Reflections from Provence

With the aid of technology, I am able to behold things constructed beyond the outstretched hand of any mortal human, and these sights, these sites, I view in wonderment, enthrallment, my splotchy, pallid self amidst roiling oceans of white, gray when bloated by water, pink, purple, orange, and yellow daubed on fluffy churnings, swirlings, and spiralings into faces, animals, phalluses, torsos, ligaments, these figments created by the conjurer in my mind, flying above the roads and blinking buildings in a seemingly rickety airplane, nauseous dips, shrill noises reverberating ricocheting off a bellowing baby and a couple in conflict until the altitude and the speed has increased enough and the sound is no longer palpable, a current of cold air at my feet that makes them feel wet, and that steady vibration and humming of spinning that lulls me to sleep from fear or hypnosis. Upheavals of the earth, it exalts and I exult, these thrusts that aspire for the periphery of the firmament, and every so often the guide decides to stop the car for a moment to capture this scene on our cameras through rays of gray, this cyclopean rock juggernaut, flecks of brown betraying metals that rust, black streaks like a lightning strike cleaving the blue-gray cliché of what I typically think as a rock. No skyscraper scrapes the sky, but these monoliths try, and every time I alight from the leather-lined van I must reflect again on my place in the universe, but each essay for some symbiosis between the me and the other becomes more effete than the previous one, and when she says that this is great spot for a family photograph I feel my speck condensing even more, while the mountains loom larger, which signifies all that will thrive in the darkness and light when I am gone.

The Old Friend and the Roommate

An update, just talked to the roommate, it’s no longer any secret that he’s questioning his sexuality, and the old, drunken friend asked if he could he sleep in his bed. The roommate played a game of football on his Xbox, and decided to retire. He saw someone sprawled out on the floor, facedown, could not identify who it was, and as he descended into sleep he heard rummaging in the refrigerator, ponderous bumbling stumbling, so he arose, turned off the fan, and opened his door to investigate. The old friend stood pantless, leaning against the wall, heaving heavily, and with red eyes he said,” hey dude, how are you?”

They went into the living room where the old friend fell to the floor, and started laughing. My roommate, perplexed and fatigued from a busy night at the restaurant and the thought of having to awaken early for the soccer game in the morning, sat on the couch, unsure whether he should turn the television on to drown out the odd noises emanating from the supine man on the scuffed, dirty floor. I’m going to sweep today. Abruptly, the old friend bounded up, and collapsed into the blue chair, and the questions began…

(I’m withholding my real name for I do not want to censor myself, and am planning to write about the people and events in my life without any restraint. No one I know knows I have this blog anyways, and I plan to tell no one about it. This blog is for my online friends, who will never see me in three dimensions. From now on I will call my Weline, and if there’s anyone reading this, and you’d like to know my real name, then I’d happily tell you, but I’m doubting this writing is something that people would flock to. When one writes of alienation what can one expect?)

“How is it living with Weline? It seems pretty clean around here,” the old friend said.

“It has its ups and downs.”

“Are you anal?”

“I think to the individual when considering their own habits and standard, they would never call oneself anal, you know. I think I have higher standards than Weline when it comes to things like cleanliness and order.”

“So are you anal?” I think he just wanted to use the word anal, for the conversation veered into the realm of gay sex, with the location of said conversation in my roommate’s bedroom. Where were they sitting?

“Would you want to take or receive?” The old friend said.

“I’d probably do both, why not?”

“Fucking sick man. I’d only want to give,” the old friend said. I imagine the awkward aura, a cloying creep of the old friend’s closeness, and my roommate, paranoid, fearful man he is, probably scanned the room for something to put between him and the drunkard wobbling, salivating, palpating his body, bemusement growing, like the temperature dropping in the night.

The old friend, still wearing his t-shirt with the Camel cigarettes logo, thin layer of cloth separating his ass and loins from the ether and the eyes of my roommate, laid down on the bed.

“What if you turned off the light and got underneath the covers with me?”

“Come on man, this isn’t cool.” Do I have to go wake up Weline?”

I don’t know if my roommate would have told me if something happened between them, but I would I like to know? Yes, I can’t help loving the gossip. I love hearing about what people are doing, those I went to high school with, those I went to college with, are they domesticated, settled down, planning a family with the bounty of money building in their bank accounts? Are they wallowing in the prerogatives of the small town I grew up in, filling the same sports bar night after night, still obsessing of sport success, and fucking adorable, but opinion-less broads? Are they disillusioned and consternated, seeing futility in everything, a lifelong peregrination, the ever-present question of wanting or abrogating security, safety, when will you come home to boredom and monotony, when will the attraction to the other become overpoweringly enticing? I want the secrets as fuel for writing, and a pathetic template in which I can compare my own life to, because I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m really pursuing. There’s no purse at the end of striving, no glory in the dingy dives and the noisome dirges, diving into causticity only to emerge to see if I can still breathe, solace and serenity torment at their current degree.

The roommate indignant about how people talk. Why are people so concerned with what others do? I told him that’s what we do, talk, reflect, what you wearing ‘round your neck, there’s a finger with a ring, a scar from plastic surgery, an odd glint in a tooth, a musty stench from clothes, how can I know what my life is without knowing something of another’s? Am I so weak that all I see is the comparing and contrasting?

I apologized profusely, said he shouldn’t have to put up with that shit in his own home, and we laughed about it, while he readied with a drag from his oney for a match with an online opponent. We talked about the Viking victory, and I said I really liked his band’s record, though I think the vocals are too loud, but that’s just my preference. His nightly button-mashing began, and I thought about ex-girlfriends through my new love lens, thought about who I can call when I’m cold, who’s having fun in Chicago, who’s smiling in Minneapolis, who’s spooning in St. Paul. Bleary eyed I perused some words, the meaning escaped me, so I brushed my teeth and went to sleep.

An Old Friend

Late, wondering and awaiting, anxious, pensive and brooding, been drinking, but not wasted, though my old friend is. His head in a bucket I brought him, legs and waist on the couch, torso off, arms wrapped around the bucket I use to mop, strange man walked into my world. Recently divorced from a beautiful model, saw her book covers, the airbrushed dimples, the exaggerated hip movement, the close ups and makeup marks, he stated that she was in love with someone else, and now the marriage is annulled. He drunkenly cheated on her, and the aftermath consisted of two years of no sex, now he is snoring, half on the couch, half off. We have talked of being roommates, but something worries me, is he gay and looking to me for relief? He is looking in the wrong place. I talk of love, and how that’s what I want, but I put up these barriers don’t I? Only females can feel the extent of what my love is, whatever it is, is focused on the female. I can have a conceivably finite intimacy with a male. I can have a naively hopeful infinite intimacy with a female. He’s snoring loudly, half dead, half alive, and I’m thinking of the phone calls from the ex-girlfriend last night that I missed because I was unconscious and I toy with the idea of making a call and exhibiting how I still feel that I need her. I won’t. There will be no call. This body is ready to turn to the toils of the next day, for effeteness seeped in surreptitiously amidst a duo of loves that appallingly reacted to the abasement and bellicose statement of the noisy snorer on the couch next to the big, blue chair I sit in. In a bar frequented by older folks looking to sit in cushy leather half- circle booths, where men with large chains and slick hair not so subtly seduce anything young, fit, or pretty, we all drank whisky, but we sipped, the snorer gulped. The lovers are following their love to Chicago tomorrow, and I scrape the remains of my love off my heart for tomorrow.

And now it is today, an odd ache in my right calf, rigidity and tightness along the breadth of my back, and the general harangue of the hangover, a body bitching and a face in the mirror not so fetching, swollen, bloated eyes, saggy skin covering the skeleton ‘round my mind, a day of loosening, reconciling, and aimless, fruitless interpreting.

I walked out of my room, his jacket and pants on the floor before the front door, the coffee table pushed far from the couch, and my roommate’s heaters whirring and glowing near the slumbering old friend. What happened after I expired? I pray that the roommate won’t find something to chastised me for, but he’s done it before, indignant when I bring someone home drunk, troubling coping with any form of chaos, the slug’s trail can only disgust. The slug lives to digest.

The old friend enlisted my help to move a couch into room in his parent’s house. Though we knocked some pictures off the wall, the couch settled into its spot fairly easily, and his mother, alone with the epileptic though frisky dog Molly, gave me a big hug, two of them in fact. Father is in South Africa visiting his daughter, who has strayed from her missionary endeavors for more entrepreneurial pursuits, to the dismay of father, who prays for a living. The old friend told me he believes in the power of prayer, told me a story of father summoning the family to the kitchen table, in a circle, hands held, eyes closed, speaking softly, exulting, beseeching, asking for a van for furtherance of the cause, and a week later the miracle manifested, someone bought a van for the family. I remember getting high as hell in that van.

The old friend showed me his various leather bound notebooks, and told me of all his plans to write in them, one for emotions, one for intellectual queries, one solely for writing about the breakup. I told him he can’t think about writing. You just do it. Thinking too much leads to impotency, and if you’re not feeling it, if it’s a struggle, leave it, forget about it, and do something else.

Drunk Love

Hey people, you see, I am acknowledging that I have an audience, hello audience, am I beautiful? Are you realizing how wonderful I am? I’m drunk and the delusions come on stronger with the sauce. I feel everything more, especially the hollers of my ego. That’s why do this shit right, write, create, fucking everything? Jay Reatard is dead. I am drinking whisky alone and have never been happier, nothing matters, my health, my responsibilities, I am nothing and loving it. Hello vibrant New Yorkers, I am talking to you, because I don’t know if anyone I actually know should read this. With a belly full of poor man’s Jameson, Seagram’s Seven, I am altered, and ebullient with the thought that I am alive, free, able to thrust my personality on all passer-bys, and now you the reader are oh so lucky to read my intoxicated words. Do you love me more now? I bet you could love me, just as easily as I could love you. I want to love you. I want to fuck you. I want to lick the sweat and salt off your skin. I want to feel fusion with another person. Jay Reatard is dead. He died in his sleep, and now I am listening to everything he ever produced. He no longer can love unless there is a heaven where love is perennial, but do we want a love perpetual? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

This heartache is what makes love. Love can’t exist without the possibility of pain. Do I want freedom from pain when I can be so in ecstasy when there’s this being close to me that’s not me? Someone that experiences what it’s like to be me in the only truly fathomable way possible. My ex-girlfriend said I’m a difficult person to get close to, and I wonder how close I am to figuring who the fuck I am. Anyone out there that can clear the clutter in my head? It’s not me, that’s for damn sure, but you know what I’m used to the clutter. Sometimes it spits out something coherent at least to this now muddled mind.

I think I’m only on this earth to experience love. That’s all I want. Nothing more, nothing less. Could you love me? How do you know when you love someone? Is it when you’d die for them? Death, doesn’t hurt when it happens to us, love, hurts when it leaves us, but when in its midst is the most exhilarating sensation, nothing compares, not playing onstage, not succeeding in whatever you’re striving for or to, and I must state an orgasm with a true lover is beyond comprehension, let alone description.

Ultimately, in my mind there’s nothing more to long for, love, nothing pleases, sates, me more, not making money, art, romantic love, that’s all there is and the despondency when it is lacking. That particular pain, I can’t qualify or quantify it, is it good? Bad? Is it a pain I never want to feel? I want you to love me. I want you to love me.

1-14-10

I want people, mounds of them, loads of them, myriad of laughers, cacophony of laughter, drunken on the stoops and the curbs, curving my hands around voluptuous curves, suffusion of nerves, a tangled mess of truth, on the street and in quiet rooms, everything flowing into me, and only love effusive. I want your desperation, action, loco locomotion, creation, trepidation, isolation, masturbation, cynicism, insecurities, apathy, elation, consternation, circumlocution, delusion, disillusion, all the dastards, flagellators, and brutes, all devotees to the despondent search, ambling, wandering, piecing together the picturesque that seethes or gleams, every day the question: Will I return to love? Will I return to love?

I saw a woman in a hurry, betraying her bent back, a skeleton showed through her thin skin, hair as threads of sliver under a knit skullcap, walking along the icy sidewalk, carrying a bag full of something, and I passed her in my awful jalopy, put me in a pensive mood. What was in the bag? Where did she long to be? Was her betrothed dead, estranged, or watching the clock that hangs over his desk, counting the minutes before he can see the only salvation he knows? I saw her for only seconds, and has she ever considered how the most trivial of events, just her presence, could have an effect on someone?

Bands, bands, bands, everyone seemingly is in a fucking band, including me, but I harbor no shame, though sometimes I wish I really could do something unique, maybe suppressing how I’ve conditioned myself to want to play music would be a noble and noteworthy action. Anyways, I thought of bands because my roommate just returned home from his serving job, and we are mired in strangeness, awkwardness, lots of closed doors, snippets of conversation consisting of the most basic of content, though I did attempt to breach this cloying cloud that breeds nervousness and anxiety within the walls of this apartment surrounded by a world now stifled by intense cold. I kicked him out of my band, and with the drummer we were playing with I am starting another. So tired of the clashing aesthetics, my lackadaisical, content with my heart’s outburst manner and his fastidious, put it all under the microscope, attention to detail, which I eventually viewed as a barrier to the progress and a harbinger of impotency. I want to be on fire. He wants routine, security, and systems. I want entropy and movement. He wants calm, and so do I, but not all the time, join me in this conflagration, like them thar forest fires, we’ll burgeon in the ash. It’s the only way I can do things, as a controlled mess, a discursion stupidly, bafflingly portraying a vestige of my own moldy, festering truth, and it’s not beautiful or ugly just like everything out there floating through whatever ether’s the most comfortable. Here I am, you are, he is, and it is. Live with it or sever it, but I will not atrophy, become gangrene, I asked him just last week if he could practice on Sunday, and texted me,” dysfunctional band, dysfunctional apartment living, just don’t feel like it,” and thus I turned away, and now I am more excited about music than I have been in a long while. I want to be happy, and I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do.

I would trade all the art in the world, especially mine for an ultimate palliative for pain. Art's not worth the torment, but somehow I learn to live with it anyways, and I cope through art. I also cope through people, but oftentimes they bestow pain, minds banging and egos clashing, the always present enthrallment with all the other options, that enlightening, gratifying, sensual and sensuous experience, and in a moment of focus I can breathe without fetters, without the attraction to other bodies except the heavenly ones, and I can feel my mind as a sun in some solar system hidden from the lenses of all the telescopes. I can feel my mind as a single cell hidden from the lenses of all the microscopes. Cell and sun fuse creating this sensation called my reality.

Pain’s not good, weighty words, but I wasn’t born to suffer, and every day is an adventure in which I flee from pain. I say this because like most humans I’ve felt it immensely, and am amazed sometimes that I do not give up the ghost, but ultimately, how can I know that that ultimate act is an escape? Grandma hasn’t come back and told me. So I while away my time consumed by my penultimate acts, writing, painting, fucking, reading, drinking, listening, philosophizing, necking, eating, seething, jamming, skating, serving, reminiscing, pissing, glistening, revering, drugging, romancing, walking, gleaning, stewing, biking, discussing, hoping, willing, I’m downright dillydallying away this life, and I’m loving it. Sometimes I think that bi-polar tendencies are just the normal flux of life. Last week I scrawled a suicide note. This week I’ve been a bouncing bundle of positivity, leaving enervation in bed where it can mingle with my forgotten dreams, greeting the morning before the sun arises, screaming,” you see this sun, I beat you! Now raise me too, exalt me so I can exist in this world.”

I’ a-gonna get drunk tonight, a little exuberance histrionic, possibly a tad too garrulous, but fuck it, deal with my inebriated, effulgent logorrhea and I’ll languish through yours. My ear is everyone’s.