let there be a wailing and a gnashing. i was doing so well. i can still fight it. someone from long ago, the boy who used to come into the cafe and who i spied sliding down the rails drunk at union square is back. i am falling and i have to put this one here or start a new one or just not fucking write it: but if i write it here no one will read it so this is like a well. not a well. a pussywillow. a cattail. i will sing my secret here and noone's ass will have ears.


I was doing so well; fucking asses and sucking and shooting it right up against their holes but not inside and not falling. A guy i met just left. ANOTHER filipino, which was a surprise. His cock on my stomach and i am playing with his ass. I rub my head against his hole and his body spasms. I think he's worried i'm gonna stick it in raw and start to say something but he ejaculates I'm coming, and without either of us touching it shoots hot hot from the wall down to my navel. My left eye is still burning. On his way in he had recognized a couple of his friends on my polaroid wall. Now they will have something to talk about. I talk too much.

The point is; as hot as Filipino #42 was - his furry hole and thick cock and hands-free fountain, etc. etc., when i got off i was thinking about the sarah lawrence boy. Falling is exactly what I don't need right now. I need to take the lessons I've learned from my holiday trip home and make something. His suitcases are here in my room. I told him he could stay until he moves into his sublet in february, but he was out tonight, sleeping with his boss. I need to stop sleeping with him. For now at least. But then shouldn't I sleep with him while he's still around? Before he is taken by manhattan?

I would do anything for you. I would climb mountains. I would swim all the oceans blue. I would walk a thousand miles reveal my secrets more than enough for me to share i would put roses round our door sit in the garden growing potatoes by the score.


falling is wrong, tristan. fuck these new people that jump out and leave the past alone.

this was TRST's livejournal from april 17, 2004 to may 11, 2006. anything before april 17, 2004 was from this little window in time when i had WAY too much time and thought i might transcribe all my pre-lj journals here. i ran into problems right away cos i didn't have a scanner and i journal in drawings mostly. not everything in here is true, or about me, but it is representative of how i journal. day-to-day, scraps of observations and overheards, short fiction, notes, short fictions with me as the narrator, embellishments, directions, song lyrics, sentence fragments.

i was never sposed to be "paletree". i am TRST. paletree was the name of the journal. when i was in college i was (and still am) sympathetic to the plight of the Kurdish people. Kurds are divided into two groups. the first are shorter & dark-haired and skinned and the second, the paletrees, are taller and lighter. in kurdish society the paletrees are better by birth. i am also pale and tall and from a family of shorter, darker people; but that is a coincidence. a few times i've talked to people i do not know on the phone and they've called me paletree and it weirds me out. it is a poor name for a human. it sounds instantly queer.


6'4", 180#, bl, bl, NEG, caucasian. if you send me pictures of your cock i will send you pictures of old lovers and tell you how they taste!


in baltimore everything changed. i became the character in my journal, if that makes any sense. i realized that there was nothing being withheld for me except what i was withholding. something's changed. and yes i will still spend my nights lovesick but something's changed about the way i think about everything. a little click in my head. click. a big wooden wheel. click click.

everything is going ok. things are prolly always more ok than i make them sound. on one hand my roommates keep insisting on putting EVERYTHING in the fridges, including chocolate and ketchup and peanut butter, but on the other hand i have a full metro card. i have two days off and i can hear the ice cream man through the window.

i am suddenly in a place where i can do so much, and i guess i always was.

I will tell you what I just did.

I thought I could talk the green man into selling me half of a $50, but after a lot of trouble I ended up giving him $48 and owing him $12. I know where you live he joked. $20 belonged to someone else. That $28 ($8 I found and $20 I've been saving) were all the money I had in the world.

All I have is $10 on a metrocard, half a pouch of American Spirit and two-thirds of an eighth of - well, pretty good stuff actually.


I owe Wendy $15. I owe a bank $199.82. I owe Sprint $179.32. I owe my landlord $650. I owe Rick $6. I owe Dain $1.50. Oh, and I owe the green man $12. I owe $1,063.24 before I still have no money. This doesn't include ongoing debts like student loans. For the first time I made enough money on paper to be interested in filing a return. I still haven't sent in my tax stuff to the CPA, so i think it is probable I am looking at an audit more than a return.

I have too much stuff in my apartment, so leaving in the middle of the night or setting my room on fire and declaring a rent strike aren't really options.

Wendy says Tell your parents they have to send you more money. Asking my parents for money is complicated. I feel bad when I do it because there is no guarantee that I will ever be worth the cash when compared to their need to take care of themselves as the grow older. Louisiana money isn't the same as nyc money. Biggest: I don't want to be in anyone's debt. I know, I know, no one does; for me it's something more. It's the same reason I didn't want to take that tenspot she lent me. Treating me to lunch or buying me an eighth is one thing - giving me cash in hand is another. It seems wrong. Like "quitting smoking" and then bumming off your friends. Lending me $10 when i have cash is not a big deal. That's not being in someone's debt as you would be if you were to borrow ten dollars when you are buying coffee with cent-pieces.

Anyway, the money I owe the bank has to be replaced before the money tube starts working again and my parents could send me cash. This means my parents can't send me anymore cash because I can never bring myself to tell them about it. I have cut myself off. I have no credit. I have no money tube. I have no money. If you are still reading this, you might be wondering why I spent the last $28 I had and $12 I didn't have at all at all on 2/3 of an eighth of what turned out to be not bad stuff. This is the question my drunk roommate Conor asked me after it finally came through at 4.56 this morning. I will tell you first what I told him: I shrugged, and you'll just have to hear the shrug when you read it, but I shrugged and said I have a problem.

And this is true, but it's also true that i've been walking around in a cloud of self-pity the past two weeks and that is something I can't do anymore because I spent the last $28 I had (and $12 i didn't have) on marijuana. Who can have pity on a fool? I can no longer pity myself. I did this to myself because I am lazy. I was proud in thinking that the world should come to me. My vanity allowed me to believe that I was special enough to not bother with controlling my destiny, as tho luck was a means to an end by itself.

---

Before I bought it I told myself that it's better to have dope in times of no money than money in times of no dope. Well, I have no money and I have some dope and I have some, and please don't laugh, but I have some Leonard Cohen and I feel ok. I will be very sparing with it and I won't smoke with other people when they offer. I won't play rpgs. I won't smoke very much because I don't have much in the way of food. When I don't smoke I don't eat, so this is a good thing. HA! There. Rationalization. It is good I spent my last $28 and $12 so that I eat. They are cutting off my phone tomorrow.

---

And this is the other thing. I am curious to see what I will do. I could have stretched that $28 another few days. At least until Dain left so I could put a better face on things. Most of the plans I've come up with in the time since I spent it involve a haircut. I clean up well. I hope they put that on my tombstone. He Cleans Up Well. The cleaning up well thing makes me feel uncomfortable, like fat fingers and little girl pussies. The girl I go to charges $45, and I don't want to go to anyone else. $45 or I shave it bald myself. Maybe not bald. Close.

My clothes are clean and I have some detergent. I have toothpaste and everything which is awesome. Something like deodorant would be a really big deal right now.

---

I have older male friends who are doing ok for themselves and I allow them to treat me out nights and sometimes I sleep with them if I am feeling it but there is a line I do not cross. I'm never disingenuous. No obligations and I'm not going to fleece you. I hang out with you because I want to and if I don't I don't. If you pay for me travel with you to Boston and put me up in your room with some boy from a local bar you've promised whatever and convinced him to kneel in front of me with his shaved asshole pressing up against the side of my dick then, yeah, i'm there. That sounds like fun, but I'm still buying my own cigarettes. At least. And I treat a round if I can.

The point is I am thinking of crossing the line. I am thinking of taking a sugardaddy. No ones gonna love me like someone I don't love.

I think to do this right I would need to have my own place, maintained by a few men. Unfortunately, i am too far gone for that, so if I do this thing I think I'm moving in with them. And I think I've made my choice. It would mean moving to Manhattan, but there would be a lot of space so I wouldn't have to lose my stuff. It would buy me some time. And I could spend my days working on my self. Making a schedule and really work on things for my self. Learn Spanish. Get in shape. Tan? I don't want to tan. I would have to work at something. Real write. What's better about the person I'm thinking of is I genuinely like him and care about him. And if I became a yoko I would jet cos that's wrong. No disrespect to Ms. Ono.

---

Wow. That was a stale fig newton. I b

The only sensible leadership -- the only effective leadership -- I have found, is leadership by example...to conduct one's afairs in such a way that a universal imitation of that conduct will bring about a general improvement in the human condition. That, to me, is the sum and substance of Wisdom. -- Suenteus Po, on abdicating his claim to the Ascension




How would one act?
How should one act?
How is it possible for one to live out his days without harming himself or any other living being?


The world has been my hammock.
The world is my ashtray.



The sun shines on piles of dog shit, yet is not polluted by them.



Anything I come into contact with has a profound effect
(and truth be known, affect) on who I am aware that I am.

I am not the sun.

I am angled away from my table in the garden at Phoebe's when the three of them arrive. The one facing looks familiar and when he sees me he tells his friends in an accent It is time for me to get a haircut. His friends, a girl and a guy - also foreign, shush him with affirmations that he looks beautiful as he is. And they are right. He is beautiful. Like one of David Geffen's kept boys trying to look like a Jersey rocker-cum-Williamsburg.

Was it me? Was it my stylistically deprived bedhead that motivated your small talk?

I continue reading my comic book and they talk to each other in at least three different languages. The parts in English I can barely make out as he holds court. So and So paid Scarlett Johansen and Usher to come to their party on a boat. When Bill Gates wakes up he calls him to check in, When are you coming back? I'm buying you a ticket. Out of the corner of my eye I can see him analyzing me; trying to decide if I become cute with a better haircut? I imagine him inside me and remember what David told me the night of Los Big Names: All the younger boys want to take it. It's rarer to find one who fucks.

Take it. Take everything. Not just on their backs but standing up or sitting across the table from you. Is it just the taking or is it easier to get your asshole open for the old and rich than to get a hardon? What happens in that moment when you enter someone? Is your cock a vacuum sucking up their soul or is your ass a flytrap absorbing their essence? Taking materials will get you by, but there is no point in strip mining someone if you can't take the ethereal. Right? Right.

Let us say I made Four Million Dollars he says in English before slipping into Italian or Spanish. The boy across the table from him stands up and pulls up his underwear and jeans. Gray boxer-briefs barely clinging to his stick body. I run inside for more coffee and there's a boy facing the door with thick black hair, grommits in his ears and yellow shoes like Scott. Cute. Big nose. Back outside the kept boy is speaking in what I decide is either Hebrew or Russian. This time he doesn't look in my direction at all.

I try to picture him inside me and get restless. I've slept with...I'm not sure how many people I've had sexual congress with. The number must be somewhere between one and two hundred with less than 10% of those being girls. The amazing thing is how many of those were exactly like this guy once I made it to nyc. I am a sucker for a pretty face. Some of them were obvious, starfuckers, handed down to me from friends or boys I met at parties where there was a clear difference between the hot boys and the movers and shakers. I couch my words like I've learned to do from watching my friends. I'm not a hotboy so I must be someone under the radar. After I spunk on my chest there's a silence followed with Why don't you live in Manhattan? How do you know X and Y? Disappointment in my answers, and in return i am disappointed that these encounters will always mean more to me than to them. A couple of loads to a studhorse is forgetable by the end of the week. I stay in bed the next day still dirty and trying to find Brian Eno in the smell of their jizm dried against my pillow.

Something about Myspace. People on Myspace. Too much coffee and I pack my bag to go. Words in a different language and I catch their drift and look up. As I turn the boy and girl look back at me. 'Sup I say and walk off while they nod. Asian boy with a mohawk follows me in and sits next to me at the bar while I wait for the bathroom. He thinks I'm straight and when his bag bumps in to me he apologizes while trying to read my shirt. I look at him and try to decide if he's still cute with a less attractive haircut. The chubby girl completes her toilette and I drain my piss before getting back on the subway. You never know how long the train will actually take.

And I want the Asian Mohawk boy. And the kept boy, and his friend, and Big Nose with the Same Shoes as Scott, and the Mexicans behind the counter. In a perfect world I take them all on at once and walk out of Phoebe with a heart full of myself only. How do people do it? I fall in love with the old ladies on the train and the busboy who brings me the sugar. It is so hard to tell where I end and other people begin that I end up hating or loving everybody to the same extent that I love or hate myself. How can you see yourself in me and sleep with your arms around my torso, but then relegate me to an afterthought? How can you fuck someone without seeing your own eyes staring back?

The L is filled with kids getting off of school. My Myspace is the shit one of them says. I got it all worked out. Someone who lives in my hallway has a male cat and it sprayed all over their door. Every day it is in our faces. Piss, Shit, Blood, Food; dead people on the sidewalk and you are late to wherever because someone tried and failed to get their phone out of the pit before the train came. What sense could anyone make of the world? Why am I still ordering X-Ray Specs out of the back of Archie comics? If I hit my head against this wall long enough something will give.

I understand that another has your heart; that it is his for the taking if he decides he wants it: I have only recently taken my heart back from someone who never deserved it myself.

Should he wake up and realize what he is pissing away in his havering I hope it is not too late and I hope that you go to him. I don't want you to have any doubts or regrets and I would rather see you happy than mine. I'm not even sure that possessing someone is the answer to the crossroads I find myself at right now.

We both believe in Unconditional Love. That's what drew me towards you. Lately, however, I'm not sure what Unconditional Love could be an answer to, or what the question could have possibly been. I loved Carlo without condition, and should we have found rejoinder I doubt my life would be any better.

Doubt.
I am unsure of who I am and what I want. I am doubting everything, everyone and everywhere.


The only thing I am sure of is that you make me want to be a better person. I am smoking less. I am using drugs less. I am walking from one place to another in Brooklyn instead of taking the train. I am keeping with my girl pushups and weights. There are many ways in which I wish to be a better person, but out of all the boys in my life you are one of the only ones that make me yearn for self-improvement and provoke a specific response. I am lucky to have someone so inspiring in my life. Truly.

So...
Thank you.

I very nearly broke my thumb just now. I wasn't even doing anything breakworthy. I don't really think you'd be interested in this, it's more of a note to myself. I've never broken anything before, but usually when i see people with a broken something it's the opposite side of their dominant hand. It was my left thumb and I was born right-handed. I wonder if your body instinctively shoves your submissive side into danger's way, or if it's just that your dominant hand is usually already occupied.

It would suck to lose a thumb. I use my fingers a lot.
Um...more than you little people I guess?


Man, it hurts and a vein has surfaced on the top of my thumb. I hope it goes away.

the last three days have been pretty good. weird. whatever. those stretches where my days are filled with random events and i get excited that i am me. at least i am liking myself. feel almost complete except for the nagging urge to SHARE my life with someone. with the nag comes the realization that if i had someone to share my life with, said life would be radically different and the variables might go away.

like trying to look at youself while you sleep. like trying to piss your own dick. how you gonna piss your own dick?

they would have to be really random and have a big ol' Mark of Cain slapped onto their foreheads.


two days ago the neighbors who attract the roaches clogged their toilet with blood and vomit and then kept trying to flush. my room inherited their runoff. further evidence of the AMAZING nature of the human unconcious sensory apparatus is that right before i heard the water draining into the space above my room I "felt" the water leaking, turned off all the noises in my room and waited for the confirmation from my ears.


so i've finished cleaning up after the deluge and need to finish organizing my room cos karis arrives tomorrow. people never come to my place, so it'll be nice to sleep next to someone in my own bed. one of the best things about being with him when we were together was how well we fit when we slept. to have that without the old dramas would be really sweet.

I left the house at 6am and walked to Tina's. I encountered no one but pigeons and two people in a buick. Quiet quiet. Casey Kasem was on the radio but the volume was too low for me to hear what he was saying. An R&B song came over right before my eggs. I meant to order meat but decided against. After a while people occasionally flitted in. Lone wolves, bears, mercenaries, one club couple; all with vacant faces and these words for their fellow diners: It's so quiet today.

The wind was blowing on my way back home, and the color of the graffiti seemed brighter. Corners of buildings suddenly had perspective and a grid emerged - x, y & z. Old man sweeping his stoop. Someone jogging in a construction pit.

Felt like a Last Day.


When I made it home Frog pulled up in a cab with a femmy thin guy. I held the door open and up the stairs the femme said You didn't tell him thank you.

Frog said, He's a cab driver.

i am crying a little bit although vonnegut says that we should remember the greatness of the Biafran people and not focus on their tragedy; their protein-deprived children with red hair and protruding assholes, their people massacred, their industry despoiled. He was there when the republic fell. It is odd to think of him in Biafra when the armored cars advance; with his big hair and mustache - children dangling from his fingers.

The line that urged me was this: It is probably true that all nations are great and even holy at the time of death.

And I think about the Jews in Warsaw.


As the Biafran people waited for death they spent their time begging for food, selling trinkets and doing each other's hair. What did you do when waiting for death?


on wikipedia:
In the three years of the war necessity gave birth to invention. During those three years of heroic bound, we leapt across the great chasm that separates knowledge from know-how. We built rocket, and we designed and built our own delivery systems. We guided our rockets. We guided them far; we guided them accurately. For three years, blockaded without hope of import, we maintained all our vehicles. The state extracted and refined petrol, individuals refined petrol in their back gardens. We built and maintained our airports, maintained them under heavy bombardment. Despite the heavy bombardment, we recovered so quickly after each raid that we were able to maintain the record for the busiest airport in the continent of Africa. We spoke to the world through telecommunication system engineered by local ingenuity; the world heard us and spoke back to us! We built armored cars and tanks. We modified aircraft from trainer to fighters, from passenger aircraft to bombers. In the three years of freedom we had broken the technological barrier. In the three years we became the most civilized, the most technologically advanced black people on earth. -- Gen. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu

A frum accompanied by two dominicans just stopped by and handed me a stack full of documents written in Hebrew. A rabbinical court has ruled in favor of one group of hassids against another, and the management of our sweatshop will change hands at the end of the month. I told him that I couldn't read Hebrew, and he smiled and told me that it was ok. The dominicans behind him kept their arms crossed and nodded sagely. Then one of them said very loudly in English (like Americans do to foreign tourists) one word: Laundry Rooms.

And then they were gone. I wait for Shelly, our loft israeli to come home and interpret the papers I have been served.

What an unnerving day.

I usually pretend that I bought the Taft house from the proceeds of my own industry, but this is a lie. When I was 18 my parents had enough of me and were worried about future embarrasment so they bought me the house and wrote it off for taxes. I hated it at first. I hated that I was being kicked out of what I thought of as my home and moved into this cabin on the outskirts of FreeTown, a lawless and corrupt crack village.

I might have appreciated it more if I had earned it with my sweat, but instead I turned it into a flophouse. In the end I loved that house more than I thought possible. Leaving TaftHaus was the hardest part. I didn't tell anyone I was leaving Louisiana until two weeks before my departure, and then quickly rented it to friends who would at some point during each month deposit their rent into the money tube. I was forced to sell it at the end of 2004 to keep myself afloat in nyc.

This picture is from the first time I went back to Louisiana. I was surprised by how clean it was. They kept all my stuff and worked with it. When I went home for the holidays this past Christmas I stopped by the house again. It was filthy once more, but still filled with my stuff. I'm not sure what I am sposed to be homesick for or where.

In 2004 Nemo, the Dandy and I went to Coney Island.

It was the first and only time I've been to Coney Island. Almost everything was closed. We went to play skeeball, and skeeball we did. Shortly after this picture was taken Nemo went back to Asheville, the Dandy went on his European tour and I went back to Louisiana for "rehab". I think. It's really hard to remember this time in my life, except for the smell of acetone.

Acetone always brings me back.


I know I'm posting a lot of pictures today. It has a lot to do with the boxes I'm opening the I haven't touched since I moved out of the factory on Hope. Also, three people from lj have tracked down my myspace and I'm wondering what all my secrecy was about. Even tho I still have three years left before the statue of limitations runs out on my last big fuck-up, it doesn't seem as important anymore. Plus, if I post all the pictures today, when I freak out in a few days and want to remove the posts, it will be a really easy batch to make private.