Skyline from Long Island City (c.1999)

Road Trip Notes, 1998 (part 2)

-- Dreams of ex-girlfriends forgiving me.

-- To hell with I can'tor my writing isn't that good. Who cares?  I write to just do something, as differentiated from nothing, to say I was here, these are the things I thought about and saw not out of any desire to be good, but in response to impermanence. Just so, when I die, I can say at least i didn't watch life pass and just think things, I watched this pass and thought these things, and this is what i made up in my head that one time, this is what I noticed that day. 

-- He's definitely smart, he's very smart. He's just not intelligent.  Oh and he's also a dick.

-- It's essentially impossible to have grown up in the last part of the 20th century and not have attention-deficit disorder.

-- I guess there's some truth to that, but it's too annoying to dwell on.

-- What's the difference between transit silence and transit talking?  Sobriety?

-- The conversation and alcohol flow with equal dissatisfaction. Waiting for things of moment to occur, and of course they never do.  How can they? We're in a bar after all.

-- Sordid telepathic affairs.

-- They'd get naked, throw money at each other and call each other "whore".  They're the happiest couple I know.

-- Your overdraft protection is hereby withdrawn.  You're dead.  Your keys are someplace in your sofa your hands will never reach.

-- Power line towers, like giant ladies in waiting, primly lifting their electric-cable hems to cross a river (puddle).

-- It becomes easier to watch TV when you start living with a bunch of guys you can't relate to.

Prospect Park (c. 1999)

Paris 1999 Picasso Museum

The Moon (2000)

The moon's taking up the sun, half-moon, and for the first time (it feels like the first time) I'm seeing the moon as a physical object, a big round ball of rock just sitting there (moving, sure, but it looks like it's just plonked down there up there), and it really is like the 4th grade science teacher shining a flashlight on a baseball in a dark room, the sunlight coming from there, right there.

I feel like (tonight) I can tell exactly where the sun is in relation to me on the other side of the earth but not directly below my feet. I have a sense of the size of the moon and the size of the sun and as a result a pretty good feeling for how far apart they are from one another and from me. It's weird because I usually just see a flat disk up there and the sense of its depth is really dramatic right now.

It feels like the moon is the "lovers' sphere" because of its untraversable proximity. The moon, like all lovers, is so close, so freaking close compared to everything else in space, everything that is mind-scramblingly distant and inconceivable, but still so impossibly far away.  You just can't get there and really touch it.

Amsterdam Vondelpark, not even fair, 1999

Unfinished unedited untitled short story (pt. 1) (2002)

     Mason Belber sat at the small white table in his small yellow kitchen drinking of a cup of carrot juice and trying to relax his mind. He hadn't woken up this early in over a month and he was agitated and confused and unhappy.

     The only thing more depressing, Mason thought to himself, than being out of work was trying to get a job.  Certainly, unemployment had had its drawbacks. Ignoring money worries (which should never be underestimated), Mason felt guilt and shame in his idleness. This wasn't like him!  And even if this had actually been quite like him for a while now, there remained a deep sense that he was playing a role he was never meant to play.

    As he stared down into the deep red and blue bars of his tie, a tie he hadn't worn since the day he'd been laid off, a distant dull panic started to have its way with Mason's stomach. It all came back to him in an accelerated rush of fear and dread: the beige and the brown, the unforgiving logic of spreadsheets, the unpaid overtime, the lonely lunches on busy midtown side-street mews, miles from everyone else with their tuna melts and gyros and reubens and cobb salads bathed in a gelatinous slather of blue cheese dressing, and the carnage of that day, a year ago, when his whole department had been laid off, one by one, without warning, heads rolling multi-directional like the pearls of a pearl choker torn from an old woman's neck, some in tears, others pink with indignation, all eyes staring in what-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-do-now paralytic stasis and fear; and Mason, luckier than most as one of the last and offered a moderate severance, riding home in a car the company, in a startling act of cruelty, offered to them all, Mason, sitting there forced to crawl down 7th Avenue, past all the city's employed, like the cousin of a murdered monarch, not important enough to behead, but still royal enough to deserve the agony of penniless exile, paraded down the Avenue des Champs Elysees in a horse drawn carriage, while the peasants throw tuna melts and gyros and cobb salads and snarling leers of hatred at him, Mason quietly churning two emotions he was sure (though wrong, he'd never really gotten to know anyone there) that none of the others felt: regret at failing (finally having been given carte blanche!) to deliver the fustian monologue of righteous invective he'd practiced for months and that ran through his mind, even now, a clarion, alliterative masterpiece of a diatribe worthy of brute Baptist, even evangelical, delivery that would have certainly caused Randy Slough, that manager of the middle, that toady tormentor, that banally evil bureaucrat, to confess his mistakes and his own unworthiness to a tribunal and submit himself to a very public and painful cleansing; and the second emotion, the one Mason had a hard time accounting for (and accounting was his business!) but that once felt, he had to admit was maybe his truest expression of self, coming, as it did, unbidden and shameful...a nonsensical and enveloping relief that had him giggling for the rest of the ride home.

Mason hated his job, hated the people he worked with and especially hate the toxicity of all that hate, yes, but his happiness at this point was the cautious happiness of the wrongly convicted and finally absolved criminal. It had nothing to do with the prison drear, the warden's sanctimony, the guards' sadism or his fellow prisoners' hopelessness. It was the simplest of joys.  It was not yet one PM, the sun was out, and Mason had absolutely nothing to do.

Road Trip Notes, 1998 (part 1)

-- The fun bus fills up fast.

-- A girl on St. Mark's Place yells "Hey, Larry!" to no one in particular.  That's right, go on and yell "Hey Larry!" and who knows? Larry might show up and yell, "Yeah?!" and the cycle begins anew.

-- What's funny is that none of this is funny.

-- A ghost town called Chlorine

-- Chapman University is at the end of a strip mall.

-- I'm the net in the conversational tennis match.

-- Four hours of boring is four hours less than eight hours of boring. 

-- Today is the day that guy lost his shirt and I just happened to be here.

-- I feel like when I'm not being mean I'm being fake; but also when I'm being mean I feel like I wish I was someone else.

-- Do I have to make nice with the girl my friend's sleeping with?  She's silly and loud.

-- What does she have to tell me that I haven't already thought of and rejected?

-- _____________ is very giving when he's keeping things from you.

-- (Billboard) If you need a gun, you need to call Good Guys Guns. 

St. Malo, France, 1999