Made a soup today. From a recipe. From scratch.
AND THUS SPOKE GLORIA GAYNOR

We were not asleep before we woke up

Copping Jay McInerney. Making myself universal, out here in what seems to be less than two-dimensional space:

NAUSEA, BY JEAN PAUL SARTRE:

Last week you fucked up a hard-boiled egg, and even at the time this seemed catastrophic in ways beyond the culinary. You failed at an empirically simple task, and that makes the egg itself a symptom of what you may now call a disease: the things happening in your mind suddenly have real life, tangible repercussions and they are serious, involving life and death matters, sustenance. You're not just "possibly emotionally starving," you're dying, physically, literally, mentally -- you no longer have the faculty to provide for yourself in any meaningful way. Proof.

In a small, irrational gesture of protest, you make several plans to go out to brunch this week, where you'll expect to spend money you don't have. In the strain of domino theory most recognizable in those 'Give a Mouse a Cookie,' books, it soon becomes clear that the lifestyle of a person who makes plans to go to brunch simply won't accommodate a tedious desk job, or homework or rehearsals. You prune events from your planner with the same discrimination as your average born-again ascetic might rid themselves of earthly possessions: all you want is time. Time at home. Time to kill. Time to simmer in your poverty, your divine decadence. Time to become this alternative -- a fabulous care-free brunch cadet, unfettered by the possibility of cooking solo, subsequently happy, subsequently not sick. You giggle a little at this terrific loophole, the active imagination. But when you run out of money two meals later and find yourself surrounded only by the loose promises you broke already and the smuggled hours you fought so hard for, it's pretty clear you don't HAVE anything to do.

This draws attention to the fact that you don't WANT to do anything.

Luckily, the Internet has various portals for watching movies not-yet-released on DVD, and you and your roommates have thrown so many parties this month that the house can always be scoured and the repetition of this task won't seem insane. Luckily, sleep is always a good option -- It's like a friendly shadow, a suggestion, a wink. Luckily, most other people around you, aside from those few who know you very well, are happy to talk in a Cockney that makes your sick pedestrian: "Yeah, this semester has been rough. I've been feeling blue, too. What's up this weekend for you?" Luckily, Sushi delivery comes straight to the door. Luckily, no place in the neighborhood seems interested in upholding America's liquor laws. Most luckily, the real embracing of cynicism -- and I mean snuggling up to the concept, becoming BOSOM BUDDIES -- enables a candor you've been wary of before; a self-referential, 'dangerous', chiefly obnoxious, self-pitying kind of gobbledegook that creeps into your writing like a thief, your voice like a bandit, your art in general like inkblots on a page. You're only a little surprised that the glibness slips into you so easy now, when previously you've always felt yourself modest and comparatively well-adjusted, at times hypersensitive to rudeness and hesitant-to-offend to the point of fault. Whatever, is what you say now, Luckily there is some instant macaroni and cheese in the cabinet. You make this, following all the instructions a to a tee, and it doesn't taste right. It just doesn't taste right.

The night stretches out like a yawn still, full moon tongue. It asks nothing of you. You have no response. Is this funny? you wonder. Perhaps this is the Infinite Jest. You can't ever muse this with any credibility though, because you haven't finished the book.

The Only Living Boy in New York

Here is what happened today. That’s the best way, so the only way, to begin:
I woke up at a friend’s house, early, with morning mouth and no toothbrush. The sun was rising with me when I tiptoed out the front door and down the block, eclipsed then underground while I waited for the first of two trains to take me home. I was sleepy. A little blind. Wearing the clothes from the night before, which is, as always, ‘another story’. The quotations there are glib and a little stupidly ironic. Don’t think too hard about them or the two sentences following.

I walked into my empty, chilly apartment and had some trouble breathing. Then I went to sleep. When it was time to wake up in an hour and a half, I was almost able to pretend that I’d been in my bed all night long and unusual things had happened during the previous night and day, unpredictable and unprecedented things. I set the water as hot as it could go in the shower and then, like most days, I jumped in the tub quickly and jumped right back out again because I’d burned my skin. By now the sun was high in the sky, hanging over Manhattan, but it still felt a bit like sunrise because the light was so cold and so colorful streaming down between the patches of autumn leaves in tall trees. I made breakfast, I put on some clothes, I put a few things in a bag and then made a big production of yelling ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ to no one.

I wish now, already, that I’d thought to write down what I was thinking when I was thinking it during the day -- I see now, already, how even old minutes are robbed of their sincerity viewed backwards from a present mood. Right now, I listen to bluegrass and yawn and think about ways I could make this all very profound very quickly. I think about eccentric, half-baked metaphors that might service. I think about itemized lists of objects and encounters and artwork, lists that might do the work for me of shedding light on the elusive subject (bewildered fragments?) crux of this…piece. At some point today I finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go,’ because I have been assigned to read it for a class. I decided that if the book is as profound as it could be I like it and if it is not, I don’t. It registers that this is a stupid kind of opinion, one lacking panache and real drive, but I hold on to it anyways. I write it down now with an intention not so divorced from the ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ ploy this morning -- asserting my personality in case anyone’s watching who would really enjoy It and care to say something agreeable or laugh or wave frantically at me across a train platform in concurrent response.

Here I go. I’m psyching up for the word itself. You are possibly very confused, untrusting, wary that what comes next will be presumptuous, predictable, pseudo-intellectual bullshit at best, many bad things. It is an honest thing, at least. The word is lonely. I’m exploring it in my mouth. Have you ever noticed that ‘lonely’ sounds like a swallow? Not the bird, but the gesture. It also sounds like a single fork clinking against a porcelain dish, or a solo saxophone far away, or eavesdropping on two old friends talking about something easy and great. There are a lot of things it isn’t, too, just so we’re clear -- it isn’t explicitly the two trains to get home in the morning. It isn’t directly to do with the other story, the one about the party last night. I’ll shake my head and correct you if you try to bring in the bluegrass or the sunrise or the trouble breathing. Lonely doesn’t walk around and behave logically, it doesn’t flatten or crush or do anything active, which is something I realized today, perhaps. It doesn’t make sense. It seems like it should be much older and wiser than twenty and a little girl. Mostly, lonely sags and underperforms, lonely’s impotent. It wants nothing and it’s uses are few.

I know a lot of people who claim they are lonely -- and I respect them because it isn’t an easy or socially acceptable thing to admit. In my experience, that act of admitting loneliness falls into one of two camps: 1) jolly self-deprecation/defense mechanism for single people surrounded by couples OR 2) Very Serious, Melancholic, Emo, See A Therapist. In a way, these social constructions makes perfect sense. Who wants to talk about being lonely at the dinner table? Who wants to really allow that kind of vulnerability, especially when the merit of doing so is virtually impossible to see? I could tell you I’m lonely, inactively and lamely, and there is not even the allowed hope that anything will come of it. You will know a pathetic part of my soul you perhaps already knew or didn’t want to know, necessarily, suddenly. I will have said it aloud and it will be real. But loneliness is not patently ‘curable’ or even ‘pitiable’ like another kind of problem, though I guess the former could often engender or imply the latter. In and of itself, loneliness is not an illness. It’s a religion: “I guess we’re all of us, more or less lonely and there’s no help for it” (A Cited Source).

Yet it doesn’t seem that everybody could be, especially since that vague holy grail for the lonely (okay, me) is being loved and in love and some people are those things. It’s supposedly possible to be lonely and loved and in love all at once, but this is a completely unsympathetic perspective to someone who is lonely alone, so I will speak for those I consider my people and not address these others, who we‘ll henceforth call ‘Greedy Bastards‘. If so many of Us, the Lonely Alone, shouting to empty apartments and telling no one useless stories of failed evenings, do feel folded folded folded folded up inside ourselves (this is what I feel), I guess I’m now tasked to ask, in a rallying cry, why no one’s mailing their orgy invitations or striking up heart-to-hearts with passersby. They tell me this life is an active exercise, it’s wanting, it’s having soul enough to show terror to someone else. You, if you’re like me, are so convinced you have a soul. It’s burying you, in fact. Is looking-for-love a scapegoat? A social pressure? What’s that honest hunt for a witness about, as ever, and why? So? Serious.

Not as far away, a nighttime S train rumbles up or down Franklin Avenue carrying people a short distance, some of them to a train I know for a fact isn‘t running right now. What will the poor believers in the C do when they realize they‘ve been adandoned? My roommates, returned from a weekend away, flutter papers or cough to prove they’re existing (just like me) in this big, drafty space. We must hear one another, surely. I’m listening for them, anyways.