insomnia
while my body is still on hong kong time, there are lots of things rattling around the attic at 2 am. i liked what rj wrote recently:

i've been in california for about 8 months now. i haven't really danced since i left michigan. sometimes i worry whether or not i am still capable of doing everything i used to do, all those things i was known for. the thing with personas is that they aren't fictional representations, false identities that one might play on television, then shed like dead skin when the cameras stopped rolling. they're more like different sides of the same die, numbers that turn up when the conditions are just right; they are the shards of our ideal selves, made real and public if only for a moment. when they are gone, it is as if a portion of our soul has disappeared beneath the currents of time, leaving us with the bittersweet taste of nostalgia on our tongues. not even the wine of california's napa valley can mask its flavor.

potent images from new york, dc, london, berkeley ebbing and flowing in my dramamine addled head. it all seemed so long ago, a totally different world. i have been blessed and cursed with a bad memory that i have worked hard to achieve over the years with drugs and more alcohol than i would like to admit and a little bit of will. i stumbled in five inch heels three weeks ago in an empty dive bar with a pool table in the back off polk street. i got drenched in rain on bush near the stockton tunnel and had fernet and soggy cigarettes at a dark round table. i shivered in shorts in a windswept smoking area in front of circolo and passed along parliaments and gossip.

but how does that compare to hennessy goldschlager 151 tequila captain kamikaze shots on the ground floor of dream, dancing and smoking next to minnie and margot, buying lin a liquid cocaine and not teling him what it was, watching alice puke behind a couch at a club on H street, seeing that couple go upstairs into rj's room, telling the twins i really don't want to do another shot, not being sure if you are sweating alcohol or sweat, getting jaime some water, hey your friend is cute, hitting a foil pipe that margot made, buying from my SGM hairdresser, was my skirt this short when i left the house?, doesn't clarence look exactly like arthur?, i think he likes you, the power of suggestion, let's call him while he's on his date, she's not even that cute!, not the beer bong again, not those annoying guys again, oh my god let's do a shot. but isn't margot in the shower? she doesn't mind doing shots by herself. what is she doing in the shower at 11 pm while there is a party downstairs?

or later, stumbling through chinatown in head to toe crushing marc jacobs, thinking only of soup dumplings, and how many excrutiating steps it will take to get there, having a few drinks in the lower east side and zipping home across the bridge in a taxi in ten minutes, eating my first deviled egg and hearing minnie drunkenly scream at a bitchy looking asian girl for saying shit about wellesley, hearing a white guy do a perfect karaoke of shaggy's "angel", feeling like alice in wonderland at the dove bar, laughing in rite aid with minnie and bot about a random guy saying that caramel candy was not so good, seeing bear heads in the snow in philly.

dear lord, it's 3 am.