i wish it was christmas today

It is really cold in New York right now. It's February cold in December; the kind of cold that makes you hurt from the inside. The sort that makes you want to work extra hours at your job, out of gratitude for being able to pay for the roof over your head, the clean pillow underneath it, the chocolate you eat under blankets.

I left my office tonight and saw the same man I see often, sitting underneath the scaffolding outside the door. He's in a wheelchair. The first time I saw him, he was grappling for his dropped cell phone. This time a woman, a stranger, was helping him with his sleeve. I couldn't really see what she was doing, but I heard her say, Is that better? His face is partially paralyzed so he can't talk very well, but he mumbled something in response. He was bundled up, and I wondered who had helped him dress. I thought about goodness.

In my work neighborhood there is a Dunkin' Donuts with a mirror on one side that runs the entire length of the space. I go in every morning and spend three dollars and 48 cents on a coffee and an orange juice, plus tax. I don't like to think about how much money that really is, or how I never used to drink coffee. There is a Latino woman who works the register. Sometimes she remembers my order before I say it, and sometimes she smiles. Some mornings she does neither of those things, but every morning she's there.

The other day as I was leaving an older man was coming in. I let him in first, and in passing I smiled at him and said good morning. The blue sky was making me feel friendlier. As I went out, I caught a glimpse of him in that long mirror. He had whipped around and I saw his face following me, stunned. I think he had forgotten what good morning sounded like coming out of a complete stranger.

The thing about a city is that it embodies all the people in it. It is only as good or as bad as the eyes that see it. It contains the properties of the people who observe it. The thing about a city is that it is just like everything else.

the worst are full of passionate intensity

I bought a new type of soap the other day. I thought it was lotion and it was really cheap and it promised to provide seven different types of hydration, so I bought it. When I discovered it was soap I felt surprised then disappointed then excited I wouldn't have to buy soap for a while. For sale, soap and a full range of emotions.

The soap is scented. It smells like my ex-boyfriend. Not the one who pushed me down onto the bed, but the one who tied me there. When I shower now I feel mesh knots grazing my wrists and hear flesh rubbing against flesh and taste red wine. One time we got really drunk on red wine and stayed up til six in the morning fucking and talking and fucking some more until the sun came up and we blacked out. Even after living in New York for two years, that night might be the closest I've come to a rock star life.

We had problems. He drank too much, like everyone else in college. He was on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds to help him cope with the loss of his parents. He was an orphan by the time he was 19. When we started dating, I knew his mother had died fairly recently, and one night we were at his apartment watching a movie and there was a scene with a funeral or something. He mentioned casually that it reminded him of when his dad had died, years ago. I told him I had to use the restroom, then I sat on the toilet with the fan on, crying.

The pills made him numb, I think. Not completely, but partially. He always appeared to be just on the brink of a sincere emotion, except for when we were intimate. When he kissed me, when he held onto the back of my neck while he made me come, when he rested his head on my stomach, that's when I saw who he really was. But outside of that, he lived in a shell. I saw him cry one time, on the eve of his college graduation. He said, No one will be there to watch me walk. A lone tear fell from his eye and I crawled  into his lap on the edge of my bed and pulled his forehead into my neck and cradled him. Women who say they don't want to take care of men are lying. People want to take care of other people.

He was good at comforting too. Since I was a kid I've had this compulsion to scratch myself. My parents always said it was scented soaps and detergents, but really it's a coping mechanism to deal with stress and anxiety. Sometimes I scratch myself in my sleep. I would wake up in his bed with these red welts on my legs, blood drawn. He would pull me into the bathroom naked, bend down and run his hands along my marks and say, Oh sweetie, you have to stop scratching. 

Another time, I was with him when I found out I had ovarian cysts. I had the worst period I've ever had in my life. I lay in his bed in the fetal position, unable to move from the pain. He went out and bought heating pads and laid them across my lower abdomen. They were the kind that stick to your skin, so I fell asleep with them on me, like leeches. I woke up in the middle of the night covered in sweat so I ripped them off and cranked up the central AC and curled my body into his. We were only together for eight months or so, but we took care of each other like we had been together for years. It was strange, like children, we never said I love you.

I asked him once if he believed that things happen for a reason and he answered no so immediately and coldly that I knew he wasn't lying. It was the first time I knew we wouldn't end up together. They say the strongest human sense is smell, but really I think it's loss. The sense of loss and the scent of it, haunting and halting only when you reach the bottom of the bottle.

A conversation with Ciara

A few weeks back I interviewed Ciara at her album release party in the West Village. Then I reviewed her album Basic Instinct, which comes out tomorrow. The album is basically a buffet of female power anthems. It makes me miss living in Atlanta, driving around in summer with my windows down and my speakers cranked.

When I met Ciara for the interview, we were both wearing fur vests. It was sort of hilarious. Here's a photo of us together. Sorry for the crappy quality.

teach me how to dougie

Just a couple thangs.

When I was home for Thanksgiving, my childhood best friend Ashley made me walk on train tracks in six-inch heels while she took photos of it. They are here.

I didn't write about it (not really), but at the beginning of November I went to a taping of Inside The Actor's Studio with James Franco. It was so amazing and inspiring. A few weeks later, author/fave writer Stephen Elliott wrote about Franco in his Daily Rumpus e-mail. Franco optioned The Adderall Diaries and plans to direct/star in a film version of the memoir. I wrote Stephen back and told him about the taping, and he asked me to edit my notes into an article. So I did. Then it was linked to by USA Today. So that was a good day.

Because good things usually come in threes: I have watched this like ten times. I think it says something.

i have seen the moment of my greatness flicker

Have you ever loved someone so much, whatever love might be, that you just sit in their lap and cry? You look at that person, and think about all the times you ever felt so alone, so ceaselessly alone, like the universe. You take that person's face in your hands and you try to say something that will touch your universe to the other person's. You say, I love you. You say, oh my god. You say, before I knew you, I waited. You say, never leave and I won't either. A tear might fall from the other person's eye, or maybe the person laughs, and that's when you lose it. A hundred nights of asking God for a sign seem like another life altogether. Once the sign comes it's easy to forget about the miles of stretched out concrete that led up to it. And equally easy to forget that whoever is in charge of making the signs does so without err, but doesn't account for the flecks in your eyes.

You take the person's face in your hands and a tear falls or a laugh bubbles up, and that's when you cry. You cry for every person you've ever loved, your mom and your dad. All the people you used to love but don't anymore. You want to actually curl up into a ball so small it's visible only to that person, then you want to press into their stomach and disintegrate into their skin. Being in love is wanting to disappear.

And all the other times, when you've been alone so long you nearly forget what it's like to love someone, you can allow yourself to remember. You can lie in your bed with a book and a pen and you can write in cursive letters, Sometimes I want to fall asleep with the light on. And then you'll wake up at 4 a.m. and the lights will be on and you'll crawl blind to switch them off, and then just before you drift off again, there it is, that feeling you haven't felt in this life. 

You pull the blanket up around your nose, take your face in your hands, and cry. You pray for a sign.

we are all little boys and little girls

Yesterday was my Kid A reading. It was really amazing - Cake Shop was packed out and pretty much everyone I know in New York City was there, plus a couple people from out of town. It was definitely the largest group of people I've ever read in front of.

My assignment was to write a poem inspired by Radiohead's song Motion Picture Soundtrack off the album Kid A. The song is a part of who I am, and I wanted so badly to do it justice. After listening to the song for the 10,000th time this year, I came to the conclusion that it's essentially a love letter to suicide, a tale of the battle between the good and evil forces that plays out in all of our lives.

Here is my poem. Thanks to everyone who came out yesterday. Sometimes it is like the movies.
---

we are all little boys and little girls

1.
I had a discussion with a friend
over monitors
about Freemasons,
who is one and who isn't.


I said I didn't know what
the big deal was.
People always say artists sold their souls to the devil at a crossroads
to get the talent they have,
whatever talent might be.
He said,
who knows.


Instead,
maybe they sold their souls to God
in the back alleys of their minds.
Because eventually the road ends,
and it's either death or nothing.

People start to believe things they said they'd never believe.
People curl into themselves under sweat-soaked bedsheets.
People tousle the clouds under their feet as they walk upon high,
on rooftops so gilded,
they strip soles of humanity.
People smoke cigarettes and flick ash into the fire.


2.
I have measured out my life with IM boxes.
I have cried onto my keyboard,
drawing myself into a cube with tears running a river through Qs, Rs and Ts.
I have confused names and old faces and
I have forgotten who I am.


I have imagined defenestration
and masturbation
and a different nation,
one run entirely by machines,
leaving people like me
to capacitate and then undo their demons,
all while in their pajamas
or maybe never getting dressed at all.


3.
I am a Freemason.
You are a Freemason
And you and you and him
and his yellow dog too.
It's one of those things
we can never disprove so it may as well be true.


God is a Freemason.


4.
The fall is nearly as thrilling as the high,
and it’s a cheek turned to God.

Because eventually the road ends.
All the parts you thought made you
shut off at once.
The grinding halt reverberates off slick bricks,
the rooftop blown off.


You're left barefoot and childless.
Loveless neon signs vibrate through whiskey glasses,
wooden stools steal your shirts,
people tell you things but you can't remember.


You remember when you used to hope,
but the feeling is distant
like a city you read about in a book but never visited.


5.
I think you're crazy maybe,
but worse yet I think you're dead.
Every day is a memory of the next.


I have seen you beg for your soul,
stirring it around in a bucket of shit,
over and over to the tune of a harp
that's strung with the hairs of the people you loved
who didn't love you back.


6.
At the end of the road,
there’s a sign.
It is the same in all languages, at all times,
and it reads:
What do you live for?
What do you live for?
What do you live for?


7.

I live for a newspaper pressed into seedy cement on the street in Harlem.
I live for nights spent with strangers on SoHo benches.
I live for my mother, who said you can always come home!
I live for saltwater seeping into my skin as I step onto the floor of silent seas.
I live for must, and do, and will, but never should.
I live for the guiding light of glow in the dark stars stuck to the ceilings of our skulls.
I live for muzzles butting mirrors and stretching to their ends.
I live for a saxophone in a subway station squealing syncopated sadness.
I live for reflections in rocking cars, breath beating upon bombs planted in our bellies.
I live for my disembodied spine dancing in the dark to an invisible drum.
I live for church organs and choirs and stained glass thrown across my chest, broken.
I live for visions and revisions and reversing my decisions.
I live for the smell of your incense, your insensitive hands throwing me against the wall.
I live for the fucking Freemasons.
And I live for myself,
The only person who will never leave me,
Because I won't let her.
The law of their God is in their hearts.

cultivating habits

She went with a friend to a chain bookstore on her lunch break. She went to buy a new book by a famous rapper, in which he writes the meanings behind some of his lyrics, like with footnotes. The book has one of Andy Warhol's Rorschach paintings on the cover, in gold metallic foil. She was waiting in line to pay, talking to her friend about Camus, because he was looking for a copy of The Stranger. She said, did you know that Bohemian Rhapsody is based on The Stranger? He said, yeah you've told me that before. She said, oh yeah. She said, what's that other book he wrote? Something about a man in a cage. And then there's the one, like The Flu or something. Not The Flu but an epidemic of some sort. The Epidemic? No. Shit. What is that book called? A man in front of her in line turned around and said, I think it's called The Plague. They both laughed. He said, but I like your title better. He walked off to pay for his book. She laughed and laughed, then bought her book about rap/poetry. On his way out the man turned around and said to her, You just made my day. She said, no sir, you made mine. They both laughed again. Then later, walking on the streets of New York, in the drizzling rain, she said: Now I will never forget the name of The Plague. She thought, I'm glad I didn't buy this book on Amazon.