transmissions from a compromised antenna

I'm going through sort of a dark phase right now... And I don't mean dark in a good, sexy way with pounding electronic bass, either. I just can't seem to motivate myself to do all the stuff I should be doing. Finding it very hard to write, although I'm trying to force myself to. In a really sick way I miss working for the various groups who tell me what to do and then I follow orders. What I want to develop is the ability to follow my own orders. 

Tomorrow I turn thirty. As a friend just informed me, I have the same birthday as Eminem.

It's weird that I can remember very clearly being about twenty and looking forward to being thirty, thinking by that this point I would have all kinds of stuff figured out, would have found the shining path, and the whole rest of the way would be easier because all I would have to do was follow it.

I'm afraid I'm still lost in the jungle, blazing a crooked trail towards a clearing where I will meet a god with the head of who knows what beast? In other words, the channel did not change. That doesn't mean I'm in the same place I was ten years ago—-on my twentieth birthday, for instance, I awoke to the feel of cold water seeping through my sleeping bag as I slept under the bushes outside City College. They were watering the plants. And the day pretty much continued on along those lines; I think I treated myself to some Korean bar-b-cue for a birthday meal (yes this was before I went veg—that happened about a year and a half later), and took shelter in the library when it rained.

I'm glad I have that moment thrust down into the settling soil of my mind, a little red flag to mark the distance as the years go on. Not just the distance in terms of achievement. Like, "Oh I live in an apartment now instead of under a bush SO I'VE MADE IT!!!! WOO-HOO!" My illusions about what it would mean to be thirty, that I would be this opaque personality that had everything figured out, are perhaps a better point of comparison. I mean, I suppose I know now that when I'm forty I'll probably feel more or less the same, even if the situation of my life is very different: confused and focused, bitter and hopeful, proud and self-hating, defeated and struggling, alive and dead. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes nothing at all. Still capable of hearing a song like "nude" on the new Radiohead album and collapsing with a kind of orgasmic grief. I just can't expect anyone to reach down and change the channel anymore. If anyone's gonna do that, it's gonna be me. But I couldn't even take a step towards a different channel I would actually like without my friends' love and support. So thanks to everybody who's been good to me. I'll try to be good back.

I was out last night with my friend Shawna, who I know from Food Not Bombs/Homeless Census/Haunted House/assorted seedy adventures. I ran into her last week and we've been doing a bit of catching up. Seems she's become a professional dominatrix, which surprised me at first because Shawna is not what I would normally think of as "the type." More cutesy, crustie, cheerful punk girl than any kind of stern, paddle-brandishing dom thing. But she tells me she can "turn it on at will."

The funny thing was something she said over pecan pie last night:

"The dom scene is really small so after a while you meet everybody else who's working in it. Right when I started I heard that my friend Kiri had just started too, but I hadn't seen her in a couple of years so I didn't look her up. I just figured sooner or later I'd run into her. Now this is my friend Kiri who I know from squatting on the Lower East Side, my DIRTY DIRTY DIRTY, dumpster-diving, anarchist, fucked-up girl Kiri. Kiri that stole everything she had and never showered. And then a client comes up to me after a session and tells me 'I sometimes go to see another girl named Kiri. She told me to say hi to you.'"

"And James, it was crazy because here we are, these two old squatter friends, who know each other as habitual shoplifters and outcasts, and this guy is connecting us again who sees us only as . . . as . . . "

"Upscale commodities?" I suggest, using all that great marketing experience.

"Upscale commodities!"