summertime

oh your daddy's rich
and your ma is good lookin'

so hush little trust fund baby,
don't you cry.

boys don't cry

scientists say that tears have an evolutionary purpose.

only humans shed tears, after all. animals howl - cry out in pain - but tears are the opposable thumb of emotion.

there are theories on this: like anything in evolution, what has stayed with us must have helped in advancing the species.

when in danger, tears signal to your "intimates" (only a few feet away) that you are suffering without betraying your vulnerable state to the predator.

tears built communities, salvaged broken relationships. this is called "theory of mind" or empathy.

tears got someone's attention. the good criers were survivors because they would not be left alone, unattended, go hungry, etc.

when someone is crying, it's difficult to argue with them (or so they say). BACK OFF. I'M ASHAMED. I'M GUILTY. i'm small. don't go.

tears are an evolved mechanism of camouflage (i.e. crocodile tears).

there exists an entire language of tears that we've evolved to perform and interpret simultaneously.

(ah, fascinating what you learn from the radio in the morning before going to work. in the mirror, you smile at the mole under your right eye that superstitious relatives back home had warned you to remove permanently - a sure sign of "a lifetime of tears," they said.

little did they know, you were fortunate enough to be armed with such a predictable fate.)

sunday reading (T magazine)

she's little more than imported wallpaper; the perfect obscure object of desire (what i wish i saw when i look out the back window of my house in manhattan).

this is not unusual for sufferers of dorian gray syndrome, a little-known psychological disorder first identified in 2000 by a cabal of staff shrinks at germany's justus-liebig-university, giessen.

an ethnographic view of fat shows it to be a more fluid construct. the stigmatizing term "obese," from the latin obesus, originally meant "having eaten well" until it was reclassified by 19th-century doctors and health workers, just as "fat" was once a flattering term used by the greeks.

flesh suggests messiness. art, control.

do you love?

i.
word of the day: "le coeur."
not to be confused or mispronounced as "le cul."
though sometimes "le coeur" is not far off from "le cul."
it's a matter of perspective.

ii.
the difference between what you thought love was at 19 and what you have come to think of it as at 23:

"it would degrade me to marry heathcliff now; so he shall never know how i love him: and that, not because he's handsome, nelly, but because he's more myself than i am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire."
- emily bronte; wuthering heights

"when you fall in love, my sister said / it's like being struck by lightening. / she was speaking hopefully, / to draw the attention of the lightening. / i reminded her that she was repeating exactly / our mother's formula, which she and i / had discussed in childhood, because we both felt / that what we were looking at in the adults, / were not the effects of lightening / but of the electric chair." - louise glück; "prism"

iii.
since you can remember, you've always asked yourself: "do you love?" never, "do you love him?" (m, r, b, etc...fill in said blank), but: "do you love?"
when referencing a feeling, it's best not to use names. names require specificity, hence thinking. generalizing is your safest bet and almost 99% of the time yields an affirmative response: "yes."

no need to REinvent the wheel

"i'm perpetually lonely. i'm lonely when i'm in relationships. it's my condition as an artist....i also think i'm afraid of depleting my energy. i have this weird thing that if i sleep with someone they're going to take my creativity from me through my vagina."

- excerpt from an interview w/ lady gaga ("lady gaga's cultural REvolution," lisa robinson; vanity fair - sept. 2010)

REcast genius in another form. what beauty is, is.

this is called "exercising your muscle"

poor poor blistered feet. one on each second toe.
smoking your cowboy cigarettes in your underwear.
nobody cares. only the pigeons frequent your stash
of ash in a metal tin can on the fire escape.
sober up kitten. you got work tomorrow.

Water Works

Surprise. More like a big fuck you. No water in your studio. No water in the building. No water in the entire fucking neighborhood.

You knock on your neighbor’s door for the first time. It’s a little past seven in the morning, but you can hear the T.V. through the walls. He’s up. Why you assume it’s a he, you don’t know. Your landlady said someone was moving into 5C right around the same time you were moving into the building. “Alex living in 5C”: Could go either way.

Well, "Alex living in 5C" is refusing to be sociable or neighborly for that matter. You knock again. Just in case, you give him a second chance to redeem himself. No answer. You bite your bottom lip and then venture downstairs to see if Dan the super is around.

It will turn out he’s not. But in the moment as you make your way down the stairs, you hear this awful noise echoing against the concrete walls, traveling upwards as you descend.

"DON’T YOU DARE CALL ME ANOTHER NAME."

It was the woman’s voice you heard all along. You couldn’t even hear the man before. Not until you walked right past 2A and picked up what sounded like a man’s voice; muffled, as if he was speaking with a sock in his mouth. She was crying. No, more like moaning. More like the whimper of a wounded wild animal.

Why that metaphor? Wild animal. As you push the glass door open and walk into the street, you think: “The hunter is sometimes weaker than the prey.”

At the Midnight Express next door, you order a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and bananas. They’re not serving coffee. This is when you find out that the entire block and not just your building is without running water. You realize you need to pee pretty badly.

The construction workers outside are making a raucous affair out of turning the water back on for a hot second. You watch the water, muddied with sediment, gushing from what appears to be a complex network of massive pipes underground.

The waitress behind the counter sucks the air through her teeth, muttering: “Brown water. This is going to stay brown for days.” You comment on the brown water to be friendly, and she responds with: “Makes me happy to be living in Brooklyn.” Then you explain to her how you just moved from Brooklyn—Williamsburg in fact—to the Upper East Side. You don’t know why you keep talking. The words just come out, and luckily she’s somewhat responsive.

“I’d drink bottled water for at least a week if I were you,” she advises. “And when you get home tonight, run the water. Just let it run for a good minute or two. You’ll have to. It’s going to be dirty for days.”

Later, as you make your way down into the train station to take the 6 to work, you toy with the idea of letting the water run all night. You imagine every tenant in the building doing the same. It would be analogous to performing some kind of surgical procedure on the building: Collective bloodletting if you will, one of those ancient medical practices that probably did more harm than good but felt necessary and somehow logical.

Opening the vein carefully to let the water out and then collecting the liquid in exquisitely wrought bowls of glass: Here is the first harsh word spoken aloud. Followed by the echo of an empty room. Then the name replaced with silence.