Broken Ankle

Little did I know how much things would change...

Collapsed just that night with a broken ankle. And now, here I am stuck in a cast and away from myself. As much as I hate myself, I hate being away from myself even more.

I feel such a suffocated pressing on my chest. Yet, how much time has passed since I've had anyone to explain it to.

I just got a message from that kid, PianoBoy. Worse than that he keeps calling me is that without my independence, I've been castrated and there's no sense in calling him back. I can't have any kind of social life for months!

And I'm going to lose everything I had started. I can't even call that damn bouncer back.

There's not even the privacy of a phone call.

At the Athens Cafe

In the Athens Cafe in Astoria with B. (He just went to the restroom). It's very cool to be able to smoke here, but my stomach feels strange from the combination of Indian food, cappuccino and smoke...

The table is a pink, silver and black granite framed by an oak-ish wood. It's a strange combination. I wonder who designed it.

I wonder why I feel so different when I smoke. I love that B thinks I'm a "cool" smoker. I don't think I'll ever quit, just for the transformation it allows me. It's so unfair that there's only one more month until Bloomberg's fucking laws go into effect.

I want to be a writer. Find some kind of job researching. Not have to put on a show or get dressed up for anyone. I really hate that. It makes it hard to be myself. Hard to feel grounded in who I am. Maybe I can find some kind of job in research for the next year.

Being here makes me miss my dad. The guy at the next table has worry-beads. And all of the smoke and the coffee... I miss him. It's just so unfair. I wonder what he would think of me... Even now, I think he'd be disappointed. I guess that's kind of pathetic in a way.

I feel very exposed sitting in the window like this. There's a gray-moustached man on the payphone outside who stands very near to the window.

What kind of research job could I get? Would I be able to find something with the job market as it is? I don't know...

Lunching Alone in the Snow

In the Comfort Diner. The first time I'm out for lunch for pleasure, alone, since B. I feel good about that. With Elvis' "I've Never Been to Spain" to celebrate. Today... on a day when the snowflakes are so fat that they stick in my eyes and the gray pea-coat doesn't fit but the blue one is in the cleaner. (One thing at a time).

I hope my voice lesson today is as good as it was last week. I didn't even want to write to OperaBoy to tell him that I still sing. It seems weird because he's just going so far with it. He is so amazingly talented... and I knew him when he was 16!

The green tiled specks in the counter look like miniature turtle shells, crawling along the surface, their faces suffocated in cement.

Food here. Must go.

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Okay. Just finished. I think I know why I used to write in my journals so much and then stopped. I just had no one to talk to. It's just one big fat solipsistic exercise in which I become the listener as well as the speaker-- the participant and the observer. My own confessor. I think it warps things... Whatever.... It is what it is.

And Elvis is still singing... That book (the Penguin lives) makes such an interesting point about Elvis rebelling against poverty but inspiring a rebellion against the very middle class conformist affluence he attempted to become a part of. Is that the difference between Schoenberg and Wagner? Was Wagner safe on the inside while Schoenberg became "degenerate" (like Elvis-the-pelvis)? Then, once Elvis "got it," he couldn't join the '60's rebellion of people trying to get out. It's just so fucking sad... but easy to see how he made all the "best" decisions for himself but still became irrelevant.

That Michael Jackson documentary on 20/20 last night was so creepy. It's scary how life can be so distorting. Meryl Streep in Adaptation-- "I want to be new." Isn't that what we all want? To be born again? Not necessarily to do it differently, but to be no longer living with what has already been done... Like when Elvis was new... When I was still "brilliant" for my age and not just "without direction." Prodigy into mediocrity in a flash.

I didn't realize how good that music I wrote was back then. I always think I'm being on the clock. One day I will be...

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Ok. On the M104 now and heading across 42nd Street, stopped at the light on Lex. The snow is falling so fiercely now that it seems like the flakes are all feeling something in the skies. They are frantically running parallel to the bus in horizontal grooves until we slow and they continue, stuck together in clusters, to rain down towards obliteration on the pavement.

I keep seeing pink in the windows for spring. I like pink. But God, do I need to lose some weight. I need to stock the fridge, eat all my meals at home and not think about it. If only it would stop snowing so I could go for the groceries.

(Elvis just finished his "American Trilogy"). We're at Madison. I think I'll close for now.

Adaptation

You are what you love
(I want to be new)

And obsession-- the world is so big sometimes we try to just whittle it away to something manageable. (Fragile...Fleeting)

YOU ARE WHAT YOU LOVE.

I have to see it again.

The flowers are meaningless. (The agent asks him-- are they special?) and proceeds to talk about fucking all of the women that go by the window as if they are nothing special.

Charlie sees the women as ghost orchids-- painfully beautiful, but elusive. (At the end-- you are what you love. He is special because he can obsess.)

Obsession is a way for man to give meaning.

The shot at the end of the film made the flowers just flowers again-- adapted to the city. (Forever blooming).

Susan, when she saw her orchid (Larouche) had to grab it. But that's just it-- we can't have our orchid because we will find that we put the meaning there ourselves (like when I tried to talk to my dad in heaven). And so, she takes drugs instead-- her beautiful, almost religious, quiet turns into a totally material experience ground out of the physical substance of the orchids to nurse her illusions. That is why Donald can't and doesn't really exist. He's the only one okay with the illusion being just an illusion and so he writes his scripts that way-- an illusion of life.

At the end of the film, Charlie is okay to let his "love" go because if you hold your orchid, you will crush it to dust and it will intoxicate you.