studying at notsuoh with phil, drinking raspberry tea, and listening to the cowboy junkies accompanied by the soft tap-tap of laptop keys, i felt content for the first time in weeks.
Archive for April, 2001
of late i am having trouble distinguishing my dreams from reality. did i spend time in a hospital, caring for two deathly-ill sisters? did i drink tea from loosely-beaded cups in the dishwasher? did i hide out in a plush basement, hoping i wouldn’t be discovered? am i dizzy? broken? probably.
i was driving down memorial today, and i noticed one of those convex mirrors near a side street, placed so that traffic emerging onto memorial could check for cars coming fast around the corner. i couldn’t help thinking that, were i on that side street, straining to see when i could make my turn, i wouldn’t rely on the mirror at all. it looked like a false representation of reality. it looked like it couldn’t be trusted. it looked like a silver ball christmas-tree ornament, one that distorts your face in its reflection, making your eyes beady and your nose bulbous.
when i was little, i used to think about lightspots all the time. on night car trips or days spent outside, i would frequently close my eyes to check for the shadowy echoes of headlights and sunlight reflected on the insides of my eyelids. i was really bothered by these lightspots; i was always careful not to look at strong light for fear i would acquire them, and if i did, i would close my eyes and stare at them, hard, to try to make them go away. i stopped noticing the lightspots for years and years, until today when i was sitting at a booth by the window at artiste, and a car pulled up with its headlights on. i looked directly at the headlights, and i couldn’t concentrate after that.
perhaps i’m not bothered by strange dreams or convex mirrors or eyelid lightspots at all. perhaps i’m bothered by reality itself.
i’m now participating in yanda’s new collaborative site, cafe brasil in exile. i went to cafe brasil on monday nights with this group of people (most of them, anyway) during a time in my life which was both beautiful and horrendous, but absolutely necessary. the site is neither horrendous nor necessary, but it’s fun, which is what one expects from a collaborative site.
this evening’s simpsons episode was a parody of run lola run. i very nearly exploded.
at notsuoh, we sat at a big table (the one near the cracked-skull mannequin with the boyz n the hood baseball cap) and played with the blocks and scrabble tiles, spelling out homeless words and disconnected phrases.
mullet goo
mullet god
far from me
mo axl rose
rob nags me
was we born
morrisse (there was no y)
i assembled most of the scrabble tiles to spell out “because there’s never any way to make the fields of wax drip upward into oblivion.“ rob spelled some things about his toaster as an insane, reflective saviour. at the table next to us, a bum sat alone, drinking hanh’s water and my leftover tea, breaking fffff
is there any way to take apart a keyboard and clean underneath the keys? there’s some serious ick in mine (particularly under the f key) and i’d like to get rid of it, as it is grossing me out.
breaking veronica’s potato chips (she had abandoned them in favor of a game of chess) into miniscule pieces, which he arranged neatly on a magazine cover. he ate them slowly and deliberately, one by one. he didn’t have any teeth.
this morning when i went to a gas station to buy some much-needed coffee, someone finally noticed my simpsons-defaced wallet. “that’s very clever, montgomery burns,” the cashier said as i opened my wallet to retrieve my money, “that’s very clever, indeed.”
this afternoon, a ups delivery man, who was wearing eyeshadow and lipstick (yes, really) that did not match his uniform, showed up at my door with an amazon package that i didn’t remember ordering. it turned out to contain a copy of douglas coupland’s microserfs, an early birthday gift from jodi. i thought at first that she’d found my wishlist, but instead it was just a really nice coincidence that she sent me a book i’ve been wanting to read for awhile now. so thank you, jodi! you’re so sweet!
not having much experience with this hour of the day/night, i don’t know if four a.m. is late or early.
but i know it hurts.
there’s nothing lonelier than coming home early because you’re tired, you don’t feel well, and you have to write a paper, to find nothing in your inbox save for some penis-enlargement spam. maybe it means that if my penis was larger, i’d be okay.
as i was telling thomas at artiste, my illness this evening doesn’t fall into a headache or stomachache category, or any category at all. it’s just a vague, dull ache, an ache i can place anywhere on my person just by focusing my concentration. perhaps it is in my head. or my stomach or my throat or the back of my neck. yes.
today was the last day of poetry workshop. we’d each turned in a packet of five poems, which we spent time peer-reviewing during class. today we discussed my packet, and i discovered that glen was indeed right. he said that if you submit work that is really personal, when it is reviewed by your peers it will feel to you as if they are reviewing not your work but you, your thoughts, your experiences, your emotions. when he said that in fiction class last semester, i didn’t think it was a big deal. but boy, was it ever hard to hear criticism about this.
at some point, i stopped paying attention to the weather. i miss it.
