Garbage Tragedy

Last night: wrote a whole big fucking long blog about the bridge and tunnel bitches who flashed their perky tits on the dancefloor at Webster Hall's classy Thursday night act: Playgirl's GIRL'S NIGHT OUT celebration. Full of snark, wit, and shit, but then, with one mistaken keystroke, Blogger gobbled it up and I never saw it again.

So instead of trying to recapture all my witty titty ditties, I spent five hours transferring files from my old computer to my new computer.

(You'll never learn about how Laura and I ushered at the Astor Place Theater and saw Blue Man Group for free, where the only revelation of the night was that they throw shit at you. (Are they Gallagher ? I mean, what the fuck? It is "whimsical" and "well choreographed" and "subversive of audience/participant delimiters," and all that $69/seat neo-dada crap that it pretends it is, but really, they ought to advertise their greatest draw on their posters: you get to watch busloads of Ohio pre-teens get their plastic ponchos sprayed with gelatinous orange coagulations. I mean, gelatinous orange coagulations in addition to the gelatinous orange coagulations that already cover their pubescent pores. I went with Laura and we spent the first hour exchanging "Thank GOD we didn't pay for this shit" looks and the second hour sniffing around our seats, trying to find the source of the poop smell that emanated down our row.

You'll never learn how the Playgirl party, which I thought would be fag heaven, was actually an E. 11 th street extension of Bergen County, where the non-lesbian women call their friends "girlfriends" and drink green tea cocktails and wear varicose-vein-squeezingly-tight white jeans and hoop earrings and no bras and crepe-paper smocks, and the men are not homosexuals but merely poorly-rendered metrosexuals, all hair gel, ribbed t-shirts and pectoral muscles in various states of roid-deflation. Laura and I were like sensibly-shod Jacques Cousteaus descended upon the wonderful world of lampreys. The poor gay bartenders and their admirable sangfroid in the face of their own toplessness and tiplessness (cheap-ass Jersey girls, snapping up free drinks but not leaving a thing for the men who poured them); the free issues of Playgirl (FLACCID PENISES! HAIRLESS CROTCHES! I want my money back); the hurried rush to the exit (careful to make no eye contact); sandwiching Playgirl into the latest New Yorker so I could read it in shame on the train.

Next Thursday night: same party time, same party place, different party clothes. Going high femme, lipstick and wigs and all. Free entry and free drinks. Free anthropology. Anyone else who wants to join, write me.

You'll never learn about these things, no, because instead of re-writing my blogpost, what I did last night was far more shameful than a thousand Thursdays of Playgirl's GIRL'S NIGHT OUT. What I did was like getting caught by your dad, who is bringing you tangerines that he peeled himself, looking at straight porn on your computer when you are 22 years old and back in Palo Alto for winter break and he thinks you're working very hard on your senior thesis at Harvard University, a prestigious place where your prestigious thesis, about the cult of "objectivity" in news reporting, requires diligent late night effort, when actually all you are doing is examining the various positions of heterosexual coupling profiled on SEXXXYSLUTZ.org, and he drops off the tangerines and looks up and sees the screen and blurts out, "It's all sex!" and backs out the door in a hurry and you don't even turn your head to look at him because your face is the color of nasturtiums in bloom.

Oh, a digression. What I did last night was nearly so humiliatingly bad. I got suckered by myself into reading about myself. I'm an obsessive documenter (Duh! Welcome to my blog! Today I ingested 67.5 ounces of tap water and excreted 2.3 pounds of refuse, and then I thought manly thoughts of self-sacrifice at 2:43.32 p.m. before patting my dog's head 14 times with a gentle but firm counterstroke) and a complete narcissist (Duh! Here I am, here are my innards, this is my colonoscopy webcam, here is every pearl of wisdom that has issued forth from the divinity that masquerades as my lips). I started my first journal in 1986 and still have it somewhere. So I have kept everything I have written since I was in 8 th grade, all neatly tucked in to "My Documents" on my computer. This now-massive folder has undergone four computer changes seamlessly.

So last night, as I transferred files from one laptop ("Gluey") to the new laptop ("Jondalar"), I delved into a long-fallow file folder: "Old Emails." There were about two hundred files in this folder, all email transcripts from my fas.harvard.edu account, long dead. And what do I do? I click on the one that's bound to create the most heartache and scroll through all 200-some emails, 1998 to 2003, learning all about lovelorn lornlost lost lusting lackluster listing labyrinthine love from the perspective of someone who I haven't heard from in two years and who hasn't listened to me in three or four years. Crap. There was lots of cringing, some laughter, some heartthrobbing. Man, it was like a good movie. Man alive, whoo, oo.

Okay, I find now that I have nothing interesting to say about that at all, since I'm not willing to disclose the gory details of our protracted breakup or the motes of affection that made the hardest words seem tender, because I am a sentimental couche-tard. I am as gummy-eyed as a Precious Moments drawing; thinking of foie gras production makes me teary. I get all riled up thinking about lost things, just because they are lost. Taking out the garbage is an everyday tragedy because of that.

Not sure why I'm writing this now. There's my 1970 Pontiac Firebird. The car I always wanted and now I have it. I rule!