New
York City Diary, Summer 2007
Sweltering
heat and the smell of fresh feces can really put a girl in a
philosophical mood...
May
9th and 14th: I run into a friend of from
college at two separate yet equally prestigious rock concerts. He is
a part of an entourage that includes a celebrity DJ and his
supermodel girlfriend. She and her model friends are partially
responsible for a fight that occurs during the second concert, a
particularly sweaty and aggressive fight, that ends with me drenched in
beer. A model friend pulls me aside to assure me that it wasn't
their fault. Afterwards I see the supermodel around my neighborhood
and begin to plot her demise.
May 17th: A woman at the Jeff Wall exhibit at the MoMA has her hands entirely down the pants of a man I assume is her boyfriend. Call me frigid, but I don't think pictures of the industrial Vancouver scenery should get one all hot and bothered.
May 31st: I see my arch-nemesis in a yoga class. She is a short-haired, condescending, faux-hardcore bitch that stole my tattoo after someone pointed it out in the middle of a writing seminar in college. (And yes, I am positive that's what happened). I give her the evil eye. She avoids my gaze. I pray that when she looks in the mirror she sees me starting back at her vengefully, giving the loser sign with my hand on my forehead.
June 1st: Try to convince myself I don't consider something as silly as a tattoo to be emblematic of one's individuality.
June 15th: While walking to the subway from therapy on the Upper West Side, I see an elderly woman hunched over in her wheelchair, which is parked between a payphone and a garbage can. It's approximately ninety-six degrees out, and the street is very crowded. A woman next to me asks if I think anyone would notice if she were dead, or stop to check. I tell her no, and we keep walking. The same day, a friend calls and tells me that he saw a man take a shit on the hood of a car near Times Square.
June
16th: I go to the Whitney's Summer of Love exhibit.
After reading the reviews, I'm kind of pissed at their judging
of the show as generally mediocre. It was fluffy, sure, but I want
the high, baby, not a bad trip!
June 23rd: I find the
head of a dead mouse in my tiny apartment. I have yet to find the
body.
July 17th: A friend asks if it's cool with me if she does coke. It's ten pm on a Tuesday and we're watching television. I tell her she can use a book if she needs a flat surface. She chooses Sartre's No Exit from my bookshelf and I can't decide whether that's hysterical or profoundly disturbing or entirely meaningless.
July 21st: I develop a theory to support the existence of God based on the fact that every time I strut around in high heels and think I look really foxy and cool, I wipe out in public. My God, obviously, is a humbling one.
July 24th: I think a lot about a writer and filmmaker who killed herself eight days before her artist boyfriend walked into the ocean off Rockaway Beach. Her website is still there, and I think about how long someone's Blog can survive them. How long until they pass on to that big e-cemetery in the...ky? I try to discuss this with numerous people, none of whom seem to recognize the thoroughly modern existential ramifications of this subject except for one. She suggests the creation of a job whose duties would be to read the obituaries and find the deceased individual's site and shut it down. This person would be an e-undertaker. I think it's brilliant, and start to add the prefix "e-" to everything, and just wonder about that.
July 27th: A hot girl from one season of the Real World, maybe season eighty-i-don't-give-a-shit-who-still-watches-this?, serves me drinks at an overrated, overpriced club in Chelsea.
July 28th: I attend a loft party during which a friend theorizes that we've been magically transported back to the eighties, and I think about American Psycho and how I sometimes sympathize with Patrick Bateman.
August
2nd: I accidentally steal a book about the political
decline of the United States in the past five years from a thrifty,
street-side book dealer on Saint Mark's Place. I return it to
him half an hour later and congratulate myself on my karmic
awareness. But then I wonder: would I have returned it to him if it
were something I wanted to read?
August 3rd:
I see an absurdly tall, skinny man dressed in all purple riding an
absurdly tall, skinny purple bike the wrong way down Eleventh Street
and for the first time in ages I giggle.
