The Wall

This goes out to the girl reading my blog who's been encouraging me to kill myself: I HAVE RECENTLY BEEN MADE HAPPY BY MY WALLS.

.. the walls of my apartment, which I've spent a lot of time staring at of late. However, what makes these walls different from the walls I usually stare at is that I have been staring in order to pick a color to put on them. These are not the walls I stare at inadvertently while contemplating the meaninglessness and tedium of my life, which makes a nice change.

I put this color on ONE of them.



I mean, yes, okay, the edges of the wall make it look like my apartment was painted by a ten-year-old boy, aided possibly by his eight-year-old friend, and that instead of taping the edges, they ran Hot Wheels dipped in paint across them.

But when I look straight at the center, I feel happy. I feel like I'm staring into the deep blue sea. Well, actually, that's wrong. It looks much more like blue cake icing than the ocean. It's a nice old Blue #12, "To Our All-Star Son!" icing. Maybe that's why I like it. I have always been soothed by sweets and confection. Huh - happy accident.

Now that I went to the terrible trouble of putting this color on the one wall, and it's connected ceiling beam, I'm not so sure i want to paint the rest of the walls. And that's not just 'cause I'm lazy and it's harder than I thought it would be (up and down that bleedin' ladder...) but more because I like having a white apartment with one blue side.

If I wasn't such a shortsighted fool, I would not have put dozens of "test squares" all over the place. I've got four different shades of blue in misshapen one-foot squares on every wall in the apartment.



(Look to your right. Those are all over the joint.)

And now I've either got to cover them up with paint, or try to pass them off as modern art.

I don't think anyone will buy the latter. Even if they did, I wouldn't buy it - and I'm trying to recognize the little man inside my head as a legitimate voice that sometimes has good ideas.

I already bought a gallon of a DIFFERENT shade of blue, which I'd planned to put on the other walls, but I think that might be a mistake. However, I don't have the money to buy another gallon of paint, so I am now asking anyone out there who has white paint left over from any old projects to send it to me.

Please pour into an envelope and send to:

'BLACKMAIL
BEHIND THE HOT WATER PIPES
THIRD WASHROOM ALONG
VICTORIA STATION'

(did I mention I'm also inexplicably HAPPY about the upcoming 40th Anniversary of:

?)

Ho! Take that, suicide girl. Depressive nerd gettin' happy over here over a little thing called October 5th!

NOW who's maladjusted?

I wish I was a fucking poet

Because approximately one month ago I moved from what passes for an idyllic suburb (Prospect Heights) to what is a verifiable urban shit-hole. That's the Lower East Side. Yeah, yeah, I know - the Lower East Side used to be a literal shit-hole, back when the Mosholu brought tankards of immigrants from Minsk and Latvia and Italy who filled in the newly built rat-traps south of Houston, and I know the Lower East Side REMAINED a literal shit-hole all the way through the 1980's, home to every drug epidemic imaginable: smack, crack, meth, and all the other illegal substances I've never even seen, let alone tried. When I say the Lower East Side is still a shit-hole, I include all the improvements. I throw in the rock venues, the bars, and the specialty foods. The Chinese, the Latinos, and the white or honorary white hipsters. The V-necks and Ray Bans. The limos and the porn shops. The piles of garbage that crowd the sidewalk (not just Long Islanders, but often real bags of half-open trash). And the smell. The smell below Delancey Street is something out of a previous century. From the intersection of Broome and Allen, to the corner of Hester and Essex, it smells like one part Industrial Revolution, two parts 1970's sanitation strike, three parts dead Chinese gangster odor. Fuzhouan gangsters buried under Grandma Ying's bake shop. It smells like the opposite of society.

And so I wish I was a poet. This is the perfect setting to awaken one's inner Kerouac. This is the urban disgrace from which only a Ginsberg can rise. (Now ask me if I've read either one of them.) I wished I was Jack Kerouac while out on my walk tonight at 11pm. No longer in fear of my life at the hands of a thug, but in fear of my relevance at the sight of ten bachelorettes in a Belgian Frites bar. At the sight of two sixteen year old sisters in skirts playing to a packed crowd at the Sidewalk Cafe, strumming ultra-twee bullshit on a pair of ukuleles. And I decided to hate them at first sight. And to the small crowd of T-shirted dough-faced goat boys smoking outside the Sidewalk tonight - the place where I've played my last ten solo concerts - I couldn't even bring myself to say hi. I know them, though not well. The guy who runs the place, and one of the acoustic crown princes of the place - I saw them, and could have ambled over to say, "hey." But I didn't, because I am not one of them. I belong to no movement. I lack all motivation. I lack any semblance of testicle, I feel no feeling but fear, I mock them incessantly but they do not know it. They do not know that I am not only just as talented a songwriter as they are, I am better. I am better because I am me. I am I. I was born this fucking good. I have been great longer than they have been tenacious. But they laugh at me, they scorn me, they chide me, they dismiss me, because I am a silent Kerouac making mental note of downtown Manhattan's abuses of me, its bullying of me, its smelling, its puking night - because I am making mental note of the poet I deserve to be, and don't have the guts to actually get on stage and scream.

Why bother? The same four people will show up. Or the same new twelve. Some girl I fancy and her brother. That's the way I see it. Why play at all when you're playing below your pay grade?

I wish I was a real poet. A real downtowner. I still could be, because downtown is still real and still here. Drugs and coffee are still here. Beer and cognac are still here. Garbage and pollution and I guarantee you dead bodies are still here. They may have made a museum out of the tenements (the ones right across the street from my building), but the rat-traps are still here. It's just that the rats are bigger now. And they wear dirty yarmulkes and smoke Pall Malls. I wish I smoked cigarettes. I could have used one while drinking a tiny glass of cognac for nine dollars at an Austrian specialty bar, 11:45 pm. Instead I pressed my fingers to my lips between sips AS IF I was smoking. I picked up that habit a long time ago. Whenever I want to feel urban and distressed and poetic, I make a pretend smoking gesture, one that I hope no one else notices. I pretend to smoke.

I also pretend to drink. Don't get me wrong, I really drink what I'm drinking, I really put the whole thing back, and usually pretty quickly - I just mean: I pretend to drink like a poet, like someone who's helped by the stuff. Someone who benefits from the shit he breathes.

Like someone who deserves to drink.