanchester said...

I keep forgetting to check your blog and I LOVE it, so now I am officially following you for vicarious thrills and great music and terrific writing. Continue right on please. Love from Manchester, England ...x