Mad Diarist

29

2007-02-15T09:13:00.000-08:00

I walk and the hours pass. I get tired of shade and walk in the sun, then I find shade again. I find strange shops, strange places to eat, strange houses made out of wood that look really old, but aren't. I sit in different places. Benches, stoops, stones, a sandwich store and I direct my thoughts at everything that passes through my eyes. Bricks, leafless ivy, people, lots of walking people.

28

2007-02-12T08:11:00.001-08:00

Walking down the block she's grabbing onto my arm, turning me into a quasi human walking stick.

27

2007-02-12T08:09:00.000-08:00

From a distance I think nothing of her, just another tramp with bulging clevage visible from one block's distance. Then, when she gets closer I notice something. I notice as she flies past me that she is dry. Dry hair, dry clothes, dry shoes. It has been pouring all day and she is perfectly dry.

26

2007-02-09T08:37:00.001-08:00

The girl had a small round face with straight brown hair that hung just above her shoulders. A fishnet shirt exposed the black tank top she wore underneath. Her lips were pink like cheap bubble gum and the middle of the lower one had a small silver ring going through it. She was very thin and wore green and pink leg warmers that almost reached her knees and left a gap of about a foot of leg between their tops and the bottom of her skirt.

25

2007-02-09T08:36:00.001-08:00

I'm compelled to run my tongue along this bottom lip of mine in attempt to medicate the cracks on it with spit.

24

2007-02-09T08:35:00.001-08:00

I walk by a tall black building that shoots into the sky like a tower out of a fantasy film. The windows are tinted and it looks like they're not even there.

23

2007-02-06T07:36:00.001-08:00

For fun I hop fences.

22

2007-02-06T07:34:00.000-08:00

I'm out the door and within five minutes I wish that I hadn't left. It's that hot, but not just hot, it's humid and the air is still. Stiller than still. The exhaust and dust coming off of the rooftops from the passing trucks drift toward the ground slower than snowflakes and the smell takes even longer.

21

2007-02-01T07:44:00.001-08:00

It was in a Wendy's on some dirty street somewhere and I saw her talking into her phone, glancing at me every now and then. I didn't have the sense to smile. Just to chew and keep chewing. Her shirt was a green that only shirts can be. Here eyes were a brown that only HER eyes could be and I would just look every now and then and I would chew and chew.

20

2007-01-31T10:53:00.001-08:00

TV says all the laughs are over.

19

2007-01-29T09:47:00.001-08:00

A garbage pile casts the unmistakable silhouette of a snarling hound on a patch of sidewalk that usually shines with bits of broken glass and the phlegm of hell bound crack heads. Under normal circumstances I would, perhaps tediously, tiptoe over the specter and I would have no good reason for doing so, but the rum pulsing through the god knows what within my body is a superb ally for the disregard of old habits. Most old habits.

My cigarette breaks at the flick of a finger and I curse my failed attempt at sprinkling stray ash into the frigid air.

18

2007-01-29T09:46:00.001-08:00

These eyes of hers sucked in the whole world and were especially powerful in the darkest corner of night.

17

2007-01-26T14:24:00.001-08:00

Outside is never outside in a city like this. Instead one goes from being indoors into something bigger.

16

2007-01-26T14:22:00.001-08:00

I looked at her and saw black pants and a large white sweatshirt hiding her body. Her face so white that I was taken aback a little as I was expecting it to be rather white and here, in person, my prediction was a shameful understatement. All I could think about for a brief moment was the contrast of her red lipstick, which always slightly constricts my lungs upon first notice, against her white cheeks. They look much thinner - her cheeks, and I would notice this constantly through out the night and think that she looks like she's aged a bit. I immediately accepted her smile by giving her one of my own.

15

2007-01-24T08:12:00.000-08:00

I feel a droplet forming in my left nostril.

14

2007-01-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

At night there's a thick mist hovering over the lake. There are trees on the other side, but they are only shadows in the moonlight. There's a pool next to the lake. It's here because this is the only flat place on the property. Strange how people need to make their own body of water next to a natural one.

13

2007-01-23T07:52:00.000-08:00

I'm watching one of them now. A woman of maybe forty, probably younger, but she looks middle aged. A blond died brown by the dirt that settles on a person from being out in the elements too long. She sits across the street, her back resting on a staircase of weathering cinder bricks and the sign is on her shins. "Hungry please help."

12

2007-01-23T07:50:00.000-08:00

The hours pass slowly when you're waiting for something and don't quite know what it is you're waiting for. The hours are passing very slowly.

11

2007-01-22T08:24:00.001-08:00

A moment ago I was laying in the folds of the sofa in the living room, yearning for sleep to take hold of me. I need rest, I thought. I do need rest. Sleep wasn't coming too easy though - probably because I had just undergone a ferocious battle with a moth that found it's way to my irritable side.

10

2007-01-22T08:23:00.001-08:00

Last night she was a new face, a new body. She was nameless and quiet and when here arms wrapped around me in the middle of our first kiss I felt like my ribs might crumble from the overwhelming softness of her hands.

9

2007-01-19T07:41:00.000-08:00

She tied the string very loosely, barely tight enough to keep the pants from sliding off her hips and hurried to the bathroom shivering and still topless – her arms wrapped tightly around her breasts as if there were someone to hide them from. Upon entering the bathroom the pants immediately hit the floor again and like any other morning she went through the motions of showering.

8

2007-01-18T13:19:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in a supermarket with a sushi bar in it on the lower east side and I'm staring at the window into overlapping worlds. Buses and cabs drive through a translucent reflection of aisles with assorted fruits & nuts.

7

2007-01-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

I see nothing but a red window curtain so thick that the little bit of light that pours out of it is immediately engulfed by the shadows.

"Have a seat." The voice appears to come from a wall, but that's just the darkness messing with me, the anxiety.

"I can't see a thing." I say.

"Have a seat right there." She says.

Slowly I bend my knees and lower myself, confused. There's a huge leather cushion under me, a bean bag type thing. I'm surprised I didn't trip over it coming in. My hands quickly make a home for themselves in creases that they hunt out while I think about what to say.

6

2007-01-17T20:09:00.000-08:00

Around the time that dinner would be the sky looked mad. A fading emerald glow crept up from behind the buildings along the skyline. Magnificent greens that can only be seen in the eyes of one you lust after spread upon the people witnessing them a most infectious awe. That's how it was and these words will perhaps remind me one day.

5

2007-01-17T08:05:00.000-08:00

I had a strange feeling this morning on the way to the subway. I was walking at a brisk pace, bordering hurry, with my pouch of tobacco in hand. The papers were still in my pocket and I removed them and rolled myself a straight cigarette while hardly slowing my pace. It was lit less than a block later and I found myself strolling leisurely down the street relishing the taste of these deep breaths.

4

2007-01-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

I take her to the rundown buildings along the water front. They've always been rundown. Closing, re-opening, getting wrecked, renovated, bulldozed, resurrected, always decaying, always dark. Some of them are factories, lofts, pseudo power plants, labs, residences, dock houses, and in between them there is always the same stink. The almost, but not quite sewage stink. It smells like being near a dried up pond in the middle of the woods. It's pretty bearable if you take the fact that you're smelling every kind of waste imaginable and just put that as far back in your mind as possible. The smell doesn't seem to bother her, but if it does she is very good at hiding it. "Are we there?" She asks. I tell her we're almost there and we both realize that it's a quarter to four. "Maybe we can come back in the evening," she suggests. "Although I think I can prolong my lunch just a little." But I shouldn't, and I don't, I walk her back to the store, she flips the sign, kisses my cheek. "Evening?" She asks. I say yes, evening. Then she's back at her counter, back in her book, and I'm back at work and everything is fucked.

3

2007-01-14T12:52:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in a breeze a few minutes ago buried in a book. Nausea by Sartre. I was somewhere around page one hundred and five when I heard a crash. I wasn't really all that phased by the crash, not even slightly, but then I heard yelling. A woman's voice. It was deep and authoritative. A security guard woman, maybe police officer. I looked up from page whatever and saw a man running like the world was crumbling behind him. He was being chased by police and by security guards with the woman still yelling, "He's got a gun! He's got a gun." The crowd reacted like a nest of lab mice and went silent and scared. Everyone who was sitting continued to sit still and those who were standing migrated into one group to see what was going on. A while after the culprit had turned behind a big brown office building and the shouts still echoed from the chase I sat on the park bench with only my book. Time to kill and my book, and nothing else.

2

2007-01-12T07:18:00.000-08:00

I try to do things differently and the world insists that I'm wrong. I think that I might be onto something.

1

2007-01-11T09:21:00.000-08:00

She slides her hand into my pants, combs through a layer of boxers and wraps her fingers around my shaft. She smiles, elated at her discovery. Bites her bottom lip.

-Do you love me?
-I love you.

I love her and she has this maniacal grin that summons all of Pandora's scattered curses on the world as she whispers them into my ear in the form of my name.This is followed by some odd statement, a bizarre decleration. She repeats the word "love" keeping her grip and it makes me very dizzy, the grip that is. In the moments before I'm naked her fist is an anchor, attached to me as long as it wants to be, keeping me floating in an ocean of anticipation. Then I swim in strange warmth and it all ends with the spins. Now where the hell is the love in that?