Greetings from seclusion! I keep telling myself that I should be posting something on one of my various blogs, but the whole thing always feels so self-indulgent and self serving that I haven't bothered. Lately though, there have been a couple people who were wondering where the hell I've been, so I figured it was about time. So with that out of the way, here's what's been going on:

1) In the spring I applied for a scholarship to attend the one year residency program at the Hunter College School of Social Work. Basically, I get to keep working at Pathways To Housing, and get a fully subsidized MSW in the process. In May, I received a letter notifying me that I got the scholarship! Woo-hoo! As classes approach, I'm actually starting to look forward to going back to school. Best case scenario, this will rekindle my interest in all things intellectual and serve as the kick-in-the-ass I all too possibly need. Worst case scenario, I get a terminal degree for free. Either way, not too shabby.

2) Kristen and I are still together. It's been over three years now....officially my longest relationship. I never would have thought it when we first got together, considering that we're the one-night-stand that never ended, but I can't imagine my life without her now. I love her more and more every day, and to watch her continue to grow into this confident and determined and amazing person who believes in herself....it's a joy to watch. Really. She's finishing up at the French Culinary Institute later this year, and then she'll be looking for jobs. She loves doing what she does, and I find myself sometimes envying her for that. I don't know if I love anything as much as she loves cooking...

3) Which brings me to....poetry. Ah yes, my ex. My on again, off again, fickle lover. The self-indulgent bitch I can't ever seem to come to terms with. I don't know what to say about her. And I think that part of the reason I haven't been updating this blog is because my relationship with her is what always compelled me to keep up a public persona. Nowadays, I just don't care. Don't care about performing, or publishing, or touching people with my work. Honestly, I'm doubtful that my work would ever make a bit of difference, even if I did devote my life to it. The fact that I can disappear off the face of the planet for months at a time, without the world missing a beat seems to attest to that fact. So why bother? Does that mean I won't write anymore. No. I write because I have to, and there will undoubtedly come a time in my life where I'll have to write my way out of one predicament or another. But for now, I'm tired of trying to be something I'm not. My whole identity as a writer is bound up in my social identity, and it's become increasingly difficult to maintain the pretense of sociability when the whole thing is so awkward and painful for me. I do it to prove to myself that I can, but what's the point of only doing something so you can say that you did it--when you don't derive joy from it. Lately, I'm more concerned with doing what I want to do.....which may seem completely selfish. And to some extent it is. I've spent most of my life being miserable, either on account of my depression, my inability to change a world that doesn't seem to want fixing, or as a result my ongoing attempts to ingratiate myself into the world of "normal people". Well, the truth is, I'm not normal, I'm tired of saving the world (though I'll inevitably continue to try my best to do it), and the best thing for my depression is often just to focus on what's important to me, instead of worrying about what other people might think. Lately, I've been questioning the extent to which my choices even matter. Sure, I do quite a bit to help others, and so much of my life has revolved around trying to do the right thing, but in my absence won't there always be someone else to do the same thing? I could devote the rest of my life to creating literature, possibly at the expense of my own happiness. Or, I could sit around playing video games and getting high (purely hypothetical, of course). In the end, I'm not convinced that choosing to do one or the other will make the slightest bit of difference. Beyond that, even if I'm not writing, I'm still devoting the majority of my life to helping my clients. So it's not as if not writing makes me any less of a good person, right? Don't answer that. I suppose that this is when most people start a family, or find God, or whatever it is that people do when they approach 30 and recognize that the world existed before you, it will go on existing after you, and the odds of your making a significant difference to it are waning by the day. Oh, delusions of grandiosity, where have you gone? ;-) So what do I do? Continue to force myself to brave a world that makes me more miserable and lonely the more I confront and fight it? Or, paradoxically, take refuge in what I have, enjoy the peace and quiet and tranquility my relative isolation affords, even if it comes at the expense of my ego's longing to be remembered? Obviously I've been opting for the latter of late, and part of me wants to be convinced otherwise.....but I'm skeptical, to say the least....

4) I say relative isolation because lately, I want more of it. I'm tired of noise. Sirens. Obnoxious people. Belligerent people. Arrogant people. Stupid people. People. I want peace and quiet. I want to be left alone. I don't want to have to bite my tongue and grin and bear it for fear that opening my mouth will lead me to blow up and make a decision I'll end up regretting. Maybe moving to New York, for all of the wonderful things that have happened to me here, isn't a long term solution for me. I don't think the suburbs are either. Lately, I keep imagining living on some nice, secluded land, far away from the constant tension I feel in this place. I carry it all with me....all of it. In my body--my shoulders are so sore. In my jaw--Kristen can hardly sleep next to me. I feel like I'm constantly on the verge of exploding, and while I don't want to hurt anyone, there are so many times I'm tempted to let it all out, fuck the consequence. There are so many peope who prey on the patience and decency of people like me, and like I've written before, I'm tired of biting my tongue. I feel like the next chapter of my life, maybe in a couple years, will be quiet.....just the word itself makes me feel better.....quiet. Ahhh. That's all I want. Maybe an organic garden full of fruits and vegetables. We could harvest them and cook our own food. No one to bother me. No one to hurt me. I'm not talking Unabomber or anything crazy like that (though I'm a little disturbed myself at how easily this feeling could start to turn into that). I'm hardly a Luddite. I love my technology. I like being able to engage with the world--from a distance. But this place, it doesn't feel right for me anymore. I can't carry it all on my shoulders. I can't take all of the constant hostility: from my clients, from strangers, from the kids who loiter outside of my door making noise day and night. I just can't take it anymore, and in the absence of being able to up and leave (which isn't feasible at this time), I take solace in my fantasy. A nice little house in the country. A fire out back. Watching the sunset. Picking fresh fruit from the garden. Honestly, it sounds like the nicest thing in the world....Dear lord....I've gone domestic...lol.

5) I could prattle on about politics, and pop culture, and make my little inane observations. But hoenstly, who cares, really? Maybe I'll come back around to a place where I feel like it matters. Maybe I'll miss feeling witty and insightful. But for now I'm confident that the world is just fine with me in the margins. It's really where I'm most comfortable. And who am I to argue with that?

There is no God...

The Greatest Song Ever...

This happened right outside my apartment earlier today....

A twelve year old girl got hit by a stray bullet. The bodega they show in the video is directly across the street from my place. So between the grandmother in the wheelchair who was killed by a stray bullet outside my old apartment, and a 12 year old girl getting shot outside of this one, I've been in the middle of two senseless shootings. And that's not even to mention the guy who got shot in the face three blocks from my place on Franklin Avenue. Or the guy that I almost stepped on trying to get on the train at Franklin, who had been stabbed in a triple stabbing, and was just laying there on the ground in a pool of blood.

At least this girl got lucky. She'll be alright.


And then there's shit like these shootings, which happened a little while back a little ways up the block from where I used to live on Franklin. It says that the one guy was buying a lottery ticket. Damn. If that's not one fucked up poem waiting to happen, I don't know what is.

And I like my neighborhood, but this shit needs to stop. Stupid wannabe-gangster drug dealers and fake ass thugs gotta go and mess it up for all the rest of the decent people who live around here. It's not right. This kind of shit makes me want to move out into the middle of nowhere, far away from anywhere where I'll have to worry about the idiocy of people getting other people killed for no good reason.

Whatever...I'm still alive. So I guess I'm one of the lucky ones.

What's wrong with people?

Never mind our government torture and terror, genocide, and every other thing that leaves you wishing you could just give yourself a lobotomy. I guess what bothers me even more when it's right outside your door is that you can't escape it. You can stop watching the news, you can disengage yourself from politics (why I'm a social worker now, as opposed to the political activist I once was), but it's like this is the world's way of insisting that, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself you live in an essentially decent world, surprise fucker, it's just not. No matter how much good you can do, no matter how much refuge you take in love and doing something positive with your life, you'll always come back to the screaming reality of this shit. I feel like I do when I was fifteen and I had a psychologist, and I would sit there and run through the litany of fucked up things that I saw in the world, and all he would tell me, after perseverating for an hour at a time, was that--while he totally agreed with everything I was saying--he just didn't agree with my emotional response to it. And this is not to blame him. He was right. But that's the point. The cold hard truth at the base of that is that part of growing up is just accepting that the world is a cold and uncaring, fucked up place, and that in order to live a decent live, you just have to accept that as a fact of the world and move on. And each day it gets a little bit easier. News of genocide is filler between checking my fantasy football scores and and my fantasy baseball scores. Kids getting shot is something I check because I see police tape and thirty cop cars while I'm across the street getting Guinness so I can kick back and watch some Bob Saget stand-up (I'm serious, don't knock it until you've tried it....fucker is brilliant). The war in Iraq becomes fodder for some good jokes on the Daily Show. We resort to absurdity to make sense of a reality that's too often too hard to bear. I love the shit, because it makes the fucked up world we live in a little more bearable, and makes me feel a little less crazy. And what's the alternative? The only unbearable thing, is that nothing is unbearable....

Anyways, I digress. So if you ever wonder why I blog about gay monkey porn, or being the lovechild of Euhud Barak, Julie Andrews, P Diddy, a young Sean Astin, and Luca from the second floor....it's because of shit like this. Because that shit is funny. But all this other shit.....it just isn't. Peace and Love Fuckers. Hug Somebody.

Your Loving Curmudgeonous Fuck,
mcs

What I've Always Known Deep Inside...

It's strange, because for years people have been asking me: "has anyone ever told you that you look like a mix of Julie Andrews, P Diddy, Jackie Chan, a young Sean Astin, Luca from the second floor, and the prime minister of Israel?" And I'm always like, "yeah, but really, who doesn't?"

Warning: This Post Is Rated NC-17!

....with that warning out of the way--Welcome. This post will not be for the squeamish.

1. So in the midst of Kristen telling me that I should switch my Trillian (IM) icon to something different "butt fighting monkeys" (her typo)....which inevitably compelled me to google "monkey sex" to mess with her. Ladies and gentleman.....if I can impress one thing upon you, don't ever google "monkey sex" without a filter. Ever. For one, I found out that there is a website called beastclub.com, which advertises itself as the "web's first gay beastiality website". And all I can think about is, really, there's a market for this? Really?!?! I mean, are there really people out there thinking "Ya know, I've wanted to get into beastiality, but the idea of a monkey getting it on with a human female....I don't know....it just doesn't do it for me. But gay monkey sex.....Eureka!!!." And then I started thinking about some guy out there, browsing through his favorite beastiality websites thinking "damn, this is some damn fine monkey porn", and he comes upon this site and he's like "oh....jesus....human males....and male monkeys together....now THAT'S JUST SICK!!!! May Jesus have mercy on your souls!!! If there's one thing I know, it's that the creator intended for male monkeys and human females to be together, and anything else, well that my friend is just an abomination of nature!!!"


2. This picture cracked me up.

"Awww....I give you perfectly meaningless monkey love and you're gonna make me cuddle? Really? Let's not try to turn this into something it isn't babe, kay?"




3. Has anyone else noticed how they've been taking less and less attractive women and putting their pics on the myspace new friend invitations? Apparently they caught on to the fact that most of us know that women who look like the ones who have been trying to friend us don't talk to people like us, so we've just started ignoring the friend requests. But, these new women actually look like real people, so you have to actually click on the link to see if the friend invite is real or not. Damned you, you crafty bastards! You got me again! What I'm waiting for is the day that they start using pictures of one-legged, Quasimodo looking women in an attempt to guilt me into friending them. So, I'm apologizing in advance to any one-legged Quasimodo looking women out there who sincerely want to be my friend. Ya know what? I want to be your friend too, but people like this are making that impossible. And when a demented man and a one-legged Quasimodo looking woman can't be friends anymore, well....I don't even want to have to think about living in that kind of world.....Damn you myspace!!!!

4. Many of you know Guy Lecharles Gonzalez. But what you may not know is that he made a video back in the day that's been all over the internet lately. If you see him, give him a shout out cuz he's bashful about it, but he really deserves the props. The man's a genius. Seriously. Just check out the video.





He's all growed up now, but as brilliant as ever!



5. I have a client whose mother is completely incapable of brevity. Quite literally, it takes her twenty minutes to tell you why she's calling: "Hello, how are you. I am calling to tell you that I would like to tell you something. Because my son is in the program and because he is in the program I think that it is good to tell you things. So I call you to tell you things because this is what I think that it is good for me to do. Because he tell me that I call Pathways, and I think that that is a good idea"....etc, etc, etc.....I swear I'm not exagerrating. Our office manager will tell me that I have a phone call and won't tell me that it's her, and I'll literally spend the next half hour deciphering her telling me that her son just needs us to deliver medication to him! I think it may be a language thing because she's Hatian, but damn woman! Spit it out!!!!

So she called the other day to say that her son was in the hospital and that she thought that someone had been putting drugs in her son's food. I think that someone else was telling her this, because in spite of speaking only broken english with a thick Hatian accent, she's like "yes, I think someone put trees in his food." Trees? And so I was like "fo shizzle? They came all up in his crib, all up up da heezy and put trees in ya boys food? Man, that shit get me so heated, I'm bout to smoke an El right now!" ;-)

And she was like "yes, the teenage boys he have in his apartment--maybe they did it." And really, that's just messed up. I mean, what kind of world do we live in when a man can't have sex with teenage boys without having to worry about them putting drugs in his food?" Na'mean?

I could go on and on about my clients, but I'll leave it at that for now. If you want more client stories, just say the words and I'll post a couple more.

Hello......hello......anyone out there? Fine, I never liked ya'll anyways!

Trying My Hardest To Let The Real Me Shine,
mcs ;-)

This Is Awesome!