miami vice

day one, miami FLA.

we arrive at the standard 4 hours too early, so we immediately hit the pool. while sunning in the kind of sticky, tingly heat that immediately tans, i overhear the two girls next to my sister talking about xanax. i look up and flash them a smile. 'you want some?' the blonde one asks me, and i do, but my sister is the opposite of feeling it, so i say maybe. but then she raises a joint and laughs. that i definitely want.

so i walk down the dock (still in plain sight of everyone at the pool) and spark this big beautifully rolled joint with vania and diana, these two latin dimepieces, and i tell them it's my first hour ever in miami.

diana laughs. "welcome to miami!"

will smith reference? check.

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the next evening, after a long session in the turkish hamam (and three caiparinhas), i hit up the hotel bar. i'm still in the robe... it seems as if it's cool to do that around here. i order a shot for me and the bartender, patron, and we're immediately friends. the couple next to me is super friendly... an attractive young businessman with glasses and a curvy cuban girl with big hair. she asks me if i like her man. i say, yeah, he seems cool. we talk a little bit about some books and i get the feeling they are definitely trying to bone. me. aldo writes his information on a napkin and i tuck it in my bathing suit.

later that night he texts me, room 701. the tides hotel. i don't go.

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at the bar the next day, the same bartender covers my drinks. cuba libres. i hear a rumor there's a hula hoop party upstairs in the yoga room and i end up in the midst of a throbbing drum circle with a bunch of middle aged hippies. i had no idea there were hippies in miami. all of em have great bodies. it takes me a few minutes to find my groove on the hoop but i end up working up a sweat there, really feeling the vibe. later, when sexy bingo's about to start, i run into the main drum guy, he's about sixty-five, tan, with a sort of khaki top hat covering a head of grey curls. i tell him i live in brooklyn and he says i don't belong there. he grew up off kings hwy. i said why? and he said you're not a regular person.

i don't think he's been to brooklyn for a long time.

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the bingo caller is a big beautiful black lesbian woman, and she cracks jokes the whole time. every time she picks up a ball everyone yells BALLS! and then she hands the mic to someone in the audience, who can choose to say 'in your mooouuuuth' or anything else that relates to balls. we win two mudbaths but don't have time to use them. when she puts the mic in my face i say, 'flapping in the wind'. i don't know why i say that.

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on the last day it's pouring rain and the cab driver only takes cash. my sister and i are broke for cash, spent way too much, so i have to overdraft to cover the fare. he drives us to fort lauderdale, it looks like a fucking tropical storm and i have anxiety. he has two cellphones and a walkie talkie, and uses all of them simultaneously while weaving through traffic on the freeway. i've had this anxiety since i fell asleep the night before but the juggling act he's performing is definitely not helping. i ask do you think the rain will delay flights? and he says yes of course, definitely. when we finally arrive he tells us, have a beautiful flight ladies!

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everything in miami feels like a trap... from the luscious hotel bed to the tingly sun to the 10 dollar drinks made up almost entirely of rum... it's a beautiful, an indulgent trap, but a trap nonetheless.

i'll be back there.

summer in the city

I'm sorting the past two weeks out in my brain, or trying to...

it's been a mash, a seven-layer-dip of awesomeness, mixed with one or two minor glitches and a single terrible accident.

it's hard because i want to love it fully, all of it, but rachel's foot is broken and her dreams are temporarily on hold. and i bore witness to it--she came to new york, and i didn't take care of her. :(

but she is strong and talented at many things and she will succeed because thats her type. positive, and anything's possible for her. there's no two ways of looking at it, though. no way to feel but sad.

we had a blast up until that very moment. brooklyn flea, walking the bridge and the mets game with my sis, shopping and eating and drinking and hitting the beach and gee whiz, your girl even got a little suntan in this city with no pools.

i hung out with a lot of cool people from austin this past week (new to me) and had many adventures. we followed a night at the bar with a cab ride sing-along to man in the mirror and followed that with a legit eighth-grade allnight sleepover with a bottle of patron, egg sandwiches, and a passed-out nurk/jesus with a lampshade on his head. just plain silly fun.

tonight i pack for atlanta and miami. one on one time with the sis, a drive through florida, and spa day at the hotel are things i am looking forward to. soul food with the moms and the trees of atlanta are calling to me as well.

soon this summer will end but for now i am grasping it, holding it close, squeezing it for the awkward extra 3 seconds just so it knows i really mean it.

wait wait, fixate

we are in the thick of summer. i'm in the middle of a long line of visitors, some of my favorite people in this world, and i'm more than grateful. those last few lonely days were pushing the limit.

i have been having bad dreams. i don't know why, because i'm feeling so happy these days. summer is my soul's season. i know i'm nervous about what's coming but i really just want to live this city right now... everything is in place and fixating on all the details over and over just leaves the bigger picture smudged.

so i just want to listen to drake, warm nights and cold patron, chill with my friends and my sis... soon i'll be in ATL, and then cruisin through florida, massages in miami... beach, and swag, and just livin.

i've been meeting and chilling with some really cool new people. this new life is proving itself... i'm just stoked and grateful.

conclusions to be determined

Reading Didion's the year of magical thinking. Sad.

In it she talks about writing in LIFE as a columnist, feeling betrayed because she wanted to be in Saigon covering My Lai and they expected her to write an introductory piece to 'let the readers know who she was.' 

"I wrote the colum letting the readers know who I was. It appeared. At the time it seemed an unexceptional enough eight hundred words in the assigned genre, but there was, at the end of the second paragraph, a line so out of sync with the entire LIFE mode of self-presentation that it might as well have suggested abduction by space aliens: "We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce." A week later we happened to be in New York. "Did you know she was writing it," many people asked John, sotto voice.

Did he know I was writing it?

He edited it.

He took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo so I could rewrite it.

He drove me to the Western Union office in downtown Honolulu so I could file it.

At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it. That was what you always put at the end of the cable, he said. Why, I said. Because you do, he said."

I read that piece of hers "In the Islands" quite a while ago. That line had struck me. This excerpt struck me harder. What honesty, transparency. And how brave. And what a man, the obvious sort of man for Joan.

She lives on East 71st street. I want to meet her. 

Nin left her husband out. Didion wrote him a tribute.

While Nin had many passionate affairs, it seems Didion found her match. Conclusions on this to be determined.

blues for mama

someone asked me the other day what i liked about myself. i said i keep it real. they asked what i meant by that...

i try to be honest. say what's on my mind. live out in the open.

but there are things i don't like about myself. and these things are hard to look in the face, let alone lay on the table for others.

he has a way of always calling as soon as he's out of my head. it's like there's a censor in his brain, oh, she must be doing alright, i should call her and start the endless/boring/excruciating/embarrassing/guilt-ridden cycle all over again. still it retains its power over me.

is this because i'm weak? is it because of the things i can't look in the face? because of my complex and sometimes unfortunate relationship to my own sexuality? he called me last night and we talked about nothing, and it upset me just the same.

i had a nightmare last night. always the other woman. or another woman. or some reason why i don't deserve the whole of him (of anyone?) 

i have an idea of how to do it the right way. but to go that way, i need a lot of patience, resilience against rejection, and the ability to get on board fully with someone. it's been so long since i've had to be accountable to someone else that i don't even know if i remember how. 

i have a reasonable amount of faith that it will work itself out for the best. patience is the thing that's hardest to grasp, especially with this muhfucker calling me, testing my weakness, knowing my weakness more than any other person.

and sometimes i'd rather dream up supportive qualities in the men around me instead of recognizing the lack of such qualities in them. and recognizing that i am truly alone.

keeping it cool

whew. your girl is moving up in the world... got AC in the apartment, just in time for hannah's arrival tomorrow... i can't wait to see her, it's been ages. it's her first time in new york!

only thing is the window unit kind of fucks up the bridge view from my bed. but for the hot months, i'll take AC over view, thank you very much. if it needs to be sexy we can take it to the couch... view's better from there anywayz.

i'm meeting a girl from school tonight.. she lives in bensonhurst (real close) so we're gonna chill around my neighborhood. i'm glad because although i live here, i haven't really gotten to chill around here much.

today i went with my landlord to buy the window unit at home depot, and afterwards he took me around south brooklyn. bensonhurst, coney island, brighton beach, sheepshead bay... i really like it down here. 

whew! feelin this chilly breeze too though! damn. all last week it was cool baths, very little clothes, and a lot of laying spread eagle on my bed under the fan blowing full blast. which is kind of romantic in a summer heat sort of way, but with guests coming pretty much nonstop until mid-july, i gotta keep it cool.

i went and got a pedi today (much needed) and i had my toes painted 'up at noon' hot pink. because honestly, i'm in hardcore summer mode, and i'm lucky to be up by noon. i know i know, i'm lazy and probably somehow a bad person for enjoying a summer like this. i'm not in school or working or doing much of anything besides chillin and i even have the gall to paint my toes 'up at noon' hot pink. blasphemous.

but i gotta admit, seeing as i'm trying to ball out once august comes around, it's been nice to indulge. you're only 23 and living in new york city alone and ain't got shit to do once, right?

brooklyn evening heat

charles is in heat again.

it's a summer thunderstorm outside and i've got django on the record player and i've temporarily converted my hallway into a den. cold tecate in a can, windows open, serene really but for charles trying to rub her ass on me any way she can, writhing into backbends on the wood floor.

i feel bad for her, but no more than i do for myself.

i am still trying to get my head around the fact that anais nin edited her husband out of  all her diaries. for such an exhibitionist to flaunt her diary (it is brilliant) and then hold private that huge aspect of her life... it's mind boggling. what are girls supposed to think? she steps over the most important part of a diary. 

my diary, without my lovers, is no diary at all.

everything else, i put it out there, for you to read, you few who actually do. maybe if anais had a blog, she would put her words there, and save her notebook for her lovers. some of them undoubtedly show up in her erotica...

but it brings up a point. how much of yourself is your work, and therefore belongs to others, and how much is solely yours? maybe one day it will be a dilemma i face... to open fully to the world, or keep some part sacred.

i think only the ones who hold something sacred get by all right in the end. but keeping half of myself secret is a difficult task, and i don't know what it ends up accomplishing. you never know what parts of yourself are exposed to any given person.

i was reading about anais and they said some people speculate on how much her husband could have meant to her if she kept him out. i say just because she didn't publish it, doesn't mean she didn't write it. i'm sure there are endless volumes... that's just who she is. she's a writer. 

and to be anais nin's husband, he must either be endlessly rich and boring, which would leave her time for all her lovers, or tragically dark and tempestuous, because those are the men she loves.

i guess from where i'm sitting at the moment, it's a wholly theoretical dilemma; just me and chazzy, in the brooklyn evening heat.