just bought a pricey chair. Justifying it by telling myself all I do is sit, all day long, every day. I need such a chair to stay comfortable, I tell myself; my current chair's 'suspension' is spent, requiring me to type while my wrists are up about the level of my chin. (Here sprouts a new branch of Zen practice, perhaps?) But justification is a delicate art, and in my own thinking I must skillfully diminish the fact that my purchase will leave me homeless on or before Christmas.
But so what? It is a fabulous chair! I can't wait to sit in it.
All the various delivery people, whose livelihoods I underwrite, must consider this apartment a fair hole of bottomless consumerism. But maybe they dislike coming here, and having me gawk lasciviously at their various manhoods (as I imagine them), despite the lucrative commerce they enjoy by coming across my threshold.
I live from delivery to delivery, each a manufactured excitement like a carnival come to town, only it's not social, there's no screaming kids or sauntering couples, not any rides being operated by scrawny severe-looking young carnies, and no fryolators filling the warm evening air with aromas of corn dogs and clam fritters—in short, not really much fun.
Gotta go to the pizza shop, b r b...
whoever invented Italian sub rolls must have also invented the method of dispensing toothpaste from a tube. These things are not made to be eaten, they have to be swallowed whole, or else the entire contents goosh out from three sides, onto your hands, clothes, keyboard and floor. I suppose it is just simple physics, but they always goosh the other way, never into my mouth—the subs, that is. I have not 'enjoyed' any other gooshing in recent history, apart from toasted roast beef and cheese subs, and fantasies.
i must not be like I pretend. I guess that's why I started doing this journal; to try and be honest. I don't do that very well 'live'. It's not like I am conniving to mislead, or hatching elaborate deceptions; I don't know anyone outside of fiction who does that. But honesty went the way of innocence a long, long time ago. You see, to be honest, I got fucked when I was four, and at four I couldn't really handle being honest about that. So I had to find another way. I guess I've been ready to come back from that other way for a decade, or two, now, and this journal is just one of the several circuitous paths I have been listlessly tarrying along in an effort to come back. I don't want to come back, and you are no doubt sick of hearing that. But I know how to come back, and I am getting sick of being stagnant. It's summer, and I don't want to sit.
It's midnight and I sort of said on the phone tonight that I would be going to Boston tomorrow. I'm already loitering. I'll probably drink too much, spend too much, not dance enough or sleep enough (no passion expected, I just don't sleep well away from home). But I just spent $400 on a chair! Is that all I want to have to tell when I'm standing in the slop line at the shelter? Or wouldn't I rather relate how I went bankrupt in dissolute living, partying at gay bars, riding the Red Line to the Eagle and Ramrod, the Blue Line to the 119, got sloppy drunk and propositioned a cab driver every night, and asked five boys to marry me, one of 'em seriously? If I must, wouldn't I prefer that my poverty be the result of something worthy; a riotous good time, a high and bright explosion like an Independence Day rocket? Come home with my underwear in my pocket—or missing, entirely?
Wouldn't I rather have a real story to tell, honestly?
|
|
|
|
updated |