Sunday, July 31, 2011

She sang you a song; you sat through it

A New York City summer! my New York City summer! the island is on fire! Everyone, underground, sugared over with sweat, glazed like so many donuts, tempers running high and trains running slow. I see whole days in 'opportunities for central air.' I taste beer in my mouth all the time, I taste the cool amber bottle and the flaking label. I smell lavender. I hear indie music everywhere I go, mostly Arcade Fire and lo-fi ice cream trucks and girls playing hand-games out on Franklin Avenue, out past their bedtime. My Sundays are real Sundays – no one calls, no one emails, the hours go slow, they follow the sun. I get high on Netflix and bookstores and Seamless.com; my outrageous joy in these things makes me feel nursing-home-old but also toddler-safe.

And if I ever feel empty in a day, PLANS are what fill me: if I'm drowning in my twisted bunches of wrinkly sheets (themselves sprinkled over with Nilla wafer crumbs and receipts and other things I just need around me, this my own island, could-be-crypt)... when I start days with goals like “try to understand what's so great about Radiohead” or “form opinion on the debt crisis”...when I eat and eat and eat and dream of things I will do some other day, when the sun goes down, maybe, when the leaves change, maybe... I must make a mental note to remember that this is peace. Or just as good, and nameless.

You know 'Daylight' by Matt and Kim? You remember the sun on your squinting face when you heard it live and too-fast? Baby-fist-sized art with meaning, not so much meaning, a little bit of meaning, enough to want to remember. Rattling coda: how often do other people think about the things you think about? That 'sex every seven seconds' thing, is that racket or real?

So PARTICULARLY in summer, I think. Particularly in midtown, where the humidity levels often make sidewalks feel like the inside of someone's mouth. Particularly on nighttime strolls, particularly with red lipstick on, particularly with no one demanding a product of you, particularly with time on your hands, particularly in packets of giggling and what can only be described as good, clean fun. It gets easy this way to trip down rabbit holes, to slip off horses' backs, to go ricocheting across sky or water like a flying thing or a flying thing's shadow in a lake (...what).

The season here stands in as metaphor or simile (whatever); I am using it as a cheap emotional prop. What I'm really thinking about, what I really want cyberspace to know, is just too scattered and flung to make tidy in coherent paragraphs and law-abiding sentences. So I'll just continue to spell it out: “summer” love is drunk brunch and movies with like-minded ladies, “summer” love is talking about grief and a mythic set of good-old- days with a best friend, summer love is all the things I liked and believed in during high school and elevate now, it's that music. Being in love -- in like -- in summer is thus aloft, ridiculous, devoted, nostalgic, sweet, even though it's only a boy, you're only a girl, it's only a collection of months.

Periods of time that evoke frames of mind and feeling = zany words, words like firework trails. Time is funny. Periods of rest and recuperation make me feel like life is a boomerang, with tides of going away and currents of coming home. I'm sailing away these days. I'm on a vacation from certain strains of me. I'm kidding, I'm a kid, I take the money and run, I'm under no obligation to make sense to you. And liking a distant, vague YOU in a lavender haze, on a pulpit probably better suited to revelation or review (being a pulpit and not a confessional) on that hot cloud of cause-less celebration and hours and hours and hours of nothing-something...tralalalala!, that's what I've got. That's what you've got too, I'm guessing.

COOL it, imaginary critics. Being in love (in like, in space) is only a problem, as everyone knows, when it continues into fall. Though I might fall from here. It's quite high up.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Restless-aunt Week

Remind yourself it's just a job, ad thus a sickly, doomed kid of friendship. To begin with.

There is Gabriel Long-Arms. He is a circus freak; he grazes doorways, he's spindly. He's an actor, too.
Jeanine calls you sweetie and snaps gum. You thought she was your age but she's not, she's just a very slinky 32.
Ed reminds you of a childhood friend who died in a freak boating accident. He has no 'other life' (neither of them do); he wears gold chains and judges your ability to do your job instead.
You're in love with Jerad, who lopes around like a hunched turtle and teases you, sometimes rescues you from a rogue tray or a spill. He's Eastern European, but his accent suggests he might be the kind of guy raised in a pack of blacks (like yourself), but the question is...will-that-mean-he-understands-you-less-or-more?
Every day at Wickham's is a train to Bowling Green, or a favorite song that's way too short – full of promise, ultimately disappointing.
People in the restaurant all ought to have other lives – some are painters, some are dancers. You look for their art in the way they spin silverware or talk shop. No – the biggest trick is to stop being such a chickenshit, to shake, rattle and roll like a working cog. People yell. They yell AT you. They yell at you with the surefire conviction that you mean business, you mean evil, your business is evil, you are a deep canker sore of a problem in the mouth of their happiness. You're the wait, you're the lull, you're the rush, you're how-come-I'm-nine-covers-behind, you're smudged windows, but you are paid to smile. It's not a sad lament story of woe – it's not like you mine coal. And hey, as for the money? No one anywhere is being paid enough so just cut that mess, teenager. Grow up, out, a pair.
A ma follows you from a 4 to a 6 train one night, peering at you like he's trying to communicate something across a language barrier or without a tongue. You're just sitting there, quietly considering jacking up your roommates' share of an electric bill (because two of them are quiet, shedding monsters and the other one, the real one, is flaunting an overly attentive boyfriend like sweet new jewelry lately). What a chump, you chump. But remember the miners and rejoice.
The man isn't a rapist (nor is he a future husband, a prophet or a policeman), he's not anything, he just gets lost on his own, he becomes an anecdote to you. At work. You tell it-him-the-the man- about him to people at work who aren't entirely your friends but know an awful lot of your secrets anyways, an awful lot of your worst jokes. Sounds you make. Faces you make. Sexual horror stories, repetitive worries, fears in canon. These are the things we repeat over and over and so the fabric of your personality, de facto, rhythmic, unchanging. And where have you heard?
Oh, right. No one can tell what's wrong with them but everyone else can see instantly. Mad Men. A true thing.
Work has become a place to mull over the miniutiae of human interaction, for instance – a white woman is mean to you and Shannick one day. When Ralph Goldberg-the-Boss arrives, the aggressor becomes a purring cat. Maybe this is about race. Maybe Jerad's distance is about race. It could be the age difference or the fact that you're at work, but a small soldier says it could also be the skin – and there's no certainty. You remember being shown a house with your whole family sometime in high school, a big rambler in the chic suburbs. The old lady realtor was mean and you swore you could taste it, then, only it didn't compute – if she only knew me... (remember to stop being such a chickenshit).
But that can't really be your preoccupation. It is trite and you are not, you have strong bones beneath a kind, sort of sentimental and in a weird way you assume very rational carcass. You believe in pieces of peace. You can understand flip sides, for the most part – flip sides sparing furious hate groups with silly names. But meeting people, it's easy to smile and nod, to accommodate, to say 'that makes sense', to say 'thank you', 'welcome', and worst of all, 'enjoy.'

A night the moon is full an ex-boyfriend comes into your bar, and you are like a movie: of all the ______'s in all the ______, you had to ____________ into ________. He just smiles at you dopey and you look for places on his face you've affected; patches you can claim. You're looking for damage and remorse and regret. You think you find some. Twitching above a left eye like low-potassium.
The moon warps and twists across the glass window of a building opposite. It is not the moon, it is a street light. He did love you, but did-he-understand-you. Does it matter now. Does he want fries with that.

You pass some more tests. Shannick is loud about disliking gay marriage. You are mad, you let her know, but some people start hating her after this. You don't. You are a 50s housewife concerning sex, in a movie, on TV – you decide not to talk about it. This is the workplace.
Meanwhile, time is passing at the workplace.
You are growing roots and getting nicknames. People like you – that's it – and that feels good. Liking people feels good. You make a circle, you provide a surface, you provide a service, but no matter how hard you try you show but one side. You're the moon, dummy.
There's scarcely time for anything but caricature – people are busy eating, finishing eating, money's changing hands, you're just an ornament. It's not about you.
On the subway, look for eyes looking for eyes. Start that way. Then, start looking for eyes looking for your eyes. People reading the books you're reading or have read. Say hi OR – swallow timid coos. Think of Gerad, being easy and normal and Eastern European, sliding down a mountain on a snowboard (Gerad snowboards). A man across from you reads blatantly over someone's shoulder. Stop being such a chickenshit, you think – to, about, everyone.

The world is a frustrating place. All it ever is is the 4 train, and that means grating teenagers and other writers or other actors profaning what people must think of you by being loud. You have always, you will always, wear colorful clothes to stand out. These days you wear make-up. You've only listened to one very indie bad for weeks now, you can't pull yourself away, you're sucking on it.
And elsewhere, people who mean things to you and have meant things to you might be attempting to digest you, to reconcile your contradictions, to dig for bones below, people could be on their home couches, pondering the magnificent freakness of you – the parts you delight in, the sweet, the spicy.
I said, people could be. But they probably aren't. Eyes looking for your eyes – only the very, very lonely look back, and in the middle of the night. Big old Harvest Moon eyes, vacant, without questions. Have they not noticed, you wonder. Have they already seen, you speculate. Who are you digesting by candlelight, who is spinning like a basketball around and around in your mind.
Everyone who works at a restaurant, you're learning, has failed at something OR has a gap that was once a deep want and is now a deep pit, requiring something to fill it. You assess. You organize the dinner menus. You dream of snowboarding trips with Jerad, you dream of catching all the boy's eyes, you dream of catching all the world's eyes, you dream of dreaming.