RE:  Christodoro, by Tim Murphy

Jared, re breakup: ' he's drinking every night w his buddies,.  Bombed, he would wordlessly approach them and give them long, rocking hugs   How ya doin, they'd ask, and he'd shrug slowly, searching for words:

'I'd say I just went from the period of unbearable, scalding misery to the period of abiding but somehow just barely tolerable misery, he'd finally say.  Like, from waking up in the morning and thinking, first thing, I'm alone, I wanna die, to thinking, I'm alone, I wanna die, yeah, so fucking get some coffee and the paper and get on with your day and deal with it.'
AUGH!

'Like all New Yorkers who move to LA, even those like her who'd lived in New York but briefly, she clung to her New York identity…'

'…she held on to that New York period of her life, when she was a messy, lost party girl booty-grinding to Mary J. Blige on a coffee table at somebody's after-hours party.'
(that was Part II, the late 90s NYC, post-deevorce pour moi; (a little bit, as Carmen would say.  I love you so much, honey.  I just love you a little bit, okay?)

[ASIDE: Notes for book:
You'll See What I See
Take a Look at My Life; other lyrics, songs from that album.}

Back to el libro!:

'Protease, fucking protease.  I fucking hate that word.'
(God!  It never occurred to me!  What a weird big-pharm mindfuck!)

'And then, oh God, Carrie!  He'd sought her out…lured her…he was so hungry to use…'put your self-hatred about Carrie on the shelf,' his sponsor says. … That's about the only thought that keeps Mateo from blowing his brains out over the thought of Carrie, because basically he feels like he killed her.'

I can imagine that so well.
[ELEPHANT ENTERS ROOM.  HEAD.  HEART.]
It's a heart-stopping, mind-killing STOMP.

A guy at an AA mtg, 'Welcome to my world, little man.  The Try-Not-To-Hate-Yourself-Too-Much-Today Club!  We're all VIP members here!'
(Now that's the line that would lure me in…)

'There will never be a drug that hits him as hard and as fast as New York City, the first sight of which, swallowed whole from above, seizes him with dizzying waves of exhilaration, nostalgia … And unlike a drug, it's real, it's all real.  Everything that happened down there is real, real, real.'

'The cab went straight through the East Village tonight.  I got a hot flash when we  crossed Ninth street.'
Me, too, M-Dreem – especially when I checked out the list of tenants on 317 East 9th, and there was my name, on #7  (you can see Veselka's from there, gone from humble 24-hour café, to posh diner that serves $18 bowls of borscht!)

Damn!  I hoped I'd still been living there, and there I was!

March 12, 2016