without this blog I would have no friends

2010-08-04T17:43:00.002-07:00

i work for a website called www.patch.com. it is a local news website owned by AOL.

i am having trouble typing.

for some reason i am told it is a perfect job. i wake up around noon and go to bed around 3am and feel like shit if i wake up before 11am. i go to stores and i take pictures of the store, i take pictures of the outside of the store, then i go inside and try to talk to someone. i try to get information about the store. i tell them i'm writing local business directory listings for a website called patch.com and that it's a free thing we do and that it's free advertising for them and maybe they could let me take inside pictures or maybe answer some questions. most people think i'm lying or selling things but sometimes people are very nice to me. i hate my job.

today a sweaty used car dealership man grilled me. he wouldn't answer any questions. he let me take pictures of his business, which i would have done regardless. i went down the street and talked to another used car dealership, this one looked larger and more legitimate, but the owner said he would 'discuss it with his partner' and looked very serious. i kept waiting for him to say more, so i kept saying more, but he didn't. he said he would email me if he was interested. tomorrow i am going to park across the street to take pictures.

here are some pictures i took for the website which i'm not sure i'm allowed to actually share but i am going to anyway:

most of the places i've been to were pizza places. levittown is full of pizza places and used car dealerships and bad real estate offices. it is cheap and run down and nobody has any more or any reason to fix anything. there are some nice places, the nice-looking places are nice to me.

once i was kicked out of a pizza place by a fat man in a football jersey. i wanted to call him a pizza jockey and an ape but i didn't.

2010-07-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

i bought it
so it goes inside my mouth.

into the great green daytime to attempt to scrounge up a job at a job i'd rather not scrounge, probably feel embarrassed, probably fail in certain ways.

at least my prescription will be filled.

currently looking for investors in a coffee shop slash breakfast sandwich specialty shop slash poetry shop slash used bookstore. i call it 'bacon, egg, and verse.' we serve nothing but breakfast sandwiches and coffee and poetry. maybe some indie press novels / novellas / whatever. the idea is to introduce people to the joys of poetry through the king of all sandwiches, the breakfast sandwich. stomachs will be full, souls will be full, the world will rejoice in the eggy majesty of the breakfast sandwich.

2010-07-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

i have experienced the moment when you see someone familiar, or something familiar, or a situation that is familiar, in a different way. it isn't the person that changes, she is perfectly the same, it is your perception that changes. it is as if the light changes, as if the room goes a mustard gold and this person is suddenly honest, and you're seeing them for the first time without the history of a relationship. these moments happen less and less often for me, but they happen, and when they do something imperceptible changes, maybe a few hairs look weird, or the way someone walks suddenly seems off, but there is a change in perception that doesn't go away.

2010-07-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

the vivid dreams continue. my testicles are swollen. my jaw, my teeth, cramp and bleed.

i'm thinking about the ways in which my poems are constructed, because they are constructed, but not brick by brick but stacked slab on slab. each poem after the poem current is just an extension of poem current, through the words change, the themes change, but the swerve is there, the way in which the poem moves between ideas or images or people stays the same. my relation to the i that speaks changes. my relation to the you i need changes. but each poem stacks on after the other and continues. i don't write in separate files for each poem anymore, my poems are simply stacked in one enormous text file.

how do i speak of my own writing when my own writing is hardly out there, wherever it needs to be, inside other brains.

2010-07-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

had a dream in which i knew a man with a hunting jacket covered in little words and phrases like feathers. when he misspoke, people would show him the correct way on his jacket. one day, after many hours of being corrected, he took off the coat and disappeared into the forest.

2010-07-05T18:24:00.000-07:00

are tits and birds the only important things in poetry, is that all we've become.

2010-07-05T13:31:00.001-07:00

i had a dream last night that ariana reines posted a video of her having sex on her blog to prove that she had sex. i didn't watch it.

2010-07-02T21:09:00.000-07:00

"We should be disgusted with our boredom considering spring and all the beauty of this privilege we have called poetry."

i should be disgusted by the non-movement i've been doing. by the lack. the lack of leaving the house for days at at time, the lack of writing, the lack of reading, the lack of a job.

but i'm strangely or not so strangely not.

2010-07-02T18:05:00.001-07:00

according to one hebrew tradition, there are 36 people in the world who's job it is to justify humankind in the eyes of god. they are called lamevavniks or nistarim.

they do not know they are who they are and they do not know the others. there are only ever 36 at any given time.

if you claim to be one of the 36, you are not one of the 36.

they help people avert disasters. only their prayers are heard by god.

i don't think 36 is enough, but i like 36 as a number.

2010-07-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

why is 'beach culture' a current thing in indie music?

sex and sand everyone, sex and sand, answers seem like they are not forthcoming.

2010-06-30T18:29:00.001-07:00

anyway, about my testicle,

i'm giving it a day to heal if healing is what it needs.

2010-06-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

i who cannot leave a room leave a room only sometimes.

i who read cannot read. currently reading: 'the history of love' by nicole krauss, 'three poems' by john ashbery, 'black life' by dorothea lasky.

i think though the only things i really always love are these books packed into stupid beer boxes on the floor of my room.

woke up this morning around 5 with a white blob, a furry white nothing on my right shoulder or in my right armpit. my body jerked so fast i felt like something would break, i slapped away whatever it was, if it was, and got out of bed. i turned on the light and couldn't find anything, there was no furry white something, a bug maybe, a small bug that got away in my half-awake fear. though really i went from sloshy head to instant awake in maybe 5 seconds, it was very strange. my bed is low to the ground and the house does have some things crawling around so i wouldn't be surprised if these things crawled around into my low bed. and then again, my blanket is white, an almost-furry white, and in my half-head i could have imagined the blanket as the thing.

heat has been making me have weird dreams, weird weird dreams.

i need a job.

2010-06-27T15:20:00.001-07:00

i've got prose

i've got prose

in different area codes

area codes

prose

2010-06-26T23:12:00.000-07:00

i trimmed my crotch today

in anticipation

it is in tiny pieces ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo yes

2010-06-26T15:22:00.001-07:00

i finished 'dhalgren' by samuel delaney, who works at temple university where i am an undergrad.

'dhalgren' is a monster of a book, a reeling monster of a book without beginning or end or sense, but has plenty of narrative and sense in that way. i would tell every person to read it if every person didn't mind feeling uncertain, disgusted and delighted, lost in a labyrinth of a city built from prose and distilled through a fragmented fictional mind, a self-consciously fragmented mind.

the story is about a man unsure of his name entering a city called bellona where something happened. it's post-apocalyptic literary sci-fi. it's one of my favorite books, without a doubt.

'to enter dhalgren is to be progressively stripped of various certainties' - william gibson, from the foreword.

i think that quote, what gibson said, is exactly right, is dead-on. dhalgren opens doors and never closes them, doesn't pretend to, doesn't bother. which is part of the confused mystery, which is why i loved it. i want to compare it to the first three or four seasons of lost, when the questions just piled and never parsed, but better. i wish i hadn't compared it to lost, but maybe it needs a sort of focal point, a way into the questions that feels familiar, at least to me, in some certain ways.

there are long stretches of graphic sex, gay, straight, group. the group sex section basically involved a train of men sleeping with one woman, was graphic and intense, one of the most disgusting and great sex scenes i've read in awhile. there are questions of race, gender, rape.

likely in a year i'll reread the last section. nothing is resolved. but it is ended.

go read 'dhalgren' if you need a challenge, a real book to question to.

2010-06-25T13:38:00.001-07:00

shark repellent bat spray

bon voyage pussy

2010-06-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

currently on part 3 of errol morris's 'the anosognosic's dilemna.' 'belief is not a monolithic thing' is the title of the section, pretty interesting, meaning belief is built through layers 'like a deck of cards' or, in shrek terms, an onion. what we believe we believe through an amalgamation of certain things, whether things are facts or not or whatever. here.

toilet got fixed today, victory to the republic.

reading ashbery's 'three poems' which i found in a nearby used bookstore for six dollars.

finished 'bird any damn kind' by lucas farrell, published by caketrain press, last night. ejoyed it, full of the birds i hate, but not overly full, used sparingly and to some degree jarringly. i suggest getting 'bird any damn kind' and 'ghost machines' by ben mirov, which is also great, they make great little objects.

i hope to one day be inside of a great little object, like a hermit crab, or herpes.

2010-06-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

what is with birds in contemporary poetry, where did they come from.

what do they even mean, do they even mean, why would they even mean.

but there are birds in everything. i think people just like birds. so ok on the birds, if used sparingly spared.

have a large cardboard poster of jack nicholson's face tearing through the bathroom door in 'the shining,' it watches over me.