On Tuesday, September 15, 2009, Johanna was forced to work late due to forces beyond her control, like idiot coworkers.
Johanna is the one who usually makes dinner, and she didn’t know when she would be home, only that she would be hungry.
I, uh, don’t really cook all that much. This was a problem.
The thing about pleated pants is that they are disastrously unattractive. I don’t know what it is about certain people that makes them think that this phenomenon does not apply to them — a lack of style? a failed understanding of the very concept of aesthetic beauty? — but they exist.
Awake, late, hot, naked, reading a couple hundred pages of someone else’s dream and wondering how I got here, but we both know that’s exactly the kind of half-secret half-mystery that I’m never going to be able to answer.
For a while, I assisted my friend Danny in the running of his karaoke show. He is an inspiration in the field, setting up a bunch of technology to make his setup cooler for no reason other than the fact that he could. He also helped me with this post, since I’m walking ground upon which his feet are much more firmly planted.
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
Last week, I was interviewed by Margaret Durfy for her dissertation. Her subject is city living, urban subcultures, and hipsters. For whatever reason, she was put into contact with me by my friend Katie, who long ago fucked off out of NYC to go grad school in Boulder and, you know, be all successful and stuff.
Anyway. I met Margaret at Joe on East 13th Street. Despite my oft-professed misanthropy, I found her very affable, not least because she wanted to ask me all about my favorite subject: me!
In the days following the close of polls in November 2008, it slowly came clear that gay rights had not moved as far forward as it appeared to many people. The people of California, that liberal bastion, home of San Francisco, gave their mandate that gays should not be allowed to marry.
Well, shit. If it wasn’t going to happen in California, then what chance did the nation have? Could it really be possible that so many Americans legitimately believe that gays are somehow inferior and don’t deserve the right to join with the person they love?
I took the day off from writing at RoastBean because I spent the whole morning writing checks to pay my company’s bills and my hand cramped up. I wasn’t using my pen, and I’m not all that used to writing by hand anyway, so doing it for 2 1/2 hours with minimal break was more than my pathetic extremity could take.
I also reached out to a friend today for some help. You would think (if you know me at all) that I would have a well and truly deep grasp of the fear of failure. Which is true, by the way. The problem is that I don’t know how to write about it in an interesting way for more than a couple sentences at a time.
Turns out that consistently joking about how much I suck at life does not make for a compelling narrative. I know, I know, I was surprised, too. But there’s also the distinct possibility that I’ve never composed a compelling narrative in any case. So, you know, have that argument with yourself.
If anyone has advice, please, by all means, let me know.
I have been trying to be a patron of the new coffee shop on the corner of the block near my job. The coffee is good, the prices are comparable to Starbucks, and they had the stones to open up literally across the street from a Starbucks in the middle of a recession.
I have started moving forward on a project that I first came up with two years ago. What do you get, I wonder, when you combine mixtapes and short stories, matching a mix to each story and loading yourself down with a host of rules and strictures to make everything go together? I don’t fucking know, and neither do you, but if we’re all lucky, we’re going to find out.