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Short Themes from Longer Compositions Okay...Just...I don't wanna over-think this thing too much, you know? I've gone from writing pretty regularly and posting it (Okay, for me, anyway -- I mean, seriously, the only thing I do on a predictably regular basis is shower: it happens pretty much first thing in the morning after I wake up, check my e-mail and more often than not, masturbate. Yes, someone who has as much sex as I do still masturbates. A lot. I don't particularly feel the need to talk about it, as it's not my favourite thing to do or anything; it's just something I do because I am, quite possibly, the horniest motherfucker on the planet. I didn't do it this morning, though. Well, technically, I guess I did, but it was like 3 a.m., and I'd just gotten off the phone with Grady in Louisiana.), to writing prolifically and not posting it because I didn't have time to edit it, to writing only in my head and only sporadic thoughts, despite a great desire to actually stop and get longer themes down on paper. Perhaps one day, I'll have the time if I can manage to take one of those things people do where they go away from where they usually are. I can't quite remember what they're called, but I think the word starts with the letter V and isn't "venereal disease". So here are some of the brief themes I've wanted to explore lately. 1. If you're a homosexual and associate yourself with the republican party at this time, you're the equivalent of a black person running a plantation and owning slaves in the mid-19th century. 2. I stood at a window near my office looking out at the enormous advertisement for Park Avenue Place ("Be home in a New York minute.") and wondered what it must be like for my parents, living in the rural Old South (totally different concept from the Deep South, though the former is sometimes part of the latter), to have this son, their only one, whom they almost never see, who's largely just a disembodied voice on the other end of a cellular phone line, who lives a life they cannot imagine in a city that's more like a foreign country, where they scarcely can communicate. While they go to casual friendly dinners, church meetings, automotive repair shops, whatever they do to fill their days, driving from place to place amid fields, forests, small rural and suburban neighborhoods, rarely seeing buildings more than a few stories high, I dart from work to function to expensive drinks and tawdry parties with bad habits, lurching below ground with crowds in trains or careening above it in traffic in yellow taxi-cabs which scuttle beneath the watchful empty eyes of monolithic skyscrapers, stabbing hundreds of feet into the sky. How strange must it be for them, in their leisurely worlds of sunlight and flowers, puppies and children, hardwood and brick, to think of me rushing in shadows and concrete, subway rats and derelicts, steel and glass. 3. I need to go home. I know that I do not belong there, but I cannot deny the influence the place and its people have on my life. They have played a major part in making me who I am, and for that, much as I sometimes resent them, I love them. And I miss them. And I fear how much time I may not have left with them, and all the things I might never have the chance to say or hear. This point was driven home to me recently when at a party on an upper east side rooftop, I was told of the passing, some months ago, of my favourite French professor. He deserves an article unto himself, so I'll only say here that I always intended so much, but in the end, I acted so regrettably little. 4. I have set about filling my iPod only with music that makes me happy. I still love the sad songs, but I noticed, I think on the train at some point, that life was much more bearable--in the subway, on the street--if I listened to certain music, that there were certain songs that made me smile, laugh, tap my feet, drum on whatever was convenient, stand up straight, walk with a purpose, with a swagger, and generally feel that anything was possible, that I could buy, or at least seduce to my purposes, anyone in sight. I looked at the contents of my iPod and noticed that they were mostly sad songs. I began going through my CD collection looking for the energetic music instead--removing anything inclined to make me pensive, introspective, sentimental, and replacing with the tunes that make me amused to think that anyone might wonder what's going through my head. So I'm still allowed to listen to the introspective stuff at home and when traveling, just NOT when I have to navigate the concrete jungle and its undergirding, not when I'm trying to be ambitious and RISE. 5. I've received a piece of spam e-mail this morning with the subject heading, "your teeths are disquat". I did not read the message, but it made me laugh. And then, it made me think of the fact that I'm a year overdue for a dental appointment. Oops. 6. A few weeks ago, the ridiculously hot, blond-haired, blue-eyed (even in black and white) seven-stories-tall guy on the Abercrombie & Fitch billboard which wraps around their future location on the northwest corner of East 56th and 5th developed an unsightly suburban-style streetlight protruding like a z-axis from the back of his right hand. Take that to mean what you will about life and the universe. 7. "Gingko biloba." Say it aloud like Jimminy Glick. Now, say it like James Earl Jones. Is that not the funnest thing EVER?! I'm stopping now. r
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