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| 06302002 | ||
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At the shelter, of course, there's some dogs who aren't going anywhere. Since BARC is a no-kill shelter, some dogs will be there quite probably until the end of their natural lives. Sunday morning, head still reeling from not enough sleep and too much booze-fueled shake, I found myself behind the leash of a dog completely blind, eyes clouded over with a pinkish-red sheen, yet still running right up to me and licking my hand. "Give gentle pulls on the leash at all times, or talk to her," they told me, "so she'll know which way to go. And make sure she doesn't run into any dumpsters." I did my best, although she did turn around too fast and whack her head against a lamppost, but she wouldn't happily walk more than a few blocks away from the shelter without turning around and frantically crawling on her belly back to the door. I decided to compromise by walking her a few in every direction.
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What's better than spending a sunny Saturday afternoon in the greatest city in the world, in a crowd of a couple hundred fellow funsters, walking down 10th street in an enormous, gleeful wedding procession being led by two people in giant, gumdrop-shaped bird costumes? Not much, I'll grant you, but the reception for said wedding just about pulled it off. As I walk in, I see people swinging madly atop a spinning tire swing, centrifugal force pulling them out in ever-widening arcs. The contraption can't take it - with a screech of metal, it collapses onto its side, sparks shooting off as it hits the ground, the swingers trying to not get crushed underneath. This is going to be a good one, I think, and go get a shot of whiskey and a foamy, lukewarm beer. When i get home, my pants are still soaked with dancing sweat. Congratulations, Chengwin.
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Some of you may have noticed on Wednesday, for a few strange hours, if you tried to visit this site you were redirected to an atrociously shitty ceramics site that makes statues of dragons and fairies and other fruity crap. Why did that happen? Because people are fuckholes, that's why. Some no-name hosting company in Bumfuck, Hicksville decided instead of registering a unique IP for their clients to just use any old IP address they could think of. Unfortunately, they used mine. However, due to the quick thinking and volcanic rage of Chet over at PoE Hosting, the best damn hosting company in the universe, things were restored to normal. Fuckin' with my web site - christ!
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Bring on the weekend, please; spending the day booking the bossmaster on a vacation to Amsterdam can make a serf jealous of the concept of free time. I'm workin' for the weekend, all right, you can hear it blaring out the windows of Firebirds parked afront the convenience store, mullets and tallboy cans ahoy. I need to get out from behind the computer and into the sun; I need to walk the dogs (missed them last week due to comics foolery), need to do some damage to the world I spend the week building.
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A sweet, quiet night last night, Tomas, Erikka and me over at Nina's, the world's most gracious hostess, to watch Donnie Darko, brain-twisted bunny costumes and all, and, of course, The Warriors. Chinese food, good pale beer, and air conditioning in her bedroom. Cracking wise and not so wise, Nina stops watching halfway through and goes to her desk to work on her Arabic homework, occasionally glancing over at the screen as Donnie moved forwards and backwards in time. Tomas leaves as we put in The Warriors, home to his bed, and halfway through the movie Nina leaves for her boyfriend's abode too; we'd driven her out of her own house. Erikka and I exchange a look, open another beer and watch them get back to Coney Island, in the summer.
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I am so fucking excited right now I could piss fire and burn the world down - Erikka sent me a link to a bike ride recreating the cinema classic "The Warriors," Bronx to Brooklyn, sunset to sunrise. I can't fucking wait. We're putting our gang together now, looking for the perfect gimmick, practicing our ass-kicking and pedal-pushing. This is going to be a fucking awesome, beautiful, sweaty chaos of insanity and I'm going to be right there in the middle of it, with good friends watching my back. I can't fucking wait.
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Saturday a day for floppy breasts covered in paint and the chaos and hilarity of Coney Island, firemen spraying an appreciative crowd with water, my glasses speckled with the drops as I comb the paradegoers looking for my posse, one of my many posses. The sun is not beating down but rather gently enfolding everything like a blanket, sweat drops gleaming off of heads and necks and by God everybody in the world is beautiful sometimes. We are shining, we are warm, and the haunted house ride is called the "ghost hole" and but for want of tickets, I would descend.
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I think that went well, for the most part. I am managing to keep a fairly realistic outlook on the whole process of finagling somebody to lay out a not inconsiderable sum of money to translate my drawings into paperback form. Got the preview into the hands of the people who needed to see it and some who didn't and got out fast, not wanting to get caught up in the mercenary envelope and say something that I'll regret. I'm walking on gilded splinters here, fully cognizant that one misstep, another misstep, could doom my chances for a few more years. brush to paper; draw.
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It's going to be a long night of drawing. Things are on schedule - the cover is almost done and colored, the interior pages are almost completely drawn and just need to be scanned and toned - I'm feeling pretty confident that, given enough effort, I can get this out the door by tomorrow noonish or so and into the hands of the half-dozen people who I need to see it. I'm not expecting anything amazing to come of this - nobody's going to be foolish enough to agree to publish a 240-page book on the merits of 5 pages and a cover, but it's a little wiggle to get the hook set and hopefully by SPX in September I'll have enough in hand to get the name on the dotted line. My first real book.
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It's hard to believe that June is almost through with us already. That's kind of a common symptom of summer, though - time acceleration. Even as the days get "longer" as we careen towards the solstice, they seem shorter, a wink between sunrise and sunset, a pretty girl sits down next to you on the subway train at noon and by the time you're at your stop it's midnight again. Each drop of sweat on my brow is another in the hourglass - each trip to the bathroom at work an Odyssey. Eras used to fall and rise in the time it takes me to peel an orange - the burn of the citric acid on my lower lip is here and gone. Are things slower because I observe them or faster because I live them? I don't have the kind of four-dimensional mind that it takes to process this kind of shit. When the asphalt is hot, the air above it shimmers - it's so hot here, that time bends with light.
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Feeling a little better, a little older, a little wiser, laid brush to paper for solid straight hours last night and this morning and am more confident that I'll at least have enough of the book in hand to tease prospective publishers with. Met up with Clay for lunch at Funky Broome today and felt bustling and bursting, fully aware that living in New York has given me opportunities uncountable to do things that most people never even think of doing. Everything is working, it seems - all the cylinders are firing for once. Will it be enough to entice somebody into committing a printing press to two hundred and forty pages of me? I'll find out when you do.
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I'm not going to get this book done in time, or at least the measly few pages of this book that I wanted to show to prospective publishers on Saturday. Why am I so goddamned lazy? I talk all this shit about loving to draw and being a cartoonist and all, and I really want to do this book and have it done and in my hot little hands and get praise and BJs and such for its inestimable genius, but when it comes to actually drawing the thing there always turns out to be a million things I'd rather be doing, like updating a website or going for a run or what have you. I have five days. Five goddamned days.
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Haiku: Summer forever; I don't ever want to go inside anyway |
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French wine, Polish vodka and Belgian beer are collaborating on a truly classical hangover mode experience driving the trans-Europe xpressway through my skull, but I drag myself off the couch, sullenly masticate a bagel on the train and go to the shelter to walk the dogs. I get to take Shiva out, the crazy puppy who refused to be walked last week. This week she's a lot more willing, altough every spot of shade we cross she flops down in and rolls around in the dirt for awhile. I take her down Bedford and she darts between and through my legs, nipping at the cuffs of my pants as I try to walk, and everybody stops and pets her black head as I reel and struggle to keep standing, drinking frantically from a huge bottle of water. The sun cripples my brain and warms my skin, all at once. I feel like shit, but it's a pretty good shit. |
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Up on the rooftops, silver paper over the tar, a 22 of Chimay in my hand, jet-setting sophisto like a Belgian 40 of King Cobra at ten times the price. It's Erikka's birthday party, and I'm still reeling from good red wine and laughing too hard at Leela's birthday party just a few hours back, and sometimes I think that that's how I want to live, fuck all the drawing and writing and working, I want to jet-set from party to party, always with a drink in my hand. And then it's time to leave, the party's over, and consumed with glee to be caught up in the rainstorm outside I spin around too fast and my glasses fly into a puddle. I fish them out and put them right back on. |
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It's fucking raining and of course I've got a satchel full of original art and no umbrella with which to shield it. Of course I've got a million errands to run that I could have run yesterday while the sun was shining but no, had to wait, had to let old man cloudyfarts come back and drench the city in piss once more. I've got a life to lead, O nameless gods of weather, O jet streams and cold fronts and masses of air dampening and battling in the stratosphere above. I have places to go, trees to climb, I don't want them slicked by your leavings. Blow through, blow through. |
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I used to be fat - somebody showed me a picture taken of me four years ago in DC where my belly is sticking out like I'm pregnant with a whole litter of puppies. What happened to me then? What made me get that bloated, that degenerate? I know what reversed it - a sudden blast of perspective roused me from my tiny bed one day, one summer, adrift in a pool of sweat. I jumped from my bed, wrapped my ankles around a post and began frantically doing situps, bringing my elbows up to my knees over and over and over, the wood cutting into my feet until I was bleeding out of the inside of each ankle, wheezing and gasping for breath. And now I'm not fat anymore. |
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When A. broke up with me last year, I took to riding my bicycle to and around Prospect Park every day, as I was unemployed and had nothing better to do. The Thursday after the Saturday she left me, I was riding down Carroll when I overheard two italian teenagers having a dialogue. "So what, you can't wear underwear now?" "No, man, not for three days. I couldn't believe it!" "That's rough. Rough." "Yeah, I'm going to have to jerk off like five times tonight to make up for it." I started laughing to myself, and then I thought, "I have to call A. to tell her about that." And when I realized I couldn't anymore I started crying and, eyes clouded with tears, ran my bicycle into the back of a van. |
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I was going to go do yoga last night, something that always fills me with an intriguing mixture of happiness and despair. I love the practice, I love the way it makes me feel even though I'm a rank beginner, but the long-term discomfort I have always felt in my body is only amplified by being in a room filled with smiling devotees. In a way, the comfort of others makes me uncomfortable. An hour before I was supposed to go to class, I started farting, little stinkclouds burping out of my ass into my Aeron chair. There was no way that I was going to put my legs up over my head and cut one into the incensed air of the yoga center. They'd have to bring in a whole horde of monks to purify the psychic space. So instead I ran down by the river, alone and farting. |
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August forgot the source code so I got to do my favorite thing in the whole world, leaving the office and getting outside to deliver him the CD. Uptown on the W train, off at 57th, and then a little crosstown, beads of sweat gleaming off of my forehead as I navigate the city I love, CD clutched firm in hand. I want to be outside all the time, like a dog, panting as the sun rewards me. The summer has come, the summer I seem to have been waiting for for so long. I idly flex my right bicep, look down at it with pride and embarrassment, and jump atop a newspaper box, waiting for the light to change for me. It does, O lord, it does. |
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I got to the dog shelter a little late and so most of the fun dogs were already walked - every week there's a different legion of corporate types doing their feel-good community service down at the shelter, not that I resent them but I'm all of the mindset of "more dogs for me." I took Honey out and she's as cute as the dickens, though, turning around to nip at my ankles and give me slobbery licks on the forehead, down bedford where the hipsters dwell. They gave me Ozzy, a huge black barrel of drool and disdain, pissing like a racehorse on a Village Voice box before I took him down to the river, kicking up dust and putting his big lunker head under the dripping water fountain. Japanese supermodels cut each others hair on a nearby park bench as Ozzy stared down competing dogs crossing by. When it was time to bring him back I gave a tug on the leash, called his name and he promptly sat down on the sidewalk immobile, like a piece of rock shot from a volcano. |
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I was walking through Park Slope, lollygagging as usual, trying to get Chris on the phone, killing time until Gabe's fish fry and get-down party. I'd played some mediocre horseshoes in the park and laid on the grass, trying in vain to isolate each individual sprig pressing up against the back of my neck, a little hangover buzzing beneath my lobes but not too bad. The world was exploding with color and life - everything was alive, everything was singing. I walked through streets roped off for block parties, photographs of kids playing with dogs Scotch-taped to walls, old people at card tables, cut vegetables, and I breathed in and out like a bellows, inviting thousands of new microorganisms into my body, to habitate in my lungs and stomach. I felt my cells harmonize with each other, the unlikeliest machine. I sat down on the steps and drank some water. And then I looked straight into the sun and was justifiably blinded. |
CURRENT JULY
all content (c) 2002 k. thor jensen