Fermez la porte. Voici la nuit.
Winter holiday = café glut, so after wandering all over the hill (only 1 cat, but it was that fat Mas) & drifting past cafés 1, 2, 3. If not a crowd, then an old foreign lady I don't want to talk (listen) to.
Today I
Today I Today I
I looked up "rheumatism" in the dictionary & there I was. It didn't make me feel any better, knowing there's a name for my ill(s). I typed 2 pages of the second bound book. If I do more on that one, it will be severely edited because—well, because I went on & on. Yes me, imagine. I thought of calling Lee (at the # I have for "Lance") but did not—maybe next weekend. (What if he's dying, would I want to know? umm ah nuh-ah-umn.) I thought of sending JHY the definition of the Leaden Rule that I am applying to him (give him the same un-response that he gives me), but I think I won't bother because he wouldn't get it. Stop me if I've said this already, but when women practice the Golden Rule, men give it the Marxian twist (from You according to your great ability, honey & to me according to my bottomless need) & expect you to nod adoringly too as you listen: "ooh Eddy, that's heavy."
*
I had knife dreams last night. There are words for the way I've been feeling but I do not want to try digging them up right now, for I think they lie deep in the bog. Hardly decayed at all.
BM «Bucks
Unlike Me — Degeneration’s Popsie
I take 2 cohosh & go from 2 hot flashes a day & a balky hip to 12 hot flashes overnight & hobbling around, my left leg sore all the way down.
You call that medicine? (Sure, bad medicine.) And then I read Dr. Weil, who writes, "Cohosh doesn't work for everybody." I also read about menopause & rheumatism & frankly it sounds like myositis/fibromyalgia to me. (So what can we sell her? Depression? Excuse me, but if you went from being strong & vital & dancing the ballet, running the 10K, swimming the mile to a faded old bitch who can barely hobble about, wouldn't you be depressed?)
I understand in a way I never did before (& bear in mind, speaking is the unchallenged Queen of PMS 1974-1987) the need for snake oil in all human societies, esp. those where the poppy does not grow. (
Actually I may try the gin-soaked raisins. And apple-cider vinegar. I really do want the perfect nostrum. What is odd is I still think that if only I'd fast for a few days or weeks, I'd be well & young again. And stay that way.
Since I tried to call Lee using various bogus #'s & my unfamiliar phone card & got only frustration, I sent him a note & a self-addressed p.c. And then/now it's started raining again. I'm worse, then better, then worse. Funny, huh?
Control
We gain it, we lose it. Sometimes we regain it, and then lose it again.
Hey, I lost it. My youth.
Heart is getting old.
Trish working tonight, with her hair getting quite long. She tells me that (arrogant) Patrick stopped by, up from S.F. with his girlfriend. He asked after Lee & was most surprised to find he'd gone back to
It is hard. I’ve been feeling bad. My shoulder is worse again. Hips sore, feet sore. But also good—another agent asked to read OD&D. Sometimes I forget who or where I am—except when I walk out of my apartment into that awful corridor with the teal carpet. Then I remember only too well.
Almost good dreams. Last night I was about to interview Paul Theroux.
Night Fall
Up where the birds are flying, light remains. I walk up & over the hill in thickening darkness. New moon/Chinese new year. Halfway up the hill I seem to hear the day sigh out its breath & when I reach the top, I see a blush suffuse the western clouds. West is where the god of the winds lives.
I like that hushed whisper, that susurrus. And the air is like (like?) clotted dark. Inspissated. (La-di-dah!) Actual magic at the turn of day. (I ever miss the early one...) Is it necessary to be alone? It is necessary to be alone.
Or at least to be silent.
*
I walk so far my feet complain. The space shuttle blew up. I found a dollar on the floor. I paid my bills. $1000. Not much. After my tax return - I’ll have $1600.
I want a house, a home. A chest x-ray. I sit in the window with the lights marking out the hollows in my face. I want to watch the parade, but I think the marchers can see me better than I can see them.
Broadway «Bux
Why I Never Captured What my Life Has Been & Why I Never Will
Music. I mean I can say music is my life (and I have), but what does that reveal of the day to day? And what it means? Means may not be the best word. More than means, music is. Fills the empty spots. Walls off (curtains?) the uninteresting & unmusical (mostly) speech of others.
Even that jangly Miles Davis I like—music suggestive of Too Much Caffeine.
And as much pleasure music can give, so much also irritation—exacerbation, if not actual pain. The wrong music, the wrong mood.
*
Then I eavesdrop: language conversation. Does the guy asking about "Si" (French) want to know, or is he trying to make time with the blonde-ringletted girl. When he leaves, I tell the girl about "Yo" in Norsk. (Gee, I think it's “yo") (ha ha — doesn't matter, I'll never get called on it.)
Um, in the interests of accuracy...
I start in about music because music is
is
Music is what gives meaning (recompense?) to life.
I've let music down.
No, truly, I wonder what I might have done. (Why didn't Grandma see through my palisade? Why didn’t somebody?)
Put the Club Down, Tim
Good radio drama line. All us café-sitters lifted our heads to look, all at once. But that was Thursday & now it's Saturday at the café. Many people: 15 or so, besides the staff (people I don't know, but I didn't know Tim either). Cozy on a cold February day. The fog never lifted. I regretted my shorn & hatless state. But now I don't care—obviously—and, oh dear, the fussy baby (girl, a bald-headed beauty) & her court: mom & 2 friends. They go. Hilda hunches in. I make myself very small. The music is strange: orchestral versions of old pop, then somebody who sounds like Marianne Faithful sings "Que Sera Sera." Now Frank Sinatra(?) singing in Mexican. Novelty acts.
*
Good eavesdropping: The handsome brown gay baristo (the tall one who likes rain) tells his friend that he & his roommate have a boa constrictor named Precious.
Misty
Just when they said there was a high pressure mountain parked right here & it would never move—it began misting (just as I left the "house"). And though it stayed mist, I got well wetted. Dropped my glove at the Internet Cafe & stepped right over it—luckily the nice little freckled girl with the red mohawk & skull tattoos picked it up for me. Then I walk into & out of several cafes (rainy Sunday—even the 15th Ave Stabbux was packed) & come to rest at the Broadway-Vue bar in the Broadway Starbux I see 2 women right off who obviously shop at the same stores—is that it, we pick friends with the same consumer demographics? Well, no wonder I don't have any friends, I have no buying habits. (Which means I look like the other cuckoos at the library.)
The overcast today tamped & damped my spirits.
Bway «Bux
Wanting a Clean Slate
Or else a slate scribbled all over with fresh words.
This is from walking into the Café on a Wednesday night & wishing I could change my channel.
A mannish woman in a baseball hat, a woman in an "ear" haircut (gee, do I look that weird from the back?), a cute Asian couple talking too softly for me to hear. Other couples couple-color & not. Mix it up...studious ♂ & ♀ all in black. The guy in the white baseball hat (when did it slip away...no, it was never here: even hippie had sub-styles.) Show-offs on cell phones.
J. Franzen's essays (How to be Alone) are making me feel Not So Alone, or Not So Alien. Yes, I keep saying: it's the cell phone talkers & other exhibitionists that make one feel one's privacy has been invaded. J.F. was a reading-alien too. His birthday is the same as mine.
Oh, a strip of Valentine-red cloud lies across the west like a heavenly tease. My heart yawps: Jesus, will you take a look at that?! And before anyone else so much as glances up, it softens to "titty-pink" & then disappears. Perhaps I made it up. If so, I do good work. And the sky is yellow & blue at the same time.
Café Stories
Before I get to tonight, let me return to Wednesday when I walked out to go home & discovered that it hadn't disappeared, but still brooded over the west. It had concentrated to sheer purple, as if glory were pouring through Welch's grape jelly. A band about 2 fingers wide behind "our" skyscrapers. I wanted to stop everyone I saw & tell them, make them look. But I only stopped one woman—at least she didn't snub me.
*
Tonight the moon, 7/8's, is up two hands in the east & as ever when confronted by the benign indifference of the heavenly heavens, I am raised — 3 notches above content. I come into the cafe & tell Trish I finally heard from Lee. (I need to find cards with strange photos for him.) Trish tells me how she asked Hilda to be interviewed for an oral history project—& now Hilda won't come in when she's here. "I shoulda thought of that," I said, "maybe she thinks you're with the INS."
On my left is that plug-ugly woman with a hairdo like mine only shorter & a Hapsburg lip. On the right Big Sue & the baldish boomer guy are talking about war & oil & ideology & so on. I think it's about SUV's.
My BP has been high: 140/75 last time I checked. I've got to stop eating.
Seems As If
That's the short definition of art, one anyway.
I stopped eating—until
*
This is not fun. It rained most of the day & I walked to the library & bussed back to Broadway & couldn’t find the aloe vera cream I wanted but got sold a lottery ticket by a girl with red-devil eyes—both of them. I couldn't tell what it was—a weird disorder or weird-scary contact lenses—because I didn't want to stare. Well, I mean I did want to stare, oh how I wanted to stare, but I am polite, so I couldn't. Damn.
And Lee didn't answer his phone, not today or yesterday or Friday. His laugh on his message makes me smile.
Bad nights: sore joints, shoulders & hips mostly, weird chest pangs or pains. But right now the sum of my discontent is small: two wet feet. It feels very late at
Broadway «Bux
I Can't Tell Any More
Why the bad mood? It used to be I could count the days of my month or find the moon...but now I don't know, can't tell if it's me or what. I finally got through on the phone to Lee. Except that I didn't feel I was in contact. The conversation felt askance/askew. I don't know, almost like there was something wrong with the phone: we kept talking at the same time, like we didn't know how long to pause. Lee had a hard time figuring out who Mark (Marcus) is: He didn't remember Trish. He told me that he never quit smoking & never said he did. Then MCI cut us off. Lee threw Marcus's cards away. He says everybody in
Or maybe I'm depressed because after all the months of work (almost 5) I only have $1600 plus my rent for next mo, and maybe 600 coming from the IRS—if I didn't make a mistake. See? And that dope Ann Rittenberg turned down OD&D. 3 days a week of work until the end of March will mean $500 more. But I gotta move too.
I can't stay where I am and I can't be broke. And nobody...
Every day or every night something hurts. Filling up my little rooms with evil spirits—my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment