oh you've got green eyes oh you've got blue eyes oh you've got gray eyes

Friends of 4 a.m. Society called once again to order. I couldn't sleep and instead spent a couple cereal-munching hours finishing Giovanni's Room in preparation for viewing a Thursday night performance of an adaptation of it at CUNY Grad Center. [Come one, come all: January 19 at 7:30 at 365 Fifth Ave. between 34th and 35th. RSVP for performances at ch@gc.cuny.edu.] I can't help but map everything I read onto myself. King Lear and I imagine the prospective tragedy of my own old age; The WPA Guide to New York City is a lunar baedecker I wish I had been around to have been written into; Giovanni's Room and I'm wondering if I've ruined everyone's lives with my fear, internalized homophobia, indecision, risk-aversion. I think the solution to this is only to read light novels and/or FDA nutrition labels? That way I either feel levitated by levity or informed by recommended dosage predictions; win-win.

Blah blah. Sorry, AO, this blog peaked with the mouse in the house problem and has quickly redescended back into the world of the boring and dead.

[By the way, Julius continues to breed and colonize the entire house. We plugged the mouseholes in the living room radiators--the next night, he has made another hole [filled, AGAIN! with kibbles] under the bikes. We lay finger-breaking traps next to that hole and, clever bitch, he tunnels into the radiator THREE FEET FROM MY HEAD. I saw him walking across my bedroom floor yesterday--not walking, but waltzing, taking a leisurely turn on the catwalk, doing everything to indicate that he was pleased with the breadth of his dominion and his comfort in traipsing through it besides walking on hindlegs with his forelegs folded, a la Ferris Bueller, behind his little, crushable gray head. I've had fantasies wherein my name is Pu Yi, I am the last emperor of China, I am petulant and young, and my empire has been lost, and in frustration I hurl my adored pet mouse against the shuttered Tiananmen gates, where he dies in a burst of blood and hair. These are pleasant fantasies, good dreams, like dreams of coconut cocktails and flight.

But the mouse worry was supplanted, for five hygenic hours this Saturday, by a sudden fear of bedbug infestation. So we scoured the house, did our laundry, and borrowed (but didn't use) virulent pesticides that, according to a warning label partially obscured by price tags, "May or may not carve flesh off your face in gory curtains" and "Should be exercised with level of caution to be exercised around live electric wires, black mambas, etc." This makes four feared apartment infestations in the last two years--five if you count two roundworms in my colon as an apartment infestation--mice, lice, scabies, bedbugs, plus a coupla roaches just for good measure. In the last two years I have been cleaner than I've ever been--no more proud "Haven't showed in three weeks! I can exfoliate by putting on a sweater!" declarations for me--but this makes me wonder if this is backwards land and all that cleanliness is actually doing me wrong.]

How did I get on the subject of vermin? Oh right, channeling bad feelings into levity. Also these days I'm keeping a square inch of pomegranate/grapefruit scented soap that I stole from the New York New York hotel and casino in a plastic Ziploc in my backpack so I can take it out and sniff at it and remind myself of what it feels like to dive headfirst into an unpopulated swimming pool on a summer night. I'm still making the mistake of writing "2005" on things that should be labelled "2006." I wonder if law is right for me. I am helping a woman get on Social Security disability and every time I look over her case I want to punch someone in the face because she is 57 and unable to lift five pounds because her lifetime of sweatshop labor has disabled her. The Heavy Pets have found a drummer/bassist/guitarist; we're rocking out the BMCC studio weekly now. Things to love, things to pass time with: I wish I had the Brian to write about better things.