10/30/17

i've read and reread a lot of short story writers this year. lydia davis seems like the most analytical, almost metaphysical, in her handling of emotions and relationships. she doesn't seem to wander through a feeling as much as, say, joy williams or lorrie moore, or even deb olin unferth. this may or may not have something to do with her being a translator, and a little more of an academic than the others. most of this is based off of very unrefined knowledge. i drank too much coffee

on saturday katie and i went to see 'black sunday' (1960) at the mid-manhattan branch of the new york public library. i couldn't hear for a lot of it. barbara steele looked really good, and it wasn't as cold as the last time we went to the movies at the library. afterwards we ate borscht, stuffed cabbage and pierogis. the borscht, on the menu, was referred to as "borsch soup" and had a single piece of beef in it, which i ate

we went to an art show, where abby painted our faces and made us hot toddies. we ate candy corn from citarella that tasted like soap, and i thought about lifethyme natural market for the first time in probably a year or more. i want to drink one of their smoothies with coconut meat in it

on friday i went to an awful party. it wasn't really awful, but i felt bad and got home around three a.m. and listened to 'the wicker man' (1973) original soundtrack on youtube

i'm eleven days into a fourteen day waiting period, potentially. i think i'm doing an okay job at that

katie and i also watched 'the craft' (1996), part of 'hocus pocus' (1993) and 'the texas chainsaw massacre (1974)

we got stoned and waited at the thai place across from her new apartment for forty minutes for our takeout order. the people who worked there weren't very apologetic, but the food was great. while we waited, katie and i talked about what kind of an ex-boyfriend obama probably is. like if he dated someone in college for nine months or something, and it was weird for her to see him on tv as president a few decades later. i think he probably remembers one specific thing from, like, all of his past relationships, and if he ever runs into an ex, he says that thing and makes the person feel really special, but he actually doesn't remember that much, and he maintains a token memory like that for everyone he's encountered so that he seems more personable and affable, but he was actually just too busy and preoccupied and even a little weird to ever actually connect with more than a couple people at a time... or over a lifetime... i think all politicians are this way

while trying to fall asleep, i kept looking at a tree outside the window. it was storming, and the wind through it was loud and it was swaying violently, and i felt scared and fell asleep thinking about a giant, like... "body"... like living creature, but just of hair... "a body of hair"... sort of moving, getting bigger and more anthropomorphic

i dreamed that katie had prioritized heroin over everything in her life, but katie's never done or shown any interest in heroin. we conferred colv's ashes to a pond in prospect park where he and john and i came up on acid four and a half years before. it was raining really hard, and all the bodegas in clinton hill were sold out of pumpkins

i also dreamed michael scott (from 'the office') was skateboarding over the manhattan bridge(?) (i don't know, it was unclear what bridge it was contextually. it looked like this highway bridge on i-95 in connecticut near new london) to work at dunder mifflin (it was still the same regular office in scranton). he was wearing a kind of nikes that looked sort of like cortezes but that i knew, like instinctually, were called "studebakers," and they had "bushwick" written on the side of them like where adidas sambas say "samba," i think. once at work, angela complained that michael smelled bad from skateboarding. she encouraged him to take the subway next time (she pointed to a map that didn't look the new york mta map, but had similarly named and designed transit lines), and she said she had a new boyfriend. pam said angela just didn't want michael's smell to get into her coffee so her new boyfriend would think she had really bad breath. then, in an interview pam said something like "can you get epilepsy from a smell" re that michael's stink could give her epilepsy. i woke soon after that