04/19/97 2:40:40 AM Can't seem to stop sleeping this week. 13-14 hours a night, with strange dreams of wearing bright red pants in an open Romanesque bathhouse where all the people I've ever known are forced to shower openly in antique shower basins out on the sidewalk. All the bathers thinks it strange, but only a few people bother to ask me why I'm the only person not required to shower publicly. I see many of them walk around naked, and I display embarrassment, but they always say "Oh, it's OK." I don't know what it means. Who cares... Moving sucks. Packing boxes, sifting through every single scrap of paper in this apartment, I didn't think it would suck this badly, but it REALLY FUCKING SUCKS, MAN! Today I turned on the cam-corder and talked into it for a couple of hours while sorting and disposing of things from the drawers of this desk. It was liberating to openly comment on the significance of receipts and ticket stubs and unfinished letters, but after a while the energy had passed and it seemed kind of COCKAMAMEY (love that word) to sit here talking in full voice to nobody except myself and some future friend or acquaintance or LUVAAH who might discover these 2 8mm cam-corder tapes filled with my sodden ramblings. So much crap. Never so much crap as now. There were these lists I made for myself in October, 1990, when I first arrived in New York. Lists of possible hotels to live in, lists of possible jobs (none of which ever materialized). Yesterday I finally uncovered photographs of the apartments I lived in before this one. All but one of them, room 14-22 at 166 West 75th Street, the very first room I ever had to myself in New York. Must not have had a camera then; it's the only possible reason I would not have taken pictures of it. Room 317, though (at 166 West 75th), there are lots of pictures of that pithole. Living there, I would cook something on my little burner, and I'd put it on a plate. And I'd start eating it. While eating, though, I would sometimes turn around to grab a napkin or a fork, and when I turned back to face the food I was eating it would be covered with roaches, hundreds of them which had been lying in wait for me to turn away for just a moment so they could pounce on my pork chops or my cheeseburger and just carry the damn thing away, up the wall and out the window and off into the night. Ten-Hut! I'll get a scanner sooner or later and post some of the pictures from that apartment, I mean "Transient Hotel" room, here. Then there are the 2 rooms I had (not simultaneously) up at 9 Cabrini Blvd, #3-C. Oh, and the insane roommates, and the powerful noise pouring in off the George Washington Bridge (which was about 20 yards from the window of my apartment), and the toilet full of piss and turds (because the plumbing always conked out at 6:30 pm every Friday night). Did I mention the insane roommates? The singer/trombone player who simply could not sing or play the trombone? And the violinist who spent all his time talking about the outrageous cost of anal beads and 16 year old girls who looked 28 and made millions starring in porn flicks? Don't' get me started, I'm getting worked up just thinking about it. Then there was the big studio up at 5057 Broadway. Not sure where the pictures of that apartment are, come to think of it. There's a roll of film somewhere here that's been lying around years now, maybe they're on there. Then there is this place, on the Upper East Side. Next up will be something in Atlanta, though at this time I have no idea what it will be (house/apartment/condo), and no idea where in that town it will be. I'm thinking that Virginia Highlands will probably be sensible. Buckhead also sounds OK, though I'm vigorously informed that I will change my mind about Buckhead the second I lay eyes on it. It's amazing how much personal postal mail I used to get. I still get letters occasionally, but it's rare. Almost everyone I know (and an alarming quantity [of sometimes disturbing quality] of people I do not know) send e-mail now. Speaking of e-mail (I just spent the last few hours catching up on the less demanding correspondences that I maintain), I keep meaning to post these 2 messages from someone who calls herself "Wacky." She lives in New Zealand and travels everywhere, it seems. Can't think of a way to categorize or even describe mail like this, coming as it does from out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, but from someone who has been everywhere. Wacky and I have a healthy game of Net-Scrabble going on right now, and as she and I already know, we'll always have Paris. Man, I'm so tired. Feels like I haven't shaved in about 300 years. Biblical years, that is. It's time for a Guinness, I say. Speaking of nothing, last week for no apparent reason (or rather, no reason that I wish to share right now, because I'm feeling cagey) I got onto this cyclothymic frenzy of making a complete list of all my CDs. Such listings used to seem so pointless, but in the spirit of packing my apartment up and going through every single item that I own, it seemed to make even a little bit of sense to chronicle some of it. Well, there's more (equally vague) to that story on this page. It will take some polishing off in the coming weeks and months. All this week I kept thinking of sitting down and chronicling the significance of each particle of residue which lies about this apartment from the last 6½ years of my life. The receipts, the opera ticket stubs, the notes-to-self. It's been a sometimes somber week of solitary reminiscences. The number of times death has visited me seems ungodly. Or rather, the significance of those events makes each of them impossible to forget, and even today I wish that some of those people could walk up to me on a crowded street and squeeze my arm or smile at me again. But that can't happen. A lot of things that would be nice can't ever happen, and death is not always to blame. Goddamit, why am I crying all of a sudden? Hokay, I'm gonna wrap this up. The hardest work of moving out of here is done. The rest is up to whoever I hire to do it, and beyond that it's up to the rest of my life to decide where all this is going.