Erin and another blues bar

We both needed cures last night. Me for restlessness and unspeakable sadness. Erin for alcohol-induced ranting and Coke spillage.

Nowhere is the right place to vent your blues. No venue is blues-accommodating. Bars and coffee houses are practiced at alienating you when you need them most. They don't want your sadness, it spoils the atmosphere. Bars and coffee houses are for romanticists and sexy hipsters; realists aren't allowed. The light they bring is too harsh for those places, even with their dimmed lighting and mood music.

This, at least, seemed to be the case last night. So we went where it made the most sense - Northside Tavern (aka "The Blues Bar"). Except they weren't playing our blues, they were playing middle-class white boy wanna be Elvis Costello blues. It wasn't even danceable. And then there were the alpha male pool hall preppy show-offs we had to contend with, who lurked around our pool table as though they were interested in our game. (I kicked Erin's ass BTW)...(fuck you, I'm not a show-off).

I chain-smoked last night and don't even feel it this morning. Normally I'd sound like Betty Davis.

Oh, and Erin, thanks for leaving your half-eaten piece of cheesecake in my car.

willing

I got my Indian drone box yesterday. It imitates the sound of a Tanpura (an instrument like a sitar). I played my cello with it and it felt oh, so good. Harmonizing is therapeutic, especially when there's no attachment to melody or performance. One note, played with complete concentration and submission can be the most beautiful, expressive thing. When it's your heart spilling out and you know it and choose to let it go anyway. You will it to go.

And you're not embarrassed this time.

mad death

I can't stop dying. I can't wait to stop dying. Maybe healing. Re-creating. Dis-covery. If I were alive I could make some happiness for myself.

He worries there might be someone else because something changed with me, suddenly but not at all sudden. Something broke that was always. There isn't anyone else but it might be easier for him to accept if there were. People understand the language of better and want. They follow their eyes.

love
bitter as iron
we eat as though it were
sweet and easy

Dear John:

At first you pack in secret –
Quietly stowing away your happiness,
Then your grief.

Turning to your belongings,
You look at them in a different light;
What goes and what stays,

What's essential and what you would leave
If it were burning. It's me that's burning.
You can guess the rest.

Majda's house

Every time I leave your house it's the same. The same fog, the same wet grass, the same darkness. Every time I try to make a three point turn and almost hit your mailbox. Every time I feel the loneliness. It sets in before I make it past your hedge (monkey grass that gives me goose-bumps when it brushes against my legs in the summer).

Atlanta was a series of headless buildings tonight. Low clouds. You would have liked that. You're all destruction and slow unraveling. I'm veils and burning fields. You make me certain of my absolute sanity. We scare men at Kinkos into giving us discounts. We stink of smoke and coffee.

Your mother campaigns for me to gain weight and does so successfully. Homemade bread and cheese and salmon - sometimes a piece of cake or a hunk of smoked beef. Some soup or other Bosnian delight whose name I can neither pronounce nor find a word for in English. When I ask your mom to make it I say it's that noodle-wrap-cheesy-meat-thing.

You like fragments too.
not to be broken.
We don't pretend

I hope all those fancy schools in New York reject you. I've told you this. I imagine us in Chicago, nursing each other through graduate school. I want to think about that. I don't want to think about the fires we've set to our lives. Maybe it was smoke that masked Atlanta, disguised as clouds. Like I'm disguised as a wife.

clementines before bed

I'm wearing blue slippers with stars and moons on them. They were given to me in December of 2001 at a company Christmas party. I took off my heels and put them on. I got chided by my boss for doing so - but only because we were at the Ritz.

My fingers smell of clementines because I've just eaten about five of them. There's something about peeling fruit. Oranges, tangerines, pomegranites, grapefruit even. Everything is veiled. Everything breaths, everything shits, and everything has a membrane of some sort.

Burst your bubble.

We often say we're doing something to "get close", but we're usually just talking about physical proximity. Matt wants to "get close" me. I want to "get close" to ____. But I just ate a clementine. What the hell are we talking about?