1. Poet/bartender Shappy served my requisite Peach Schnapps.
1a. He is a bad influence and should be spanked.
2. LDM host Todd Zuniga is suave and debonair, and vaguely resembles my new 80s rock obsession Nick Gilder.
2a. I didn’t tell Todd about Nick Gilder.
3. Nelly Reifler kept giving me a paper clip all night, and told her it was “too twee” of us to keep giving it to each other back and forth.
3a. She also kicked my ass in the first round.
3b. It occurs to me this might have been part of her strategy all along.
4. I read a digested version of the Footlicker Story, and I still went over time (7 minutes? 8 minutes?).
4a. Drat!
5. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz had warned me. “Read as fast as [Henry] Rollins does,” she said.
6. Instead I read it like Sonny Rollins.
6a. Or Droopy Dog.
7. During the Death Match judging, the Paris Review judge person called my piece a “long journal entry.”
7a. Which it wasn’t.
7b. This miffed me. I thought the night was supposed to be fun, nonjudgmental and all non sequitur-like.
7c. WTF?
7d. Later, during the break, the Paris Review lady complimented my story.
7e. And I was all like, “Yeah, not bad for a ‘long journal entry,’ right?”
7f. And she was all like, “It’s gonna be like that?”
7g. And then I was all like, “Yes, it is in fact going to be like that.”
8. Deep Image Poet Chris, my friend, stole an issue of Opium, and I will shortly PayPal them 10 bucks to make this theft right.
8a. Christopher Kennedy, who read superbo poems in the next half, beat out a guy who wrote a detective novel in the style of Ernest Hemingway.
8b. His passage employed the term “vaginal grip.”
8c. I then noticed a pattern through the fog of Jagermeister shots.
8d. The judges, while I suppose not prudes, definitely chose the less-blue pieces from each segment.
9. There were NYU interns to the left and right of me in the cab to the afterparty, and they were all more sophistated at 19 years old than I am now.
10. I myself am pretty sophisticated. So that’s a compliment.
10a. I couldn’t believe how well-attended this thing was.
11. I had a blast.
11a. I woke up with a fake mustache glued to my forehead.
11b. I think I had it on me for the entire afterparty.
