It’s 1 AM and I have now been awake for 39 hours straight for a reason that involves zip codes and home sale prices and that’s about all that is worth mentioning. What I have is not exactly synesthesia, but I do have an acutely aware sense of smell, especially of those things that are on the not so pleasing end of the sensory scale. I keep smelling bad flatulence, cat piss, rotting corpses… I am starting to think of this like some of my friends think of detox diets, lemonade fasts, confession, etc. It’s been years since I last stayed up all night, and that time it was writing and recording a bad song. This time it was a bad map. But I do feel like I a resetting my clock. Tonight was one of my most relaxed in recent memory. I felt like most of the synapses were firing properly, so I went to see a baseball game. The boys of summer in this here town put up numbers that would have won all of their recent scoreless games. I stepped into a pile of melting summer bubble gum today that is still collecting gravel on my out-of-season boots. I should learn how to dress better for this weather. The words “I love you” can save a life. I will sleep like a baby...
I guess I wonder in some ways if you told me about Nate and you, and the absence of a relationship between the two of you, as a means of trying to sway me from moving to Austin. I mean, as Robert pointed out tonight, of course I say I don’t want to hear about the two of you breaking up, or any other news really, but, at the same time I relish every tidbit and am happy for myself at least on some level. Of course I’ve wanted you to say something that would make me not go. I have wanted lots of people and institutions to do something that would make me not go. I know that things are going to be okay for me and for you both someday. I just still can’t shake the feeling that I was so much more content with you in my life. I think those days are gone though. I go every Tuesday to exorcize that line of thought. I don’t believe that it would be good for me or you to really be back in a relationship with each other, at least now, and possibly ever. I have to let that go and I am making progress. You are the main reason I have found to stay, but if I believe what I say above, that’s no good reason. It’s amazing that I can read the self-help books and go to the therapy sessions and then when facing the difficult situation, when facing you and all of these mixed-up emotions, I cannot figure out what to do. I love...
Today was one of those go to the Korean market and get a ham sandwich and eat at your desk type days at work. I am working on the zip code delineated home sales data map and apparently the data is not mean prices, but median prices, and you cannot do an accurate weighted average of median data. I had to google the difference because I could not quite extract that one from the catacombs of my brain. I used to be a designer, now I am becoming, reluctantly, something else. So I go to the Korean market and feel that the humidity is down so the low nineties don’t feel like they will later on this Summer. Outside the market there are two semi-homeless white guys talking about what to buy and they decide upon an Icehouse and a pack of Rave cigarettes. I know the Icehouse trick from baseball games, as cheap as the other beers but with more kick, but you will find it kicking you in the head in the morning, but I figure living in this moment is probably what these guys want. It’s probably what I would want if I were in their shoes as well. So I find myself in line behind the one of them sent to procure the goods in the market, and upon hearing his total, he begins digging vigorously in his sock, partially removing his shoe, and produces several singles and probably three dollars in coins. I wondered how he was able to walk. I wondered was this one of the safe ways of the street. Then I...
Today there was three homeless folks that I saw, met, and felt sorry for. I could not give the money because it was not Friday, which is my alms day. I gave a cigarette today, and a light, and realized that I need to stop smoking, except I do not want to think myself better than that. It is the beginning of summer in this crowded and cluttered city. In this city in which you cannot even pick your nose in peace on the way home because there are eyes from every angle always watching you. There is a Miller Light bottle cap in my pocket because I didn’t know where to put it. It is a badge of shame or honor depending on the crowd the you inhabit when you confess. I am so tired of confessions. I just want the truth to be real, to be something that we can all touch. My body is all swollen with the mess. The heat gets in my head. My body feels old. To day was the longest day of the year. There was a party to go to at a recording studio. I thought of Gatsby. You should always have a party on this day of the year. I just wish we were all in linen and hats and that Dorothy Parker was telling jokes in corner. I listened to This American Life today and the episode was about camp. Summer camps, places we made friends and lovers, maybe even got married, cried and wiped each other’s tears away. Places we were away from mom and dad in which...
I guess I am truly getting better. I let the solstice pass with only the usual thoughts about Gatsby, and thoughts of my summer project, and it was only today, two full days past, that I remembered mine and your beginnings – shooting stars, kisses, and all – and it made me...
It’s not for the want of beauty that I still want you. Not that you are not beautiful. It is not that at all. It is not for the fact that I have the image of you in my stupid little head that still wants you, or the image, and it all gets too fucked up. It is not for the want of Jesus. It is not for the want of headaches. It is not for the lack of tennis. It is not for the lack of sex. It is not for the lack of your skin next to mine… Hold on, I went too far. It is for the lack of of you lying close to me. Skin on skin. It is for the lack of you in my life. It is for those lacks. It is for the lack of me never giving up. It is for the want of a non-giving-up you. It is for the want of growing old with you in my arms, night after night, and babies asleep in the other room, and me with a bottle in their mouth and not in mine finally, and for me realizing there is as much reason to stay in this place as there is to go anywhere else in this little...
There’s a tiger outside in the bushes, and he’s drunk and screaming, growling, howling in this Lake Claire night. Not me, I sit inside and listen to this discontent and wait for the morning. I wait for the calm down. The chillout. I wait for the feelings to subside, for me and that crazy cat. The neighbors have called the fire trucks and the little guy is standing on the corner by the stop sign, without a shirt, and throwing rocks at my car. There’s a woman sitting and weeping on the curb. Nothing ever happens until it does. It has to be 10 degrees cooler there. The electricity bills must be lower. Work will kill me in the end. We work too much. We love too little. We live too little also. Tonight there’s a full moon in my heart. The trees are lighted up with something like christmas lights, but different. A naked lady runs up and down the street screaming… partially in pain, partially in joy. She is naked and I cannot help from looking, so I do, but she is not...
I fell down a thousand wells to get here. Thirty three years and a month or two to get there. I like my butterflies, but not like you like butterflies. Ten day off medication. Wish that this mess wasn’t mine to deal with. I sing alleluia, alleluia. The lord is my shepherd. He makes me whole. I ask you for so many things, oh pretty boy. I still believe. I still believe. I still believe. After all of this I finally and still believe. The prisms through which we try to view this life bring us sadness, joy, heartbreak, etc. Mine is a dark crystal, yet turning light. I drink sparkling water from a can tonight, with a touch of lemon, or something like that. Don’t kill me when I think these things can be real. Don’t kill me, oh lord, for believing. Take me to a river where all of these sins can be washed away. A swift running river where everything I have done is five miles down stream already. Where we have all already seen God and passed or signed up for the passage. Forgive me father for I have done things. I have told lies. I have tried my best to protect whatever it is that I understand myself to be. Forgive me father, and mother, and friends, and little tiny animals. Forgive me, all of you. There are pictures of me, in this place, of people I do not know, and they keep asking me to remember, and I continue to say no. Let’s fall asleep and see if we can awake as Peter...
I hope you are smiling a lot.
For the time that’s left I will keep this place like a museum to what has passed between the two of us. I will be a little hermit curator moving items from one place to the next until they are exactly as I remember them. I will water the plants and dust the relics. Then I will sell off the things I can, and return the other things to the donors. I will curate no longer. I don’t know that it is as much me moving to something new and exciting as it is me feeling as if I am moving away from something. Not something altogether bad, just something that I cannot seem to make sense of at such close range. We talk of not knowing whether we can love anyone else the way we love each other, yet the love we do have between us is not enough to make us want to try again. What a sad lot we are. I know only time heals the wounds, helps us make sense of these conundrums, and I am sure it will eventually all work out for both of us, but even tonight, when I thought I had let it all go, returning from the movie in the park, I see his car once again in front of your house and it sent my spirits straight down the crapper. I could always drive a circuitous route so as not to have to see these things, but I got used to it when the car used to always be there, and now I have gotten used to it not...
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