Tryst.

This may be the most important video at the moment. It says so many things. If you make it to the guitar solos then you understand what I'm saying. We're connected.

When being wet is the last resort.

I think there’s an expectation you have with prog rock that the music you’re listening to comes from a tight group of guys with long hair and weeks of stubble growing on their chins, working hard, sweating and lighting up in a studio to produce a transaction between the psyche of the band and the listener. That’s a given. So when the new Muse record is played through you can’t help but be amazed by how earnestly, truthfully, and of course, spectacularly (!) gay an experience it is!

This is my first experience traversing through what can only be described as “Camp Space-Rock.” Love child of Barbarella, YES, ELP, Hawkwind and just about a gallon of pretension, and they somehow become the hairdresser’s version of Pink Floyd.

This is of course delightful.

Other avenues of though? Not many functioning today. The heat’s too high, the sun too bright, and most of the day spent working towards going home, which will not be that much fun due to the furnace like qualities of the apartment.

I feel clinically depressed, which is good for me as I work in a cubicle landscape with no lab coats in sight. It’s almost as if my emotions have no bearing whatsoever on my life or the lives of others. No wonder people think I’m a soulless zombie…it’s quite true.

If I’m around a conversation between a group of people (that means I’m not the focus of the conversation if you’re bothering to follow this) and you notice I’m not talking this is why: I’m imagining what you would look like dead after a car hit you. This is also quite true. Another example: when I go to bars I imagine the look on people’s faces if someone were to suddenly pull a gun on them. I want to know what their mouths would do. How fast would the react? Do they ever consider the possibility that someone could become really unhinged and do that? How thin is this transparent line between the crime and dream of the crime? Andrew Cunanan was possibly obsessed with this idea.

In a typical fashion I’m hiding from reality, so nothing cold can touch the last spark that burns.

I can’t be chastised for the awful things I think.

Sitting down at this late hour in the work day (just under 27 minutes before I go home) I’m trying to think of what I want to write about. This isn’t one of those journalistic clichés where the writer then muses on some ordinary event and suddenly, triumphantly, pulls out some meditation on life that you obviously expect and enjoy otherwise why would anyone print that garbage? Anyway, I’m not trying to muse on anything; I’m just applying the filter so I don’t inadvertently spill any of the truly good details out here. Muse on that.

In non-chronological ordering, then. Yesterday I spent one of the hottest days on earth skulking around the North End of Boston. It was apparently the Feast of the Madonna (and not, as I had hoped might be the case, a cause for some Gay Italian group to pose a counter-festival like the Feats of Madonna), but this was quickly and obviously subsumed by the Feast of World Cup Football Playoffs or whatever they were by Italy and France. The Italian fans outnumbered the French fans at City Hall Plaza by about 5,500 to one. I haven’t seen that much meat since the last time I checked out the dry cure room at Whole Foods. Ba-da-bing!

On with that festive note (I can only sing in a rather limited register), I haven’t been that hot all summer. Something about the mixture of concrete and brick at the plaza seems to create a breeze vortex, and where it was mildly unbearable just a few feet away, suddenly you’re walking across the surface of the sun while trying to avoid the noxious smell of unwashed armpits and beer bellies hungry for more beer, sausage, and goals. Goals! I don’t know how many there were. I didn’t care. I wasn’t there for the majesty of football, I didn’t show up for the mist tent, and I certainly don’t care to be surrounded by so many Italians! What was my point? I’m just in it for the put-downs. I’m not really interested in providing any content.

Well, I don’t have a sophisticated philosophy upon which to draw platitudes and observations that would make women with appliqué sweaters swoon, so I’ll just end it here. If one of these women happens to read some of these neatly typed lines and would like to issue some sort of reprimand to me for dragging them into this nonexistent fray, well, you just go ahead, dear, it won’t make a bit of difference, but I will sure love reading some of your homespun ridicule.

Tying knots in the stomach of teenage lovers everywhere.

No, I have not updated in ages, but Time marches forward and I’m stuck on the soft leather of her heels. I feel as though I’ve been keeping a low profile, but this does seem to indicate that there is something out there desperate to get through to me and that’s just not the case. In a world full of political intrigue and high stakes games of war and famine, I haven’t even had the energy to go out for breakfast and have some pancakes.

Between strip clubs and the google-eyed monster of strip poker MC’d by an un-disguised cohort sans the usual mascara, Pride parades and Pride debauchery, leather bars and more hamburgers than I’d care to remember, somehow, for some reason, the summer has settled its choke upon me. No, I have not yet seen Superman’s returning bulge, or Streep’s spin as fashion Gestapo, or even heard Owen Wilson dubbing an animated car with a slightly out-of-alignment front bumper. So in some sense, the summer has yet to truly foist itself upon me, but that yoke is going to tighten, I just know it.

My birthday came and went with such little fanfare I feel as though it didn’t happen, so score one for me, I’m going to be younger than I should for at least another 11 months. There was something primal about spending so much time on my own that weekend, if by primal I can include hours of Stargate SG-1 (Season 7), watching the 24 hour Superman: the Animated Series marathon on Boomerang, and walking in the rain to get iced coffee form Dunkin Donuts, then by all means, call me Mr. Primitive.

There really isn’t much else for me to say, as this isn’t much of a platform for any thoughts I have. I can’t really be bothered trying to telegraph them to you, anyway. I wrote a letter last week in support of some legislation I know nothing about. I was asked to do this for certain reasons that obliged me to comply. I tried to interpret the undertaking and relate it back to myself, but the information I was provided was so thin I really couldn’t, and really couldn’t be bothered. Still, I wrote the letter, attempting to infuse it with a personal sense of expression such that the recipient(s) (were there any?) might feel that the missive originated from at least, by most accounts, a real person. Did I succeed? I have no idea. I am of the opinion that the actions I was asked to support were already accepted and in the pipeline of execution, that this was all just a formality, such is the true nature of politics and civic reality, but I still wonder who read it and if they even cared a little. I mean, I know I didn’t.

Once again I find myself several paragraphs deeper on the page than I had intended. There are few things in life that once removed I actually miss. But there are some. Then there are those things that have been so long gone I rarely think of them unless some odd phrase or visual induces a wavy lined flashback. At those moments I suddenly feel transported and transmuted into whatever mindset I was experiencing at the time. I do like to remember that I once knew less than I do now. At those times there’s a sense of panic, and then abandon. I don’t hang on to tokens of the past, or at least the things I hang on to are not for sentimental reasons. But there are moments, incidents of personal weakness, when a sense of nostalgia for my own history can be rather overwhelming. If nothing else, at the very least the story of my life has kept me somewhat engaged. You may not find it a riveting page turner, but in the end, it’s the only book I’ve got. And yes, I have tried to exchange it for an erotic anthology but the clerk at Border’s was less than accommodating.