Event for the release of “Sentences I Never Said”

Release Party for Sentences I Never Said May 5, at 5:55 pm

On Saturday, April 5, at 5:55, please join me at the studio, 618 east 9th street in the Lower East Side of New York City.
There will be 55 signed copies and a poster available for sale, plus free bookmarks.

Sentences I Never Said is a game my long-time roommate and I used to play. The rules go like this: We take turns saying statements that someone might never say but are completely made up. For Example: “I am so happy your sister’s couch potato boyfriend is still sleeping on our couch after two weeks, is a Sentence I Never Said, so please move him out.”

Or “I love that endless guitar solo” is one of the Sentences I Never Said (since I am such a techno kid). My roommate worked at record labels, and I created a lot of graphics for them and the clubs so I could go to the shows for free. And we would be out all the time. A typical sentence my roommate would never say would be: “Can we go home now?”

There are sentences I wish I had said —or wish I had said more clearly. And sentences I didn’t listen to. I must admit: I am a very bad listener, as I’ve discovered. That’s why I want to warn you —the third story is about suicide. A kind of homicidal suicide, if such a thing exists, is an unintended death, at least in my view. Sometimes, I changed the characters’ names. Most of the stories in this booklet wrote themselves, a form of auto-fiction because we inevitably tell ourselves stories to make sense of what happened. In my mind, they became truths; memory is never accurate.

One story takes place around the vortex of Ninth Street, specifically the Lower East Side block between Avenues B and C. My studio/store is in the middle of the block, surrounded by a beautiful backyard and community gardens. We live in a bubble within a bubble, which is New York City, a place filled with endless stories waiting to be told. You think I told them wrong, and I will ask you to look at the cover: I never said it.