"This city of stone and stridor is not a sentinent perpetuation of Old New York...it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life." --H.P. Lovecraft, "He"
January 9, 2004
Consider the facts, dear reader, and decide: Great night last night--ran into Erin Dwight, whom I haven't seen since long before the World Historical Events of Sept. 11. Happily married now, she gushed about the realities of being in love with her husband and made it all sound very simple and stress-reducing, like the Atkins diet, except no fat. That was nice.
Last night I received a call from my future roommate, the one with the "rent controlled" apartment, saying (three weeks, mind you, until my moving date) that our too-good-to-be-true apartment was going up in rent and he's not sure either of us will be able to afford it. "But how much, exactly, will it be going up?" I asked him. "I don't know," he says, "but my landlord has started consulting his lawyer. There was shouting." At which point I spit out my nicotine gum and bought a pack of Marlboroughs.
I sleep on a couch. I came home the other day and Bryan looks at the place where I'm standing. "I can't believe you still live here," he says. "Neither can I," I reply.
I have two articles due in the next week, one of about 4,000 words on the subject of Mars and one of considerably shorter length on the former editor of Vibe magazine. Every time I sit down to start one of these articles I get writer's block, followed, after a few convoluted hours of plodding, one-sentence-every-half-hour writing, by the urge to throw myself out the window.
"...where your eyes had been dark and enigmatic before, they were just then all brand new, brilliant, a little drunk and gleaming down at me like happy pools of oil, still dark, but dancing like lanterns in deep water..." O Christ, reader, this tragic bit of Victoriana was written by none other than yours truly, during a Wagnerian fit of lovelorness on New Years Eve, my eyes squirting tears like they were big sucking turkey basters, to a friend of mine who I can only assume will call the police the next time she sees me.
Women and employers of more casual acquaintance won't return my phone calls, either.
Five months in, dear reader, and New York appears to be a bust. Your hero, practically homeless and jobless, is sputtering his last, and the villains are breaking through the door. I ask you this one question before I recede definitively into the abyss: is failure making me middlebrow? I mean, I am writing a blog. That's the literary equivalent of flipping burgers.
12:41 PM
She invited me to poker night at her place, where the guy who plays Lex Luthor on Smallville sometimes plays, or has played once, or something. I'm not entirely sure that means I should be picking his brain. Only if he's really Stanislovskian about it.
Ran into Jonathan Jackson, too--another married chap from Manchester via London via Chicago, a guy who just got finished wiring the sound for P.Diddy's self-produced documentary about how heroic it is that he ran in the New York marathon. Jonathan has been married a bit longer than Erin, and has a kid now, and so isn't quite as misty-eyed about the whole enterprise, but seems to recommend it in a general sense.
This was all at Enid's. They both gave me moral support in terms of talking to Indira, who, glory be to God for dappled things, began dancing to Brenton Wood's Oogum Boogum Song while she was working behind the bar. They sent out little probes for me, determined that she was single and maybe a little too wild for me. "Go for it," was the consensus. As it turned out, Indira and I talked a bit about Eddie Murphy vs. Bill Cosby, and Bill Cosby vs. Wanda Sykes. We determined that Bill Cosby always wins.
On another note: Someone is going to make a real War of the Worlds movie someday, with late Victorian costumes and decadent, frenchified, art-nouveau walking tripods: the whole nine. Then, that same person is going to do a serious arthouse film about Ezra Pound's journey to Milan during the final days of Mussolini's Italy. Pisan Cantos, chicken-wire cage, and everything. I'm thinking either Peter Jackson or myself.
12:52 PM
Greg Purcell | noslander2006@yahoo.com
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