Ta-ta!

Blogger and I have endured a long and mostly happy and healthy relationship together, but you know the drill...we're all each other has ever known and we're ready to spread our wings and give new things a try, blah, blah, blah, etc. etc.

Blogger...well, he lived here before I did, so it only seemed fair to let him stay while I proceeded to find new digs over at tumblr (who's already a lot sexier, more exciting, and frankly less of a bore).

Living at tumblr I'm hoping to make some new friends, keep some old ones (preferably the cool ones with good haircuts and expensive shoes...err, I mean the ones with interesting thoughts and experiences and well-written content. Obviously. Obviously.) and update you all as to my whereabouts and whatabouts more frequently than I've been recently doing.

If you care at all, I've changed my surname but not my given, and I'm here now.

HTTP://NIGHTGOWNSANDCIGARETTES.TUMBLR.COM

Blogger, darling. Don't be mad at me. It was great while it lasted.

Adios, muchacho!

Their Satanic Majesties.

Allen Ginsberg makes me cry at my desk sometimes.

In San Francisco Ginsberg saw a $1 an hour psychiatrist, Philip Hicks, who asked him what he would like to do. "Doctor," as Ginsberg recalls his answer...

"I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever. Never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now, and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone - maybe even a man - and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. Then he said "Well, why don't you?" I asked him what the American Psychoanalytic Association would say about that, and he said . . . if that is what you really feel would please you, what in the world is stopping you from doing it?

A brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1996)


Oh god. My thoughts exactly.

A Eulogy, To One of the Only Things I Have Left From Back Then

When I was fifteen I was asked out by the captain of my high school’s football team.

I didn’t care much, didn’t kiss him even. Went red-faced nonetheless.

15 year old girls, we do things like this.

But I? I was in love.

My high school had a mezzanine in a library full of winding, yellowing dog-eared pages and the smell of text that’s lived longer than any of us within it. Who can honestly say that they don’t love that smell, want to suck it up into a jar and wear it every day, the smell of knowledge so much older and greater than oneself?

I couldn’t keep it then, and I can’t now. So I went there (every day), sat there, and put on Definitely Maybe. I still, some days, wish I had it in a bottle somewhere.

I still, some days, wish I had the sandwiches my mother lovingly made me that back then were carelessly, terribly thrown into garbage bins prior to entering that place.

15 year old girls, we do things like this. Was there any part of my head that wasn’t, in some way or another, sad and sick?

Probably not, but someone, something, else loved me anyways.

And so I put on my headphones, and put on Definitely Maybe.

Supersonic. That solo. Blew my mind and gave me heaven. Every. Single. Fucking Time. Fifteen years old, no place to go. It gave me everywhere to go then (and still, now).

Then, when I was nineteen, there was D’You Know What I Mean. Taking me through 06:17 train rides, had me standing purposeful and thin and in a black pea coat that looked exactly as I meant it to, as I wanted it to (and still, now).

She’s Electric when dancing in my childhood home’s backyard, in faded grey track shorts and frizzed out summer hair, reflecting Californian sun for the first time, electric under my skin and swinging a little white dog, dying, round ‘til neither of us could take another breath or breathe, breathe, breathe out and drown in the staccato joy of strums and sound.

Hey Now! was highway car trips through West Virginian mountains and Carolinian plains that had alligators in their ditches. Scared us all.

Morning Glory, and I’m calling home from neon sign lit South Beach payphones on calling cards with my brother holding the receiver while I talk into it, afraid of the spit that others have left on it, afraid of anyone finding the three stale menthols I’ve hidden in a CD case in my motel room drawer, as if I lived there and had made a life there for the four night stay.

Some Might Say, my first driving test. I failed.

Listen Up in a car, driving home from early morning dreams in coffee shop windows, knowing that I really, really don’t mind being on my own and feeling it so deep throughout my bones when he sang it, too.

And I can’t say what it was about that album, those songs, that took me everywhere I needed to go in my head, but it did. It did at fifteen, and it did at every year I’ve been in between.

And now, at twenty four years old, it’s all over and, in another sense, just beginning.

I don’t feel like anyone could really ever understand what it is that I feel for those songs because, in a certain sense, they can’t. They’ll never hear the sunrises and being still drunk at work with Champagne Supernova, they’ll never feel the 3 a.m. Yonge Street walks alone of Cast No Shadow, or smell that library, full of sagacity and future, with the whole glorious fifty one minutes of Definitely Maybe.

And then one day, the makers, they’re gone. Like everything, every moment, every one of us in time.

That’s okay, though. That part of me is too.

But if I ever need to go back? They know, and I know, where to find me.

Mirages of Matchstick Men (and you).

Sublime Oh Nine.

Made it through, didn't I?

It's not so cut and dry as beginnings and endings in some respects. And I don't know what I want to say right now, but I know I want to say something. So writing, sitting here on bones and in skin that isn't as uncomfortable to be inside as it was at this time last year, feels more right than I know or have any words to type. I need to say something honest, start this year with honesty. Be a real, apologetically honest human being.

hon·est (ŏn'ĭst)
adj.

1. Marked by or displaying integrity; upright.

2. Not deceptive or fraudulent; genuine.

3. Equitable; fair.

4. 1. Characterized by truth; not false.

   2. Sincere; frank.

   3. Of good repute; respectable.

   4. Without affectation; plain.

5. 1. Of good repute; respectable.

   2. Without affectation; plain.

6. Virtuous; chaste.

All of them. And find out what I've actually been hiding from all these years, and if it's really as scary as I've made it out to be in my head.

It's hard to trust, but it gets easier the more you do it.

And splitting yourself into a million selves? Easy. The only part of it that's a little tricky is maintaining them. But finding yourself, being one single self? Harder than it looks.

But it gets easier the more you do it.

Happy New Year!

and you just keep on getting closer.

crystallized from Fake TV on Vimeo.

Hi, hi, high.

those who don't never will. but those who do?

Rise and shine to you.
For you
The moon and the stars and
The sky. There is always
Quick heat in mouths touching, built
with brick around
frost, and hung
with a thousand particles of
light around brick.
Stolen, not taken. My world
is the same as any other (because
what is a world?) if a look is taken
at the brick and
the frost, the lights
in the dark.
But between? There, in the
tiny, apparent barren space that
no one bothers
or, maybe, looks close enough
to see?
There is a rise
and shine
to you
For you
Always sticking.
It is steady, it is even. and
I?
I have seen what a world is after all.

A year, in review.

This season. It doesn't feel like a single one that's come before it, not that I can remember.

Last year, same day. December 21. I wrote this.

Months and years past of train ticket machines click-click-clashing my passage to and from a place that I knew was my home. I took a train again this morning in a sweater two sizes too large for me, and stared out a frostbitten window knowing that I don't know where that home is anymore.

And, far more significantly, knowing that it's alright to not know.

I expect that having figured everything out at the age of 23 would make for a horribly dull, albeit easier and more manageable existence. I could be wrong, of course, so if there's a 20-something (or 30, or 40, or ever 50-something for that matter) out there who believes that they've obtained such clarity, please send me an e-mail...I'd love to hear all about it. So, for the time being, I'm unsure as to what direction this is all going in, and I mean that in the broadest sense possible. Past, present and future blogs, schools, careers, homes, shoes, cigarettes, planes, trains, automobiles, holidays - you name it, I've probably not quite figured it out. And the great clarity I've been seeking for a longer time than I would like to recollect kicks in when I remind myself that it's not something I even want. I'm in love with not knowing, and for right now that's good enough.

A few days ago my oft-alluded to man and I sat in our beautiful tropicana coloured kitchen nook, where we sit most every evening and enjoy the beautiful meals we alternately prepare for one another, and we talked. We always talk.

It's nice, being with someone who likes listening to you talk, likes the way your face moves when you listen to them talk, likes talking to you.

Our talks range from making silly noises and singing at one another to examining existentialist treatises to congratulating each other and ourselves on the accomplishments of the week (songs, chapters finished, meals made, dancing fun had). This time we talked about happiness. What it means, where you feel it, whether it's in your chest or bones or stomach or skin or brain or all of then at once. How it doesn't change who you are, it lets you be who you are. And even though I still don't know what it is, or how to explain to anyone how to feel it like I do...

Happiness. We came to this conclusion. When you can just be, it just is.

And this? This I know.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Not Here.

There's courage involved if you want

to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group? What's the
use of old and frozen thought? I want

a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm

won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

- Rumi

Us.

People sometimes forget that every beginning is an ending, too.

The change, the change...it all happened for a reason, didn't it?

I've made it. I'll keep it.

It's you, always.