i am a bastard of nature with urban sensibilities, a smiling bull-in-a-china-shop of a fellow. i call people on nonsense and go to the wall over ideals.

let me save you some time.

if you sympathetically vibrate when you hear

"fine dining" "polished" "lifestyle" "gentleman" "soul mate" "generous" "culture" "partner in crime" "long walks [anywhere]" "shopping" or "golf"

we will be cursed in any attempt to approximate relationship. i've got buckets of other nice qualities but the preceding is generally not part of me - at least not in a "romantic" or soft-focus sense.

i'm an experientialist who likes to push his nose into experience. i'm not shy and i'll instigate in a pinch.

+ + + + +

i'm also an intellect headquartered in the working class with a physical motor that runs hard. i like to fuck wildly and think about it too much when i'm not. i also like books and music and think about them, though not so much as sex. i curse for punctuation and scatter my dialogue with obscure words that are often mispronounced and sometimes willfully butchered.

wordy, dirty and down.

i also have an artisanal haircut that could fairly be called outsider art - and likely remain inscrutable to nearly all of you. if we do meet it makes it easy to spot me.

sapiosexual.

i fence with life and play orbit capture with strong women. opinionated, creative, anti-authoritarian by nature. independent. intensely loyal. compassionate troublemaker, master of context, fool for detail, champion of the underdog, enemy of the state, plays well with others. recovering pedagogue, steiner schools division.

atypical, amoral, terminally ethical. wannabe suburban wheatgrass farmer, feminist in wolf's clothing, unrepentant slam dancer, machinegunner housewife. culturally insurgent, aesthetically fluent, politically inept.

baltimore still defines me.

age is accurate. GGG.

lately trying to focus on who i'm being in the moment as opposed to what i'm doing - prophylactic against creeping narcissism.

last couple days crushing under unmanageable man-love for bleached's drummer. so i'm pretending to stalk him/them.

+ + +

i was the primary caregiver for my daughters for their first twelve plus years and remain deeply connected to them all. the girls are now scattering into their adult lives in different regions of the country and i'm looking to get into some variant on an arts-based nonprofit.

i like to see live music involving quirky or lesser-known names in small clubs and bootleg spaces. i used to do a lot of photography and i'd like to get back to that.

i either stumble across or search out abandoned industrial zones, old manufacturing neighborhoods and urban wastelands and do some serious exploration. i love sprawling, battered old brick buildings that have yet to be repurposed. paterson, brooklyn and baltimore still have surprising amounts of this stuff left. camden is, unfortunately, a vacant lot. trenton and philly are on my expedition list.

ask me what i think about gentrification some time if you're ready to get an earful.

i do some of the usual workout suspects. i've got caving gear that i haven't used in too long. rope and harnesses and stuff.

getting purposely lost. kids. driving. parallel parking. overthinking. formerly really good at blacking out and taking anything i was handed without asking.

i know the absolute best spot to watch the fireworks on the fourth.

until recently i've been really terrible at setting goals, but here's a small one: i want to be the last person on earth with a dumbphone.

i can render convention invisible.

that i am in their way when they are texting on the sidewalk.

i stole that.

eyes, intensity. asylum haircut. diddy-boppin' on the street.

auto-da-fé, the complete lockpick pornography, the orphan master's son, grimm's fairy tales, the motion of light in water, in sunlight and in shadow, matterhorn, moon palace, the chemistry between us, the idiot, alif the unseen, 1Q84, alice's adventures in wonderland/through the looking glass, nanjing 1937, times square red times square blue, netherland, the shock doctrine, the inferno, dhalgren, the fountain at the center of the world, the administration of fear, the fairy tales of oscar wilde, frog and toad, killer on the road, parasites like us, the philosophy of freiheit, against the day, goodnight moon, skagboys, a naked singularity, the loser, pynchon, delillo, delany, murakami, helprin, welsh.

+i sincerely hope you found the alchemist to be one of the most extravagantly painful books you have ever read+

+in other news, that john waters quote about books and fucking seems almost endemic amongst y'all+

female trouble, the affair, bad guy, city of life and death, biutiful, beautiful, spring/summer/fall/winter . . . and spring, 3-iron, the night the lights went out, waltz with bashir, cosmopolis, taxi driver, short bus, brazil, full metal jacket, amores perros, lifeboat, bra boys, storm surfers, john waters, kim ki-duk, alejandro gonzález iñárritu, hitchcock.

+subtitles+

akino arai, archie bell & the drells, the oliver north boy choir, notes to myself, los campesinos!, japanther, chumbawamba, bonaparte, bliss 'n esso, melt-banana, boom boom satellites, butter 08, bleached, thelonious monk, reggie watts, tenniscoats, queen suitcase, buck 65, 65daysofstatic, 7L & esoteric, pairs, ry cooder, charlie parker, charlie parr, ringo deathstarr, NYOil, eternal summers, mclusky, the maccabees, mooncake, movemeant, spangle call lilli line, shina ringo, rachid taha, noise addict, sonic youth, son volt, my bloody valentine, slowdive, school food punishment, silversun pickups, so cow, snakefarm, the mountain goats, the eels, hedgehog, deerhoof, bow wow wow, field mice, field mouse, skip skip ben ben, mika miko, the coathangers, camera obscura, afroman, silver jews, shellac, gang of four, four tet, my little airport, helicopter girl, petty booka, megapuss, frank black, big black, big joe little joe, bob wills, earl sweatshirt, john coltrane, ninjasonik, mono, polysics, parliament/funkadelic, p.s. eliot, leo kottke, supercar, carsick cars, husker du, sugar, okay, low, hello saferide, gangstagrass, stereopony, pony up!, new young pony club, the tom-tom club, the go! team, miles davis, the minutemen, the editors, the subways, the cardigans, air, atmosphere, explosions in the sky, the death set, the kills, minor threat, the jesus and mary chain, the jesus lizard, mystery squid, fra-foa, charles mingus, cadence weapon, nouvelle vague, screaming females, seagull screaming kiss her kiss her, fucked up, puffy, you say party!, say hi, why?, the velvet underground, xui xui, x, world's end girlfriend, C-86, motown, northern soul, hardcore, slowcore, chipcore, cuddlecore, shitcore, piedmont blues, bluegrass, twee, texas swing, jangle pop, bebop, hip hop, noise.

jonathan schwartz.

++

dan savage, the stranger, the new york times, the guardian, AAWW, BBC, thought catalog, a softer world, al jazeera

+fifty shades of grey and now the marketing juggernaut trailing nose to stern. you knew your own mind on bondage way before this nonsense started. that is all+

+whatever television you watch is no concern of mine but understand that no matter how badly i want to impress you i will immediately blank on any show references. feel free to throw tropes about weather or the F train instead+

foodwise? i like street food and night markets. hereabouts, i like ottomanelli's and anything in one of the various chinatowns. i'll drive to baltimore if i'm craving a good crab cake. i like going to H-Mart and looking for the octopuses in the tanks and seven-kilo bags of kimchi. m noodles on metropolitan. mitsuwa in edgewater. super 88 in allston.

+i'm pretty unlikely to be found in any joint with the word "artisanal" anywhere anything; or less likely, any place with a dress code+

i like pho, banh mi and durian. i abhor dressing up and would wear my standard work uniform of jeans/tee/sneaks/hoodie all day and night every day if i could. sometimes i do.

i watch what i eat in the sense that i try to eat as low on the food chain as i possibly can. it's hard for me to enjoy extravagances when i think about how many people can't find daily basics.

you foodies can all go fuck yourselves in a tank of spinach foam. serious.

+in my world "fine dining" is hot and wrapped in wax paper+

barbara kruger. rothko. bruce nauman. shiva, ganesh and hanuman; not necessarily in that order.

i appreciate a naive vision.

+i will not be going to "punk" at the met; thank you, anna wintour, for clarifying this+

yoshitomo nara. all his stuff speaks to me so strongly that i need to namecheck him somewhere. he's a standing ebay search. no big deal maybe but my only other searches are for jeep parts and a good woman. not so many listings for women on ebay, though.

+there's a nara show at pace until the end of june. and koons is running just around the block at gagosian+

the laws of physics, the laws of attraction, the laws of karma.

anarchy, embryology and thermodynamics.

WNYC, uberlube and dopamine. i'm a contrarian, contrarians get nine maybe ten . . . synaesthesia.

sex. whatever's next. refining a 1993 cherokee. all my kids.

people, places and things. is margaret thatcher dead yet? yes she is, finally.

why so much attention here to the oxford comma?

the tsarnaev kid's body was rejected by four cemeteries in three states before finally going to ground in virginia. i do not recall any such issue when burying any of our string of mass shooters. this divergence bugs me no little bit.

es ist nur eine frage der zeit.

working and then driving into the weekend.

i like quirky non-datey venues for a first meeting; say the entrance ramp to the lincoln tunnel on 30th and 10th any weeknight around 9pm? watch out for the hudson yards construction; bring signage and a hard hat.

i lean left.

you're looking for something beyond the usual event horizon and you find some of this appealing; or better, compelling. hopefully, neither "yoga" nor "4u" appears anywhere in your user name. nothing against yoga.

you want to support folsom east before the arrivistes shut it down forever.

+too late, it's gone+

if you're bright and fit with a noteworthy libido, we'll get along. if you're wildly intelligent and insatiable i'll drop everything else right now and go devotional.

with that out of the way, i'll add that i'm not big on dating and it's been a while.

there's a lot of projection in online dating. sometimes i receive messages that distress me in their misunderstanding. i'm certain that if i were a woman i would recognize a distant violence, and i am sorry for the need and pain and confusion therein.

like everyone else, i only want to be understood.