n: vb: the spice of imagination
And sometimes the night looks like morning, while at other times like rain.
This past year wasn’t what I wanted. Though there were exquisite moments, beautiful, troubling and lovely, I’ve been left tired and burned out, worn down to the grain. In spite of obscene amounts of effort to the contrary, I remain plagued by chronic debt, injuries, and unemployment, and the haunting suspicion that no matter how hard I fight against these things, it’s possible that I will never escape.
For those who are new here, and there do seem to be a lot of you, here is a published book you should buy a downloadable copy of and my story in it.
I would like to say this is going to be my last six:thirty a.m. awake for awhile now that I finally have a job, but I know that would be a greedy lie. My face down unhappiness has been heaping lots of them upon me lately and I don’t like that my bed no longer smells like me. The air of the apartment has been filling with Kier, our house-guest who hasn’t paid his rent yet. It’s unsettling, it makes me want to double-wash all my sheets and blankets. I have no desire to climb naked into a bed that someone else has been rewriting while I’ve been away.
Flickr just reached a quarter of a billion photos.
Sam’s lent me a novel, Futureland by Walter Mosely, that I’m halfway through and still can’t decide what to do with. I get the feeling off this book that it’s not trying to be anything but a sci-fi novel. It was not written to be enduring, inspiring or to be especially moving. This isn’t rocking me, not even like a baby. It was written to be put in a bookstore and bought off the wire-rack shelf, to be consumed and then lost to some second-hand table fair. It’s a little.. baffling. I remember skimming past books like this in gift shops when I was younger, (and still commonly bought books), scanning the covers and dismissing them, the metallic newspaper quotes on the back covers.
“5,000 of the most important photographs of the last 150 years.”
I decided then I was only going to read books I would like to write, or literature that pushed my envelope, built of a nature so different that I can barely grasp them, insisting in my head that the better quality I read, the better I will write. Input matching output, I decided I want my shelf to be full of books that are endlessly interesting, not quite classics, but of the sort that can light up repeatedly and at different times of my life. This leaves me a rabbit in the headlights, uncertain what Futureland is for. This book is entirely alien to my nature. I suspect it’s meant to be entertaining, but it doesn’t survive my criteria, I don’t feel challenged. Is this what people commonly read?
World Jump Day was a resounding global success. You can check out photos on the Lambda Omega Lambda website under RECENT EVENTS, videos are found here.
(The Richmond Night Market Excursion and the first Mad Hatters Tea Party went pretty well too, more later).
Sitting in the shoe store alone, I’m getting that absent feeling of two a.m. where you know the rest of the world has mostly gone to bed. The only clock is on the computer desktop, but I can’t escape the impression of ticking, like I should know how to play piano to explain myself. I think of brickwork, of his hands on the keys and on my back, the way he kissed me as if drowning were the way to go. I remember a lot of things and wonder how much of it is important. I should send him a letter. I should send more people writing. I suppose this is my version of dwelling on mortality, mourning for the people I love that are too inaccessible for me to tell them so.
I don’t think I could put their skills and talent in my freezer. I’m not big enough for that. My family outshines me more than singing for the joy of it. Me, it’s sun outside and I feel like I need a raincoat. I seem strewn into limbo. My feet are pulling me forward on habit alone. People on the street and I’m waiting for them to stop talking and begin using their heads. Waiting and losing time, staring into the sky for an unrecalled twenty minutes, losing my soul to a string of other people’s glorious smiles. My voice is dying, trapped in the amber of a summer I don’t remember enough of, trapped by a time that never came because it’s a film-strip of memories, days and evenings and too many transient whispers.
Boys calling on the phone and asking for improbable sizes. “Do you have red boots in size 15? I want something slinky.” Boys who sound similar to friends but not quite, enough to pause me a second more, stutter my voice and steal my certainty. I’m abandoning my faith, you see. Rolling up the primrose path and trying to be with someone I’m not in love with. It’s a first, but I’m too exhausted. Maybe it’s time to be like everyone else.
