one good day of the week / and I’ll be up again
Wednesday 9 January 2002 | I like a cookie
Yesterday Joanne the Lunch Lady on Radio Free Santa Fe claimed that Bono was only, like, 34 years old. It’s almost impossible to believe, and indeed M. nearly fell into the dishwater last night with laughing when I told him. He’s so cute (M., that is—not that battered, dissipated, leathery rock star with the ragged swooning alto pipes, who looks fifty if a day). Someday when my bloggery skills improve I’ll post a picture of my spouse—for now the main thing to say is that he’s utterly beautiful, as all my older female friends remind me: a treasure: a gorgeous, brilliant, attentive, thoughtful male—and I can’t for the life of me figure out what more it is I seem to be wanting these days.
In some sense, craving is habitual—what Herself calls attachment. It’s all either attachment or aversion. And I think I spent too many formative years lying in bed in the dark, awake, songs stuck in my head, poems lodged in my throat, something beating in my chest saying more, more, more, more—but now? why continue this swollen fumbling practice? how about me enjoying the moment for once?
It would be the more meaningful if there were any object for my fixation: but there is not. Perhaps it’s only the recent influx of torridly romantic films, as M. and I have been renting luxuriant numbers of DVDs for viewing on my new…yes…G4 PowerBook. (Alas, my mom didn’t want to wait until the Combo drives were out, so I can only read CDs and DVDs, not burn them…still, if that’s the biggest problem I ever encounter in life, I’m practically divine.)
We started with High Fidelity and Wonder Boys then went on to watch The Age of Innocence, Out of Africa, and some other films of longing and renunciation I can’t currently remember. [We’ve also seen some corking films which have nothing to do with the heterosexual fantasy, such as Tigerland (Colin Farrell is magnificently careless while managing to convey how implicated he is at the same time), The Dreamlife of Angels, which maybe has more to do with what can happen to a woman when her myth collapses, and such spacious standbys as Gandhi.]
And. And as well, I stayed up one night until one a.m. (keeping a grumpy M. awake in the other room) talking to my ex-girlfriend in Iowa City. She lives in Paris and has for the last 8 years, off and on, but was home visiting her parents and we seized the excuse for a cheaper phone call. Funnily enough, she has the same first name I do, which was very confusing when we were dating. She’s a poet, and, when I knew her best, had wicked green eyes and an indifferent streak and velvety skin and would troll around in front of me with different men and women who were conspicuously not me. You can imagine that after about, oh, say, four years of this I might finally wise up and move on. Which is what I did, to her occasional bewilderment and resentment. But we can still talk shop, and we did—a few hours of poe biz gossip, whining about day jobs, and trying to figure out how we were going to get NEAs (her with over 30 pages of poetry published, me with a scant 17, so I will almost certainly have to wait another 2 years even to apply).
But interspersed with this innocent collegiality came some sense of ache or remorse, things undone, nights I played guitar and sang, late nights we danced together in the college-town gay clubs called the North Star or Pearl Street, early morning hours we drank and talked and well the rest I leave to your vivid imagination. She dyed her hair black and had an emerald at the side of her nose and was afraid of ghosts in the South Hadley graveyard. She bought me a fifth of tequila and shoved me up on stage. So there was that in there, as well. It’s nothing active, or even dormant—it’s like reading history books and wishing that you had been around to see their desperate, human events take place yourself. It’s like Tori singing not tonight, Josephine. It’s aging, and watching approach the onset of senescence in shapes and sounds and forms I once loved ferociously, even to my damage and despair.
So I suspect that all this input is partially what’s to blame for convincing me that when I peer in my cup, it looks, as Herself says sternly, half empty. That and poetry—writing, I mean. It can make a girl feel rent with something, a gasp or gap, a kind of reaching outward. And then she tries to model something, fashion an encasement, for all this swirling affect which needs a focus, a fix. And there isn’t one, other than (see fascination with senescence, above) a handful of older men with whom to have purely cerebral relationships. Yet my bond with M. has become that, as well. And you know what it’s like to be a brain slut.
christ I’m out of my mind
I need to be loved
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