  ARGHH! My original birthday post was all about me feeling old and unaccomplished but A)considering that most people I deal with are at least 25 and over, I decided against it and I would elicit ZERO sympathy B)fuck that! I've done alot so far and I'm happy... I've lived most of my life on over drive, in this mad dash to get to the next benchmark.... to hit bottom to break even and I don't want to anymore....It's not so much that I feel old, just that I feel my twenties going and going really fast..... You're decisions start changing You get more patient you get less tolerant And there's this push to live and live slower......... soo.. I'll keep this short My birthday is July 29th If you wanna get me something here's my list 1. a macintosh with FinalCut Pro 2.an ipod 3. theatre tickets 4. Gift Certificates to the following are also acceptable a. Barnes & Noble b. Amazon.com C. Babes in Toyland d. The Gap 5.
Books are always endearing :)It's interesting to see what people (especially older more experienced people) think I should read. You can't grow in a vaccum. 6. Dinner is always good. I'm always hungry and I'm always broke 7. Same applies for alchohol.
I'm always broke and always drunk :) 8. Flowers work.Pretty ones. I used to get them for my apartment all the time. It made everything so alive.. 9. Plants work even better :) (I'm particular to basil,oregeno , sage and....) yeah you get the idea ;) 10. Vin Diesel...in a dark room.
If you know him...or know someone who does.. hook a sister up! 11. While you're at it....remember i DID mention a gift certificate to babes in toyland Or maybe I'll celebrate my birthday hobbit style and give presents to my friends.... I'll sleep on THAT one. Part II I talked to Eric the night before. He's fully moving in to his apartment this weekend and from what he's told me He's got an amazing two bed room with a view of a mountain for get this... 490 or something ridiculous like that!
I could fall on my ass and STILL make my rent with something like that. We talked... I plan on leaving new york in the increasingly near future.. Though this city is great, I swear it runs on grime and stress... I grew up here.....and I've left and come back and let me tell you, it drains you. It's been amazing and an amazing place for inspiration, creativity and expression but it's a shitty place to write... at least for me.
I spend more time getting from A to B and stressing how I get there and less time being able to reflect on the trip. More of my time is spent getting money to have time to be a writer than actually writing. When I was upstate, I still had a very full life. A waitressing job at Denny's , worked out 4 times a week, went to school full time, studied my ass off and my quality of life was so much better. During the summer my rent/expenses averaged to about 150 month (without beer and food) I could make that working at Denny's for two or three days. I had time to *gasp* live for a living granted I lived in a shit hole but it was MY shit hole and THAT shit hole had a huge kitchen (with carpet older than dirt... yes carpet in a kitchen.
How ghetto is that? ) and broken windows and lots of light... and at night after work we bbq'ed on the porch and drank beers and Stephan Palermo read my poems/stories and we talked shit and watched the traffic go by. I read books.... and I worked on plays and stories and obsessed over them as much as I damn well pleased. Now most of the productive writing I do is on my blog and even that always feels rushed. It's full of spelling errors and runs into streams of concious that even I have a hard time following. Maybe it's just me.
I'm not the type of writer to just throw something on the page and have it be brilliant. For me the process is in the editing, the slaving over it, the obssession. Maybe that's why I've always considered myself a much better fiction/play wright than poet simply because of how great something can get out of sheer force of will where as poetry requires a wit that isn't always that readily available..... Anyway, when I found out that Eric was leaving...it just made sense. New York isn't for everyone, especially when its nervous energy simply serves to enervate you. Some people are made for this....
I'm not one of them. It's just aged me, beyond my years maybe that's why my birthday seems to be coming too soon. I look into the mirror and I check for wrinkles... I have a friend who's CONVINCED that his hairline is receding (it's not) One of my oldest friends just gave birth to her second child... a premmie.. She's 21 She's on welfare now Half of NYC commutes from Queens or Long Island yet looking anyone in the eye is an act of overt agression. The pushing, the shoving...grinding the humanity straight out of you... the cubicles the office politics the cabbies that won't stop for you the dirt the grime the corruption don't get me started on the corruption $2 rides Bloomberg don't get me started on bloomberg the smoking the NO smoking the budget cuts the overcrowded schools the unemployment the homeless the crackheads.... new york,new york big city of dreams..... MIKE: If you're too careful, your whole life can become a fuckin' grind 
