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2/23/03 This morning there is fog everywhere, hovering over the projects to the southeast and the city, across the water, to the west. It's odd to see my neighborhood like this because it reminds me so much of Seattle. I remember waking up in the morning there in the summer and watching the fog move over the city and sky, and waiting, patiently for the sun to burn it off. In the winter you just accepted it, months and months of fog and rain and gloom. It's been a bit like that here this winter, in this gloomiest of winters. It makes you not want to write or talk about it at all because it just makes you feel worse. You're trapped in this cloud, and there's no sun coming to burn it off. I think things are going to get better soon, though. I can just feel it. *** Bernie came to New York from Pennsylvania yesterday, so that we could work on our piece for Los Angeles (time, title, and info to be announced at a later date), and so that she could bring me a painting. The painting is gorgeous, a man and a woman entertwined as three people swoon in the background in a sea of red and orange swirls. It will look great on my wall. I know just where to put it. We went to Diner to work out the kinks in our piece. We both wrote on the butcher sheets of paper on the table, lists of topics, titles for the chapters of our imaginary book. We doodled. We drank three glasses of wine each. We made progress, in fact we've got the entire piece architected so now it's just to the writing. I always think the conceptual part is the most fun, so for me, yesterday was heaven on earth. Bernie says she's fascinated with process, always has been, so there you go, Bernie. Give me a pen, paper, and a glass of wine, and I can write anything. Later we went to Todd Levin's birthday party at the Screening Room, where every girl I met had either dated Todd or was roommate's with someone who had. I told Todd I always hate it when the guy I'm dating is still friends with his ex-girlfriends, because then you have to hang out with these people who have fucked your boyfriend. Forget it. It's a mess. And yes, I am just like that. We also hung out with Todd's optometrist, and later, Maggie Powers, for a long, long time. How ridiculous is that sentence? And yet it's true. As usual Bernie brought the conversation to new heights and we spent inordinate amount of time discussing penis size. I apparently have improbable tastes, and Todd's optometrist has a, "dick the size of an airplane bottle of alcohol." It only went downhill from there. I imagined that other people at the party - this clean-cut, attractive, pleasant group of people - were having high-fallutin' conversation about literary things. There we sat, huddled, talking like truck drivers, but out there, where the tall skinny people were, they were inventing new technology and so forth. But as I walked through the crowd to the bathroom I heard snippets of saucy talk, and I even heard one girl, in recanting a story to a friend, say, "You know, if it's just sex, let's fuck already." It was heart-warming to know that Bernie, Todd's optometrist, and I are not the only truck drivers in town. *** I got a cat. A kitten, I guess. Jules couldn't keep him, BARC wouldn't take him, and so now I am the proud owner of a little monster who trashed my bathroom - how did the kitty litter get from the box under the sink to the shower? - in one single night. I still haven't named him yet but if he doesn't watch it, it's going to be something really dorky. |