beware of banker

i took a walk yesterday afternoon and ran into a German banker whose acquaintance i made a little more than a week ago. she is perhaps 45, blond (of course), and rather fetching. she was born in Romania, studied French as a child, and moved to this country four years ago when she married an American.

the ring is still on her finger.

she told me that she was looking for some excitement, something to do, and that perhaps she would take in a show at a local theater where i work from time to time. i told her not to, that the shows they brought were crap, and that instead she should check out a more adventurous company who presents international acts in Miami. but this is beside the point.

the point is that it never even occurred to me that this woman was making a pass at me until it was too late, and i realized that i had watched my very own Mrs. Robinson come and go on a Wednesday afternoon just east of the railroad tracks.

dejected, i took solace in teaching sound editing vis-à-vis the opening scene of Fear and Loathing to my film sections; it is never too soon to expose impressionable young minds to the dangers of giant bats and raw ether...

the need for this experiment has ended

prelude

i wrote a poem on 29 November 2008 about taking a walk downtown; i called it "Wonderful prelude..." and later that afternoon i received a letter from a beautiful Russian telling me she didn't want to be with me any more. i had just written her a note and left it on the pillow where we had planned to rest our heads that night. her letter said that she still wanted to see me and i agreed.

before leaving to see her that night, i took a vow of celibacy until the dusk of the new moon of February 2009. (today). and thus the experiment began.


day 1

that night was one of the most amazing nights of my life, and i do not know if i have ever seen the magic so clearly as when we sat by the waterfront and a tour boat floated us in the canal. two hundred drunken tourists yelled in unison: "kiss her!"

but i did not kiss her and the moment passed us by.


month 1

the first month was the hardest, uncomfortable, restless, not even sure of what i was doing. i told:

Mardou, who once had a lover who did the same before meeting her.
my classmate, with whom i had a late summer parking lot flirtation.
my sister, who has rarely gone more than a week since i met her.
Jache, who does the same when his girlfriend is on her period.
my teacher, who had been telling me to do this since summer.
and (the one who is never mentioned but always there).

i told the beautiful Russian in her living room before we went to Art Basel. that night we walked in a room full of art, not touching any of it, and the moment passed us by.


the tipping point

i received a letter from Mardou on 22 December 2008 wishing me a happy birthday. my birthday was still more than a month away, but the gift was perfectly timed. it was a picture of her in front of a wall full of words in Jamaica.

that night i talked to the beautiful Russian and told her i was sick of not talking to her. i told her all the things i had been unable to tell Mardou the year before, swimming in the ocean at night, when i let the moment pass us by.


month two

the second month was the easiest, maintaining my vow in letter if not intent. i started teaching and had a full class load. i stayed busy. i turned 32 and was fed art, pizza and cauliflower in celebration. somehow i ended up with three birthday cards in my windowsill, not understanding how they got there or what they meant.

i didn't want any more moments to pass me by.


month three

the last month was the hardest. i felt strained and stretched. my teacher asked me if i had checked out on him, i didn't sleep well, i didn't eat well, i didn't write well. i felt trapped and panicked and full of doubt. i subjected myself to wild tales, the Fear, and mid-afternoon malaise.

i dreamt of La Cienega; i dreamt of Mardou; i dreamt of all the ones i had loved and the moments that passed me by.


the end

the end actually came a week earlier than i thought it would, and it wasn't what i had expected. i sat crying in a chair with my eyes closed in a house that wasn't mine, touching a place i had been only once, more than two years before.

the next day saw its own revelations and Saturday there was another one of those moments, when it all might have turned around and gone the other way, led me down a different path, a different life, a different fate, but i let it pass me by.

one cannot help but do his dharma.

there is no need to mourn the moments that pass us by;
nothing is resolved, nothing ever is.

we love,
we live,
we lose,
we die.

every heart is whole unto itself,
every moment is a requiem,
every art is a lie,
let us rejoice.

day 88

it seems,
nowadays,
for some reason,
i can't go a single blog
without talking about orgies.

today i came across a quote from the collector Edward Fuchs, whose name is punny given current context and (im)proper pronunciation. Mr. Fuchs, in his vast, yet finite wisdom noted that:

"the pleasure of orgiastic rites
is among the most valuable
aspects of culture."

well put.

and the winner is...

i talked to (the one who is never mentioned but always there) tonight and told her that, while the rest of the world was preparing to go to drunken Oscar orgies, she and i were making plans to meditate mid-morning. but this is beside the point.

the point is that it is very late, all the mid-terms are graded, none of the reading is done, and one of the papers (the one in French) is written. the coming week promises to be a long one, in spite of the (theoretical) shift in methodology as i re-inflect the experiment back into the Experiment.

goddess of the hunt

my (ex)neighbor moved [was evicted] earlier this week and i no longer have to lock my door when i come home. it felt bittersweet watching her go; but i was sick of the stalking, the paranoia, the changing of locks, the standing out in the middle of the street with a hundred dollar bill, screaming "i got my own money now."

her apartment faced the courtyard and she always kept her blinds drawn wide open, asking for help, asking for someone to peek inside and see into her world. i remember when i first moved here, walking by and wondering about the sad, lonely woman whose living room tableaus provided such passing melancholies.

she asked every woman she ever saw me with (my roommate, my half-roommate, my ______), "what did you call me?" and they would provide startled answers or else walk away. she once traded Jache a painting for two cigarettes. a week later she asked:

"has he sold it yet?"
-what?
"has he sold the painting yet?"
-no, i don't no, i don't think so.
"well, tell him not to."

i changed her kitchen light bulb once and declined her invitations for movies and art galleries and Naples. i found her once angrily smoking in her doorway and she told me she had no food. i gave her a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, and two weeks later a bottle of wine showed up on my door. i passed it along to a friend of mine, but a month later my (ex)neighbor came calling for a corkscrew. i told her i didn't have one and she went away, but i spent the rest of the night thinking that she must now know i never drank that bottle of wine...

and i began locking my door.

it is sad to watch the facades break and crumble, watch the masks pass away and reveal the sad souls of middle-aged women who were once beautiful and crazy - but are now only crazy.

a prayer for you all.

om shanti, om shanti, om shanti.

i read what?

i got an A on my oral exam for French class yesterday. (sadly,) no kissing was involved, but this is beside the point.

the point is that i just finished the worst academic article i have ever read, perhaps the worst ever written. its ability to conflate ideas was surpassed only by its lack of sophistication. some of my favorites:

"...what it comes down to in the unconscious mind of the common soldier is the passive submission to homosexual rape. Not an inviting prospect..."

"Because of its inherently non-Newtonian nature, the nuclear weapon cannot be an extension of the hand, or phallus..."

"If nuclear violence takes an overt form, it will be the worst thing that has ever happened."

i dreamed last night of Mardou,

a dream stained by the strains of the (k)not i've tied myself into. in the dream we kept getting closer and closer to a moment that never even existed when we lived crosstown and wanting.

i woke just this side of safety, but this is beside the point.

the point is:

i've been asking each night for a dream to wipe clear this ambiguity.

do (not)

do not fall apart, do not break, do not listen to too much Exile on Main Street, do not feed emotions, do not forget to juggle, do not watch too many documentaries on the origins of the American space program, do not kiss, do not eat less than 60% raw foods, do not not meditate, do not conflate Raymond Williams' ideas concerning counter cultural social formations with the Romantic lurking inside, do not forget to submit the appropriate papers to the proper authorities before 18 February 2009, do not masturbate, do not do not, do not take yourself too seriously, do not stay up too late, do not have sex, do not get lost in the stories, do not rationalize, do not know just enough to be dangerous, do not get too Oedipal, do not commit additional metaphorical incest, do not recycle doppelganger themes from two summers ago, when i chanted, as if it was mantra:

"i did not touch the girl."

good question

"Why should I drive my body from place to place,

when my soul travels so lightly?"

- Charles Baudelaire, "Projects"

full coverage

Jache just arrived and told me that, not only was he (apparently) dating a two year old, but that further more she was calling him and breathing heavily. i'm not yet sure of all the details, and he is engaged in pre-panini barista banter at the moment. but this is beside the point.

the point is that this type of maddening ambiguity seems to be a them in my life at present: reading rehabilitatons of Althusserian Marxism, watching documentaries on Slavoj Zizek, and becoming embedded in the very texts i hope to transcend.

(and repeating myself)

[lapse]

so Jache has weighed in on the matters at hand, and somewhere i hear disambiguation waxing under the din of Texas Hold 'Em.

and another thing...

remind me never to go to Terni.

paraskavedekatriaphobia

when i was a kid, my brother and i would got to my aunt's house to hang out with our cousin and watch slasher films. needless to say, our favorite was Friday the 13th and we would run around all night in our pajamas, hopped up on Coca-Cola, nachos, and fear. my cousin and i would terrorize my younger brother by chanting over and over again "Jason, Malachi, Jason, Malachi, Jason, Malachi..."

one time our uncle, who was scary in his own right, came to the sliding glass door dressed in a hockey mask and brandishing a machete. he tapped on the window, and we ran terrified into various nooks and crannies while my aunt prepared to yell at him for scaring us. but this is beside the point.

the point is that some lame remake comes out today, and it has me remembering those childhood days, thinking about hidden histories and modern fairy tales and the enduring myth of the menacing woodsman.

the sitting of houses

i'm sitting half a house; i'm house half sitter; i'm half-house sitter.

i am sick to death of the not writing and the stumbling around the things i want to say and getting embedded in the very texts i'm trying to transcend and it just goes on and on and on and i'm so full full of conjunctions that i feel like i have conjuntivitis and so in the midst of all this pink eye'm seeing red and wearing a rouge shirt with Chariman Mao and characters i cannot understand and on and on and on and on and i'm getting sick of this experiment and so my plan is to:

breathe ... release ... repeat

it's about time [its a bow thyme]

i [fine alley] spoke with Jache last night, [aft her] a week of missed [call sand] paths left uncrossed. he told me that he required both social and [stud he thyme] this weekend. [i yak he quest] and so we agreed to meet on Sunday.

[laps]

he spoke of Hemingway's white elephants; i spoke of elision.

it's too early for this

it's too early for this, and yet here i am, typing away to some (imagined) invisible.

and so...

i dreamed last night of Saylor and La Cienega, overlapping tableaus of collapsible stainless steel platforms in the middle of the sea and haze-filled rooms, punctuated by the sound of collapsing real estate markets.

what in the sam hell?

i just got home from class and walked in to find my roommate and ex-half roommate lying in the living room with all the lights off and some sort of fire burning in a giant pot.

weird.

ah yes,

ah yes, the night before, dragging the drugged drunken man back to his door, enduring the wrist-rubbing advances of a stranger nearly run over, burning marshmallows, overcooked rice, the rolling of sushi, and ghost tales:

his brother met the dead Wisconsinite fisherman of yore and cleaned his house for one full summer (aged 16) and now, twenty-five years later, lips are still sealed shut.

and my dreams?

ah yes, the unwritten dreams of an Aquarian with Gemini rising...

the poems fall out

the poems fall out on bearded Friday mornings while walking to libraries and avoiding neighbors. the poems fall out after mad four hour talks of emergent cultures and the structures of feeling. the poems fall out at the 73% completion mark of experiments in asceticism.

the poems fall out after a month of nothing.

feeding emotions

now i know, in theory, it is a bad idea to feed emotions.

but

i wonder if whoever theorizes such things ever took into account the scrumptious, sacramental nature of pizza, especially when said pizza is topped with delicious feta cheese, pesto base, spicy jalapeño, and not one, but two fungarific types of mushrooms.

this, it seems to me, must surely be some sort of exception.

numb v. drool

i received a text yesterday from a friend informing that she had just had six cavities filled, and so i called to speak to her before the Novocaine wore off. the voice that answered was barely recognizable, fragments of drool mixing with existential psychology, an outline of numb tinged with English as a second language.

speaking of junkies...

today is the 30th anniversary of the death of Sid Vicious and, in an unrelated (?) occurrence, i came across a copy of the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Revisited at the library today.

naturally, i checked it out, walked back to my apartment, and introduced it to my iTunes. much to my (pleasant) surprise, i discovered that one of the songs features my favorite (living) junkie.

trippy.

(sadly, Bill Burroughs is yet to make an appearance)

at the movies

it seems i've spent more time in cinemas in the past week than i have since the fall of 1999, when i roamed the streets of Manhattan late at night with a bottle of gin and a bag full of tonic water. there was a time when i might have called those the salad days, the high water mark of spending my mis-spent youth.

i remember watching 16mm on 11th Street at midnight, wondering how Bogey was going to get the black bird, after learning the truth and falling for Mary Astor.

i remember exiting a bus on the Lower East Side at 4am, wondering how i was going to get home, after a night spent riding in the dark and emptying a bottle.

i remember arrving at the Port Authority at 6am, wondering how i was going to leave a dancer who loved me, after a week spent vacationing in Gainesville and filling a journal.

but all this is beside the point.

the point is that nothing was spent (mis or otherwise);

there is endless purpose and meaning and rhythm and magic to all things - even in the days when we are too young to know the truth.