About Friday.

I went out last night. To several places, after my piano lessons were concluded. I am recovering. I will write on Monday.

-Rich

continuee.

I drive down 95 in the left lane, going as quickly as possible to avoid the slower cars on the right. It always infuriates me when someone is driving slowly in the left or the center lane - didn't the driver have to pass some sort of driving school? Aren't they required to know what the hell they are doing? Then when I pass, I see their somewhat sheepish faces and it makes me feel guilty that I am harboring such anger for someone who is probably scared. Then I feel stupid for feeling guilty for cowards - a coward is less than nothing, a coward is what remains after everything good in a person is gone. I make note to never give a damn about these people again. I know that I will. Human nature is as binding as anything else that humanity depends on.

There is a starbucks near my office and I contemplate going, but I am trying to detox my body in preparation for the weekend so I decide to skip it. I used to go all the time when the beautiful girls worked there but they all left, they grew up and got jobs somewhere else, they worked and laughed and some of them must have died in the time between now and then. I hate the burnt out women that remain. There are two in particular - one is a shrewish former riot grrrl with terrible red dyed hair and a nasal tone to her voice that makes my skin crawl. She is an idiot - fully incapable of actually working at a starbucks. Imagine just how stupid a person has to be to be unable to work at a starbucks. She can not remember anything beyond the first second that she is told it, and her utter complacency is annoying. The other woman is simply old and stupid, and I can not fault her for being old and stupid but I wish she were not old and stupid. I drive past the starbucks and head to the office. My shirt feels tighter around my wrists when I clench the steering wheel with both hands, making a circuit. My head is in the middle - that's the part that lights up but I can't, I can't see through the night like that, I can't.

I am merging into the correct lane with my turn signal on, driving at a conscientous speed, when the truck hits me from behind and flips my car over. I black out too slowly, unmercifully. The last thing I note is that my radio has died, and that the road is really a very loud thing after all, every car passing by sounds like an arrow loosed from a bow, and I am the target, riddled with colored circles and worth so many points. Have we made our point? It sings out of every wounded limb, yes.

-Rich
complete satisfaction spells a four letter word

Into Sinister

On the molded and shaped bent walnut end table beside my bed sits a sleek black alarm clock shaped like a lozenge. It rings today at eight thirty. Eight thirty no hyphen, because hyphens are "bastardized English", thank you Mr. Hellinquist, my fourth grade teacher who did not know or care that my friend was a bastard, is a bastard, you are a bastard for life. I walk into the bathroom and brush my teeth while staring into the mirror. My hair is raked back from my forehead and I yawn while brushing. I decided that keeping my mouth closed is a better idea. My mirror is spotless and my cleaning lady deserves a raise but will not get one. I step into the shower and turn the knob all the way towards hot, and then back a bit towards cold until the shower is just hot enough to steam up the room and just cold enough to not burn my skin. I wash with a soap bought for its content of dead sea mud and then shampoo but no conditioner because today is a work day, today is one of the days when I go to work and work on my work.

Socks on, then underwear, then shirt, then pants, then belt, then shoes, then jacket. No tie today. It has been frowned upon before but I don't like ties. There is too much of a relationship between ties and nooses, slender silken cords that can still break a neck and dislodge the friendship that spines must feel for themselves. It is like a love in, but one that keeps you alive instead of slowly draining your life away. Drugs can't substitute for brains, even though we keep testing the waters.

I check my bag and I am panicking because I cannot locate my vitamins. Every day should start with the proper intake of vitamins B and A. B makes you relaxed and also increases your propensity for concentration. A is good for your skin and eyes, and any good businessman needs good skin and eyes. I locate the vitamins in a my disjecta drawer and pop one, holding my breath as I do so. Vitamins taste like shit but you can't disregard how much they help, you just can't.

I take the elevator down and I press the button for the parking garage with only the barest fraction of the tip of my finger. I dislike the thought of touching something that a child has touched, with their hands covered in the kind of shit that children play with. Environments should be sterile, like the feeling in the elevator. The walls are polished to a mirror sheen and when I look around I can only see myself and that seems right to me. The doors open on a different floor and a woman walks on wearing what appears to be a workout outfit and the illusion disappears. Suddenly there are hundreds of her in the mirrors and I look down at the marble floor of the elevator until we reach the second floor. There is a round of courteous sayings and I walk out and into the humid heat of the parking garage.

My car is parked perfectly parallel alliteration always alienates. I slide into the driver's seat and check my mirrors, adjusting the rearview a bit. I place my bag in the passenger seat and buckle it in - I once had it slide onto the floor and felt terrible about it for the rest of the day. Responsibility does not end when the things in your care are not alive. It is present and measureable. I start the car and for a moment the hum of the engine is soothing and I lay my head on the steering wheel, cold leather against my forehead, until I put the car in drive and head out into the world. I am a child leaving the womb. Let us mark our broken tomb.

-Rich
someone wrote a song about Jessie

It was with some surprise that I viewed the seared foie gras on my plate. It was floating in what appeared to be a brown sauce whose base was mostly fat from the liver - there was a line of white truffled oil circling the whole ordeal. A small and thinly sliced piece of toast lay in the sauce, the smell of butter almost overpowering the smell of truffles, with a single quail egg laying over easy in a hole in the bread. It was poetic, it was prosaic, and it was completely unexpected.

My last experience with foie gras was an excellent one - Judd, myself, and a few others sitting around a table at Les Halles, using our forks to pull a bit of the ground of foie gras onto small pieces of bread. It was decadent in a way that most meals fail to be - a strange cocktail of luxury and of dirt stained elbows, sweat lined collars and laughter that starts from the belly. The foie gras lasted for only a few bites, but they were delicious.

This experience was a bit different. There was no sharing involved, there was no overt joy at seeing such a beautiful piece of food. There was only my intense focus on how delicious it would be. I used my knife and gently, with the tines of my fork gently prodding the top of this quivering block, I pulled the knife down and through. I picked up the slice with my fork and cut off a small piece of bread, and then ate them together. It was masterful and for a moment I forgot that there were other people at the table, people whose opinions of me certainly mattered in a business sense, and instead I let the sensation of eating overtake me.

It would be hard for me to determine which dining experience was better or more enjoyable; on one hand I had foie gras with friends and laughed about things that were more humorous because of the company I keep. On the other hand I was eating in the bosom of luxury, wearing a suit that is sometimes too tight on the shoulders, and which gives me the posture of a choir boy. I can't really say which experience I preferred - I don't know that preference for anything applies to either situation. I can say that both situations revolved around the same meal, the same feathery black earth sensation that spread from my tongue outwards. I can say that eating something so purposeful in its intent makes a person different, it changes not only who you are at the moment, but who you are in consideration. There is no other way to describe such an experience, except to say that it should be considered an experience and not simply a memory, or a story to tell friends after two glasses of wine.

Now I am sitting in an office, smelling faintly of recovery, that acerbic high tone of the nose, and thinking about how this moment will never mean anything more than a shrug, a glance, or five fingers drummed in quick succession.

-Rich
everyone we knew loves someone else

winding down.

Outside the window are sidewalks and carefully trimmed islands of colorful poinsettas. Whenever I picture those hermetically minded flowers, I see colored pencils with their tops shaved into perfect cylinders, wood lightly dusted by the strangely shaded graphite tips.

Inside there is flourescent light that makes everything it touches the same shade of misery. White papers with black ink become pulsating tablets written all over with strange sigils. A blue covered book looks like nothing more than a bruise, a brush with strangers that ended badly. The red top of an aspirin bottle glares at me, furious intent that I cannot understand, or simply choose not to out of a sense of well-being. The wood paneled table in front of me, far from giving of that cheery visage of cedar smoked mahogany, seems to be febrile, so tense from expectation that a single touch would draw it to the ground into outlines. I look at everything and it makes sense to me, and perhaps that is the scariest part - that this all seems to make sense to me.

Today is a day of recovery, as Sunday was a day of recovery. Perhaps every day is a day of recovery for people like me - those who are less comfortable within themselves than they are without.

-Rich
one banana two banana three banana loves you

Last Niiight

I drove the porsche for the first time last night. I also drove a stick shift for basically the first time last night. That is not a particularly comfortable thing, and frankly I would probably have done better to just practice for a while, but the concept seemed fairly simple: Clutch down, gas in, clutch up. What is so hard about that?

Of course, I did not anticipate the speed that the porsche is capable of...nor did I anticipate, at any point, how fucking dangerous it is to drive on 95 N and then in Baltimore with little to no experience behind the wheel of a sick sports car. So that was new.

Somehow I survived, and had no accidents or anything like that. I did learn that I do not like steep hills at all. Nor do I like stop and go traffic in the slightest. I do rather enjoy driving on open road, with the engine just purring beneath me. That, that I can understand, and understand rightly enough.

Today I get my nissan back, my reliable and trusty steed. I don't want him back. That is fairly clear. There is something about driving in a nice sports car that makes you realize just how terrible it is to drive in anything else, anything that doesn't have the same sense of motion, the same passion. A car is just a car. Unless it is something else entirely - those who have never driven one might scoff, but I assure you that it is indeed the case with this one.

I have a lot of things to do today, including dinner with a great friend of mine. I hope that I manage to get to everything. I hope everyone is doing well. Ciao, bunnies.

-Rich
let me know about summers in spain

A balanced reaction

So there I was, man, standing in this hallway looking down and it was one of those railroad apartments that New Yorkers think is really cozy but really just seems like something out of hellraiser, you know? Like you turn the corner and you end up at the same corner, and finally you realize you are in a spiral and trapped forever. I guess spirals wouldn't really trap you forever - at some point a spiral has to end, right? It's not like a circle that way, it's not like you have to always find a new beginning and mark it or something. You have a beginning and an end and that's really all you can ask for these days.

Around the corner the apartment actually opens up a bit, like a scorpion or something. Like the door is the stinger and the rest of the place is the body and claws, clicking and clacking away, typewriters of nature. A thousand of them in one place could write a book about a monkey writing on a typewriter. Let's burn Bonfire of the Vanities later tonight, how ironic would that be? How deliciously ironic?

Anyways, she's sitting on the bed, right? Like just sort of sitting forlorn, and it jabs at me repeatedly when I look at her. I mean, I kind of want to be nice to her but I kind of don't and it gets tough when I think about it. All I do is, I end up sitting across from her on this big leather chest thing - I know that the top opens and I guess the designer didn't want anyone to know that it served as a chest as well as a bench, but it is pretty fucking obvious, right? Like politely ignoring someone puking into a ficus plant at an airport, especially when they are puking out something that looks like a bag of big league chew. Do you remember that gum? It came in a pouch like chewing tobacco and looked like chewing tobacco, and it was basically chewing tobacco for kids. I wonder how many of our generation have mouth cancer now because of some stupid gum we chewed on during little league games, that our parents gleefully bought for us.

Sorry man, I was distracted there for a bit. What? Yeah, I know, that's just something that I do...I feel like I can't really stop the brain from thinking, especially when it's thinking so quickly. Like normally I have one train of thought with lots of stops, but today I have lots of different trains and it gets a little crazy keeping track of all of them in my head, right? I mean, I'm not a MTA map or anything, all the lines are the same color, white as ghosts and bitterly cold enough to put in mugs of hot cocoa instead of marshmallows...again? Yeah, I'll get back into it, thanks for nudging me, and thanks for listening to me, thanks again.

So she's across from me and we don't say anything. I mean, it's one of those moments where you are afraid to interrupt the other person, and they are afraid to interrupt you and so nobody says a damn thing at all. We just sat there looking at each other's hands and I could hear construction going on outside, people yelling at each other, machines in that metal orgy of creation, that kind of thing, and I was wondering why life isn't more like that. Why can't people just talk to each other, yell across rooms and get their damn points across that easily, like pulling back on a bow and letting go? It just isn't that kind of world anymore - even when you try to be subtle and drop hints, nobody gets them at all. You might as well mail them around your state with those pictures of the missing kids and who they were last seen with. Nobody gives a shit, not even the people printing out the flyers.

-Rich
I know what you knew about letting our sympathies fail

Some defining moments of the Dan Deacon/Girltalk show:

1)Dan Deacon was mixing, lying on the floor in front of the stage. He was sick or something, but it was cool. It was like a little love in.

2)Playing the entirety of his 11 minute song with lyrics projected up onto the screen.

3)people dancing EVERYWHERE

4)Girltalk crowd surfing and then surfing back to the stage and mixing it up.

5)When Girltalk mixed in Kelly Clarkson and every fucking person there knew the song. Hell, I know the song. Since you've been gooooonnnnneeeeeeeeeee I can feeeeeeel for the first time.

6)Dancing for hours and drinking water and not alcohol.

7)The casalino sisters are fucking hot.

8)I did not hit on Giulia, which is surprising even to me.

9)Leaving the show covered in sweat, walking to Republic, and getting my sunglasses back.

10)The cute little girl dancing in front of me, and the tall hot girl next to her. It was like, "take your pick, gentlemen".

So I am still basically recovering from the last weekend. I ran in the gym for a few hours last night and watched two episodes of law and order while doing so - I can't think of a show that I have seen more definitively. When I was younger I used to watch the episodes that came on during the day on A&E. Nowadays everything has to become so edgy - SVU and all of that shit is perhaps more indicative of the voyeur mindset than it is in any recognizeable growth in atrocity.

Yet where does it all end? Does it end when everyone is a criminal, when those emotions that define us as humans are no longer within us? How many of us, the somewhat priveleged generation, can say that we are not apathetic, that we are not spending our lives exactly as they come in - fuck the future. Look to the next generation and the discouragement is so strong that I wonder if perhaps there will be a generation after that.

Even in all of this, there is hope. There is always hope...though at times it can seem like an illness rather than a blessing. The Greeks considered hope to be the most dangerous of man's ills, as it rendered his ability valueless. I wonder how we will see it in a hundred years, whether it will still be a virtue in a sea of apathy.

-Rich

oh my my my my my my my my

Something is everything

I was dancing in Baltimore the other night and I heard one guy turn to his buddy(they were both probably a few years younger than me, maybe 23-24) and say, "Dude, have you heard about this thing called Myspace?" Which by itself is a "zuh" moment, right? His friend goes, "No, what's that?" At which point my brain exploded.

Dancing has becomes my anti-anti drug. I'm not not drinking. I hate people that think wit is so easily discovered, so barely transparent. It is, instead, the kind of thing that sounds dry, even when underwater. Bubbles carry words for a second - for the first moment where your mouth is open, the sound is contained in that acoustic space. I am willing to bet that it is wonderful.

I have had a craving for Stella's Bakery for the last week, but am unfortunately close to broke. We will see if I can purchase a chocolate enclosing a bit of ginger, later on in the week.

My writing is burnt out for the moment, and I will return to it tomorrow. Love you all, bunnies.

-Rich
do you have another pool stick in mind?

mordant.

Saturday is Caturday. Watching girls in search of pussy cats here kitty kitty kitty. Hung out with Two Tigresses, girls whose eyes reflected nothing but moonlight, nothing but net and the crowd paints a wave across those buffed and shined floorboards until we reflect madly, our laughter turning into a grimace. Frowns are smiles turned upside down, but only when our faces never change.

Girltalk girl talk girls talk girls talking at the Girltalk show me shows me showed me showing me that dancing is not a language that matters to anyone else but you. No-one but you. Beer thrown smells better than sweat until the beer smells too sweet for us to differentiate. I felt my arms and legs become weights and press agains the rest of my body, a sheathe of pain and numb sensations, soundwaves like paper balls against a chalkboard, the classroom saying no, no, hell no and the teacher writing equations that prove, somehow, that everything always works out for us.

It was my birthday. I am twenty six. There are twenty six versions of me, twenty six iterations and I think that I am in love with only two of them.

-Rich
we couldn't keep up with them

The food ban, and stupidity.

Foie gras has been banned for a while because of "animal cruelty" laws. For those who don't know what foie gras is, I will briefly explain. It is the liver of geese which have been fattened by forcefeeding - the forcefeeding is done by inserting a nozzle and hose down the goose's neck and then pumping corn and whatnot directly into the stomach. The goose's liver becomes fatty, and the goose is then killed, the liver being turned into foie gras. The rest of the goose is eaten/sold at market. Such is the circle of life.

Foie gras is also fucking delicious. It is one of the greatest things in the world, in terms of sheer culinary impact. The taste of foie gras cannot be likened to anything else in the food kingdom...it is similar in texture to a pate, but the taste is rich and earthy, thick with a perfume that suffuses the mouth and nostrils, and which becomes something other than what it begins as. For those of you who don't eat meat, I'm not shitting on your dietary choices, so please stop shitting on mine...don't ban something you have in all probability never even eaten.

Whether or not the geese are actually experiencing pain is highly debated, to the point where this writer is certain that the ban exists because people just don't want us to kill any other animals. Animal friendly PETA members fail to understand what pretty much every other creature on this planet instinctually understands - every animal wants to kill every other animal. That is how nature works. The fact that other animals taste delicious to me is just a bonus, the proverbial "icing on the cake".

Morally, my argument is "who gives a shit about animals?" I posited my theory about PETA recently, and had a friend become violently angry. I said that people care about dogs and cats and other animals because animals can be owned. Humans can be confident in their dominance over these cute creatures that depend on them for survival - it is simply a power issue that makes people so eager to help animals. And yet those same people will ignore the homeless, the sick, the mentally ill. They will ignore these subsets of humanity because you can't own another person, because those other people might not be grateful, might never allow you to own the direction of their lives. It is a fairly common feature of humanity that we desire control over some small part of the universe, if only to truly ascertain whether we exist or not. It is also a fairly common feature of humanity that we become thirsty for power once we taste a little bit of it. Humanity is really only seen in a life where it does not exist - the ability to kill and indulge in the terrible things of this world are really what define us as a species. The murder trait is more endemic than any other in our world, it simply manifests in different ways for different people.

I would like to think that people could simply mind their own damn business and let other people do what the want to do. In a perfect world we would all be responsible for ourselves and that is all. This is not a perfect world in the slightest, but I like to think that we are trying to get there, even when the evidence is so obviously to the contrary.

So PETA, vegetarians, liberals who are only liberal when you agree with their opinions, fuck off. Nobody cares about you. Nobody loves you. Nobody ever will. A friend of mine described a girl he described as "sweet" as being very easily offended. This girl was ostensibly a hippie, open to the world...and yet when another friend said something he believed in, she decided that she hates him. I was only mildly surprised - most people are too stupid to actually understand a concept and stick to it. Kudos to the guy who said something she found offensive. To the girl and the other guy, fuck off.

Of course, now I am getting angry and invalidating my point, though not really. Ironic, no?

-Rich
sometimes we forget about labels

we weren't available.

Bethesda, Maryland is the kind of place where you can keep time by counting the cars go by and actually enjoy it. Who wouldn't like saying, "Bentley, Bentley, Maserati, Ferrari...Volkswagon Golf?" It is probably the most wealth part of the state, and all of that wealth is concentrated into a perhaps ten by ten block square, centered around Wisconsin avenue, the road that leads directly to Rome. It is a strange thing to be driving up from D.C. and to pass a few strip clubs further down that road, sketchy areas where one doesn't normally see many white girls at night, the national cathedral, and then suddenly a bloc of power stores. Neiman's, Barney's, Dior, Tiffany's, etc. All in a row. Each store glistening in the morning dew, corpulescent and smelling faintly of old bacon or denatured leather.

Even stranger than the area is the fact that wealthy ne'er-do-wells coexist with hippies. You can see them grubbing for fun, living it down as it were at the flea market, or the little vintage clothing stores or the little faux poor cafes. It is interesting to note that the hippies are generally very wealthy as well but have simply approached the fundamental question of wealth in a very different manner. That question is of course, "when you have everything you want, and you don't actually have to work, what do you do?" The quick and dirty answer is that this is a trick question - we all have to work, no matter our finances. We have to want something, it is human nature to desire, to covet desperately. That a set of people have chosen to "love the world" and really CARE about causes only serves further proof that our lives have to mean something, or why live at all? Suicide becomes one hell of a viable option if we don't mean a damn thing in the long run.

That being said, there are plenty of things in the short run to irk us. Such as going into a posh store like Sak's in Bethesda and asking if they carry Dior Homme only to have them reply, "who?" Or learning that the Barney's will stop carrying Jil Sander soon. Or that Hermes only offers their caps and select, shit scarves at the Neiman Marcus. There is no market in D.C. for class with luxury. People in the nation's capital would rather the two be separate and equal, even when luxury carries a knife behind it's back to the senior prom.

It is enough for me to drive past these stores and to wonder if the life I am living is really the life I should be living. Look at all the faux glamour surrounding these pavilions to desire, to human desire! To want to be someone or something else so desperately that money no longer means what it used to mean - it only translates into luxuries, now. I look around and I drive on through, heading back to a friend's house, heading back to the life I am comfortable with, the life that no other American seems to want any more. It used to be that even the gangsters wanted class. Now all they want is another mink coat.

-Rich
I wouldn't touch things in here

Rendezvous.

It is a miracle that miracles happen. Does that mean miracles are any less real when they are small, when their inception does not foretell their deaths?
People see miracles all the time in things like a jar of peanut butter, or a burnt piece of toast which, through the random jostling of space, creates the appearance of the virgin mary. More money is offered through ebay(as all of these objects do end up on ebay) if the virgin mary is either a)crying or b)accompanied by "The Jesus". Not the pederast. The one who died, you know, for all of our fucking sins. There is no reliable statistical information on whether it matters, to the collector, if "The big J" is an adult or a child, whether the Mary is crying a la the Pieta, or for some other reason.
What is there to think of those who collect such things - the detritus of humanity, of our ruminations. There is nothing that we would like more than to collect the proofs of our uniqueness, the signs that God whimiscally gives us, as a child will sometimes throw a pet a treat. Is that what we seek, then?
Not that I am particularly religious, or particularly not so. It simply fascinates me that people are so desperate to see something beautiful when it is so easily seen, all around us. It is said by many that there is beauty in death, but what most people tend to forget is that it is because there is beauty in life.
I will write more tomorrow - this will suffice for my first post to this board. Ciao, my lovely readers. I hope to hear from some of you.

-Rich
this is the pursuit of happiness labeled black and blue