sat 08 apr 2000 12:00:00 — allston, ma
bwoop? bwoop?
my friend [__} gets so angry that her love affair with a boy is over, she lies to him saying she's pregnant just to try and get his attention. then she just wants to hurt him, and slaps him, scratches his car with her keys, even goes to buy a box of sugar and tries to pour it into his gas tank. she tells her friends she has done something terrible. but then seems to feel no remorse, actually — she just seems to be grieving the loss of her remorse. she feels herself becoming sociopathic. has such rage inside. if ever anybody hurts her feelings, she calls it rape.
speaking of fortune cookies, i was recently at the shangrila and got a fortune cookie after paying for our dinner at the bar. the message inside said, "now is the time to try something new." i wondered if i should ask for a mai tai, or some other suicidal big girly umbrella drink. [...]
last night, the 7th, aj and i went to harper's ferry again. we found a nice spot at the corner of bar where we could see the stage quite well until it got more crowded. aj is being chatted up by a guy from florida who claims to be a diamond merchant, but doesn't want to talk about the business, since aj has a lot of questions about it. how do you feel about the afghani diamond miners making three dollars a day? etc.
and then all of a sudden this huge man whirls into view, acting like he's best friends with this guy who's chatting up aj. his name is giovanni giuseppi severi, also john severi, and he is from somewhere in oak square brighton. he says at some point that he's a chef, but he's mainly incoherent because he communicates half in machine-gun non-sequiturs and the other half in esoteric hand gestures. the two weirdest things about him were that he said he was straight, while carrying on like a flamer — and that despite his size he danced like fluid. he would suddenly burst into a twirling swirling, then come back and kinda lean on you. i was quite surprised that he didn't deck anybody with his reckless spiraling in such a thick crowd. sometimes he would pick up somebody like a long lost friend, and hold them and swing them thru the air. the thing is, although most people didn't really know him, he made them feel like they knew somebody important, so they didn't give away the fact that they had no idea who the fuck this guy was. i didn't know if he was the mayor, or the pope. he had a sort of crazed look in his eye. this all happened in between the opening act and the headliner. as soon as the headlining act came on — a rather dull but very lifelike motown ripoff — he disappeared to the dancefloor in front of the stage. then sometime while i was visiting the gents', aj saw giovanni giuseppi being escorted out by two bouncers. maybe he finally knocked somebody's lights out while dancing.
on the dancefloor in the club, very loud and big beat. people lean to speak to each other but nobody can really hear anyone. they sometimes think they hear what each other is saying. if we could have subtitles, we could see how they are miscommunicating. [...]
i was thinking the other day, it might be nice to frame shots with parts of signs in them. so there's often a word presiding over the master action.
i went for a walk thru downtown boston, i think it was on a sunday afternoon, alone, and i just looked at the buidlings. i enjoyed it a lot. it was like going to a museum in a way. not too many people around. liberty square. batterymarch. [...]
did i mention the girl who develops a computer program to simulate talking to her mother on the phone? "uh-huh. really! mmm." cuz her mother never listens to her anyway. if the software detects a questioning tone, or a questioning pause, it replies something like "i can't really talk about that now, it's too depressing." [...]
they send me in to the lab to get echocardiogram — a heart ultrasound — and the woman has me lie down on my side, hooks up some wires to me, goos up her wand and starts touching my chest with it, and suddenly i hear this "bwoooop? bwoooop?" thinking, hmm, am i making that sound? well guess what, it's the fire alarm. somebody comes in and says we all have to leave the building. so i leave my little electrodes on and go downstairs with what seems to be 100 children from elsewhere in the building. wait outside, have a smoke. go back up and finish my heart scan.