“I feel happy, I feel happy!”
Tuesday 26 September 2006 | 2 cookies in the jar
It seems that, among the slender yet stubbornly persistent throngs, a florist in Britain (?!) who makes lovely arrangements, and a drug rehab counselor in Colorado (?!?), at least, have enjoyed reading our insanity drama-mongering self-indulgent our prose. Either that or those spam bots are getting really clever. Their comments leave me speechless with gratitude, either than anyone would read in the first place or that they’d be so kind as to say so. So maybe we’re not quite ready to go on the cart yet. (”I think I’ll go for a walk…” “You’re not fooling anyone, you know!”)
Besides Mandarin’s in Spain and God’s in her heaven and it’s bloody lonely with no blog.
September’s a bitch, and then to add grave injury to its insult there’s October. At least at some point the cottonwoods along East Alameda will break open into gold and that will be something. This weekend saw snow on the Sangres and thick black tar coating my brain until every turn of thought reaffirms, nothing good can ever happen. Medication management appoint on Friday with the Cool Psychiatrist (”Yeah, I’d say we’re done with Lamictal.”). At present, all I can say is that I’m no longer alternately lying on the brown shag crapeting PRNH for four days, cleaning house viciously as if preparing the canopic jar, studying the hot-water heater until its fatal mysteries were revealed, writing Post-It notes to nonexistent EMTs (danger: possible high concentration of CO2/natural gas) and sleeping curled up underneath the desk with all my clothes on and all the house lights left up bright, mind diamond-pointed toward one end, asking not why build but only what tools. The Brujo finally disregarding the commanding stay-away-I’m-a-lycanthrope phone calls and showing up on Saturday night and behaving suspiciously like someone who cares. Rain was falling on my hands / I don’t want to live through that again. He prowled around my house on Friday, wet snow clumping down, half-convinced I was already dead but deterred by my darkened locked door. I don’t remember much of Friday other than the ferocious craving, around two in the morning, for a vanilla Coke float. Of the kind I last did not enjoy sitting across from a sweet-faced young Monk at Carrow’s, him wearing my dark blue sweatshirt and looking innocent and relieved while the effort of normality seared into my obliging gut and I faked everything I knew how—which wasn’t much, but it may have been enough for that interminable hour.
You’d think I’d be done recasting these year-old miseries into sentences but I don’t seem to be. Creamy white flecked with dark Tahitian vanilla, dredged in black frozen crusts of spiced syrup. Some say the world will end in mire; some say in mice.
I’m writing this in the dark of the Brujo’s unlit study, the “developmentally foreclosed” Fiona snoring blissfully on her futon in the corner and the B.’s housemate watching what sounds like Dr. No in the living room. The B., similarly fragile, is at his Tuesday night AA meeting and I’m typing this in the effort of trying to remember why people stay alive. The only things that seem worth it to me right now come with keys and phrasing and strings and notes and tones, and none of that brings home rent, at least not for me.
Autumn equinox went back one casualty short. Can a solstice. What another winter costs. His face craggy and kind and sane, eyes glimmering with intelligence above the collar of a black wool coat I hadn’t seen since March. Can I care fully for a fully beloved, however racked or riddled by nothing; he who of all held it, handed and heard, deserves and proved, believes; somehow loves.
While contemplating all this, still sucking fingertips slammed in the great steel door of life, I offer you not Stevie but Rickie (”I was much too far out all my life…”); singing “Stewart’s Coat” from 1994’s Traffic in Paradise. The yearning two-line riff that’s stuck in my head is actually the bridge of the song right before it, “Altar Boy” (but sometimes I see you in berries and weeds / brushing your teeth with licorice seeds) but the entirety of this song feels more germane, for now. I’d be even more hypocritical not to admit that my favorite living poets play nor lute nor lyre but Alvarez, Taylor and Böse.
•
hold me love
I can’t sleep again
I have to kiss your lips
I want to lay here next to him
I remember
walking in the rain
rain was falling on my hands
I don’t want to live through that again
outside
it hardly gets dark now
lovers walking in the park now
children singing songs of when
they’ll make all their dreams come true
I’m in love with you
it only takes love
love is a healing thing
when you give everything
you love in the world
the world gives you love
to hold on to
remember who
when summer
is over
somewhere
older there
remember
just give me many chances
I’ll see you through it all
just give me time to learn to crawl
in September
when the rain comes
and the wind blows
I would see you walking in your coat
and if you’ll let me
I will keep you here inside the stars
I will love the sound of my sheets
since you have moved beneath them
just give me many chances
I’ll see you through it all
just give me time to learn to crawl
•
Some actual links for you—speaking of Monty Python, please hasten to watch this brilliant YouTube geegaw (who the fuck makes these things, and how do they have so much time on their hands?!) via Life After Coffee, who says, much more eloquently than we ever could: “Every once in a while two geek worlds collide and the resulting geekiness is several orders of magnitude higher than the sum of the two worlds. This is one of those cases.”
Further YouTube inanity: One night some months ago (summer? hot? what?), the Brujo and I started joking about Esperanto, which led naturally enough to IMDbing Incubus with William Shatner, which led to this choke-on-your-bubble-gum trailer. It may actually be a film with some merit; we don’t know because we haven’t seen it; but you gotta admit, the trailer doesn’t bode particularly well. Godard/Bergman/Tarkovsky never made films in Esperanto. Or starring William Shatner either. Probably a good reason for that.
2 cookies in the jar
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I check in every coupla days, after I finished the marathon. I have been thinking about self-loathing recently. On those occasions when I have been *really* bad, self-loathing is hardly an issue. Instead, self-loathing it seems is a creation of my own imagination and will, a real demon with its own existence but dependent almost entirely on me for its (their) existence. So I have been saying a rowdy Fuck You to all of them, and going about my business.
encomium is a fine word. Anyhoo, you make The Brujo sound all too heroic. You’re the one with the guts. All he has to do is hang around. It’s an easy job. The Rickie song is with Kottke, que no?