Yesterday it was 60 degrees, so naturally I slept with the windows wide open. I awoke around 3 a.m. with the wind literally howling through the apartment. It was the type of wind which occasions a scurrying about, a removal of breakable items from window sills. After doing this, I returned to my bed. Over the screaming of the wind, I could hear the howling of a girl. Hers were the sort of meaty wails generally reserved for the dissolution of a long love affair. I know, as I’ve emitted them myself from time to time. At one point there was a staccato burst from a male voice, hostile, then some more yowls, and then I fell back asleep.
All of this is very promising for summer. Two words: cross ventilation.
Hello Day After Christmas. I am 28 years old today, and kind of drunk. It’s 3pm and it’s a soggy mush out there, and boy, hearing your voice fresh from sleep reminded me of that downstairs bedroom and how thoroughly I’ve slept in it. I remember the smell of it and more precisely, the smell of you. Even though I now have the permacold and smell nothing, at the same time I smell everything.
I spent the holiday season being a jerk, but it’s only fitting, I reckon. It’s an appropriate capper to an autumn spent being a drunk. Remember when we all used to be just younger and our backs so much more slick, so much more invitation for rolling off? It’s nice to be older, to be more trustworthy and assured.
Remember 2000, when cars were going to fly and there was no such thing as everything? That was nine years ago. A decade has expired and we’re still glorifying the nineties. At some point today I will go out into the grey sopping and I will like it, even though it does no favors for my complexion.
Eleven birthdays since you’ve been gone. If I lived for eleven hundred more, my heart would never stop sending you a box of candy.
To reiterate:
It’s funny how the joy derived at being done with something is considerably depleted when you know you’ve done this something poorly. Alas, not surprising.*
*Unless of course you have reached the point of not really caring that much anymore.
I am a lady who takes many baths. In fact, I am typing this from the bathtub this moment, trusty MacBook perched atop overfilled Ikea wastebasket, Star of David bedecked radiator humming and hissing and overheating the tiny bathroom. My right knee is bleeding from a shaving cut. My left leg is wound free, as I did not happen to shave that one. I am not that big on shaving. It’s boring.
All of this bathtub sitting allows for plenty of introspection. In staring at my feet, I cannot help but notice that from certain angles, it very much resembles the foot of my mother. Mostly from the top. Flat and wide. From the side, it very much resembles my father’s. My father was born with a clubfoot, which I know very little about aside from it being a birth defect that involves a strange curvature of the foot, and, at least in my father’s case, a long childhood stint in a very large cast and a get out of Vietnam free card. My somewhat southward navel gazing alerts me to my own curvaceous foot. Age does manage to serve as a reminder that we are so much the product of our genetics.
Christmas is always a difficult time of year for me. Christmas Eve was the birthday of both my father and my maternal grandmother, and as such was usually a festive occasion. They died within ten months of each other, a decade ago now. And yet, the absence of them on Christmas Eve is still pretty freshly felt. My family still hasn’t really figured out what to do with this day, so no new tradition has ever been formed. Not being a people too bent on traditions, anyway, I doubt one ever will be.
The holiday has really snuck up on me this year. While I have not done much about presents aside from brokering deals with loved ones to forego exchanging them, I must admit that I have been enjoying the decorations plastered all over the Victorian houses in my quaint little neighborhood. There’s a foot of snow on the ground and I’ve lost my favorite hat, but my affection for winter is ever increasing. A woman remarked to me today how pleasantly warm it was, in the thirties! I heartily agreed. Oh you, midwest.
I am saving up some money to buy a car. I feel like I should feel more guilty about my excitement for this impending purchase, but I do not.
Invariably wherever I live, I gravitate toward a coffee shop. In Los Angeles it was of course Cafe Tropical, the coffee joint which will always be regarded by me as unbeatable on every level.
In Brooklyn and here in Chicago, the coffee shops of choice occurred more by default than kismet. Cafe Tropical was a gift from the gods, whereas the Outpost and the Grind, respectively, were more or less the best available. Last summer, when I was miserable and unemployed, I found myself frequenting the former. It was there that I came to find myself at odds with a particular barista by the name of Lawrence. Despite my regular status, Lawrence always regarded me frostily. He never remembered my order, or at least pretended not to, though it was usually the same. He never made idle chit chat, never even cracked a smile. I knew Lawrence was capable of performing all these barista tricks, for I had seen him do it. He remembered the orders of other patrons. He greeted. He smiled. He made idle chit chat.
My Chicago coffee shop lacks all of the charm of the Outpost, as well as the good music, comfortable seating, and um, good coffee. Theirs is sort of a murky brew, that at once tastes rather syrupy and charred. The seats are neither abundant nor inviting. I would have to agree with one reviewer on Yelp that the music, no matter who is working, tends toward Lilith Fair. Still, the people who work there are unfailingly nice and for a few months now this has been my go to spot.
Last summer, just when my mental standoff with Lawrence was reaching its most passionate timbre, I decided that I had no choice but to get to know Lawrence. I needed to find out what made Lawrence tick. Knowing nothing about him save the angle of his sneer and his fondness for Will Oldham, I steeled myself. It finally occurred to me that Lawrence was a southerner. This much was pretty apparent from his accent and manner of speaking. And so I had to do it. I had to start reading Faulkner! I went to the library and checked out the only novel they had available, which I believe was called The Hamlet. I read several chapters of it before declaring it super boring, thus abandoning both the book and my quest to understand the inner workings of Lawrence the rude barista.
By some act of fate or folly on my part, I now find myself reading, through no choice of my own, Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury. My opinion on the author has not changed. Yawn and yawn. The sound is that of my slowing breathing as I fall asleep. The fury is what I feel when I realize I still have a hundred pages of this snoozefest to read before the weekend.
Perhaps it was never meant to be between Lawrence and me. It’s okay. It was never meant to be between Brooklyn and me, either. And, things aren’t looking so hot for me and Faulkner.
It’s funny how the joy derived at being done with something is considerably depleted when you know you’ve done this something poorly. Alas, not surprising.
Today was one of those days so fraught with situations begging to be racially stereotyped that you almost think you ought to keep all of this to yourself, lest you come off as the sort of person who not only notices racially stereotypical situations but also delights in recounting them. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.
So, my illness, which I assure the dear reader I complain about much more in real life than in this forum, has been relentless in its quest to make me tired and miserable. After exhausting all hippie and drugstore remedies, a few key players finally convinced me that a medical visit might be in order. I went online in the late afternoon and found a doctor, recommended by my insurance provider, located not far from my place of employment. I hailed a cab and scooted on over, only to discover that said medical office was of the sort quite commonly observed in Echo Park. Not to be that person, but let’s just say I usually left my old stomping grounds when I needed treatments of any sort. Upon entering, I took in the fact that the place was utterly filled with Mexicans, and had the decor of a basement having been furnished at a rummage sale in 1983. Absent was the aroma that is standard in all doctors’ office, yet present was the aroma that is standard in all taquerias.
I asked the receptionist if I could see the doctor and she looked at me quizzically. ”This doctor?”
I assured her that yes, I did want to see this doctor. After all, I was already there and after having hastily judged that I would likely receive subpar medical attention, I wanted to see just what that meant. Alas, it was not to be, for she could not verify my insurance and sent me away.
Dejected, I went outside and got on the #9 Ashland bus. Almost immediately after I got on, a large black woman in her late teens got on the bus with a baby that was maybe ten months or a year old. She was on her cell, loudly dropping more f-bombs than our cherished governor. All, “Michael you are not at motherfucking work, where the FUCK are you. I’m about to come and bust out your motherfucking windows!”
Two older gentlemen clucked their tongues and one said to the other, “Oughtta keep personal business personal! I don’t need this right after work.”
I was thinking that no one really needs this at any time of day, least of all the baby and possibly this Michael person. At the height of my sympathy for the wee one, the mother whipped out a donut (Dunkin’, methinks, and vanilla frosted to boot) seemingly from her pocket and handed it in its entirety to the baby. The baby seemed mostly pacified if somewhat greasy after that, and it occurred to me that perhaps there is a reason why some kids grow up to be criminals.
When I got home, my mother persuaded me to go to an urgent care center in a continued quest for resolution to my internal pathological struggle. And so I did. The clinic that I selected couldn’t have been more wonderful, in the sense that it was all tricked out like a motel on Hollywood Boulevard. Sporting an enormous, mid-1960s glass entranceway with car dealershipesque circular staircases and a dusty and dim bulbed if formerly glorious chandelier, it really was the urgent care clinic dreams are made of. Immediately upon entering my eyes fell upon a sturdy, no nonsense Filipina nurse and an ancient Chinese doctor. I knew I was in good hands. The only other patients were two young Polish gents, one of whom was in a wheelchair and was taken to x-ray, yet some thirty minutes later was mysteriously spotted walking down Western Avenue.
Anyway, I have strep throat and some ear infections and a bunch of shit to do at work tomorrow. Life is grand.
How about this photo?
I am on day nine of a really persistent and consistently painful sore throat. I haven’t slept well in weeks. Actually I haven’t slept very well in months, but for weeks it’s been especially bad. I am starting to come a little unhinged. I wish it would stop.
Another winter storm outside. More snow and sloppy streets. The city never paves the roads in this town, but why should they bother? Way too busy clearing the taxpayers’ pockets to worry about clearing their byways, they are.
On the Halloween of my fourth year, I took a tumble down the wooden stairs in my childhood home. I took literally hundreds of tumbles down these well-polished stairs, but none of the preceding nor subsequent falls occurred while I was in full clown costume. I distinctly remember my mother dabbing at my bleeding skull and my smearing makeup, as I sat perched atop the golden yellow sink in the basement bathroom.
This accident left a scar on my head that remains to this day, a white and hairless expanse about an inch or so long. For reasons unknown, this battle wound is often quite itchy. As my fingers indelicately scrape against it, I almost always have the odor of that basement, of that bathroom, of that mother in my nostrils.
