Eugenics Begins With You!

I Was Told There'd Be Wit...

Dear Sloane Crosley:

I would rather eat my own shit than let you speak for my generation.  Not everything is ironic.  Sometimes, it's okay for something to have meaning.  Even if you have to make it up.

You're so hip I can't stand it.

And yes, I'm bashing you amid your success.  Not because you're successful.  But because I think you're lazy.

Now I'm going to go watch Star Trek and be lazy myself.

Because I'm no better than you.

a.

F you in the D with my B C all up in that guy's A....

In the past few days I have:

Been seductive.
Been seduced.
Received the entire series of DS9 on DVD (I know, I haven't moved in days).
Purchased a $2.50 DVD of bible stories.
Made a ruddy fool of myself in a Walmart to make a Portuguese girl with curly hair giggle (and succeeded admirably).
Washed dishes.
Not written a goddamn thing...
Tried a Goya Cola Champagne soda... which tasted like ass perfume.

I'm going to have to go back to work soon... and this lovely little vacation I'm on is going to come to an end.

But at least I'll have DS9 to keep me entertained.

Yes.  I'm a dork.  I don't care.

I'm still charming.

Bed-tricks

Being single is so fucking strange.

Home and Not Dead

Okay... so I'm home.

I'm not going to explain how I got here, as if I do I'll become enraged and find a small creature to punch.  I will say, though, that I got to meet Larry David (whom I made laugh), got drunk at 9am with a mechanic (and screenwriter, of course) from Arkansas named Rodney, prowled through Miami International with a 50-something woman with big hair and a jiggly ass, and ate a sandwich that pulled the life out of my bottom.

I'm home now.

While in LA I got to: meet Mark Doty (whom I adore) and Dorothy Allison (of whom I thought a spectacular old douche), I ate good foodages, I got laid (I was very good), drank a lot, nearly cried when I said goodbye to my friends (who are gone, pretty much, for good now), played poker and melted a karaoke bar off the face of the planet - all while sick!

Now that I'm home I have to: endure Christmas nightmareness, write a series of penetrating and whimsical novels with Jamie (with whom I am creating a really amazingly wonderful friendship, despite the hysterical immaturity of some), clean my kitchen (not gonna happen), go on a date with a Latvian girl (not Latvian orthodox, sadly), cook, wash myself and write a million brilliant essays that coalesce the madness of existence into a resonant sheaf of poetic insight.

That and be fancy.

And I am terribly fancy.

Adventures in Los Angeles 4.? - Typhoid Mary

So I'm sick as shit.  I caught something awful, and I've spent the last two days in bed, moaning, and hoping for the ceiling above me to collapse and kill me.

Today I'm going to find out if I can get the mentor I want.  He keeps checking to see if it happened yet or not - and he gave me his home number.  Either he wants to sleep with me (highly unlikely, especially since I'm a pallid, crappy mess over here) or he's really into my work.

Actually - he said something to me the other day that I'm still glowing over.  He said before that my generation seemed to be all about irony (which is totally fucking true).  That all of the writers hide behind it - that we don't give a shit... that it's all about cleverness and wit.  Never any feeling.

Yesterday he told me that my writing proved him wrong.  "You're an existentialist," he said, "one of the last of your generation."

And then he said that my essay was one of the best he's read in years.

I so love this dude.

I just fucking hope that I get to work with him.

I'm off now to go break up with my assigned mentor.

Peace out, homeslice.

PS: <cough>

Adventures in Los Angeles 4.5 - I've made a huge mistake...

So I slept through my alarm today... and missed the opportunity to get up and submit my mentor selection form.  This means that I was assigned one randomly.  This isn't a bad thing, since I pretty much know all of the CNF mentors, and they're all very nice and good and so forth... but I don't like having choice stripped from me.  Especially when it's because I made a stupid mistake and cost myself a choice that could have affected the direction in which I will move in this last project period.

I'm working with Terry Wolverton again - she's delightful and willowy and a really great writer.  She adores me (which I still don't get...), so that's a good thing.  But this just makes me so aware of how much pressure is going to be on me this time around - I need a hundred pages, clean, good and poetic.

I've got about 40% of that.

And I have to write a bunch of book reviews.

And I have to plan a lecture for next semester.

And I have to teach Brit Lit and grade essays and be professorial.

And I'm fucking terrified.

Someone come by in the middle of the night and stick a needle into my ear.

Adventures in Los Angeles 4.4 - Zip. Boom. Bonjour.

I am back in business.

Adventures in Los Angeles 4.3.1 - I was nearly raped tonight...

So my friend Neal's got this band.  Neal is totally not the kindof guy you'd ever expect me to get along with (if you know me or knew Neal).  He comes off as the quiet type - he's a fiction writer, he's from Texas... but in no way is he a shit-kicker.  He's actually deliciously sharp and funny and wonderful, and I really adore him.

So Neal's got this band - and they had this show in San Pedro tonight.  We all loaded ourselves into a van and headed out to see them melt faces and so forth... and while there this one woman from my program decided that she would train her sites on my scrawny ass.  She's an admittedly charismatic woman, and I don't really know her well enough to have a fully-formed opinion about her - but I'll tell you this: not my type.

She's plus or minus 40.  Wrote a sex column in Florida for a while - very aggressive, physically speaking.  And not in a sultry way that I typically find appealing.  More in a, "where's the cock?" kind of way.  She's predatory.  Fuck... she's carnivorous.  She likes younger guys - and tonight, I was her target... because... for whatever reason... I'm kindof a hot item here.

I don't get it either.  I'm a pushy little grease-spot everywhere else on the planet.  Here in LA... I'm catnip.

So Neal asks me to take pictures of his band while they play tonight - and I happily oblige, because I love Neal and would do whatever he asked short of sodomy.  So I'm shooting from angles, and drinking semi-heavily because I'm in a bar, and I hate bars... and everyone's behind me and it makes me uncomfortable because I'm fucking insane... and this woman comes over to me and starts grinding her... posterior... on my... my... my business.

Now here's the thing.  I understand that 99.9% of men would have taken advantage of this situation.  They'd have at least found a way to make out with her.  It's not like she was unattractive - she is attractive... in a certain way.  In a clubby, casual-trampy kindof way.  She's a self-described MILF... and I guess, if I didn't know her, and have to work with her, and didn't hear her describe herself that way, and was willing to use a term like MILF in conversation (which I'm absolutely not, because I'm not a porn producer)... maybe I'd have been cool with what is to follow.  But I'm not like that.  I like quiet girls.  Or, rather, I like women who actually flirt, rather than dangle their swollen, baboon-like posteriors into the wind and hope for a random sniff.

I'm a firm believer in the timeless art of seduction (as defined by Cosmo Kramer).

I like the hunt - the mutual hunt.

Hunt isn't really the right word.  I like the duel.  Two people, both with the same intention, parrying one another's advances - a swipe here, a stab there unti... finally... someone touches.  That's flirtation to me.

Buying me drinks and bellowing, "I want to make out with you tonight!" into my ear... and then jamming your slug-like tongue into it, is not the way to melt my butter.

So she's tonsil-deep in my ear-canal tonight, and I'm squirming and wondering, how do I tell this woman that I'm not interested?  Not even in an ironic makeout?  How do I politely say, "here's the thing... I think you're gross.  Not objectively... objectively, I should take advantage of this... but subjectively, you're pretty rough, and I'm really not cool with all of this?"

It's weird to think that, with a few shots under my belt, I could be nailing someone's mom tonight.

And it feels pretty awesome to know that I've got the aesthetic to turn that option down.

Besides, I've got my parts reserved.

Rough night.

Yikes.

Adventures in Los Angeles 4.3 - Light and Shadow

I'm going to post a small comment here, wherein I'll continue to explore the gargantuan boner I have for Mark Doty.

I read "My Alexandria" a few years ago - and it pretty much ended my life for a week or two.  I continued to adore Doty ever since then, but I moved on from a poetry phase to a nonfiction one... so I didn't read him for a long time.

Last night I heard him read from his new book - and it killed me all over again.

Today I sat in on his lecture on Walt Whitman called Whitman: Light and Shadow.  Whitman's a poet I've never been particularly wild about.  I've sounded the occasional "barbaric yawp" here and there... but I've always found "Leaves of Grass" to be somewhat of a chore to get through.

Well I spent two hours on about ten stanzas from "Song of Myself" with Mark Doty today.

I love Walt Whitman now.

I love Mark Doty, too.  Soooo much.

That's all... I'm not going to gush anymore, I promise.

I'm going to return to revising a friend's genre submission, and then it's off to some show tonight in Palo Alto (or something like that).

Goodbye horses....

Adventures in Los Angeles 4.2 - Dogs

So my laptop is acting like a complete asshole, and it isn't recharging like it should.  I've had this problem with it before, and it annoys me that I spent like 100 bucks to get the thing fixed about five months ago, and it's happening all over again.

I have a surly old Korean man to throttle.

Oh, and by the way... I'm absurdly jetlagged and drunk.  Endure what is sure to be crappy writing.

Hello all - I'm alive and well in LA.

I'm going to make this quick because it's late and I have to be up early tomorrow.  Just a few things:

Yesterday I didn't sleep - I stayed awake through the night to ensure that I'd sleep on the plane... which I did (hooray).  Sitting in the terminal, though, I was wide awake... and I got to peer at all of the other schmos who were on their way to this absurd city.  Here's the weird thing, five of them had small dogs with them... and, even weirder, they all looked like their dogs.  There was a ridiculous woman with a puffy helmet of permed hair - she had a caramel-colored poodle on her lap who she referred to as, "Snickers."  There was a snub-nosed woman with a shietzu (whatever, I'm too tired to look it up), and a lady with salt and pepper hair and a sharp little face, holding a black and silver spitz.  Strangest collection of people ever.

Tonight I heard Mark Doty (yeah, Mark fucking Doty) read a series of poems (which were fucking beautiful), and an essay about his dog.

I cried at the end of the essay.  I just sat there in the dark, quietly weeping into my hands like a damn fool.  My friend Hazel spied me in my blubbery mess and reached over to grab my knee.  She was crying, too.

You know - and I realize that everyone's probably tired of hearing me talk about my breakup (even I am, and believe it or not, I'm nowhere near as conflicted about it as I seem... this is just my outlet for my anxieties and frustrations relating to it is all) - I'm finding so many things to miss about Erin the more time goes by.  And the strange thing is that the more I miss her, the more I'm sure that I made the right decision.  It's just becoming more andm ore clear how not right it all was... even though I really wanted it to be.  I miss her - and I like that and hate it at the same time.  I miss her family, and the relationships I developed with them all - as remote as those relationships really were.  I miss them, and I love that and hate that too.

But I also miss her dog.  Lainey.  And there's no good about that.  I just miss her awful.  I miss her groans and her orangeness and her languid adorability.  Sure I loved the girl... but fuck did I love that dog.

If I had more energy and sobriety, I'd find a way to tie all of this together - turn the ladies into a metaphor... be a bit more descriptive about this or that... but I've ingested about a quart of whiskey and two microwavable burritos, and am regretting the latter with each gurgle of my gut.

So I'm going to just go to bed.

Hopefully I'll be able to post again.

So that's it.

Goodnight.