So many years . . .

Requiem
July 12 2003
go down to the sea
to celebrate your memory
to mourn an anniversary
write it here in this diary
feeling six years guilty
tears welling up taste salty
and memories haunt me
Heard you in a dream
could not see or flee
nothing is what it seemed
and all that I leaned on
fell apart gone, a neat charm
and easy down fall
a nihilistic call from summer to fall
and to spring, a diseased king
who for my love is begging
how much do you love me
how long till my eyes see
and why cant I plead
and bleed, supplicate
and make a bargain with fate
to escape destiny?
On Lies these dreams are fed,
the mistaken notion that you are not dead.
For all I said and didnt say
from september 28 till today
for all I read, for the life I lead
for all my living and my dead
I scream to the heavens
for unleavened bread
and rain to wipe away this stain
and ban, to hold his hand
on the windswept sand
but it aint gonna happen;
its sappin my strength
shortening the length
of my stamina and rage
till as I drain merlot
to increase my flow
I finish and then addendum
for this incomplete requiem
kyrie eleison
christe eleison
all I have
for my brother,
aaron

Cold/Hot: the Decline and Fall

So I went to the boink Burlesque tonight. Managed digits without even fuckin tryin. What the fuck?

People think that we dont understand
What it takes to outta be a man

I've got work early tomorrow
gonna stay awake, drunk, try and write something, then hopefully meet up with Gina for a movie. But nothing really rides on these plans

Sure I need to work.

I don’t care much for that
I don’t know why


I'm working lotsa nights this week, but I made tuesday night at the hub, and I don't feel bad, not one bit. I made it to Deep Ellum, and man, that place is da'shit, but don't believe me, try for yourself.

When I was a kid I saw a light
Floating high above the trees one night

Laura has a new job, and I did my taxes, and I've been saving a message from scott from this morning to savor this evening. Maybe I'll listen to it now.
naw . . .

Thought ‘twas an alien
Turned out to be just god

I've got a riff going and it needs to continue in like fashion lest it be cut off.

Next wednesday, I'll meet Amis again. This time I know I'm a better writer. I can read him and know what he is doing and where he needs to go that he doesn't. When you reach the point that your idols become sketchbooks, you know your ego or your talent need to be controled. I'm hoping its the latter, and that this isn't just some unjustified posturing, some sound and fury, on my part.

f you’re not sure who not to believe
Who has better reasons to decieve

Then they’ll be glad’r
That's all they do


The twentieth century is a minefield. Everything that is worth fictionalizing has been made real. That is what the twentieth has been about. A war without conceivable reason? An extermination without reason? A camp system spread across a continent, all geared towards irreason? That is the twentieth century. Reason applied to irreason, to irrational fears and imbedded prejudice. The twentieth played out all the possibilities of a state gone insane. Gulag archipelago. Vichy.
Stalinism. Auschwitz. Nouns empowered by the state. verbs erased. The dictatorship of is. The rule of has been. processed, enumerated, put to use, eliminated. terminated. Gassed.

You wanna write fiction in the twentieth or thereafter?

Welcome to the realm of cliche and dare not, the realm of cliche and bad-taste. You just can't make this shit up.

Just a fight or just a waste of time
Hiding things that no one wants to find


You wanna write fiction, here in the twenty-first? queu up, pick a spot, grab a ticket. Line the fuck up. There's nothing to be written but what has already been enumerated in blood. From the length of your dick to the size of the galaxy, everything has been enumerated, numbered, devoured, decieved, processed, elimanated, gassed.

This was a much less sunshiney post than I intended.

Mark's going away party

Oh dear god I hurt.

A flight of tequila shots will do that to you.

Closing last night was a party, both at the party and at the store, and now I'm gonna shower and eat a muffin.

I'm not this good . . . yet

Last thing you want on a day off

This made me think of scott.

I need to go off now and buy some gloves and then meet w/ josh.

God doesn't listen to the prayers of the earnest.

PS. Comment you bastards. Comment like banshees, like avenging angels with swords of fire and mouths bellowing rapture. Comment like a train running over a school bus in alabama, like a retard in a Joyce Carol Oates story rapes little girls, comment like a hitchhiker in a flannary O'connors world kills families, comment like the tumor-ridden genetic freaks of the future you are. No comment will be denied, no claim turned away, no ceaseless begging for cock left unanswered or unsated. HAH.

Now we don't speak any english,
just american without tears.




Going to the pheebs cousins show at great scott, even though its so damn far away . . .

Tomorrow - Meet with Josh, tea tasting at central, beer tasting maybe at Field, then home again?

Thurs-Mon Closing at Inman, and you all should stop by and see me and show me some love.

The Bukowski girls feed me too much beer.

You work a long week of closes, the final day feels like a revelation.

Like Marconi beach sunrises. Oh god I miss those days. And breakfast at the Post Office at P-town. Who's down?

Maybe I'm just tired, but I'm jubilant. I've been through some harsh shit in my time, and I'm not laboring under the illusion it gets better, but I've done some time, and all I have to say is, is this the worst it can get?



I'm writing again. I'm reading again. I've got notebooks and they're filling up. I'm out of the culdesac that has plagued me for two years, and I've escaped, like Steve McQueen on his fuckin bike, riding out of a POW camp across europe.

I've got a million ideas and they're all so fuckin vivid it makes my head hurt. If all it takes to make me this euphoric is to decide once and for all to cut out people who drain me, people who demand every fucking thought in my head and even then it's discarded as lame . . . well christ, get me some more dead weight to cut away, because after a long time of searching, I've found a drug whose high is worth the addiction.

since I cannot prove a lover, to entertain these fair, well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days


The dudek recommended Kertesz' Liquidation and so far it is an expansive endeavor. Who can write fiction after an event that defines expansive imagination as darkly as the holocaust does? Kertesz can. I would argue that some others can, but only through cultural distance (Rushdie, and his own identification with Partition), or through humor (Roth and his obsession with the hang-ups of the academic american male), or simply through expansive historical flow-chartiness (Delillo, or Pynchon, who is the master of us all)

But only Kertesz can write about it without having been there. At least as far as I've read. Some people were there, and they have written memoirs that cut like cold steel and bring back blazing luminescence from places we dare not (Frankl, Wiesel) and others have attempted, without being there (Amis, Anne Frank rip-offs). But this is different. It is indirect but never avoidant, and that is what makes this book so intense.



God, I need like a dozen more drinks.

By the way, if you think you don't need to read Pynchon's Against the Day, someone needs to give you a fuckin second smile and leave your body to marinate in the gutters of mass ave.

oh god

Going hubpubbin tonight, tomorrow got a meeting with Josh, the next four days I close the store . . . I dunno, thats about all I got planned.


Yeah, I know I made a hash job of that, but my photoshop makes my laptop crash, and then when I start it back up, it hates me and acts all bitchy and burns the coffee and tells me to stop looking at so much porn.

last week was intense, and it wore me out, and I'm ready to have some beers and see people I've missed for quite some time. This fall was bizarre, and now that I'm back in the city on a less-than-transient basis, I'm discovering I had a life that I had missed all along, like that I had been another person for a few months.

God, I saw Barnicle the other night, and man, I can't help but miss drinking with that girl.

You know what I also miss?



Wild fuckin zero. That movie is inspiring.

Like watching Beethoven bend over some grossly painted hooker and play a symphony of pain with a paddock. Huh. There's a lot rattling around in my subconscious that gets outed here, and a hell of a lot that rattles around inside until it finds the level of ripeness fit to unleash havoc on my tongue and get me into trouble.

I'm home.
Scott should come home.
I need a fuckin drink.

well then

Still battling that cold, though now it is in rout, and I'm watching the ford funeral while at home and still in my Pj's. Yesterday was rough, but I got through it, thanks to some herbal tea and multi-shots of espresso.

My new year's eve was eventful, to say the least. I got a last minute email from the Zambri girls that they'd be up from NY and at TT's for the Porsches event, and so I went along to that, taking breaks to hang with coffee people at the Middle East. I have to say, after years of attending the madin nye parties, it was nice to spend one out,given that the madin's party often leads me to racing glasses of champagne with Sean, and then puking a lot in the bathroom.

Saw the pheebs last week, went out to dinner and hung around watching 5th element, very nice.

Anyway, I'll be down at the parents for tonight and tomorrow, then going back up to Cambridge wed. night. Working thurs-sun.

My lungs are filled with phlegm, my heart with hope for a better 07 than 06.



Heh. Cough.

My name is huge.