i slip off my shoes and this is what i have to tell you:
tonight i stood underneath just inside of a brick gazebo i am well acquainted with in which hangs a huge bell right at eye level to listen to and watch a boy play a guitar rocking back and forth and belting out songs in all sincerity. a spider, a white spider descended, shone in the light walking across his right shoulder on top of his red t-shirt and crawled towards his neck. i looked away, incredulous and concerned with it creeping up, and by the time i looked back, it was gone, completely gone, and i prefer to imagine that the boy just up and ate it. that it dashed up his jaw line and teetered on his lips and so the boy of course just naturally snapped it up and kept singing.
before that i had been picking mulberries off of tall trees that linger around my avenue and alley. one was leaning over the wall of the old church that is no longer a church, where i had walked to meet jonathan arp and jason laferrera skateboarding. lafff gave me an old city paper from baltimore, from when we drove up to see the weakerthans, and i peeled the pages out, rolled them up into cones, and together with ryan mcsweeney jumped up and grabbed the branches of the mulberry trees and plucked off the berries that had already begun paving the sidewalk below.
a week before on the way up to baltimore i drank a jar full of blood mary, rife with habanero pepper, and i think i beat on the seats, the ceiling, the doors of the old chevrolet celebrity the entire time with the pair of drumsticks i had stolen from andrew bourne, except for the half hour when i was pretty solidly plastered, lying in the back of that big blue car thinking about how great it is to be so at leisure at such great speeds.
to be in the gazebo was like to be in chop suey, the hot spot book shop, in the middle of the night during its twenty-four-hour book-a-thon. having just arrived, having just watched a beautiful projected seventies sitcom on the side of one of its walls, having just been beginning to realize that something was seriously wrong with my neck (that having been the w h i p l a s h) and merrily telling people about it, when liz a girl from some more southernly region, i think, began strumming on her guitar and we all noisily scooted our folding metal chairs into a jumbled mess about her and that too was moving. as a moment in a city with something special happening and not so many people noticing and you there feeling lucky. wondering how you got there.
i watched gleaming the cube this afternoon for the first time. you know, staring christian slater as the rebel skateboarder avenging his adopted vietnamese brother’s death. there have been a lot of movies lately – 24 hour party people and scratch – because it has you know been a hard weekend and i didn’t really want to move so much because it did not feel so good. i did not feel so good.
the pain had started in the middle of the night and was sharp and hard and on the inside making it gut-wrenching to sleep or walk or try to fix things. and then it changed and i saw two doctors on two different days, neither of which i had much if any confidence in. and yet still i let them give me a shot in the hip and still i take my big blue pills twice a day… it is an odd combination of resistance and resignation one has when faced with pain and fear resonating from oneself, signaling something being wrong. pretty awfully un-understandably wrong.
but let’s not dwell and don’t ask me much. i’ll tell you only what is interesting anyway and i think i have just done just about that.
scratch is a movie about djs, which joshua recommended to me way up when we were in minnesota which was gosh an awful long time ago and still i have not said a word about it.
we made origami all the way up, folding little creatures and such out of the bright solid colored paper i had found, based on the small and in no way comprehensive but at least good and basic book that came with the paper. eventually we began using maps and finally right before we arrived at the farm we had two big origami baskets filled with lots of origami birds and stars and flowers and babies, one for the bride and one for the groom. after the twenty four hour drive, we left them in the passenger seat while we hugged our hosts and rested and stretched. the window was open and of course it rained – it rained the whole time, or at least all the times it perhaps would’ve been more convenient for it not to have rained but we decided that it was all of course quite auspicious – the origami was not soaked so much as it was just damp and disappointing. we gave the gifts anyway and said: throw them away, burn them, do what you will. at least you don’t have to return them.
is there more? have i forgotten? who can say… i know there was a birthday party for everyone in the abandoned hydroelectric plant; it was dark, we were late, everyone was drunk already, and a man, an italian man, grasped my hands tightly and spoke to me intently while i tried to get away, only to have him find me later and exclaim ah it is you! you are everywhere! like an obsession! i know will go to argentina for christmas rather than alaska for the summer and perhaps if i learn my spanish there i will be mistaken as argentinean, which i think is something to look forward to in this world. i know my little sister is in jerusalem right this second and that elicits some serious emotions from me, which I will try to keep captive and quiet until she is home safe and sound and with my overdue birthday presents. i know that i miss amanda lewis even though she might not know i do and that i am anxious to receive the present i have ordered for her from an eastern bloc country though i am beginning to doubt it while ever arrive. i know that there is something good about all of this; that i can lean back in all of my serene dissatisfaction and slight confusion and still think of myself as a wealthy woman, as this being the kind of life people hope to lead once they are rich. sans speedboats and escalades.
