intersubjectivity is some insidious shit.
tonight i think i have to take a moment to write about ray, i can hear him coughing and banging his head head up against the wall all over again, there's no music, there's no shrieking, but upon returning to school i imagined that his roommate danny would be left and ray would be gone for the semester, kicked out after failing academic probation. but columbia gave ray a second chance, and danny is the one who moved out, and now i stroll the hall to the bathroom at three in the morning and hear ray through a doorway wail 'my god, i'll wake up tomorrow- shit, i'm alive, i'm still here-'. when i hear his head bang against the wall i can see his room, the bunk mattresses without sheets, empty liquor bottles, ash, and puzzle pieces scattered on the floor, a vaccuum cleaner in the corner, the walls are bare. i toured the room after hearing his voice right after checking back into my...home. no one can see ray's room, but i understand the notion of whatever that term is where your house decreases in value because your next door neighbour's looks like shit. i know i don't care about ray, at the beginning of last year he actually came to my radio show so maybe at one point we had some fun - i recall him leaving because he thought i was crazy, or it was actually too late for him, my god, too late for ray, has it once this year been too late for ray...so even when i hear a voice speaking in spanish outside my window and realize, hey, ray's dominican, that's why he looks like that, i still don't care, it's quite a strategic measure on my part to not particularly care, because he'll follow up that fact to inform me that some of his friends that he met on myspace from long island are creating mad drama and are coming for a party in his room on thursday. ray... i'm smoking out my window. your roommate, me, and my roommate have classes on friday. naturally, strategies fail and give way to the morbid fascination that underlies them- why invite them to a party in your room? but now ray's all alone next door, and i know what it looks like next door, and i look at my wall at the foot of my bed, behind the painting that my mom made, and... no one wants to take this seriously- or maybe that's just me. but i'll probably lose sleep (if not only because of the volume, then psychological fumblings). i live next to a crack den.