Work In Progress

6/10/11

Nick Burd's "If You're Lonely"

My friend Nick wrote this lovely response to my series If You're Lonely.

I adore it, and hope to include it in a publication of this work someday.

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If You're Lonely

By Nick Burd

Presented as an outline, a controlled sense of emptiness. He was a boy who never learned how to throw a football until the day in a field behind his college dorm, he did. He is unemployed and only leaves the house for bad groceries (snack cakes, orange soda, cough syrup) and to find me twisting in my foyer, too shy to speak. When my voice does come to life, it’s to ask if he would like something to drink. He’s had too much already. I want to put things in him. I want the outline to be filled. There is a note somewhere in the apartment with his screename, my screename, my password, and an apology. If we get married, I will read it at the reception and people will laugh. If I never get married, it will be because I believe in love.

I have made out with pillows, fucked furniture, caressed countertops, argued with light fixtures. I have opened my door to an empty hall and thought, Ghost knock. I have moved from one coast to another and found myself followed by the shirtless and the damned, some of them so similar to the faces I left behind that while I might get their names wrong, I usually have their flaws right. My secret is that I am the same. I am no different. I’ve taken many roads. I was 14 and fucked into oblivion the garage behind my childhood home, a garage I painted during the Summer of No Love, and it has made all the difference. This is why I am always afraid they are going to kill me until I find myself breathing at the ceiling, feeling more alive than ever.

None of them know how to dance. Movement is secondhand and calculated. Always contextual but never hythmic. If you turn on the music, they tune it out. They slouch on the red velvet bench and look around for something cool. You can tell they go out too much because they think the remix sounds more right than the original. It’s this kind of thinking that takes us far away from the artist alone in his room. Try this: take a sip of whatever you’re drinking and then stare into your bedroom and say, “Presented as an outline, a controlled sense of emptiness.” Listen for what comes back.

If you’re lonely, stand close to the window until your reflection brings you comfort. Wait patiently for the moment when the other self breaks away, when the arc of his hand doesn’t quite match yours, when you start to realize he has succeeded in areas you have failed. Get online. Fall into a sinkhole of one-handed communication. Send photographs that portray you as easygoing, popular, naked, big dicked, up for anything, glamorous, supine, wallflowesque, constantly in motion. Describe yourself as hipsterish. Say you like Bjork, the Scissor Sisters, 80’s hair metal. Lie through your teeth and pay attention to the hiss it makes. Nonsmoker. Versatile. Athletic. Swimmers build. Negative. Five foot eleven and a half. Seven and a half inches. Dirty blonde. Ambivalent. Loving. Just a few blocks away.

Nick Burd attended the University of Iowa and received his MFA from the New School. His debut novel The Vast Fields of Ordinary was published in May 2009 by Dial Books for Young Readers and received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Library School Journal, and BookList. The New York Times Sunday Book Review hailed the title as “fascinating and dreamy” and “the best kind of first novel” and also named it a Notable Book of 2009. In 2010, The Vast Fields of Ordinary won the American Library Association’s inaugural Stonewall Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. The book is currently being translated into German and has been optioned for film. His new novel, Andrew Frank, is forthcoming from Dial Books for Young Readers in summer 2011. Nick lives and writes in Brooklyn. [http://www.nick-burd.com]

6/6/11

Meeting... AJ, 2011

Here is the latest in my Meeting series... AJ. Each image is 8" x 12", and are hung in succession. You will also notice the shift in opacity, which is intentional. Also included is a detail of the larger piece.