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| Biggest plans collapse - it's cold and rainy and I'm running a dozen errands in between the house I'm sitting and the house I'm living, and by the time I'm finally free it's already sundown and prime sauna time has passed me by. So I spend the eve huddled afront the TV, cable-knit and fit to be tied with a beer by my side, the cat I'm watching lolling aside me. It's not the hard-partying Friday that I'm used to, but it'll do this time. |
| I try to remind myself that my job is not my life; to detach, glide away from the troubles that come with an office, but in my current situation, in such a small working environment, it's hard to be a cog. So when things are placed atop my curved shoulders, sometimes I forget and try a little too hard, get a little too wired up and incandescent. And so it is today, as we careen madly toward deadline as I type and edit and cut and paste and spit and polish this proposal to where I'm not horribly embarrased to kick it out the door, and we all apologize to each other and share a cookie. |
| Well, so much for that plan - I've been shanghaied into the office today to finish the final spit and polish on a proposal or two. My day off has been shunted to Friday, though, which ain't so bad, and I'm totally hitting up the sauna and massage for some serious back-wracking action then. But first I have to shoulder through two more days of laborious labor - wish me the luck of a cricket that I don't snap and tear somebody's head off. |
| Spent the end of yesterday at work tweaking the soft spots of hipsters and anti-hipsters alike on Craigslist, letting the rhetoric spiral out of control to a frenzy of anti-anti-anti-hipsterism and then people are telling me to "see through the veil of Maya" and I consider that a job well done. Read it here and try to guess which two (2) postings came from me and which are serious as Sam. |
| I'm still completely crippled, tentative reaches over to probe my upper back revealing a minefield of aching soft spots, knots and tangles mangling my every movement. I'm thinking of spending Wednesday at the Russian baths on 11th street, underground caverns hewn out of Manhattan rock and heated to thousands of degrees, masseurs beating my back with birch branches covered in soap and salt, internal organs liquefying in pure Eastern European bliss. |
| An empty, snow-covered zoo on Super Bowl Sunday may well be the single greatest thing on this or any other Earth. I'm battered and bruised but still manage to shamble through the monkey house, watching squirrel monkeys (easily the best kind of monkeys) caper around, capuchins batter each other with urine-soaked sheets of cardboard, and all sorts of other wee primates about their business. A day spent with monkeys is a day well spent, indeed. |
| Sometimes I really wonder how I passed all of those IQ tests back in the day, because I'm pretty Goddamned stupid sometimes. After buying a new Sony 20" flat screen TV, instead of being a smart New Yorker and hailing a cab to take it and me home, I heft it up, decide that it's not all that heavy, and lug it onto the subway instead. The idiocy of this plan dawns on me about halfway to the R platform, but I suck it up, get it on the train and get off at my station. However, I can't get it through the turnstile, so I get back on the train, four stops farther into Queens, hop a train back and heft it out on the other side. Then it's five blocks to my house in the freezing cold, I'm unable to carry the box more than thirty or forty feet without severe pain, but I eventually muscle it up the stairs and into my room, my right arm hanging limp off my shoulders. I don't even hook it up before I fall unconscious in bed. |
| God damn, another week has passed and we're almost at the ass-end of January. I'd do some sort of tally of what I got accomplished but a lot of it is in the realms of the unreal, mental alignments and skills falling into place. The work was done - twelve pages of Red, Black, a gobbet of True Porn, some other this and that hopefully hitting the printed page in the next couple months, and that feels good, but I still have the sensation that I'm ramping up to something bigger, that there's going to be some ray of light falling through my forehead and blazing the sky with some undefinable new concept. What that is, as of yet, I couldn't tell you. |
| I don't feel like you, the reader, can truly appreciate just how ass-blastingly cold it is around here. I mean, if you're Canadian or an Eskimo or something maybe you've got some way to relate but all of you west-coasters and tropicalistas are just completely and totally out of this world. Think of it this way: you're walking down the street and a gust of wind hits you in the face. It's so cold that your eyest start to produce tears to lubricate themselves. As the tears run uncontrollably down your face, they freeze on your cheeks and flake off in thin sheets of ice. That's how cold it's been for the past three weeks, and there's no end in sight. |
| In a restaraunt in Red Bank, New Jersey with my sister, her husband, her husband's mom and my two neices, Riley and Adelaide. We're waiting for the food to hit the table and I lean backwards over my chair to crack my malfunctioning back, yawing my arms out to stretch my shoulder blades as far as they'll go. Throughout the rest of the meal, Riley mimics this action between bites of her hot dog. Shut up, it's great. |
| Band practice tonight, if all goes well, Leela and I re-uniting to send sound waves out into the rehearsal space air once more. I've been lax on my home performance, too busy whipping my domicile into livable shape to strap on the guit-fiddle, but hopefully I haven't lost too many steps on this one and will be able to strum and drang with the best of them. I missed our songs, our lonely, creaking harmonies, and tonight they will escape my throat and hands once more. |
| I'm pretty much alone at work today - most of my few remaining co-workers took the day off, but I have much to do and had to escape the intense gravitational pull of my mattress. So I'm here in my Aeron, cracking my back and busting my knuckles, trying to make the most out of uninterrupted time. Am I doing it? Well, no, I'm as per usual frittering away in slow isolation, chatting and writing, bringing my computer back from the brink of a half-dozen crashdowns, but hwat can you do? It's Monday. |
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Epitaph for Canal Jeans Goodbye, good riddance? never can find my size, 32/30, is that so difficult? but sweaters goofy, Freddy krueger, etc tourists shop here! but I do, too, two blocks from work Diesel shoes for $30? nice knowing you! |
| Kicked off the weekend by sleeping in until noon, perhaps not the most productive way to start things off but given the sorry state of the outside world, sometimes spending 36 hours in bed over the course of a weekend is the best possible option. And to wake up to Chris making vegan biscuits and gravy made it all worthwhile, houseguests huddled around the table in the living room, listening to Fela and chowing down before suiting up for another day outside in the January frost. |
| What to do, what to do with another Friday, running around on ice-slicked streets trying to get everything done before the weekend. Finished the first real chapter of Red Eye, Black Eye - thirty-seven pages down the chute, almost a sixth of the way done. It's a good feeling to be crossing a milestone like that - it makes the rest of the book seem possible, seem feasible again. Brush in hand - draw. |
| Took the first of my days off today, as I transition towards a three-day work week, and it was amazing. We chose Thursday for the first experiment, as it's usually pretty quiet and I needed to hit up my storage space. The night before I ended up drinking gin with my roommates and their hellaciously cute but sadly vegan friend until 1AM anyways, so it all worked out. Slid out of bed woozy and wiser, kicked into gear moving, drawing, cleaning, wiring and generally getting my shit together. It's amazing how a break in the middle of the week can get you rolling on again. |
| Sometimes when you're wasting a day you can get caught up in all manner of ludicrous projects. That was the case today when me and a bunch of the PoE chat denizens took the larger part of the afternoon creating, as a tribute to everybody's favorite knife-weilding butterball, the Journal of Lard Flexington Fat. Nearly a dozen people writing frenziedly, trying to crack each other up at their desks all over America. And that's why the Internet, ladies and gentlemen, is great. |
| Went up to Tomas's last night after work to get my trusty dual deck VCR, all the better to dub Evil Videos with, and try to get the last of my detritus out of the apartment where I slept on a couch for very nearly a year. I open the door and Switch and Jack start making figure-eights around my legs, meowing up at me. I drop my bag, lay down on the old, familiar couch, and they scamper up over me, Jack nestling in my armpit and Switch on my chest, a paw on either side of my neck, purring like a voicebox earthquake. |
| Monday the 13th, although I'd rather worse luck at the end of a workweek than the beginning as you've got a weekend to recuperate. So far, though, the day seems to be going all right - no new crises tearing up my ulcerated stomach, just a day of getting by. Doing a little more moving tonight, the new abode is almost settled and should be complete by the end of January and ready to have you, whoever is you, come over. |
| I didn't get out of bed for quite a while today, the crippling cold of the outside world proving impossibly daunting. And when I did, it was off to the office to hunker down in front of my monitor doing computerized shading for my True Porn story, which I am barely half done with and the deadline was hellacious ago. I keep getting finagled into projects by the enthusiasm of other people - they get so excited about their plans that I'm all "Sign me up for a million pages!" And then I draw them a million pages. |
| Blame it on the bossa nova - spent the night out seeing Vinicius Cantuaria and his band at Tonic - my favorite transplanted Brazilian guitarist, tonight leading a six-piece through the paces, hips and makers shaking on the audience members who weren't too New York to get their cans a-moving. The day was so cold, wind cutting through your clothes like a butter knife that's been in the freezer, why wouldn't you take the opportunity to heat yourself and others up a bit on the dance floor? |
| So I didn't make deadline - I'm grace-of-godding getting it in by tomorrow at noon, hopefully by the end of this weekend I'll have sloughed some projects off of my plate just in time for some new ones to be ladled on. I've been neglecting my slacking at work - my dream of taking two days off a week has been briefly sidelined by a whole lot of stuff to do to wrap up 2002. Ah well, I'm just going to have to buckle down and do the do. |
 Rest in peace, Oolong. 1994(?)-2003. |
| A lot of stress on the plate today - I'm behind on my drawing again, scrambling to catch up with my deadline as there's been a lot occupying my brain lately. Last night I got my pajamas back from the laundry and perched on the corner of my bed (I need to get a chair), laying ink down at a frantic rate to get it done and out the door before the wolves come calling. And tonight, I'm going to do the same thing, only drunk and with a bunch of drunks. |
| Last night we had a King's Day party - not from any great desire to rock the Baby Jesus thing, rather as a good excuse to get friends together on a snowy Queens evening and eat cake, drink hot toddys and shoot the shit until the wee hours. I made hot toddys a little too strong, spiced them up with a box of Atomic Fire Balls I bought in Seattle, and relaxed. I felt at home, a feeling that is hard to come by as you get older. I felt where I belonged. And I felt good. |
| Another Monday, easily the bane of my workaday week, as everything I put off on Friday and over the weekend rushes up in a tsunami to bite me in my foxy young ass. I have meetings inside of meetings, deadlines rising from the grave, and it's doubtful it'll all get done before I leave the office today. I'm hacking away on a passel of proposals, barely have enough time to emit this missive into the inter-ether, a beep-bee-beep of satellite stransmissions saying I'm still here, I'm still here. |
| I had to sleep in for a bit to recover from my debauch but once I woke, under a new comforter, the world outside awash in flakes of snow, it was a productive sort of day. I bought coat hangers and went to brunch and generally enjoyed being alive and kicking again. Of course, by the end of the evening I was in another state of suffering, but that's just the price you pay for living in a boat of whiskey. |
| "Everything you do is lewd," she says, "subconsciously or not. I bet you couldn't do anything that's completely chaste if you tried." As I've got a few beers in me, I decide that the most chaste thing to do as a response to that statement is punch myself in the crotch. So I do, and instantly collapse into a fetal position on the floor. It's been a few years since I've taken a shot to the boys, but it still hurts exactly like I remembered it did. My face turns a beet red and I choke out "I... guess... that... proves... my... point." |
| Up sprightly and early to a light coat of snow on the streets, Queens bathed in white overnight, but as I galumphed out the door the wonder of winter turned into a barrage of freezing hailstones. So much for a quiet morning's reflection - I scrambled for the subway like the devil was at my heels, burrowed underground and waited for the train to take me away from all of this. |
| Overslept like a madman this morning, the sprawl and pull of my bed, pajamas and sheets too much for me. Last night was the first I actually sat and socialized with the new roommates - I can be a little shy at times, and it took a step to coax me out of my bedroom, headphones on and playing Gary Numan songs on the guitar, but talking about Ray Johnson and my roommate Chris's enormous installation that he's planning did it for me. I crashed out halfway through the Bunuel and to bed, enfolded for too long in dreams. |
| The cops shut down the new Year's party at the same cavernous warehouse I went to in November, unsurprising but still a little sad that they booted everybody out at 11:30 into the middle of the murder capital of Brooklyn. Drunk, soused, scrambled, I make my way onto the train, get off again, and when the year changes over I'm pissing in a Porta-Potty, and with my dick in my hand I look up through the clouded plastic dome at the sky and say "Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit" - for luck. |
DECEMBER
all content (c) 2002 k. thor jensen