everything means less than zero, hey, hey...

you know, it seems to me that it is a pretty crap time in my life when i mention antidepressants twice in one week in a public forum. everyone i know feels like shit. except kare. she's happy. i think mr mcsomething is taking her to cabo for the holidays. and she's a republican so...
i miss the early nineties. i miss optimism and clinton and high school, for heaven's sake. is anyone else happy?
oh, lawrence, i forgot lawrence. this is like the best week of his freaking life. arafat bites it and bush wins the election. i'm surprised he didn't get a 'who's your daddy?' Taz-tattoo or something. and he's getting some looooove.
yesterday, tory IMed me to say 'it's hard being a friday night person in a monday morning world.' fucking WORD tory. word. i'm lonely and i have no money and i feel like shit. i can't write anything decent, evidence my last million posts have either been immediately deleted or have just been images.
the only good thing that's happened today is that my new digital camera came in the mail. maybe i'll turn this into a for-profit vanessa porn website. okay, or not. last night i dreamt that chantal and i shared this horrible, run-down dormitory style apartment, and patrick was over. it was halloween, and i wanted to get dressed up, but i realized that everyone had left without me, and the only thing on every channel was hockey and basketball. this was a better dream than the night before's, when i was running around dwight englewood near tears because i realized that it was the first day of school, but that i also had to come to work and i was late for both first period and the goddamned tuesday morning meeting. also, my best friend was addicted to gambling and loan sharks with guns started a shootout during assembly. that was some creepy shit. i woke up shivering.
i'm hoping the digital camera will be inspiring. i'm hoping that anything at all will be inspiring because i'm tired of the postal service and clem snide and liz phair and everything just sounds like bullshit except that one fucking elvis costello song, Less Than Zero, which is just as despressing as it sounds and has nothing at all to do with Michael J. Fox, who is still cute and funny and wonderful despite his illness and what happened to Spin City. ghhhgggh.
last night i went home and drank red wine and watched america's next top model and it was like nothing at all had changed since last year, except for the fact that i'm not dating JR anymore, and it's not like he'd have been there anyway, is it? so i ordered some mexican and i watched tv and i read my sheri tepper novel (excellent) and when the show was over i scarfed two tylenol pm cold tablets and pulled the blankets over my head and before i knew it, it was time to get up again. joyful, joyful, we adore thee...
this morning robert and i randomly started quoting from Yeats' The Second Coming. you know, that is not what you'd call a happy poem, which only makes it funnier that the reason, we both realized, that it was caught in our mental spam-filters is that some crackbaby at the MTA decided it would be a really good choice for one of those Poetry on the Go placards in the subway.
so NOT the last thing i want to read as i cough up my spleen amid curds of bile-rich foam during a sarin attack, or just before my life is cut short(ish) by some other straphanger's femur being driven into my brain by a potent explosive blastwave. you'd think these people would have the good sense to make up some nice cheery e.e. cummings shit with illustrations from Yellow Submarine, or maybe pictures of the Great Barrier Reef or the Andromeda Galaxy and sweet passages from Rilke-

You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.

To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!

or

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,-
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

they say bad politics make good art, that one must suffer to be beautiful, that absence makes the heart grow fonder, that it is better to have loved and lost, that it is darkest before the storm, that when life give you lemons, you ought to make a fucking Snapple brand low-carb soft drink and patent it and prop up the economy and buy a house with marble floors in Upper Saddle River, but i think that's what they say to us. i think maybe they tell each other that there must not be a mine-shaft gap, that everybody know the war is over and the good guys lost, that absolute power is fuckin'-a what it's all about, and that all the golden parachutes and silver linings have been RSVPd, that tee time's at eleven and the Alaskans are all for the pipeline, and that that's just fine.

modern life is rubbish.