(no subject)
It's like re-entering society. I was in a kind of prison, and though I have no interest in returning to it, I am completely overwhelmed by my release. I've been living a bit too fast and hard since I got out. Under these and other cloudy conditions, playing guitar serves as a nearly literal substitute for hymnal healing. I eat dinner at Lulu's, sometimes. I met a fun and pretty girl whose phone number might have been within reach. All I wanted to say was that, hey, we should go biking some time. I know a nice forested route. Instead, I went home heavy and saturated with regret. And then I facebook-friended her the next day. Mixing facebook with crushes parallels mixing opiates with alcohol on the Maturity & Good Judgment scale. I've been drinking socially throughout the day, staying out late and wrapping my sparse hours of sleep in quiet trips to the waterfront. I hung out with old friends, drank past my prime, and lost my clunky, reliable bike. I bought a new bike that rides smoother than a Porsche, and I've fallen in love with it. My roommates and I adopted two kittens: Monkey and Adeline. Monkey climbs on everything. Addie walks like a bear, hops like a bunny, and looks like an chubby-cheeked angel dressed in gray fluff. They both carry themselves with much dignity and little foresight, falling from high places and tugging at cords connected to heavy, elevated things. These cats do not understand the basic laws of physics, but their poetry of motion obscures that and other failings. I'm continuing to buy too many records and books. I saw one of my favorite bands play in Central Park and rediscovered the joy of solitude that I had explicitly sought in the formulation of my escape. It was the best outdoor show I've seen in a long, long time. I'd missed that healthy loneliness, and the absolute silence that necessarily accompanies it, since I'd stopped camping out by the radiator under the stairs in the 42nd Street library and reading Harvey Pekar (R.I.P.) and Drawn & Quarterly. It was too hot beside that radiator, but the comics shelves were there and once I'd opened a good one I'd forget to back away and ride the escalator to the reading floor until a drop of sweat would roll down my back and I'd rediscover my surroundings. I trawl the local bars for new beers and a warm light by which to sketch. I've been sketching a lot lately, mostly recently in a notebook rather than on scraps of paper that litter my desk and pockets and floor and dissolve into whatever ether consumes Bic pens and lighters. I encountered a man blowing bubbles off the Pulaski bridge, across the river and into a cityscape pierced by the modular but nonetheless meaningful rays of a fiery sunset. I asked if he wouldn't mind my taking a picture and offered to email him whatever turned out. He consented and thanked me for liking bubbles and I thanked him for making them. He is called Big Sid, but I refer to him as the Hon. Bubblemaster. He recently sent me a stellar watercolor and I sent him a sketch in return.
I hope for more watercolors in the near term. I've nearly reached the end of a story I've been writing for about a year, and though it requires a stronger thread and radical revisions, it's progress. We screen good movies via projector in our backyard, sitting around a fire pit and roasting marshmallows. Good, colorful people congregate around the graceful light of a fire. I've been playing a lot of soccer at my rec center. I do not presume to know what eases others' pain, but nothing fixes me like two or three games of soccer. I first played a couple of months ago, and was in so much physical pain that I had to take a taxi home. I've felt invigorated since then. On weekends, I rise early, hungover and in yesterday's underwear, and bike along the water to DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights or Red Hook. Nate moved out. We have a new roommate (a human); she's a winner. Not a breadwinner, but that means she won't have to wait around for a camel's narrow passage or a needle's gaping hole, and so on. Excessive drinking fills me with anxiety and discontent, and I apparently forgot how to talk to pretty girls. I'm more beholden to alcohol than I've been in a long time. But a reasonable balance of lonely sobriety and social inebriation should sufficiently deflect both quarter-life mania and crush-aphasia. I'm still calibrating, but I'm all anew and re-learning. Stay with me. My job is exhausting and Monkey won't let me sleep. I'm watching my feet walk beneath me, but it really is a release.
I hope for more watercolors in the near term. I've nearly reached the end of a story I've been writing for about a year, and though it requires a stronger thread and radical revisions, it's progress. We screen good movies via projector in our backyard, sitting around a fire pit and roasting marshmallows. Good, colorful people congregate around the graceful light of a fire. I've been playing a lot of soccer at my rec center. I do not presume to know what eases others' pain, but nothing fixes me like two or three games of soccer. I first played a couple of months ago, and was in so much physical pain that I had to take a taxi home. I've felt invigorated since then. On weekends, I rise early, hungover and in yesterday's underwear, and bike along the water to DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights or Red Hook. Nate moved out. We have a new roommate (a human); she's a winner. Not a breadwinner, but that means she won't have to wait around for a camel's narrow passage or a needle's gaping hole, and so on. Excessive drinking fills me with anxiety and discontent, and I apparently forgot how to talk to pretty girls. I'm more beholden to alcohol than I've been in a long time. But a reasonable balance of lonely sobriety and social inebriation should sufficiently deflect both quarter-life mania and crush-aphasia. I'm still calibrating, but I'm all anew and re-learning. Stay with me. My job is exhausting and Monkey won't let me sleep. I'm watching my feet walk beneath me, but it really is a release.