cutting great neck

10:20 pm January 19 2009 Monday


today

i have been so involved in myself.



i concentrated more on the blog than anything else.

i woke up late. i watched the end of an old, black-and-white movie. a mysterious one. the maltese falcon.



i stumbled on a hill of snow. i fell. i lurched forward, trying to catch my balance. i fell. i fell. i fell, and i stood, and when i returned my fingers, my hands were burning, burning.



it's martin luther king jr. day. i feel good. i feel optimistic. tomorrow is the big day.



i'm listening to cat power, to mazzy star, to clair de lune, to tutim. i feel so empowered by their language, so learned from their musings. i want to read the last exit to brooklyn.

it's on my night desk.

i have swimming tomorrow. i don't like sports.

i plan on throwing up. on killing myself. on getting out into the biting, stabbing cold.



snow. up to my ankles.

night.



"my young bride
why are your shoulders
like that
of a tired old woman"

Monday January 19 2009 early early in the morning


the night is closing in on me.

the snow is smoothing.



frank sinatra croons jazz in my ears, his words like feathers dancing, playing in and out of shadows.

i am forgetful, old, prococious. i am a wonderer.



i said something bizarre to this girl today.

"i don't believe in god
and he's punishing me for it."



i am a paradox.



how can god punish me
if he does not exist?

how can life punish us
if we do not exist?



i went outside today.

in the snow, bitter and white and blankety, soft. it hardens in your fist. it smooths your eyes, jades them. it's fresh, it's cool, it's comfortable. it's black skies above white, brown-hued snow.



i sleep in morning hours.


and now i think of madrid.

i don't know why.



i miss madrid. i miss europe. i miss life, lives, which i had not been able to hold, which i had been able to hold but had not held long enough.

i miss persons whom i had not been able to hold long enough.



i feel so alone. so worthless.

Frank Sinatra - My Way

recently read Bono's nytime's column, downloaded my way. and i liked it. i understood it. i felt its force. its sheer, human force. and i've been thinking how different i am from everyone and how lovely everyone still is.



i took a long walk today. two friends didn't want to talk to me. that's ok. i thought about life. about friends.



on facebook, i look through pics of old israeli friends. i see how different each one looks. how grown-up. how matured. how unlike me, how like me. how tremendously altered and ostentatious, so unfamiliar, tall, gaunt, square. and i think: do i look like that to them? what would i have looked like if i stayed in israel? who would i have been?



who am i now?

Saturday January 16 2009 early early in the morning

i miss you.



whoever you are, wherever you are.



i miss you.



i love you.



you are so important to me. i really meant to tell you this a long time ago.

but, i forgot.

and it's cold. and i can see lights outside. and i miss manhattan, and i miss you, and i am so full of missing everything.



i went to school today and had tears in my eyes because this guess speaker came to talk about children in cambodia and how he was building homes and talking about how he built schools and how important life is and he showed us a video of all these cambodian kids singing a song and i had tears in my eyes and i have them now. and my spanish teacher was sitting next to me.

and i felt how strong and important humanity is.



and now i feel like you're so important to me, and that i want to see you again.



i miss you.


i had so many ideas about what to write in this post.

but i forgot them all.



oh, let's all end this with some good sylvia plath poem:

"Childless Woman
The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.

My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself,

Myself the rose you acheive---
This body,
This ivory

Ungodly as a child's shriek.
Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,
Loyal to my image,

Uttering nothing but blood---
Taste it, dark red!
And my forest

My funeral,
And this hill and this
Gleaming with the mouths of corpses."

... ... ... ... sleeppp

January 14 2009 evening

"i really can't stay
but baby it's cold outside"



"i've got to go away
baby it's cold outside"



"this evening has been"



"so very nice
i hold your hand, just like ice"



"my mother would start to worry
please don't hurry"



"my father would start pacing the floor
listen to that fireplace roar"



"so really i'd better scurry"



"well, maybe just a half-drink more
baby, put some music on while i pour..."

15/01/09




last night i sneaked out.

i had my camera in hand.

and i took a picture.

because it was so beautiful last night. the snow. the dark, starry sky. the world seemed so serene, so passive, so calm.

i woke up this morning and decided to take a picture of the view from my window.



the snow is falling from the sky. i feel so fortunate.

The sky is so black right now. I'm looking out and I can feel the obscene darkness slowly enveloping me, tousling my clothes.

"Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me..."
---

New masthead. New capitalization. New year.

---

sometimes, i feel so preoccupied by the world that i forget to commit myself to things and objects and missions that are significant to me. the world is so big, so easy to leap into, to be absorbed into like a little grain of sand swallowed by a bath sponge.

humanity is so difficult, so bizarre. just imagine: the entire world=people rule other people. that's it. the whole economic crisis, all wars, all murders, all rapes, all courtrooms, all jails, all priests and all rabbis and all terrorists and their victims--they are all people. human beings. as simple, as unintelligent, as dull and reflective as you and me. blogger's run by people!

and what makes the world so harsh, so jading, is that all of these people are seeking nirvana, and their ancestors sought nirvana, and in the end, there are two conflicts: a) ancestors' quest to nirvana clash with people's quest for nirvana; b) people's quest for nirvana clashes with other people's quest for nirvana.

and sometimes, these clashes are caused directly--bin laden flying his planes into downtown manhattan, man rapes 8-year-old girl on side of highway; most of the times, though, these clashes are indirect. a woman forced to wear a burqa because of the rules set by those who came before her, a man accidently impregnating his girlfriend...

and what i can tell you? what is the cause for all of these terrible dilemmas, all of these life-modifying milieus?

i think: religion.

religion, because G-D asked us to spread his mission, G-D asked us to hang all gays, G-D asked us to stone all whores, G-D asked us to burn those who eat pork, G-D asked us to fight Palestinians, G-D told us that there's heaven when we die, G-D told us that we won't die, G-D told us that He exists and therefore we should believe Him because He said so, because god is fucking supposed to know what the fuck he's talking about, right? well, right?

god, i hope you're there. i hope you're hearing me. i hope that you're listening to me.

if you're there, tell me: why do you make all this shit happen?

why do you make us fight in your name?

if you exist, why? why do you exist?

---

i just had a major fucking relevation.

god does not exist.

people--the same people that run this world, the same people that work this world--our ancestors--created god. they created it him out of cow skin and blood, scribing their dazed dreams onto a scratched, ragged slice of leather about their Omnipotent Creator who Made Them and Instructed Them, an eye in the sky whom we are the direct result of, and he can do everything for us, he can create everything and destruct everything all in one fellow swoop.

---

we're reading lord of the flies in english.

we read it last year too.

god, how i abstain from that book.

that's the only word i could fit in there.

i don't abhor it and i don't worship it. i appreciate it for appeasing my ideas; all values are unjustified, groundless, ambivalent, and individuals cannot for the life of them communicate with one another.

we all animals who live nowhere and anywhere at once.

and it indicates to me that there is nothing i can do to change it. nothing i can do to stop myself from living in this bubble of nihilism other than killing myself, which i will never do.

and now i need to do homework.

nope it don't.

i don't want to seem like this random left-wing make-love-not-war liberation crusader, but there are so many things i want to say about the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza and i hope i'll be able to say them all.

these are human beings. so what if hamas is hiding inside a human shield of palestinians? it is still a human shield. the attacks on hamas are not an attack on hamas; they're an attack on all citizens of gaza. attack on the children of gaza, on the women of gaza, the men of gaza, the infants and the elderly, the working class and the unemployed. but worse of all, this operation was an attack on people-- real living, breathing homo-sapien people, those who are capable of advance thinking, and jealousy and rage and misery and ecstasy, those who can sympathize.

again we come to the idea of people. people, people, people. people are so crucial to the world, and here we are, doing everything we can to obliterate them. hamas security officers are dropping off hundreds at a time, and sixteen-year-old girls bleed to death from a slice of glass of an israeli-destroyed building.

how can slaughtering civilians bring an end to the rockets in sderot?

it can't. there is nothing we can do now but wait and see. there's gonna be a third intifadah, sure. why not? more rockets: last i checked, two in the afternoon, thirty-seven had already hit. why not? more gaza death; actually, more deaths--period.

Israel can not impose Zionism on the people of gaza, nor can it defend itself by killing more innocent citizens. whatever Israel did or does or will do in gaza will only be met by more hate, more sorrow, more revenge-type of crap. instead of focusing on bombing the living shit out of gaza, we need to turn our attentions to the world around us--to europe, to the arab world, and of course to the incoming president obama. we need them to see our suffering, our pain, our sorrow, because via this horrid mass-murder and scare tactic we are only sending out a terrible message of hate.

if hamas is a terrorist organization because it sends rockets out to sderot, then israel is a terrorist state for dropping bombs on an innocent population.

---

you know what though?

i don't know.

i think i might be missing ny.

it's a nice place. i miss the snow. i miss ginger. i miss school. i miss iced coffee.

i don't know. i feel better today, but i feel like we should have stayed in israel longer. we should have seen more people, lived in more houses, went to more places. i feel like we should have stayed forever.

---

sometimes i want to live in two different worlds. i want there to be two different worlds like a ribbon, how the two sides link in the middle, so that i would not miss israel, would not miss america.

sometimes, i just wish the world would have been simpler. i was thinking yesterday about how horribly difficult it is for people to be born, and then to grow up, and then to grow old. we shouldn't have it this hard, really. and then, how some people stay in the same place their whole life--the same caste, the same little town, the same barred, metal room. why had god made us like this? there is no god.

THERE IS NO FUCKING GOD.

because why do some immoral individuals live in luxury while others, more compassionate, more beautiful people, have to scrap the shit off sidewalks to bring food home?

god does not have his ways. how can we suffer, if we do no wrong? how can we please god if we no nothing of what he wants from us?

THERE IS NO GOD.

not because life is bad. there is no god because there never was one.

and it's so hard for me to fight against this tide, of what i'm used to--i'm used to believing. someone--an orthodox friend--once told me that to believe in god you have to know that he exists even if evidence against his existence exists, too. like, if i read somewhere that the big bang did happen and that man evolved from apes and that, well, god is not there--then i can still believe in him.

so basically, life is pretty much weird.

first post in two months: let's make it a good one.

who's reading this? no one, probably.

so i had this huge headache today and i don't know why. i'm extremely superstitious when it comes to headaches so i was not sure why this headache slapped into me on this very day. maybe because i woke up on the wrong side of the face. maybe because i drank coca-cola for breakfast. maybe because i ate waaaaay too much today, and yesterday, and the day before, and even the day before. maybe it's because...

because i don't know about israel anymore.

it's boring. it's still home, but it bores me. i expected it to be different. but israel always stays the same. the same colors, the same people, the same food, everything so stationary, so lifeless, so usual, and now i don't really understand why i even anticipated anything different. maybe i had my hopes up. expectations. maybe israel isn't really my home.

is it my home?

fuck, who even knows. i don't believe in god anymore, though it pains me. is that the reason for my headache? maybe there is a god and he doesn't like me not believing in him so he lightning-struck me with this horrid mind-wrecker?

no, god doesn't know if israel is my home or not because he doesn't exist.

the truth is, i feel like during this whole trip i've been putting up this fake front. it's the biggest one i've ever pulled, and though there are some gaping holes in it, i feel like it has been somewhat successful, considering the difficulty. anyhow, this front is destroying everything i stand for and it disappoints me that life is so hard, so miserable that human beings can't even be themselves. why should someone be scared of walking around with a headscarf around, oh, i don't know, great neck ny? or why should someone be refused their right to marry their loved one? i hope all of this will change in the next century. i hope people will be seen solely as people and not as muslims, blacks, gays, sluts.

if i become a politician, a journalist, a whatever, then i will fight for this idea to the death.

but the truth is, i don't know if there is anyone who i can show myself to, or anyone who can show themselves to me. the latter is more severe than the former. i have too many acquaintances, too little friends. if i had to pick one person to live with for my entire life in a desert island, i wouldn't know who to pick. would i pick anyone? not my father, not my sister, not my mother. names swoop around like giant birds in my head. who? who? and i feel like this plays a large part in my innermost misery. who can i lean on? no one. who can i trust? no one. i can only trust myself. i can only grow my inner soul into a mature, sociable, normal character. nobody else can do anything for me. nobody else can shape me or touch me or befriend me. because i've lived too long without good friends. i've lived too long searching, too little finding, too little settling. maybe one of these days, i'll live in an exotic land--spain, france--where i would find friends, lovers. people. i could trust them.

i feel like, due to the situations that have been thrust upon me, i'm the most miserable person in... in the vast network of human beings that i know. i feel like my life has been marked by a black omen since my delivery in schneider hospital, or that my future has been marred by a negligent upbringing and overly compassionate consideration. who has to deal with all these issues? my life has been tossed and thrown around without any care to anything like i was a, a, a basketball, like god [again, god=spit, so, metaphorically, ? ...] decided to surf a rebound and shoot me and throw me around the world. i am a broken, outcasted soul, extricated from the burning center of society into the gray-blue outposts of life. i can send letters to the center, sure, maybe even take the bust there once in awhile. but i'll never live there.

for now, i need escapes--i yearn for them, reach for them. escapes: school, journalism, politics, manhattan. another headache pill could do the trick. but i'll also be searching--searching for my whole life--for more, more, more escapes--movies, Europe, nytime--more and more and more, until i would just explode. escapes will shower me by the gallon.

my head burns like a potfull of beans and beef, or chunt in other words. yum...

water? food? shelter?

i don't know what i'm doing here. what i'm doing here in the basement of my cousin's house. in my cousin's house. in hod hasharon. in israel. in this world. what the fuck am i doing here in this world?