urgh. i am not very good at the catching up. i need to be inthemomentwritingthecrap or it serves less purpose. but i have to say it was a fabulous weekend. fabulous people in fabulous hoboken drinking fabulous beer before the super-fabulous rocket from the crypt show. we went to lady jaine's, artboy and adam and i, we met up with the fabulous miss sunday and her boy, and we chattered and yammered till it was time to go rock out.

and then the charger street gang were good and all about the audience participation. the selby tigers were ok but i got a little bored by the end of their set. and then rocket. they got onstage, and before they started playing i realized there was a hand in front of my face, being held out as if it wanted to be held. i looked up and realized the hand belonged to the guitarist. ok. so i held his hand and later in the song he put his hand on my head and later in the night on adam's head and as my old roommate said, "you guys got baptized!" there was much bouncing and dancing and bopping around and whoo!

that's the real description of the night. whoo! not like TRL whoo - that's more like wooooooaaaaooo!! but a rocknroll kind of whooo!

i absolutely loved it and i loved that they played "sturdy wrists" and "don't darleen" and the one i don't know the name of, also from circa: now! that goes, "everybody smoke pot everybody smoke pot" at the end. i loved that were were right in the frickin' front row. i love that they had rings and belt buckles for the sale and that i now own a rocket from the crypt baseball shirt. i love that the other adam gave us a ride to the path station and we sat in the way way back and i could not. stop. laughing about hank azaria's character from america's sweethearts: "you a puthy? huh? you a puthy boy?"

HA! and HA! again. luckily sweettits was laughing too. though i did keep saying it far, far longer than i needed to.

saturday night we went to see planet of the apes. i talked to a couple of friends at some point that day who told me it was ok, not great, but fun. everyone i've talked to since then has despised it. me, i liked it alright. i was a little let down - especially since "bring me the spaceman!", the best line from the preview, appeared nowhere in the movie - but i had a pretty good time. i like mark wahlberg playing the mark wahlberg character, i loved tim roth's growling spitting shrieking general thade, and i'll watch helena bonham carter in anything. the plot was weak and predictable, there was no point to the blonde girl, especially when he suddenly makes out with her at the end (really, i'm not spoiling a damn thing by saying that, you knew it was coming!) and there needed to be more monkey battle rage (tm) scenes, but i didn't feel ripped off.

then again, i did see the mummy returns at the beginning of the summer, and it really doesn't get any worse than that, even in terms of big summer blockbusters. i like real movies, too, which may seem hard to believe when looking at my film selections for the summer of 2001. i like 'em a lot - the good ones have just been few and far between for the last few months. but i also have a long-standing appreciation for big dumb action movies. bring 'em on. far better than weepy chick flicks - though i will grant that the better of those, like the better of any genre, have their place and time.

after the monkey movie we went to the raven, where a friend of adam's was spinning again. adam left early but i stayed, talking to artboy and popgirl until they left, and mostly to steve afterwards, as well as a friend who i may or may not have previously nicknamed. i cannot remember. regardless, this is a friend who is having a pirate themed birthday party later in the month. everyone must come as a pirate or a wench.

i love this idea.

but leave it to steve to say, "cool! i'll come as a wench!"

the best friend was supposed to meet me at 12:30 but turned up at 2:30, just as i was about to leave. which i didn't - instead i stayed till nearly four, talking to her and the swede, talking to steve, drinking overpriced beer and having, like the last time i was at the raven till late, a really good time. i've always liked that bar, for halloween, for the jukebox, for the pinball game (though the godzilla game they have now is really hard) for the good beers on tap (even though they cost too much) and lately i've been realizing it's impossible to have a bad night there. i shouldn't say that, probably, for fear of jinxing it, but it's true.

so those were my fabulous weekend nights.

monday night i had dinner with a publishing friend i hadn't seen in almost a year. four pints of caffreys and a crappy vegetable pie (it suspiciously resembeled airplane food) at swifts and we were talking about books, about work, more about books, favorite books, crappy manuscripts, and writing books. and more stuff, but in retrospect, through my caffreys-fueled haze, it seems largely about books. and writing. and how i don't think i can write here. which will probably look like an excuse, but as soon as the words came out of my mouth they felt true. new york has become something else to me, a playground, a jungle gym, a permanent college campus. i need a break from it. i need to go home and be bored. because i want to be writing. it's not that i'm not writing because i'm going out all the time. it's that i'm going out all the time because i'm not writing.

i understand that, but sometimes it's hard to draw the disctinction for anyone else.

so we talked about that stuff a lot and he tossed a lot of compliments my way. a lot of prods, too, about there being a reason random people ask me when i'm going to write a book, or if i write, or this or that, or that i have to do it. and i hear them on one level but on another i don't know how to take a compliment and on a third level i don't understand where this faith in me comes from. we used to have a lengthy and lively email correspondence, this friend and i, and at one point he told me he kept all my letters because he liked the way they were written. he was the first person that i didn't really know who told me i should write a young adult book, and i was ecstatic. i had always wanted someone to say that based on - based on nothing, really. i just wanted to hear it. but then i realized that wasn't true, because i can't understand why he would have that kind of confidence without having read anything but letters i dashed off in between projects at work.

eventually i started to get uncomfortable from feeling like we were only talking about me (don't laugh! i'm serious!) so i changed the subject and asked how his life, post-drastic-changes and on the verge of a weekend away with a new someone-interesting, was going. but the thoughts are still bouncing around in my head, here and there, bouncing around with the things adam said to me last night - that he says all the time, for that matter.

sometimes i can hear them but i can't, i can't understand. and i love to hear them but maybe i have to sort out this not-writing bullshit on my own. i don't know.

i didn't know i was going to write any of this down until i started typing.

but enough about that. enough, enough, enough. less talk, more rock.

something like that.

i've got to get out of the office. there is more stuff on my mind - stuff about the nature of this site and why i think i'm changing it a little - but i need to go home before i go out. places to be, people to see, you know the drill. thursday in the big city.