Another Day.

I picked up my friend P at the airport today -- she’d been to Indiana for a family wedding -- and she treated me to brunch at Blue Star Cafeteria. It was crowded and we ate at the counter. I cried, she listened and cried and gave me good advice. P is a social worker, she works with the families of people who are dying, and I don’t know if she ended up doing that work because of a natural talent for maintaining equanimity in the presence of other people’s pain, or if she cultivated that talent by doing that work. But she’s good and very wise, and I felt and still feel a little better after spending time with her.

When I got home, I had a lovely, heartfelt email from someone I met briefly last year through some old friends who came to see Lizzie Borden in New York. She’s been reading this chronicle and felt compelled to send words of encouragement and support, for which I’m grateful. It helps.

I watched Palindromes last night on Netflix streaming. It’s beautiful and brilliant and a few times while watching I felt a little brightness, a little optimism about art and being an artist. I also felt sad because it’s the kind of film that M and I would have enjoyed together. I think Todd Solondz’s sensibility is one of the places where our tastes coincide: that mix of deep emotion and fucked-up weirdness. Hilarious, freaky, painful, and deeply true all at the same time. But maybe not. Maybe we both like that kind of thing but see it in completely different ways.

By the time the film was over, I was pretty drunk, but I started watching The Puffy Chair. I enjoyed it for a while, but when I saw that it was going to be all about the couple -- at some point, they were in bed and the woman said to the man that they needed to talk about the relationship -- I turned it off and went to bed. I couldn't do it.

I’m neglecting my other blogs: The Austin Chronicle and Bilerico. I don’t know what to write about. Nothing is very interesting to me right now but my own suffering. I read a little bit. I spend hours doing nothing in front of my computer: checking the hits on this blog, wondering if M is reading it, scrolling through tumblr blogs of pictures of sexy men, avoiding photos of redheads, waiting for another day to be over.