about messing around on the guitar

Sometimes when I fuck around on guitar, I'll find something decent and play it repeatedly. In that rhythm, maybe I can nail it. But if I turn on the phone to record, No. I tell myself I can play it clean without screwing up, but the memory and hands can't believe each other.

 

(posts) the poem "Sure"

Sure
 —Arlene Tribbia

I miss my brother sure
he drank Robitussin
washed down with beer
sure he smoked dope
& shot heroin
& went to prison
for selling to
an undercover cop

& sure he robbed
the town’s only hot dog stand,
Gino’s like I overheard
while I laid on my bed
staring up at the stars
under slanted curtains

& sure he used to
leave his two year old
son alone so he could
score on the street

but before all this
my brother sure
used to swing me up
onto his back, run
me around dizzy
through hallways and rooms
& we’d laugh & laugh
fall onto the bed finally
and he’d tickle me
to death sure

a note about Ms. Kitty

 

One day in second grade, I learned we had a cat. Dad found her or got her for free somewhere, I guess. We called her Ms. Kitty because that was the name a vet put on the paperwork when she was vaccinated. She was mean as hell except to my dad and me. We could pet her and hold her, but nobody else could. She would nap on my bed or sleep on dad's newspapers. When she had kittens, she got even meaner. One day my older sister brought over a boyfriend and his big, dumb German Shepherd. Ms. Kitty ran right out the door to confront the dog on the back patio, springing, claws out. I still remember bright red blood dripping off the stunned dog's rubbery black nose.

 

(posts) two Eliot Smith lyrics that have bounced around my mind the last couple weeks

 

about feelings couples have

 

There were a lot of people like her and a lot of people like me, but still we felt nobody was like us.

 

something about a human archive

I remembered a girl who thought of herself as scribblings on scraps of paper. Notes made here and there—notes that are only briefly relevant. When those notes are rediscovered after a time, they don't make sense anymore, and it is best to throw them away.

something about hearing things

A heart that beats but feels nothing at all. There are years and years that I don't recall.

about dementia

I visit my parents and wake up in my childhood bedroom. I walk into the den. Dad, who has been awake for at least two hours, asks me, "Ok, what's next?" I get coffee. "Are you getting coffee?" This is soon followed with, "Are you about done drinking coffee? Are you reading the newspaper?" No more than 45 seconds pass before he asks for a status update. He wants to know what he should be doing ("What you're doing does not concern me, does it? You don't need me for that, do you?"). He follows me around.

He often wants me to stop doing what I am doing so that I will do something else. If he appears to be waiting for me to move, I will move; but when I move, he becomes suspicious of what I am doing and wants me to stop. "Don't worry with that. Get back to whatever you were doing. Ok, go!"

He is worse the next time I visit. He confuses his words and thoughts: "Did you make dinner sweet sixteen?" "Do you use your middle name today?" "In a few minutes, you'll have to take off your blouse. You're way behind."

He becomes disoriented and wants to undress in the middle of the day. Clothes are a fixation for him now. He fingers his shirt buttons and belt throughout the day. He sees you with a soda can; after each sip, he asks, "Are you done with that?" He wants to throw it away. He badgers me until I finish a bottle of water, and then, when mom opens a can of soda, he spits, "Goddammit! We don't have time for that!"

He checks the garage door. He pulls the window shades. He sits in every seat in the room, moving from here to there, sitting in three different seats within 15 minutes.

Dad seems to know his memory is gone. When mom tells him they will go to the store tomorrow, he responds, "My memory only lasts until the last syllable leaves your lips." He says, "Tell me this 2 minutes before we leave."

about a dream that sticks with me

One Sunday morning I was sleeping late and dreamed of lying in bed with X. Lying there, dressed in sleepwear, comfortable in each other's presence, talking. Not about anything in particular—just current events, passing thoughts, and so on. For a moment, my feeling wandered from intimacy to romance, but that feeling passed and I relaxed again. In real life, I would go out of my way to avoid her. And yet, what a treat was this Sunday morning spent together. I wondered later how I could dream something so in conflict with my better judgment. The reason is probably as simple as loneliness. There are few people further away from me than X, so her being so close meant that everyone else was that much closer.

about being attached still at the roots

The blonde-headed young man slides self-consciously into frame. His eyes are pulled twice to the camera, furtively each time; he nods hair away from his face. He knows he is being seen but denies the seer. Finally, a casually intentioned look toward the camera's eye--mutually frank, unwise, and uninvested.

Recording themselves downtown, the boys were making memories, however forgettable in the grand scheme. It is that association between memory and place, time and space, that now leaves me missing home. My hometown: flawed but well planned grids of city streets; tree-heavy suburban neighborhoods where kids get excited about spending the night at friends'; where the beginning and the ending last until I die.

(posts) a picture of a rhododendron

about being attached still at the roots

The blonde-headed young man slides self-consciously into frame. His eyes twice pulled to the camera, furtively each time, he nods hair away from his face. Knowing being seen but not acknowledging the seer. Until he does acknowledge with a casually intentioned look toward the camera's eye--mutually frank, unwise, and uninvested eyes.

Recording themselves downtown, the boys were making memories, however forgettable in the grand scheme. It is that association between memory and place, time and space, that now leaves me missing home. My hometown: flawed grids of city streets; tree-heavy suburban neighborhoods where kids get excited about spending the night at friends'; where it began and the ending lasts until I die.

Some idea of himself

Imagine Jack Dawson and Rose Dewitt Bukater working for a living in New York's slums. Or Romeo and Juliet going it alone, deprived of their family fortunes. Similarly, had Jay Gatsby married Daisy Buchanan, we would have lost them. And they would likely lose each other.

But unlike the doomed pairs from the film Titanic and Shakespeare's tragedy, Gatsby was willing to volunteer for his fate. The sacrifice he was to make for Daisy is not unlike the one Abraham was to make for God: Both men stood ready to answer the call of a higher duty--a duty only answerable by renouncing all others. Abraham's duty was to God; Gatsby's to an ideal, the past, the promise.

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality if his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

For years Gatsby believed he could resurrect the past, a few moments of youth preserved under the glass of his memory, observable, close, but too fragile to touch.

"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see."
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ...

Gatsby, in his suspension, his nonexistence, is replaced in the public mind with a collection of myths borne from the incurious imaginations of passersby. In Fitzgerald's story, these are all people living a life other than their own: Tom Buchanan has his wife, Daisy, but his attentions lie with his lover in the city; Daisy pretends they don't; Gatsby suspends himself in service of his dream for Daisy; and Gatsby's guests obliterate the night with drink and forgetting, believing themselves to be in the company of a man who isn't, who isn't and who isn't.