GPOYW: The Damn, Where You Been? Edition. This is a photo of me drinking free coffee. It was taken by my friend Peter Beste, who is better known for his photos of scary black metal Norwegians and scary Houston gangsta rappers who pull guns on him. This image reminds me of those days when coffee was more about leisure than desperation. It also reminds me of the short-lived Balducci’s on 14th Street, which had the most free food of any New York supermarket ever. You could walk through the aisles in fifteen minutes, not buy anything, and walk out full. Maybe that’s why they closed.

So where have I been? Never you mind. I’ll be back shortly.

GPOYW Summer Threads Edition: It’s been a while since I posted a gratuitous picture of myself, but I was feeling kind of dapper this morning with a new haircut, some new clothes, and the first couple of days of summer session under my belt. Also, my boyfriend is in Peru, and if he gets down from Machu Picchu long enough to check the Internet — which is probably the first thing I’d do! — I wanted him to know that I’m OK. Because, you know, my last post was kind of sad.

It’s GPOYW time, but I’m not about to take a picture of myself — because it’s also finals week, and I don’t look so good. So instead, I took a picture of my “desk,” which is in reality, my dining room table. As you can see, I have not dined here in weeks.

Here is the anatomy of my Wednesday:

¹Vitamin Water. I’m not sure that I eat so well whenever I have this much to do. So I try to balance copious amounts of coffee with placebo vitamin drinks like this one, called “Defense.” The bottle claims that “this combination of zinc and fortifying vitamins can help keep you healthy as a horse,” and I believe everything the bottle tells me.

²Four Hundred Compact Discs. The CDs on this table constitute all that is left of my once thousands-strong compact disc collection. In between writing papers about how brilliant of a teacher I am going to be, I’ve been ripping whatever I need onto MP3 so I can go to the Ipodmeister and trade it all in for a 160 GB iPod and some cash. Some of the better titles in this picture include the one and only Mark Hollis solo record, Nirvana’s Bleach, Steve Lawler’s Dark Drums, and a Kinks anthology collection. Goodbye cruel plastic.

³Bhagavad-gita: As It Is. Once upon a time, I was a Hare Krishna devotee. I became a monk when I was 16 years old and went to India several times in search of something. Ultimately, at 36, I can tell you I didn’t find whatever “it” was. But Indian philosophical concepts taught me a lot about rhetoric, debate, analytical thought, and the tenets of logic, and as my 4.0 GPA will attest, I am grateful for that. I am currently in the middle of a paper about Buddhism, in which I attempt to explain to my professor how a philosophy that accepts the authority of the Vedas without accepting the predominant foundation of all Vedic thought is inherently flawed. I realize this makes no sense to almost all of you.

⁴ This is where I get all meta!

⁵ I’ve had this Converse gift certificate since the 20th Anniversary Mergefest last summer. They were giving these to anyone in a band wearing Converse, and my boyfriend — who played in Spent — happened to be wearing a pair of Converse I gave him. So he paid it forward and it’s been sitting on my desk ever since. I plan to redeem this gift as soon as possible, I swear.

⁶ Introduction to Emptiness. This is the most infuriating book I’ve ever read. Imagine if someone attempted a self-proclaimed “rational” explanation of a philosophical concept by saying something like, “Vitamin Water is wet, so therefore, reason dictates it must be red!” Because that’s the kind of dimestore logic we’re talking about here. The rest of my day will be spent composing four more pages about why this makes no sense. Wish me luck.

GPOYW: The Photo Noir Edition. This one is from a photo shoot at my apartment for the now-defunct Mass Appeal magazine, taken by Emmett Shine. The minimalist album sleeve that hangs on the wall to my left is for the 12” single of “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk” by Pet Shop Boys. (That’s all it says.) Which seems appropriate for the energy I’m giving off.

Also, as you may have noticed, there’s a low-posting frequency this week. I’m kind of busy. But I’ll be back soon — and with a new Nervous Acid mixcast — so in the meantime, here are the download links you’ll need to catch up.

GPOYW — which this week stands for Gorilla Pictures on Your Website — is all about the Bronx Zoo this week, mostly because I needed to give New Yorkers (and potential tourists) an invaluable tip: Going to the zoo in the pouring rain is like being given your own private zoo for the day. No one was there. Literally. Just do whatever you want. Like this gorilla, who ran up to the window and took a seat next to me so that he could eat some celery with a friend. For the record, I usually only have awww! moments like these with puppies.

GPOYW: Things Were So Much Simpler Then Edition. This is me, roughly sixteen years ago, standing in front of ABC-No-Rio when you could still buy heroin from dudes on the corner whispering, “Black death!” into your ear on the Lower East Side. Because it was 1994, I was wearing a backpack, a red windbreaker with the Embrace album cover silkscreened on the back, and a winter cap — even though it was probably spring. (On my feet, most likely, was a pair of canvas Israeli military shoes that my friends and I were kind of obsessed with at the time. We called them “Vegan Warriors.”) I was 20 years old, I made a living by publishing a fanzine, and my rent to live in Manhattan was $300 a month. Salad fucking days, people.

Photo: Brian Maryansky