Jude Fake

* Me and two other girls.  (Me, a girl and a boy is already ticked off.)
* Get a sugar momma.  Kristen Scott Thomas in Tell No One would be fine.
* Sing in a hardcore band

There are some moments that just burst with promise.  About a year ago, I was coming home from work on the bus.  I was reading an essay about a performance artist who created sort of technical performance art: bird perches that sang at you and told you facts about state of the singer’s species, a fringe music festival called Livid, a pack of robotic dogs that “sniff” out poisonous chemicals that have leaked into the earth from landfill sites, a motion-activated video camera pointed at the Golden Gate Bridge called the Suicide Box.  The essay was a sort of fountain of ideas.  I was so enthralled that I missed my stop and then got a call from my girl and could only blabber down the phone at her as I looped back towards home.

Since I have been alive, there has been a sort of evolution in my goals.  When I was a kid, it was all about romantic love.  I think I basically wanted to live inside a lesbian romance novel (Stirfry, Tipping The Velvet, Rotary Spokes).  Once I left University, the priority became following dreams: moving to New York City, being in bands, pursuing impossible women.  That lasted for quite a while, and then, in the last year, I’ve been consumed by the desire to be productive.  I’ve coded my ass off, released records and written a bunch of essays.  I have begun to wonder whether I’m about to shift again.  I think it might be potential next.  The silly thing is, Ariel Schrag understood potential when she was only seventeen.  It took me until I was twenty-seven to get there.

All this is a very roundabout way of leading into the fact that I got a big jolt of potential this evening.

My housemate has had his cousin staying with us for the last few days. The cousin, Tristran, is from New Zealand and has these calm, brown eyes.  He came out of the bathroom this morning with no t-shirt on and I really couldn’t help but look at his leanness.  He makes his living as a stand-up comedian and is incredibly handsome and self-assured.  Those damn alphas, man.

This morning, I woke up after dreaming all night of having sex with Jimmy McNulty from The Wire.  Today, Tristran, my housemate, Scruff, and I sat around watching Peep Show and I made Tristran some lunch.  There’s something about serving boys that I fancy that is so erotic, like I’m half a beat from dropping to my knees and sucking them off.  This evening, I went to see a read through of a play Tristran has written about his family that focuses on his relationship between him and his reformed wife-beating father and has practically every member of the family in the script.  I wanted to hold him in bed as he told me about what it was like growing up.  Yes, I probably do want to save him, just a little bit.

So, yeah, potential.

This afternoon, I went to see the Rothko exhibition at the Tate.  The thing about his paintings is that they look like windows.  And I wonder whether the world they frame is on the canvas, or around me.

I often stare at art in galleries, and start thinking about the composition, or the texture of the paint, or the technique.  But, before long, I start thinking about myself.  And I wonder whether that is what Rothko was really trying for: paintings that block out everything, that one falls into, that one finds oneself in.

Afterwards, I sat outside, drowning in sensation.  The grass was wet under my jeans and the sun warmed my hair; I thought back to earlier this week when the boy I have loved for years came to visit and we went to a talk on Ecuador and then went to supper.  Though we fucked a few times a few years ago, we have since always slept together as friends.  In the middle of the night, I found myself being gathered in by him.  Though I couldn’t really breathe I lay in his arms.  I think I would have been really happy if he’d loved me.

Yesterday, I watched Of Mice And Men.  I cried from very low inside when Gary Sinise described the farm to John Malkovich.  I think I wished that someone was imagining my home for me.

Last night, I had a dream that I was walking down the street.  It was midday and everything was bleached out by the sun like in San Francisco.  I was holding a little baby, warm against my chest.  He seemed to be like a part of me, and it was hard to breathe, but so good.  And then I threw my arm around this girl who was walking beside me, this blonde girl who I think was someone I knew vaguely back at University and I haven’t thought about in years.

My girl and I broke up last week.  Basically, she wasn’t moving to where I live, and there was no fucking way I way moving to where she lives.

I’ve felt ambivalent the whole way through, but I do feel very sad.  I miss her snuggles, the way she shhhhed me, her slender fingers, her elegant, almond-shaped face, her hips, her tummy.  Really, we were at our best when we were cuddled up in bed.

Sitting at my desk and alternately programming and playing with the teddy bear my girl gave me.  Took out my phone, about to ring her.  And then put it back in my pocket and began writing this.  Not sure why.

Lying in my dark bedroom shining my iPhone around the room like a torch. Reminded of Benjy in hospital in The Eighteenth Emergency.

Both my Mum’s and Dad’s houses have the same, scented soap in them.  The weird thing is, the smell of it remindes me of Sail, the Berlin girl I cheated on my girl with and saw for a while about six months ago.  I would lie in her mezzanine bed in her room while she showered and she would come back and her neck and hair would smell of that soap.

In July, I started a three-month sabbatical from my job. An incomplete list of the things I plan to spend my time on:

* Join the Samaritans.
* Go to more gigs.
* Write some songs.
* Work on my web startup.
* Play more squash.
* Start a new activist thing.

I’m still recovering from my ear operation.  The second bout of post-operative bleeding lasted eighteen hours.  I’ve been spending my time reading books (The Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham, The Wheatstone Pond by Robert Westall, Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter), watching films (Kill Bill Vol. 1, War Of The Worlds, Generation Kill) and programming my web startup.

I miss playing guitar and writing songs, and I miss being a part of real life.