is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Hooked Up. Detached.
I have phone, cable, and internet now. I already feel entirely overwhelmed by the number of things I could be watching on television. Are you aware that in this adult life of mine I have never, ever, had cable television, nor have I ever had more than, say, five to nine channels to choose from for viewing? That has always been just fine, too. What to do now? I suspect not much will change, and that many of the channels to which I now have access will be viewed by me never or rarely. For fun I flipped over to MTV, and laughed, because I happened upon the video for �Riding Dirty,� the rap by Chamillionaire about racial profiling that used to stalk me on the radio when I first moved to QB. That song really is inescapable. Then, after looking through the TV listings for some time, I was excited to see that later tonight I can watch two episodes of Miami Ink, including one where Kat, the hot girl tattoo artist, gets in a fight with everyone in the shop.
It is raining. The unpacking is coming along. Soon I�ll have to start working again, and in earnest. There is so much to do, workwise. The moment must come when I return to that life. Let�s call that moment: next Tuesday. For now I�ll stick to unpacking and figuring out my surroundings. Then on Thursday I�m off to Philly for a nice long weekend and a day of packing up my QB office.
I still haven�t cooked anything in the apartment. Let�s all cross our fingers that the gas thing gets worked out tomorrow.
Today, after some unpacking and jewelry-making (someone ordered a necklace, which meant I had to open all the boxes that might possibly contain the jewelry-making supplies), I went to Target at the Atlantic Center in Brooklyn for various household supplies I need. While at the Atlantic Center I also ate at a chain restaurant. It was perfect. In certain moods what I crave more than anything else is the blanket anonymity awarded to all of us so well by mall-ensconced chain restaurants. Not MacDonald�s or TCBY, mind you. No, the experience must include table service and very little possibility of interaction with other customers. That�s the mood. And that is precisely when I end up alone at Chili�s in Walnut Creek, CA, or at Friendly�s in Hadley, MA, or at Vinny�s in Ardmore, PA, or, today, at Houlihan�s in Brooklyn, NY. I had coriander grilled salmon over mashed potatoes with broccoli, and some sparkling water. And I read Anne Carson�s Autobiography of Red.
Many thanks go to Sara Kendall for introducing me to Anne Carson by sending me another of her books, The Beauty of the Husband, in the mail a month or so ago. Carson�s work is part poetry part narrative arc, and it is done so well, she has such a gift for turns of phrase, and her themes are so well-chosen, that it gives you that kind of reading pleasure that is also painful�because it�s so good but also because it�s about heartbreak or struggling with personal identity, or what-have-you.
In fact, sometimes when one is reading such a thing, a thing that cuts so close, it is best to be somewhere where one would never be interrupted, recognized, noticed, or known. Houlihan�s. Sometimes when one is reading such a thing, one has to be far removed from every other potential for intimacy, as if being near any known thing or touched by anything at all would hurt too much.
Some of my moods are like that, even when I�m not reading. (And, as Heidegger tells us, and Anne Carson uncannily reminded me today while I was lunching at Houlihan�s, �we would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods. It is state-of-mind that discloses to us that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.�)
That�s a quote from Anne Carson, but not one of the best ones, like �And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness� or �It was the hour when snow goes blue and streetlights come on and a hare may pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book,� or like the roses which �stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets and howling colossal intimacies from the back of their fused throats�.�
Perhaps it is not surprising that right now I am finding that there are many lines from Anne Carson that I do not want to commit to public space.
So.
I once had a favorite non-spot restaurant for such moods in that basement mall of the World Trade Center. I spent a lot of time there during the summer of 2001 when I was living on Bowery and Spring, and researching displaced populations at a library in Staten Island. It was a small nondescript Japanese restaurant. The last time I ate there was late August 2001.
8:24 p.m. - June 12, 2007
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