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the saddest blog that ever was
1.12.2005:
"By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters..."--Mephistopheles, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2 Section II
there's a fine scum in the air, like soapy residue on the clear glass of our lives. i feel as if i live in a giant warm pulsing compost heap, the steam rising off all the touring bodies as they toss and turn in their paltry attempts at sleep while napalm death covers minor threat in the background. somehow jersey dave's radio got accidentally turned on during the mosh and now it goes on and on in an empty locked room reciting weather conditions for all the continuous counties of the united states at 5 am while i try to drown it out with mirah. there's a slight chance of rain tomorrow in chattanooga tenessee and sleet in bellmont washington. is this what its like? is this what i was afraid of so long ago when it was smarmy and hot outside and now its damp and humid inside. it does seem so long ago; the piles of people egging each other on at three twenty four twenty five twenty going on six twenty now...the faces passing through have changed hands in the shake so many times in the last two weeks that the girls are a blurring bundle of softness and fuzzy down comfort, a place to sink into at the end of the night or the break of day. i am merely grateful that someone else could experience the spectacle, the strange and inalienable beauty that lasts for only a couple of minutes each night each song. i sit back from the others and nod as if i was really listening, instead pulling the events of the last week and a half slowly and languidly over and over in my mind like pulling molasses taffy. i am sweetly afraid but not in a hurry. i think i understand it but i make no presumptions or assumptions; i am stronger than any stray eye candy here or there yet i make no judgement on anyone or myself. i am just kind of negligently happy, as if the soul was on holiday in the deserts of the past but not scared of the clouds (if any) massing on the horizon of the future. jeff from mliw keeps talking while i think about someone else's show, looking at me funnily, perhaps like the guys at the lounge when eileen decided to stay and take on three boys at pool while aimee and i fled the scene. his voice is husky from singing so much and his lids dark. the uncle is drunk and stoned out of his gourd, calling his ex-girlfriend count it four times on tyler's phone, each time leaving a more desperate drunk message. drunk calling, i'll never have to do that again at least. it's already serving me well as i feel my fingers itch and creep towards that sole tyranny of my life, the stupid cell phone that always rings twice. the night nick's father passed away we went out to a bar, or i think i convinced him to go out drinking, and when we came home i refused to go to sleep. it was back in the days when i needed to be "closer to the earth" when i was drunk, face down and palms plastered fingers splayed to the gritty carpet he shared with stevie kelley's sneakered feet. so obstinately, i sat on the couch in the living room at fenwick number four (?) and played cold cold water and mt saint helens over and over again. nick stumbled out once to use the bathroom and blinked at me with a sigh that still makes me laugh inwardly. what the hell did he say? "oh cathy, always listening to mirah." or "oh cathy. still listening to mirah?" because i think he knew, on some silly metaphysical out-there level, he knew that i knew that he was taken, that i clung to her songs and her words because everything of his that i wanted belonged to someone else. but he could still appreciate the fact that i'm the kind of person who thought in terms of the saddest songs and the saddest blogs and coordinated her mind to the pulsings and beatings of my crazy little heart. sometimes these beatings left me black and very blue. but if i didn't try to remember this, who would? and then what would happen to the tiny little strands of my thoughts, they would become the spurious heartstrings of some maiden rendered useless by time. there were many messages blinking on and off on the machine that night, but we never bothered to press the button. in the early dawn there was an incessant ringing in the air, like my favorite story signs and symbols. i cried out and he finally picked up. in my worst nightmares there is always a phone ringing in the background.
"the universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings. from any hexagon the upper or lower stories are visible, interminably. Infinite i have just written. i have not interpolated this adjective merely from rhetorical habit. it is not illogical, i say, to think that the world is infinite. those who judge it to be limited, postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairs and hexagons could inconceivably cease--a manifest absurdity. those who imagined it to be limitless forget that the possible number of books is limited. i dare insinuate the following solution to this ancient problem: the Library is limitless and periodic. if an eternal voyager were to traverse it in any direction, he would find, after many centuries, that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself). my solitude rejoices in this elegant hope. Mar del Plata 1941.
borges makes me believe that memories are infinite, that what i felt for you then and what i still feel for you now can become a spiral in the graph, a chamber in the nautilus (our friend the cephalopod mollusk!) that blows through the pipes of pan. this elegant hope rejoices in this inelegant incomprehensibly random mind.
current music: cocteau twins' heaven or las vegas. cherry-coloured funk is such a fucking good song. how could anyone not take off their clothes immediately and not writhe on the floor like lovely slimy snakes making love when listening to the cocteau twins? why aren't i writhing right now? oh but i am, believe me i am. current mood: uh...awake. current secret: did you guys know that i also have a blog that is the funniest blog that ever was? and it is so funny. ha ha. ps: i ate thirteen slices of pizza tonight, and eileen's even had mushrooms on top. pps: i am grateful that sen catches the butcherings i wrough on baudelaire and blanchot like bad curveballs on a bad day with a bad arm at shea stadium. members only man, members only. hot. ppps: i will miss the good songs of the tender wizard when he blitzes through tour and works his magic on those western states. but the singing will save him if nothing else will, its that good.
Blog // 7:04 AM
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