Thursday 12 November 1998 – 1 A.M.

I’m sitting on the front porch after a long day working, and then going to a film and video editing place with Heather to look at her film that she shot last weekend on the first weekend of shooting her movie. I all looked great. It’s all very exciting. I could almost forget my own obsessions for a while.

But now I’m back here sitting on the porch, writing in my notebook. Why? For one thing, because it just won’t do to sit in my apartment and write in a notebook—I don’t know why—maybe because the other writing tools are in the apartment—the computer, the typewriters. Also, there’s a certain exhilaration to being out in public—even if it is just on the porch. For me, that’s the way it’s always been. I can write in bars, and coffee shops, diners and restaurants, laundromats and train stations—better than at home. But then also there’s this other reason, which I’ve been avoiding, and that’s the terrible beating my heart’s been taking ever since I fell in love with the girl who works at the bar, The Hurst, across the street. I say girl rather than woman, I don’t know why. Because I feel like I’m in fourth grade. But I say I’m in love rather than I have a crush because I’m very serious, and it’s no little thing. I think you can say you’re in love with someone even if you don’t tell them, and even if they’re not in love with you. I think you can say that. I don’t know what the rules are, but I know there aren’t any rules.

It’s a long story and it was easier saying I was in Portland, Maine because there wasn’t any background. Now it’s like I’m a complete new person. But I’m still a character. Plus, I’m kind of afraid to talk about this stuff because it might ruin my chances ever of… Whatever—what is it that I want, anyway? I don’t know. I’ll just use first names, and of course this disclaimer (this is a work of fiction, etc.) and any lawyers who approach me had better do it with a paycheck and nothing like a subpoena, or you might find yourself flying (lawyers!).

Wednesday 11 November 1998

Morning, I’m at The Hurst for breakfast, not exactly on the same bar stool I was on 12 hours earlier. (I read a review of this place somewhere, they said if they had showers here you could just live here. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, beer, music, and no TV.) It’s a nice feeling, somehow. Not a bad thing, like I have no other life. What would that life be, anyway, if I had it? A wife and kids. I don’t know—I haven’t gotten over being a kid yet, I really haven’t.

I’ve just eaten, I have a full cup of coffee, and Billie Holiday is playing, I couldn’t be more in place. I could just sit back and appreciate the little things, but I want to get back to my New Way, telling the whole truth and all. I had an interesting experience here last night. I was sitting at the bar, drinking coffee and writing in my notebook, not talking to anyone, as usual. Perfectly happy. Listening to people at open mic night. Then a bunch of people came in—all together? I don’t know—but it was that kind of a whirlwind kind of thing like when someone is returning from a long absence. Plus, they were all cold and had this freshness and vitality and outdoorness radiating off of them like they just walked here from the ocean or something. (It’s a two hour drive, so that’s not possible—motorcycles?) I don’t even know if they were all together, but there was definitely a group of people who knew each other—a short, good-looking guy who went and hugged a few people here. There was a bunch of roses produced from somewhere. The woman who checks ID’s and takes money, who sits by the door, and I’ll talk about later, got a vase for the roses. Were they for her? Or the people arriving? I was trying to observe, to figure out the relationships, etc., when I noticed that one of the people who came in was a woman who used to work here as a waitress when we first moved here—she was someone I always liked, and then one day she was gone, as happens with waitresses, and well, even your own co-workers. She was actually the first person in Portland that I had a kind of crush on. More like, if there was going to be someone I would have a crush on, it would be her. I couldn’t really have a real crush on anyone while I was going out with Heather—it wasn’t until we broke up that the complete fury of my heart was unleashed. Now, I don’t even get crushes anymore—I’m beyond that. More on that later. Later—much later.

Tuesday 10 November 1998

I’ve thought long and hard about the new… I don’t want to say rules—orientation? Let’s get this over with. I’m at the Hurst in the evening, trying to get somewhere while my coffee holds out. Before my time runs out, or the spell wears off, whatever. Okay, I’m not in Portland, Maine—that’s the first thing. I never was, and I can’t keep up this charade any longer. I’m now in Portland, Oregon—I was all the time, actually. That is, after the Fuel Tour was over. I came back here instead of going to Portland, Maine. Heather and I broke up shortly afterwards. I moved to a room on the other side of town for six months, and I was going crazy, so I started this journal—I mean, I already had a journal, you know, like my whole life—but I said I was in Portland, Maine, and started to call it the Lobster Bible. I had been going to a therapist for six months or a year previously, and that was really helping me a lot, but then my insurance coverage ran out and I needed to do something, so I kind of really went crazy within the framework of “The Lobster Bible,” my therapy journal. Therapy for the price of a notebook and a pen. That’s what I told a waitress here yesterday at breakfast who asked me what I was writing. It’s only half true. This is also part of my proposed 10,000-page novel, as yet unnamed, that I started in 1989—kind of discontinued when I was sick in the early 90s from wheat poisoning and alcohol poisoning, and then decided to continue again, I believe, in the spring of 1996 when I started the job I have presently. It was initially supposed to be a 1000-page novel, but I decided that was too limiting. Anyway, here it is in part—hopefully it will just be an organic continuous endless mess but not too much of a mess to read.

Monday 9 November 1998 – Portland

No line should be wasted, no time should be wasted, no page should be wasted, it’s a good day. I saw Velvet Goldmine yesterday, and I think it was an ingenious way to present history and biography in a movie. It probably has more real history than if you did a straight bio and tried to be true to the facts, names, and places, and all that, which is, of course, impossible. Especially in a movie. So, in changing the names and making it all a fictional story, it’s able to get at the truth much more effectively, I think—and avoid lawsuits!

That said, it’s probably not a good time to bring this up, but I’ve decided to change my entire philosophy, focus, rules, locus, nexis, sexis, plexus, what-is and etc. what have you, of this project, alas with this new notebook. And I know the reader doesn’t give a damn about this notebook, because if you are having the fortune or misfortune to read it, it is hopefully in a magazine format (and not furtively, without my knowledge!) all typeset with the misspellings fixed and the handwriting a bad memory. But it is a new beginning, because last night, while sitting in the bar attempting to write, finishing out my pages of the old notebook, I came to the realization that it just wasn’t working anymore. I was left with nowhere to go. Rather than saying goodbye—which is one option, I made the rash decision to tell the truth. I just said that for dramatic effect—I was really telling the truth all along, but now I’m just going to stop withholding information. (This has, I want to be clear, absolutely nothing to do with Bill Clinton—and I’m sorry to even bring his name up, but it’s funny to keep hearing these discussions on TV and radio about what the truth is—is it lying if you are not forthcoming with the information that you know your questioners want to hear, etc.—it seems to me it’s an issue for philosophers, not Democrats and Republicans, who will no doubt make a mess of the entire thing.)

Let’s begin by coming clean about a few things, and laying down the law for the new way. Not really “laying down the law,” I just like that expression, because I'll continue to change the rules as I go along because that’s necessary. But just to create a new framework in which to flail around in, for myself, and also to help reorient the reader, and that’s who this is all about, that is, when it’s not about me.

Sunday 8 November 1998

I’m at my usual breakfast haunt, The Hurst, and I’m haunting it. Dragging chains across the attic floor and such, the attic being my mind, and the chains are those chains that keep me from moving forward to an interesting and new place.

Much later. Now I’m back at the same place as for breakfast, but it’s now converted to a bar, a night club—with a live band playing—virtually no cover charge ($2.00)—almost empty—9 piece jazz band—a handful of paying customers—they’re essentially playing for free. My handwriting has deteriorated beyond all recognizability—hopefully I won't have to read it later. My all-day headache is a little better.

It’s really difficult for me to get to the real reason for this journal anymore. It’s not so much that I’m afraid that it will fall into the wrong hands, it’s that I’m afraid that I won’t be able to fully explain the full expression of how I feel and it will thus be a watered-down version. That’s what it is, I think—it’s that I’m afraid of feeling, afraid of jinxing myself, superstitious of talking about anything because then it won’t happen, that nothing will happen and all I’ll be left with is a bunch of sorry-ass fiction. But it’s getting to the point where I can go no further the way I am going without some major changes because I no longer know what I’m talking about. Seven patrons left at the bar to 9 musicians—that’s a fraction that very well represents my life, 7/9. Don’t ask me how or why. No. What I’m saying, what I’m trying to say, anyway, is that I need to do something to be able to write about. Otherwise I just write about writing (like I’m doing now)—which isn’t that interesting, ultimately. Or at all, maybe. So I’ve got to pick a direction and reel it in. I’ve got to pack my bags and check my maps. I’ve got to create another, make it happen, get a job on a lobster boat. It’s a matter of life and death. Not really. But it’s a matter of the life of this stupid journal. I’ve come to the end of my notebook and have to get a new one now, so I’m vowing that this will be the new way—the new changed life reflected in this new fresh new notebook, and that it will be actually interesting to read.

Saturday 31 October 1998 – Renner’s Grill

It’s like, I don’t know, a while since I wrote last. That’s the thing about time—you can just leave it alone and it’ll do its work without you. Very much unlike people—we can’t leave anything alone. I mean, you can, but it’ll go to hell. That’s essentially one definition of hell—that which is neglected. To be a good Christian it takes constant, never-flagging, unrelenting, narrow-minded, psychopathic maintenance. The scriptures must be repeated endlessly; but that goes for anything—any conviction, like “art is good,” or “I’m a fine person.” Neglect of any convictions, any information, even—your own history, your past, even—and you’ll lose it. Hell, if you don’t keep repeating the most basic things to yourself—your phone number, your address, even your name and birthdate—you’ll forget it. That’s the definition of hell, maybe—not the creeping sexual and intoxication and forgetting urges, but the mold growing on even your basic convictions, the cobwebs around what you’ve always taken for granted, but what no longer functions, due to neglect.

I’m at a place I’ve never visited before—never saw it until today. Tucked into the west suburbs on a tiny commercial strip, it’s an old bar that serves food, including Saturday morning breakfast—and a good breakfast, too. I don’t even remember the name—I’ll look when I leave and write it on the top of this entry. A good-looking diner is across the street, but it was chock full of yuppies, so I came over here with the real people—like this excellent traveling salesman sitting next to me at the bar drinking a red colored cocktail and eating a bloody steak.

It’s a dark place—very dark, with red lampshades on the lights over the bar, and the corners probably obscured. It’s not that old, but it’s as good a place as you’ll ever find in the suburbs. Too bad about the TV and the lottery machines.

It’s a good time to start a completely new start completely new start completely new, without any reference to the past, 100% uninfluenced by anything that has come before—a completely severed, sterile, cauterized, lopped off—sorry! I’m just trying to get some momentum. The reason to have a fresh start is so you don’t have to refer to anything in the past—because that takes work—so it’s easier for me to write than it is to read and make sense of what I’ve written. I know that makes you think— “Well, what about the reader?!” Yeah, well, it’s a good thing this is my super-secret private journal, and not for publication—as if anyone would want to!

Not me—that’s for sure—unless, of course, I found it somewhere—not knowing who it belonged to—then I might be intrigued. Especially if it contained “good stuff.” And just what is “good stuff?” Well, I guess it’d be anything that the person writing the journal would be mortified to have anyone read—even someone not acquainted. I wonder why that is? I guess because we’re talking about sex—what else? There’s plenty of private stuff—but the fascination of reading someone’s bowel movement diary would wear off pretty rapidly. Oh my, now that I think of it, isn’t that exactly what this is? I’ve been calling it The Lobster Bible, but maybe I should change the name to “The Bowel Movement Diary”—or else start writing some interesting shit. If I am going to call it anything “bible,” I should at least read over my own scriptures and learn something.

Sunday 18 October 1998

It’s Sunday morning and I’m at breakfast at The Hurst. The World Series is underway. Fall is underway, and this morning I am facing an extreme crisis, though one so low-key that most people wouldn’t identify it as a crisis, but just “the way things are,” or Reality, or that’s life—the phrase “general malaise” sits itself in front of me, but I’m not sure what that is, exactly—it’s not one of the 100 or so words in my vocabulary. Malaise, not general. General, I know, is one of those words that means anything you want it to. Malaise, for the longest time, I thought was something you put on sandwiches. Not really. But I don’t really know what mayonnaise is, either—I mean, I know it’s white and creamy, and what it tastes like, but I don’t know where it comes from or what it’s made from. I mean, I know it doesn’t come out of a milkweed plant or anything, and I know it has eggs in it, but then there’s eggless mayonnaise, so how important can the eggs be? I guess I never really cared, but now I’m interested. It can’t be anything too weird—it's like oil and vinegar, maybe, and eggs sometimes—but then there must be some kind of alchemy to get it to be mayonnaise! Hellmann's Malaise. You can’t get Hellmann's on the West Coast—well you can, but it’s called Best Foods. It’s a hell of a difference between those names. I really don’t know why they just don’t call it Hellmann's—Best Foods sounds like a generic brand. Our friend Despina from Conde Nast, who’s an East Coast person who moved to LA, insists that Hellmann’s and Best Foods aren’t the same. Who am I to argue, not being a connoisseur? If mayonnaise symbolizes anything, what is it? Maybe blandness, maybe middle-class, white America—though I don't know. Mayonnaise is kind of exotic in its own way. For that matter, the middle-class is kind of exotic, too, seeing how it seems so elusive, so unreachable to me. I was driving through the suburbs yesterday morning, and I got this fleeting feeling I sometimes get—a yearning, or fantasy desire to move to the suburbs—to be married to someone I have little in common with, to have a normal-looking, personality-less apartment in a complex, a TV, etc., to eat normal meals, go out to Friday’s and Tony Roma’s (a Place for Ribs) and have no aspirations, or goals bigger than that next little one—buy new sheets, wash the car, go to the movie that just opened. Of course, this fantasy ends with the thought of children, a reality that hangs over us the same way death does. You know, certain romantic artists, usually young people—my younger self included—used to excite themselves with their obsession with “sex and death.” The way the two where intertwined was interesting, and certain poets, etc., got a lot of milage out of this. But that was before AIDS. Now “sex and death” has an entirely new meaning.

Hey. Where the hell was I? I wanted to get back to my condition, how I felt, or feel—though now, I’d have to say felt, ’cause how I feel is all coffeed up. Anyway—anyway—you know, I used to be a good writer. I didn't get off on tangents; I was concise, to the point; I had standards. I can trace the beginning of my bad writing back to whenever it was that I started starting every sentence with the word “well,” and every transition began by “anyway.” I remember in some Kurt Vonnegut book how he says he feels like “Philboyd Studge.” (I don’t remember where it is, or know if that spelling’s correct, and God knows I’m not going to look it up.) I’m not sure if this is even in relation to writing, but it probably is. Anyway, that’s what I feel like, about my writing these days—like “Philboyd Studge.”

To get back to mayonnaise—what a great word—I guess it’s French—mayonnaise sounds French, but “Mayo” sounds totally New York. Back to mayonnaise, you know the cure for mayonnaise is simply a few drops or dashes of Tabasco sauce. I wish it was so easy for general malaise. I guess I say general malaise as opposed to a particular malaise. But if it is particular, it has to do with the feeling of blandness, not getting anywhere. I wouldn’t say boredom, but ennui might be appropriate. It’s probably, when it comes right down to it, just the feeling of not being in love, of having so many crushes that it becomes clear that they’re all just a smokescreen, to try to keep yourself from seeing yourself actually alone. Anyway, the way to get out of this condition—which maybe I should call Hellmann's Malaise—is by drinking. Drinking was always the cure, the antidote, the smokescreen, I guess, that worked very well in conjunction with the uncontrollable crush smokescreen. Drinking was the Tabasco to the mayonnaise/malaise. Hellmann's Malaise + Tequila = equilibrium. But now, without drinking, I have nowhere to go but church. And I can't get myself to go to church. So, I check in here, my own convention, my name-tag reading: “Hello, My Name is Philboyd Studge.”

Saturday 17 October 1998

I’m at the Polar King in Gresham, just outside of Portland. You don’t have to get too far out of Portland to be “out of town.” There are little buildups of civilization by the side of the highway, but I don't know if you’d call it a town, unless you consider a strip mall a downtown. It’s amazing how driving for a few minutes takes you to a cultural another world. It’s all Middle-America—everywhere that’s not the very urban-est urban. And in Portland it’s just a few block area—you can walk it—and outside that little oasis where they’re challenged to make good coffee, and the waitstaff can get away with unusual body piercings, you get to Middle-America—bad coffee, bad grammar, non-dairy creamer, TV culture. This is a great place—an old, probably post-war diner or hamburger joint, fixed up probably in the 80s—ruined, really, but time has done its job and put some personality back into it, with its forces of decay and the mellowness that comes from day in and out use. To everyone here it’s just a restaurant, but to me it’s an interesting artwork, one that changes with time, and even though it was once almost a (DQ or something?) (after the remodel)—now it’s interesting again.

Like I was saying, back when I was trying to recover, and backpedal (does the word “backpedal” come from the bicycle world?—certainly it must not—as you  can’t backpedal a bicycle—with ten speeds, or whatever they are now—28 speeds—you can pedal backwards, but the gears are not engaged unless it’s forward—you can’t ride backwards anyway—maybe it’s just “ped” as in walk—pedaling meaning walking, then, and backpedaling meaning retreating—look this up).

Places like this, as much as I like them, freak me out because they have all women working at them (unless there is a man owner present). Only women working, and all men customers. I mean, totally only 100% men in here. This is total, without exception. All women working. All men customers. I must admit, that kind of freaks me out.

As I’m leaving I see a big family with a couple of young women and one older one—so it’s not absolutely true. And then I see the oddest thing of all (this place is quite busy). There’s a woman leaving, paying at the register (she was here, somewhere, the same time I was)—a woman by herself! A middle-aged woman who looks neither to be a mess or all completely together. Someone who may be an alcoholic, or maybe a recovering alcoholic. Definitely not one of those scary perfect businesswomen from Mars. But someone who looks really self-sufficient, independent, I don’t know, pretty together, but not too much, you know. I mean, her just being here, at a place where like no women come in, for breakfast, anyway, especially by themselves—that makes her essentially—I mean she was just a human being on Planet Pod, and for that reason I would have really liked to talk to her, but until I get to the interview portion of this project (which I just made up just now) I won’t be able to do anything like that—and I need some kind of journalistic credibility to do that—more than just a fake press card—I need a good reputation.

Wednesday 14 October 1998

I’m at The Hurst for breakfast on a Wednesday, trying to backpedal and recover from the travesty this journal has become. Instead of an _____ for mental illness, it has become mental illness itself. [_____] [connected][by backpedal theme]

Monday 12 October 1998

I’m sitting on the front porch to continue this story, evening coffee time—a soft rain falling. It’s nice not to be in it, and it slows down the world a little. What happened to me after I was smashed like a tick and scratched like a flea, and forgotten like a _____. Well, nothing. Nothing Nothing Nothing. That's the worst thing that can happen. And then… nothing happened. If I was a song, I’d be silent. If I was a book, I’d be blank pages. If I was a TV show, I’d be cancelled. If I was a movie, I’d be the trailer. If I was a marriage, I’d be divorced. If I was a painting, I’d be gesso. If I was a poem, I’d be blank verse. If I was a…

Sunday 11 October 1998

At The Hurst for breakfast—is this my Sunday Project? Not really—it’s not really the right place—I can’t go into it, really—I probably have, actually, well, when it’s right, I’ll discuss it then.

What do you do to a threat? And what am I talking about? An example from the Seafood Kingdom—there’s a lobster, big and black (they turn black after they reach a certain age) (it’s like a hundred), and it’s become so big and old, it’s cannibalizing other lobsters (thus cannibalizing the lobster industry). It got so big it was overturning lobster boats, regularly. So, what did they do about it? They fed it. Whale blubber, and grouper, and beef. Everything. Eventually it became so fat that its exoskeleton collapsed. It washed up on the beach in millions of pieces and we could smell it for like three months.

The same technique is used on humans, but generally feeding their ego or power cravings until they are full of themselves like a bloated tick. The examples are many: Francis Coppola, Bill Clinton, James Brown, Kurt Cobain, Jack Kerouac, Jack Nicholson, Jack Kennedy, Jack & The Beanstalk. I don't know about him. I guess that beanstalk is nothing but a giant penis. That story is nothing but saltpeter for pre-adolescents. Certainly Pinocchio—also, with that penis thing—the story of fattening up someone to turn him into a slave. Hell, with Hansel and Gretel they’re just eaten—or should be. (Or is that Little Red Riding Hood?) Anyway, in my case, it’s a sad story about my countercultural, revolutionary magazine that threatened to blow the doors off of American culture—well, to make a long story short, I was heaped with praise, good reviews, and fat-dripping accolades to the point that I had a bigger head than Jeff Goldblum. Just at the point when I couldn’t walk down the street without doing an interview—it just stopped. Now, there was no conspiracy—no one planned it—it’s just the way the system is set up. The system that has been refined over ___ years of human civilization—and I suppose ___ years of life on Earth before that. Essentially the same thing happened to me as happened to the Roman Empire. In my case, I lived, but went into seclusion, started drinking—well, picked up the pace of my drinking—and didn’t do any art for years. Well, I did, but I kept it to myself, put it in my drawer—filed it under “work on later.” You know that “Work On Later” file is the same as “File 17,” or whatever the other name for the trashcan is (the “Circular File”—whatever). I could have been somebody, the next Jann Wenner, certainly, but here I am in Portland, Maine, writing about lobstering. Fuckin’ lobsters, man, interest me like not at all.

Tuesday 6 October 1998

I got to a certain point with that shit—and then I left wherever it was that I was at (The Hurst) and I don't remember where I was going with it—but it’s just as well—because I don’t want to get into it. I feel like I was on the verge of revealing too much. Who cares, anyway? Everything’s made up, everything’s true—it’s for the geeks of the next generation to figure out—and that’s only if they care, and they only care if you become a celebrity or a mass murderer or something along those lines. I’m at The Hurst again, this time for dinner—coffee, live music, and personal psychodrama. It’s the broken heart Martian open mic and end of the century open mic death celebration.

Sunday 4 October 1998

Hey, why is the clock round, with the hands spinning around, and the calendar square, or rectangular, with seven days in a row, and then—next row, next row, next row? It’s all just time. The days of the week could as well be placed in a circle, with Sunday on top, and that hand would just keep coming around to Sunday again and again and again. Like with, certain hours, certain days—it seems like they keep coming up, like a game of crooked roulette. I used to have a car with a broken clock—back when the clocks in cars had hands, not digital, but of course always broken, never saw it work. Anyway, since it was just an ornament, and always said the same time, I just set it at seven o’clock. Seven p.m., preferably, time to party! You know, I just thought of that, about the round week clock, but in this world there’s not a stone untouched—I’m sure there are alternative time expression freaks somewhere, who have calendars in the shape of clocks, and clocks in the shape of God knows what. Fortunately, until we have internet stations implanted in all of our brains, we can disregard the existence of so many things. The world keeps getting smaller, by exponential leaps, but it’s still possible to keep your world small, just for your own sanity.

Ahh, this week the smell of the salty ocean, unblemished by the heat of summer. No more rotting seafood, now it’s all crisp and clean until spring. Except for Indian Summer, of course. Which I always welcome. I really should get back to one of my previous topics. Particularly that one about putting things into code, disguising things in order to tell the truth. The definition of fiction, after all—telling lies to be able to tell the truth. My friend Randy has, or used to have, I don’t know—I haven’t heard from him in awhile—a small (small) press publishing company called T.B.S. Publications. He won’t tell anyone what the T.B.S. stands for (except that it doesn’t stand for Turner Broadcasting System or Syndicate or whatever). But he told me the secret, which is that it stands for True Bull Shit, which, he says, is the definition of fiction.

Friday 2 October 1998

Well, it’s October—a month that always looms big for me for some reason—just the name. It’s like, different than all the other month names. The first letter, that big “O”—I always visualize as either a big orange pumpkin or the big orange full moon. It’s a month I always remember has 31 days without doing any of those cute tricks.

Talk about cute tricks—Oh, I mean because Halloween is on the 31st, of course. That was always our favorite holiday, where I grew up. Anyway, about cute tricks, I’ve been thinking—we celebrate our First Amendment and all, as we should, but it’s definitely—our right to free speech—something that’s constantly being defined. I think we’re at a point now where about the only place you can get into trouble is with child pornography. But, the thing is, in the past, trouble and art have always gone really well together, hand in hand, even. Once it gets to the point where art is concentrating too much on “taboo breaking” it starts to be too contrived, and not born out of some kind of passion (except in some cases). What I’m saying is, there’s just been a great history of putting things in code that is really fascinating, and adds a dimension to art that I think is lost when it’s possible to be right up front with everything. Now, I’m not saying that is not a good thing that say a love story involving two men can be matter-of-factly what it—and then can get to further depth than when the whole thing has to be in code. But it’s just that there’s a certain elegance and mystery and exhilaration that comes from not being able to be forthright and upfront and honest. There’s something exciting about trying to express something so dangerous that you can’t be open about it, and have to veil the recognizable parts—because if you weren’t you’d be held back by fear—but in the act of changing the names, changing the places, disguising one thing as another, you can feel more free to get to the depths of whatever it is that you are obsessed with.

Sunday 27 September 1998

Another Sunday, the day for… whatever. A good day to go to church and listen to someone tell you what you should remember and what you should forget, rather than sitting in a bar listening to The Velvet Underground tell you what you remember and what you forgot. I’m at The Hurst for breakfast, writing in my therapy notebook, and well, I feel kind of well-adjusted. I guess I’ll just concentrate on eating, and looking around. Really, if all of life could be like that, looking around I mean, it would be okay. But all of life can’t be all of anything—that’s the trick. That’s why you have to quit drinking, at the point that all of life becomes drinking. Which it will, after a while, if you’re so inclined. And I guess I’m so inclined—but, hell!

Sunday 20 September 1998

Another Sunday—is there any other day? I’m at another bar for breakfast, one where, if I was so inclined, I could order up a shot of Maker’s Mark, and then a Drambuie, and then an Ouzo and then a Campari and then a cheap Tequila and then a Jameson Irish Whiskey, a Midori Melon or a Pistachio liqueur to bring back that year in New York, and a Malibu Coconut & Rum liqueur to bring back high school spring break. Just for color, in clear glasses, Crème de Menthe, Crème de Banana, Blue Curacao, and Crème de Noyaux. All neat, no ice, and why in the world would you want to mix anything? It all gets mixed soon enough in your stomach, anyway. If I want to bring back high school, I’ll have a Crème de Cacao. Always had it around. No one drank it, except me.

It’s a place, this place, The Wheel of Fortune (Holman's), that reminds me of Ohio. Just the taste of the food and the badness of the coffee. The owner, Bill Bankule, also owns a chain of funeral homes. One restaurant and bar, and a chain of cut-rate funeral homes. Five bucks for the breakfast “Special Steak.” It’s good, too. We’re all in denial about where this meat comes from because we just don’t want to know. We’re hungry!

The waitress is standing in front of me with a metal bowl of lemons, slicing them into drink-size slices. For countless drinks. I’m close enough that an invisible spray of lemon peel oil is probably floating into my hair. You could pay $100 for this treatment at a spa.

It’s almost the first day of official autumn. Today or the next day or the next. It feels like, and may well be, today. It’s cold, and I got out my fall jacket for the first time last night. Isn’t it Rosh Hashanah or something, soon, like today? I’ll look at my calendar. Just saying the word “Jewish” makes me want to eat rice pudding. The only place pretending to be a Jewish deli that I’ve discovered (never forget to take into account the undiscovered) is this overpriced place in the theatre district called Cats Deli—run, no doubt, by someone with a Jewish grandmother, and whose claim to fame, and this restaurant, was a small part changing the litter box on the Broadway musical by the same name. I’ve sent food back at restaurants only a couple of times in my life, and the chicken rice soup at Cats was one of those times. I think you accidentally ladled this out of the mop bucket. That’s okay—it’s a mistake anyone can make. But the rice pudding—like a melted vanilla fast-food milkshake with barely cooked white rice mixed in—confirmed my suspicions. Maybe these people can sing, maybe they can dance, but they can’t cook. I could only be thankful I didn’t order the gefilte fish.

I’d like to take this dreary, gray, Sunday morning first of autumn to ask you to please indulge me in a little indulgence—every fall I can’t help but to try to start this project which I call my Sunday Project. It’s based on a project I had some ten years ago, where on successive Sunday mornings I would adjourn at a particular place—a family restaurant, a particular one with a name like Country Cousins or Chicken Kitchen—very down-home and backwoods and fast-food and manufactured at the same time. An awful place, but somewhere, on those particular Sunday mornings, where I found something I can’t forget, and thus keep trying to re-live. I can’t re-live it, but the point is in the trying, the search, the failure, and finally the sitting, the eating, the drinking coffee, and the writing. It should be a place I can walk to, and have a good walk to on the way. And it should be warm, and it should be tasteless. Well, in the last few years I haven’t really found the place, but I’ll keep looking, and the important thing is that I try, and go somewhere, and write about my observations, and it’s the fall—that’s the important thing—it’s really just an autumn ritual. And as rituals go, I have a lot of them. They’re important to me, yes.

Sunday 13 September 1998

I’m eating breakfast at The Hurst (Laurelthirst Public House). I’m in the middle of moving—or almost done, actually. Moving is such an absolute pleasure that I never am compelled to write here in my therapy notebook. If there was ever a way to just be moving all the time, my problems would all be solved.

But then you wouldn’t have this—this document of descent (descent into madness)… and recovery! Descent and recovery. Recovery and descent. An endless cycle. An endless journey—at least we wish it was endless. It will all end only too soon.

I’m sitting in front of a bar mirror, with a wineglass where my head should be. An upside-down wineglass. A whole rack of upside-down wineglasses, actually. If you took all the wine I’ve drank in my life and put it into various glasses and bottles, and spread them all out on the floor, in a bar and breakfast place like this one, what kind of grisly scene would that be, huh? Each of these 30 or 40 people in this place, this morning, represent just a mountain of consumption and excrement. To become fully aware of what your body costs the world would surely lead to a hasty suicide, so I won’t think about it.

Something they’re cleaning with here is making me powerful nauseous. I think it’s the automatic dishwasher detergent. So, I’ll try to pretend that I’m giving something back to the world, as ever, as always, and go into my new apartment—and new blank canvas to cover with my own shit. Do art! Do do art art art. Huff puff cough up phlegm. Stir the soup. Flush the toilet. Come to the end of the page. Buy a new notebook.

Monday 31 August 1998

I kind of trailed off there two weeks ago—down the long trail, looking back, the trail back, the last two weeks, a lot has happened, and I haven’t been able to finish that last sentence. That sentence is a lost cause, but maybe I can finish the thought. I guess what I was getting at is that it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced, that there could be a perfect (interior-wise) 1940s diner in my hometown, hidden from me for 38 years! I mean, it had the dining car manufacturer company plate over the inside door, it had the old Formica-top counter with boomerang designs and smooth white crescents worn in from decades of forearms resting on it. There it was, all along, and I never saw it, simply because I didn’t go in the door. So what is so great about this discovery—it’s not that I’m going to move back to Sandusky, because that would surely be the cosmic force to make the place close—no, what’s great is that now I have reason to have hope, here in Portland, Maine, a place with a real drought of breakfast spots—at least in my experience here this far—I have hope that I might uncover the hidden secret greatest place ever—behind the facade of something I’ve passed by a million times even.

But it won’t be here, at the New Crystal, another downtown, uninspired, overpriced, cafeteria-style, no-personality place—a place that only exists because it can, because so many people work nearby, have few choices, and don’t like to walk more than two blocks. There’s a guy in a booth next to me who’s just chain-smoking at an alarming rate—I guess not that amazing—the cigarette just never goes out. I didn’t actually notice if he lights one cigarette off the last one. Which, if you think about it, is an incredible practice, but he’s had cigarettes going the entire time I’ve been here—like a half hour. He’s an old 90 pound bald tan grizzled guy who laughs like his lungs are full of water, and his general appearance is really that of a human cigarette. I mean, this guy has actually turned into a cigarette!

Saturday 15 August 1998

(How in the world did it get to be 15 August already! The cruelty of time and August!) At a traditional Saturday AM breakfast at the Hollywood Burger Bar—how scary it is when you get a cold Saturday in August, when you’re this far north—you see winter waiting down the road, impatiently. I’m still threatening to move closer to the equator—maybe to Florida to work in the burgeoning artificial community industry.

More on my trip to Ohio—now, nearly a month in the past—since I left—scary! Anyway, the big and weird thing that happened to me. I was visiting my parents and brother and his family in Sandusky, Ohio, my hometown. A place I grew up, and lived in for a total of about 20 years, all added together. A place I know pretty much inside and out, except for all the new bullshit. (Of course, no one really knows any place inside and out.) A place with an enormous tourist attraction, Cedar Point, an amusement park, which is open only seasonally—summer. It’s a place, Sandusky, because of the seasonal nature, that has the highest number of fast-food restaurants per capita of any place in the United States, and thus, the world, I would assume.

I went for my class reunion—the 20th, and also, to go to Cedar Point, which I do every 10 years or so to see how much has changed. Of course, by now, it’s more like to see what’s stayed the same. A remarkable number of things actually stay the same—each one of them being like a little miracle—because for the most part, the old gets moved, torn down, eliminated, to make space for the colorful, hi-tech new rides that seem to be influenced by the extreme sports fads—everything is either the fastest, tallest, steepest, etc., or based on whitewater rafting, skydiving, and bungee jumping.

Anyway, around back around the time I was in school, about 15 years ago now, I got really interested in diners—and was taking a filmmaking class, so I did a documentary portrait of diners in Ohio. Of course, I didn’t presume to find them all, but in my hometown, Sandusky, I felt like I knew what was there. The old diners that were still operating had at one time or other been remodeled—usually the exterior, usually in the Sixties or Seventies, to keep up with the times. So, I know that around the eastern United States, especially, there were many old stainless-steel train-car style diners hidden in bricked-over, shingled-over, contemporary facades. My friend Sean started a diner appreciation magazine, and we wrote and talked about this endlessly. Also, my film was partly a defining of what a diner was, which has to do more with what’s on the inside than the outside—more with atmosphere, history, function, and especially personality—both in what it’s become—as well as the people working, and the customers—than architecture.

So… I’d be the first one to say that you should look inside a place before you make any judgments about it. So, I was completely floored when I went with my dad out to this donut shop where he told me they served breakfast, and he went occasionally. It’s a place called Jolly Donut, and it’s been there for as long as I can remember, probably all my life. It’s connected to this little motel called The Sands, on the main, long shopping strip outside of Sandusky city limits. I’ve just always assumed it’s a donut shop, which it is, and never realized they had a counter and booths and served breakfast and lunch. The place, for as long as I can remember, had a brick facade and a mansard-style roof, which matches the motel. So, when we went in and it was a classic stainless-steel dining car company diner—! These classic dining car restaurants were prefab structures, manufactured by several companies, mostly in New Jersey, mostly post-war—they resembled the train dining cars, and because of their long, thin design, they were easily transported—carried behind trucks to anywhere in the country you wanted. They’re mostly in the East, then here and there throughout the Midwest. People returning from war, presumably, wanted to start a new life, work for themselves, and found this a good way to start a restaurant. So they’re associated with the Fifties, mostly, and have made a comeback in today’s nostalgia market but…

Tuesday 4 August 1998

It’s morning before work and I’m at “Patty Kakes” restaurant, a place I’ve walked by many times. It’s connected to Patty’s Retreat bar, the kind of place where Irish is a euphemism for alcoholic. A lot of old guys here, not necessarily alcoholics, but men. Everything about this place is wrong, from the mismatched chairs, to the seriously stained old brown carpet, to the orange tables placed in dehumanizing rows, to the ugly dropped ceiling painted brown, to the only décor: travel posters that are so faded and wrinkled that they make every place look as ugly as this place. Japan, Canada, Venice, China, Greece, San Francisco, Yugoslavia, Mexico, France, Germany. (Alt. order: Germany, France, Mexico, China, Greece, Japan, Canada, Venice, Yugoslavia, San Francisco.) Who’d want to go there? Not when you can just stay here, in Little Ireland.

Sitting at each of the tables against a wall is an old man—some really old, some made prematurely old by alcoholism. I’m the youngest one here—the oddball—but no one acts like they notice—we’re all sitting with our backs to the wall, facing the middle of the room, the empty tables, each other. A couple of the old guys talk to each other—they probably see each other every day, yet they don’t sit together. Some of them live at the residence hotel upstairs, and another up the street—places with nautical names, The Commodore, The Admiral’s Nest, etc.

A big, noisy fan is on, everyone is smoking except me, and the men who talk, talk about the heat even though they still haven’t got the feeling back in their limbs since last winter. It’s just wishful thinking, an actual heatwave here in Portland, Maine, dying like they are in Dallas this summer. I was in a used bookstore yesterday and a young man & woman were in there complaining about the heat—it’s 180 degrees everywhere you go, she said bitterly, not realizing, of course, that 180 degrees doesn’t mean “really, really hot,” but “turned around in the opposite direction,” or a “complete reversal.” It’s this kind of abuse of the common language that I have to endure every day. No, I’m just kidding. I find that kind of thing endearing—it’s just a matter of not thinking things through. It doesn’t get on my nerves nearly as much as abbreviating, leaving words out, and especially using adjectives as nouns. That’s what gets me to being homicidal. All this complaining about the heat, though, it just cracks me up. It’s not hot here. Someone said, after about the third straight day it hit the nineties—“I had enough of this, already.” Right! Bring on that 10-month winter!