[APPLAUSE]
Hi, that was so awesome.
Thank you so much.
Raquel's like my new best friend.
I'm going to fulfill the promiscuity genre thing
by reading sort all over the place.
Tonight I'm going to start with an essay.
And then I'm going to read from this book
and then read some new poems with a story
and try and make that all possible.
And also because I'm a total animal fetishist
and I know some of you guys love animals--
and so if you love animals, you give money to animal things.
And then you have thousands of animal calendars.
So I've brought some animal calendars and some pig
newsletters.
And so if you guys want to get a book and signing
it-- or you don't even have to buy a book.
I'll give you an animal calendar and I'll sign it
and a pig newsletter too.
With the thought, you could give them--
you can get your richest friend to give them some money
and then just live with animals all year.
But I'm going to start with this essay called
"Perverse Reading."
There's a slant all over the place here.
I think I'm visiting that area.
I mean, I was in Berlin and I said something.
And this guy said, would you write an essay about that?
And I was like, no.
And then somehow I wound up doing it.
I think it's not even getting published
but somewhere sometime, "Perverse Reading."
The thing I will say about being young is I hated it.
I was broke.
My apartment was a mess.
I shouldn't drink so much.
I only stopped criticizing my body when I was doing drugs.
And the thing I liked about the act of reading
is that my body would get lost and I would go someplace else.
The thing I didn't think so much about was the pages, so many
of them turning, turning all the time as the moments passed.
And I was free.
If I liked a song, I would play it again and again.
It didn't even strike me as peculiar.
I remember one song that made me feel
so elevated when I listened to it that I
became this other person I called a Rococo wanderer.
And she just roamed around in a bodiless way
on the face of the Earth and saw things.
The turning of the record created that.
The black disk turning making time and mind.
I was dreaming.
And the record was a chant though a petrochemical
electrical one.
It required I pay my bill, which I mostly did.
But I hated paying my bills.
And I hated doing dishes.
I hated cleaning the cat litter again and again.
I hated going down the stairs in my building.
And I hated going up.
I hated the subway.
I hated doing my laundry.
And though I liked watching it going around and around
once it was in and I could sit on the wooden bench dreaming--
I hated holidays.
I hated them coming again, thinking
of last year, my family wanting me back
and the compulsiveness with which I went to them.
I had liked going to confession when
I was a practicing Catholic.
I liked the relief.
Though I confessed the same poems, sins again and again--
and when I said something different, it got weird--
suddenly it was about him, meaning the priest, rather than
previous no one by doing nothing,
just getting wiped clean.
I stopped going.
I started going to therapy about five years ago.
I meant to go slightly before.
But instead I got in a relationship.
And mostly in therapy we talked about her.
But my therapist pronounced her name funny, misgendering her.
And I liked that.
But he always forgot to use my correct pronoun, which
I didn't like.
When she was gone, we talked about me.
And we arrived up on the great topic, which is the return.
I've concluded that the reason rock
stars die young is that they didn't want to do it.
I did.
I came in saying the reason I had come
was this feeling I had that I was turning a corner.
And I wanted help with that.
My therapist would remind me that turning a corner
was my request when I came to him.
And instead we spent three or four years talking about her.
It made me dislike her, though I certainly
thought that was my definition of a relationship,
being obsessed.
And if I were a whiteboard, it would
be about wiping me out daily and writing in her.
We got to it in the aftermath of her.
And it's this.
He said, this point in my life-- and he meant late.
I'm fairly late in the day.
I think I'm like a rambunctious evening, in which you
may or may not go out.
But you've done everything before, some things a lot
and other things not enough.
And he was like, what is it that you haven't done enough of?
And that's a big, open spot.
And though I like to confess all, I want to say--
all I want to say is that that spot is and I can fill it.
And that's what I'm doing right now.
I remember watching Julian Beck cut vegetables
in the kitchen with a good knife on a cutting board.
That was a film.
And he was very important to the person who gave me
the film, not so much to me.
But that scene has stayed with me all my life.
I dream that someone has a camera
and follows me in the morning.
It's like the Walter Mosley book I found on the sidewalk
one night on the corner.
It was bent, having just fallen out
of somebody else's back pocket.
I read it, feeling in love with the randomness of the gift.
I hope the camera never comes.
But I like the sensation of being alone with the thought.
It's how I have a soul.
And my dog has a soul too.
Her soul wants to take the same walk again and again.
We are lying in bed.
And the thing that makes the day start happens.
I'm mostly happy if I fell asleep reading
or the last thing I did, turning pages rather than foisting
all that electronic light into my brain.
I fell asleep dull and in the private world of my book.
OK, I might as well get up.
And it could be 6:00.
But it's mostly, most likely 8:00.
I stick my glasses on and my phone
into the pocket of my pajamas.
I go into the kitchen.
And I look out the window.
And I see the light.
And then I put the water on.
There might be dishes in the sink.
My ex used to be passionate about cleaning
the dishes at night.
And I brought that regime into my life for a while.
And indeed the emptiness of the clean kitchen felt great,
but I don't have to do that.
And I'll wipe a knife or a spoon while the water's boiling.
About two years ago, I stopped drinking coffee
and moved to green tea.
It's a softer high and better for ritual.
It's full of ritual, like a cigarette.
The water boils.
And I cool it for 2 minutes.
And then I pour it into the kyusu.
I wait 2.5 minutes and drink that tea.
And then I do it again.
The second time-- it steeps for three minutes--
is the third infusion.
But I generally wait and drink that later in the day.
I'm doing that right now.
I just want to say as I watch my numbers shrinking--
and I mean the word count of this piece--
this piece is only so long that all the things that
destroyed me in life, the horror of dailiness,
I experience now with this neglectful respect.
Perverse reading again and again, I find.
I think of the hot day in summer many years ago in New York.
I was living upstate.
So I was in Manhattan in hot fucking August doing errands.
And it was hell.
I'm walking down St. Mark's Place
in a pile of anxious dread.
And I had the thought, it will always be like this.
And I thought it again, it will always be like this.
And it was cool.
It was like air conditioning.
Everything, everything was cooling.
And with no notable exception, like I do fall into a pit--
but this is pretty much my life.
This condemned dailiness, cutting, cleaning,
jumping on the subway, going around and around,
being watched and there's no one there at all.
And the dog nods because she wants her walk, that walk.
And we do it every day.
And every day is exactly the same but different.
I'm on a plane.
And I've done this before.
Listen, feel the lift.
Yes.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.