This gray, paralytic restlessness has fallen on me and my neighborhood. Spending whole days beneath the fluorescent lights of a stark and joyless conference room is not helping. If I had to do this job seven days a week…well, I’d quit, is what I’d do.
I just really want to do summery things and this weather is SO not cooperating. Let’s go to the beach. Have an elaborate picnic. The kind where everyone dresses in their finest and lightest summer clothes. Let someone absently strum a guitar. Let’s just sit in the sun and be quietly reverent of how breath-taking-ly beautiful it all is. Sometimes I fantasize about spending a whole paycheck on an old Volvo station wagon and just disappearing into America for a week. See if I could eat and sleep on our United friendliness. Maybe see if churches would take us in, introduce us to their hospitable deacons and elders and such. I’d fill my camera with pictures. I’d get an e-mail address or a phone number in every county. Make instant travel friends. Or take the bus to New York and spend the whole day bouncing from diner to diner, drinking coffee and eating French fries and chatting with waitresses and regulars. Writing down their stories. Watching them watch me watch them. Looking at place-mat doodles and olympic rings of coffee stains. Or we crowd around a living room and open the windows to the hot night air and recline in conversation. The room careens with laughter. Or pulls taught with argument. Or glows with admiration and praise. I won’t drink the wine, but I’ll ask if its any good.
Instead, I’ll hope for the just-right latte. And the motivation to push on through the pages of this book. And a moment where I’m sure that being unsure doesn’t do any good. I’ll hunch my shoulders against the gray. I’ll smile an almost-smile. And I’ll say my prayers. “Everyone crawls in quicksand the same.”
“Are you still a mess?”
The new Mars Volta album is almost…relaxing? Go buy it.
Also, if you’ve never received a hand-written letter from Mari, you really haven’t lived.
His curly, dark bangs fell in front of his eyes and he wrote the words across the bottom of the page in an elegant, sweeping script. He dressed like a boy from a century ago. His trousers were the color of cold fireplace ashes. His shoes were of a simple, leather oxford style and suspenders left a trace beneath his scratchy wool cardigan. His shirt was not gingham but it made one think of the word. The frames of his glasses here heavy, round and wire. Literature majors sometimes called him “that young Dickensian” and he heard this sometimes with pleasure. He packed his leather folio and tucked it beneath a willowy arm on his way down the stairs and out into the April chill. He swung his free arm into his peacoat, and reached into a pocket, feeling at a bag of tobacco and an elaborate cellular phone.
Well, normally you’d have had at least two posts in this stretch of time. I’ve been up to other creative endeavors lately. For one thing, I rearranged my apartment and cleaned it pretty thoroughly. There’s something genetically latent in me that just loves walking into a clean apartment at the end of the day. I’ve been getting my recycle/green/hippy thing on and taking all these disposable plastic bags I’ve got saved, cutting them into rectangles and then ironing them together 5 or 6 sheets thick. Then I iron three of the sides together, flip the whole bag inside out and (*TA DA!*) it’s a tote-bag. Well, it’s a tote bag once I fashion and attach a strap from a larger, heavier-duty bag by ironing it into the seams. If that was all a little hard to follow, I’ll post pictures of ‘em soon enuff. They come out quite nice, actually. I’ve done a bit of baking, though I’m a tad behind in that department. I made what I affectionately call “grown up” bread last week. It’s made from whole wheat flour, a cup of Guinness and a cup of strong coffee. It tastes like grown-up things. I made some mediocre raisin-bran muffins and pawned them off on my friends heading down to N. Carolina for the week. They loved them and I only ate 3 or 4 of them myself. Then, on Sunday night, I finished off my giant bag-o-raisins and made some really delicious oatmeal-cinnamon-raisin bread. I think John dubbed it “breakfast bread” and I’m incline to run with that moniker. I’m scared to bake anything else cuz I ate just about all that damn breakfast bread by myself and now feel like a fatty. However, I anticipate some more bran-muffins this weekend and maybe some chocolate chip cookies when my girls get back from the shore.
I have friends who go to the shore! How east-coast of me. I met a girl coming up on two weeks ago now who was very interesting. Gonna be an Emerson senior next year. Literature major. From the south. Raised by a fundy pastor dad and now an atheist. Spent the better part of a drunken hour trying to convince me to smoke pot with her. Smart and fascinating, but we were pretty clearly about different stuff. Still, took her on a date last Thursday and had a damn good time. Stayed out late and talked and talked. I offered a second date a few days ago and she didn’t return my call. Probably for the best, since I was gonna let her know I wasn’t interested in romantic thing and that we were in different places and blah, blah, blah, lets just be friends.
Come to think of it…she lives in East Boston. Like, bumble-F East Boston. Yeah, even as friends, this never had a chance. BTW, all the pictures in this post are ones I took myself. I’m finally getting that digital camera I got for Christmas some use. How embarrassing. What I’m…
Reading: All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy Watching: Friends With Money (Film, 2007) Wearing: American Eagle skinny-ish jeans, Thrift-store button down, H&M cotton sweater, Black on Black Chucks Working On: A short story about hipsters and professors.
The spring-time soil pressed its moisture through the blades of grass and into the fibers of my shirt, its sleeves rolled up to the elbow and long un-tucked about the waist. I tried to stare at the dimming sky and roiling birds returning from their winter-time somewhere. I tried to be with the atmosphere and not wonder what bugs were crawling into my hair or if the grass was staining these new khakis. Christ, I thought, I never wear khakis and now I’m on my back in the grass and it’s getting colder and wetter every second. I pushed my toes through the sod and thanked God for His interminable patience. Patience for things that grow quickly, like grass and patience for things that grow slowly, like me. Nearly everyone had left by now. The evanescent cloud of mesquite, carnal air had since been blown off by the June-evening breeze. Little sculptures of bones and corn-cobs and silverware wore skirts of paper napkins on dance-floors of paper plates. A sub-note of cigarette smoke cut through the chill and polyphonic voices swatted the days events back and forth. Who had shared glances with whom. What so-and-so said about so-and-so’s new such-and-such. The clatter of plates and the splash of dish water and the understated barks of a dog in search of scraps. Now and then a balloon would lose its tenuous life and the voices would chirp and then cascade in laughter. This prone posture was really a stratagem and a retaliation. Retaliation for the beautiful decorations and the lovely food and the conspiratorial smiles. She’d spent most of the party perched on her sofa with the terrier, scratching behind its ears and singing quietly along with the records. She would venture up to greet those arriving and bid two-kissed farewells to those parting. She spent only 20 minutes in the sun, in an ancient lawn chair watching young men in straw hats and suspenders play badminton in pale, be-soiled bare-feet. Now I’d swiped a sweating bottle of champagne and two maybe-clean glasses and was not-so-subtly waiting for her to come and see why I was sprawled beneath the elm in her yard. Three weeks ago, we drove to the beach and I complained about sand and she dipped the edge of her dress in the skim and surf. Her eyes were smokily made up and hollowed me at a glance. Her bracelets clattered pleasantly while she regaled me with tales of galleries and underground music and the ways New York was the center of God’s own universe. I clutched my sandals, realized this day had to end and contemplated hurling myself from the lighthouse. She inspired extremity in all of us and obviously pretended not to notice. The screen door wheezed and rattled. I craned my head over back to see. The inverse form of her and her dress, all pink and lines and angles, meandered through cluttered tables towards me. She swiped a whithering peony from the last table and planted it behind her ear. “What is all this?” she inquired, sweeping a hand lazily across her field of view. I just smiled and looked up. She toed her sandals from her feet and descended, cross-legged, to my side. I did my best to pour the glasses of champagne suavely and without looking. I only spilled most of it and she laughed an absent laugh. I reached into the breast pocket of my shirt and found a small yellow note with a bit of glue across one edge. I’d written something in my neatest hand on it. I stuck it to her forehead gently and held out my other fist, closed around two small treasures. “Can I read it or do I have to walk around like this all day?” she asked, lightly touching the spot it was stuck to above her brows. I nodded and breathed her smell through both nostrils. She plucked the note from her face and I brushed the bangs from her eyes. I opened my other hand and let the sun play off the polished metal rings. The eyes that always stared at you steadily and with casual self-certainty darted for a rare moment. Darted from my hand to the note in her own and back. She pressed her lips to mine.
“It is, isn’t it?” We just watched the trees sway for a long time. The cigarette smoke would wander between us and the after-party chat would linger at the edge of attention at moments. The dog would scratch at the screen and the champagne would run out. I never did get those grass stains out.
The three-decade-old leather seats were cracked and discolored with sun-bleached striations. The foam rubber headrest was crumbling where it stood most exposed to rolled-up-window temperatures. I’d sometimes find bits of it in my hair at night, like oversized novelty dandruff. I’d cut out the ceiling upholstery somewhere east of Omaha. Creeping, two–dimensional stalagmites of rust clawed in miniature rusty fingers at the metal panels of the old Volvo wagon. The air conditioning had been fucked since just outside of Gary. The left rear window since the late 90’s. A lurid and half-peeled Jane’s Addiction sticker would sometimes reflect a sharp beam of sun into my eyes at inopportune moments. Mountain-pass switchback roads, mostly. Heading west, every color outside that $900 stack of Swedish steel burst like the Fourth of the July. It seemed like my life was earth-toned and the entire earth was life-toned. When I’d glance down to pull the water-warped road atlas from my drab shoulder bag on the passenger seat, it’s like the universe would snap from Imax, Blue-ray vivid to sepia-toned nostalgia and back, just with the dip of my gaze. I was wrapped in an ocean of beige-volvo boring, but everything that waited beyond this car was color-fast floral-print wonder. Heading west, I only listened to music that I liked a decade too late. I spent three days cycling through cassettes from bins at the Village Discount on Milwaukee. Alice in Chains. That band with the Bumble-Bee-Girl in their video. Taped to the driver’s-side pillar was a Polaroid instant with the words “Soon Enuff” swirled in an elegant but exaggerated hand across the white beam at the bottom. The image was dark and yellowed and candle lit. On the back, a stamp and an address and a postal-code. When I was almost there, sitting in insufficient-infrastructure traffic, I’d flick it nervously. When no one answered the door at the apartment at the address on the back, I’d tape it to the door handle and trusted in God and adhesive and fate. But for now, I’d just try to stay awake on highway-hypnotic stretches of American dreams. I’d listen to dead men sing and wonder if their children ever listened to their music. Where do the people who work in those little highway towns really live, anyway? “I’m sure there’s nothing about you I don’t already understand,” she’d said, leaning away from me against a flat black barroom wall, “and I’m sure you already think I’m wrong.” I laughed and she just stared at me, with something almost not quite unlike a smile on her face. She handed her empty glass to a passing bar-back and wiped her hand on her jeans. She pressed a folded napkin into my left pants pocket. “It’s okay,” she confided just an inch from my ear, “I don’t like surprises.” I’d dream about her sometimes. Heroic, absurd dreams about the things she must do between Saturday nights. As alluring and marvelous as the real girl was, the dream-girl was more so. Almost too much. A person I would watch and forget it was me watching. Someone who spiraled through the world, part pretty pin-wheel, part errant table-saw blade careening through a place narrow on either side. I was driving to her as much to demythologize the dreams as I was to reclaim some remembered reality. I drove through the crushing fauna and the crowd of mountains to the shore. Everything natural looks more natural by the ocean. Anything built looks worn out. The people all feel in between, caught in the preternatural saline air that lends one the gravitas of geology and the malleability of the weather. I took my shoes off and left the car unlocked. I meandered over rough pavement and across the sea wall, eventually settling into the coarse sand with my back to the oceanic wind. Tomorrow I would call someone and find a place to stay. Tonight I’d sleep on the beach and try to let the cold keep me from oversized dreams.
The place was a shit-hole. Dry and creaky and caustic in the winter, the stark awful paint would worm away from the walls in straggly strips. The high ceiling wore a skirt of nicotine stains. No two bulbs would stay burning at a time in the rattle-trap fixture eight feet from the rough floor boards. The window frames would swell shut in the summer swelter and lean callously to the left in the winter, welcoming dagger drafts of December chill. In a way, it suited us. Our curb-found furniture and thrift-store decorations gave the place a decrepit uniformity of squalor.
Only the kitchen really received any of our affection, though certainly not because it merited any. Being in your 20s has the compounded problem that you don’t know what to do, and now you know that neither does anyone else. “When a child first catches adults out,” wrote Steinbeck, “his world falls into panic desolation.” She and I stayed in this place, and (most importantly) stayed in this place together, out of the sheer momentum of the thing. We were too poor to shop at Whole Foods, but too self-conscious not to, even just in front of one another. We were de facto vegetarians and we never ate anything in season, except strawberries and asparagus. The month of June was best and we spoke the least. I had lists and projects. I became a master of the invented errand and could spend whole days traipsing on public transit. She had day-time TV and the joy of stuffing envelopes.
She’d tell me these stories, relaying the plight of conjoined twins from Maury or the slutty nine year old from Tyra and I’d tuck a thumb in my book and stare at her blankly. I’d start in on the liberals or the conservatives or the rich or the poor, and she’d paint silently. Thursdays, we’d crunch through sour, unripe fruit and listen to our neighbors argue in some phlegmatic and eastern European language. For six weeks, I had an untreated sinus infection so bad that I’d leave wads of blood-streaked tissue around the place, like little Technicolor Rorschach tests. Only the sex made sense. It was our sweaty, vigorous fort against the barbarian invasion of boredom and inaction. The bed was never less than a wild thicket of cheap cotton sheets and scattered pillows. If I came home and she was doing some household chore in an unlikely outfit, we wouldn’t even greet each other first. I’d stumbled backward onto the uneven sofa more than once, two soapy handprints bleeding through the back of my t-shirt. After the afterward scavenger hunt for shirts and socks, I’d always realize I’d forgotten to drop something in the mail. Or to get some important ingredient for dinner. Sometimes I wouldn’t leave, but she would lock herself in the bathroom and cry, naked against the long unwashed tile.
And an hour later, her thumb would tuck into my waistband and her free hand would make a greasy climb through my hair while I tried in vain to make the hallway door not scrape against the floorboards twisting towards the ceiling, like eternally separated lovers craning to kiss from distant afterlives.
First and foremost, you should know that for the whole month of June, the really awesome chicago-suburban band Sleeping At Last will be giving their album "Keep No Score" away for free on the interwebs. Here is the info from the studio-journal blog: In celebration of our upcoming new album, we’re thrilled to announce that for the entire month of JUNE our previous album “Keep No Score” will be available as a FREE download!
Here’s how it works: Through a company called NoiseTrade we’ve set up a widget that allows you to choose between two ways to receive an immediate download of the album:
The first way is to enter your name, email address and zip code along with the emails of five of your friends. You can then immediately start downloading the album for FREE. You’re friends will receive just one email inviting them to sample the music and download it themselves. Neither you or your friends will receive any spam from NoiseTrade and only those that choose to sign up will receive any emails from us as well.
The second way is to pay any amount you wish, from $1 and up and start downloading.
Also, if you would like to help spread the word, the widget can be embedded anywhere that accepts html! So you can add it to your own facebook, myspace etc.. by click the “embed this widget” button or use the “twitter this” button.
Check it all out now, here: www.noisetrade.com/sleepingatlast
We’re really excited about all of this, thanks so much for reading! We’ll be updating you all soon on lots of exciting news about the upcoming New Album!
Love, Dan & Ryan – Sleeping At Last
And, here's a clip of their string players recording from their studio journal, which you can follow HERE:
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Now, let’s interrupt the micro-fiction for a bit with some good ‘ole fashioned what’s-up-with-Jon bloggery, whadduya say?
I just spent two weeks in California, which is where I did the last couple entries here. Among other things, I went to Santa Cruz and hung out w/ my family, both biological and ecclesial at Missions Springs. I’ve been going on this all-church retreat every year since I was a kid and I try to make sure I get back in time to attend it after my spring semesters end. It was sunny and warm and delightful. I sat on the grass and read with my sister. And went and explored Santa Cruz with my sister and her BFF. And goofed off and rough housed with my sister. And got roped into running lights and sound for the worship services…with my sister.
Look, I’m gonna warn you right now, my sister is appearing prominently in this post. She’s totally awesome, so that shouldn’t be a problem. But if it is, you can suck it.
ANYWAYS, after we all got back, I went and saw Ben Folds play in Oakland. My mom loves herself some Ben, so she bought tickets for herself, one of her friends, my sister, me and JD, my BFF. We all went, the oldies sat in the balcony and the youths stood on the floor. We bathed in pot smoke and Folds’ awesomeness for a couple of hours. It was pretty damn cool. Plus, any time you hear a whole concert audience burst into three part harmony, you know its gonna be a good night.
Didn’t do much the rest of the week xcept hang w/ JD and read and drink coffee and shop and write for this blog. I read The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand. If you like history, academics in general and/or America, go pick this book up. Excellent popular history of the influence of a handful of post-civil war new-england-style nerds on the 20th century. Friday night me and the sister drove to the Shoreline Amphitheater and saw the NIN/JA (Nine Inch Nails / Jane’s Addiction) Tour. We got there late cuz she had to work, but we saw all of NIN set. If you can catch them on this tour, get off your ass. Worth every penny. They are dialed in musically and their lighting design might be the best concert design of the decade. Just impeccable. Also, I argued with some fundamentalists who were picketing the concert, fueling further Christian-bashing amongst America’s youth. (My sister might still hate me for that.)
On Saturday, I went to a rawkin’ nineties-themed house party, where my sister rescued me from a it’s-3am-and-I’ve-lost-good-judgment make-out-session with the party-host’s ex GF by demanding we go home. I woke up the next morning and thanked her. After thanking her and sleeping through church, I played roller hockey w/ the guys, which was just fantastic and pain-inducing, and then church and a heffenade party at the same venue as the previous night, sans-almost-make-out girl. Then Monday night I got my owl finished and once its healed, I’ll post pictures. Some more JD/Sister/Coffee/Writing and one last jaunt to Santa Cruz, and then I hopped a plane back to Boston, where I promptly went to Common Ground for 80’s night.
So, anyways, I’m back on the East Coast and trying to get my summer legs about me. A brief run-down of what the heck that means? The briefest:
- Lattes and reading/writing at Café Fixe in Wash Sq. - Hipster girls with bad attitudes, 2 at a time. - 20 hours of soul sucking IT job a week - Cooking/Baking/Crafting/Artsy-ing - Lonergan/Blondel paper-proposal cluster-fuck
