So you wanna spin the world around, Gomez plays like it did in my head that morning at the Excellence when I thought I would have to turn myself inside out to get any peace. Wondered sometimes what I thought I was getting out of flaying my skin to shreds, wondered why songs would spin round in my head and I would want so much to just leave – but be unable to… I could have just picked up my shirt and my shoes and walked home, just hiked the short way home that day, but in spite of the knowledge even then that I was getting into a deeper and deeper soft sticky snare of unrequited love I stayed, it was safer and easier even to put up with the frustration and anger and sheer screaming lie of the situation than to leave and discard the helpful umbrella of a loving doormat, the cushion of money and security and the ease of a human shield against the world.
[gomez – we haven’t turned around]
The music I’ve chosen makes it fall of 2000, Garage time, Cakedemons time, razorblade time, dewy morning barefoot time, RAINN time, clothesline time, PRIDE time, sesame-seed bagel and chocolate milk time, stray cats outside the low window time, french homework and week in bed time, exploration of the spirit time, time to fly, time for A’s until October, time for inevitable failure, time for sickness and sleep, time to hide from work and school and the people I know will know me well enough to make me stand when all I want to do is collapse into coma. It’s three in the morning in my head, white sheets still only two months old, greg in jacksonville on long-distance and instant messenger, tori on the speakers janeake in her room hiding from me hiding from her, quiet except for typing away on healingvictiminfectiousbandaid sites for survivors of ourselves and our own self-rotting post-trauma tendencies. The victim culture is alive and well in my bedroom. I am just 19, the carpet still smells like a new car and the bathroom is full of hairdye and the bed is so clean, so clean, clean with brownie crumbs and sesame massage oil and sweat, clean with tears and unspoken never-known pain and new sex, clean with love and frustration and the passing of two souls like ships in the night. (I’m just beginning to get the hang of you, now two years later and so much farther away.) No wise man sleeping in his jeans to comfort this strange wild thing, this birdmadgirl, could ever be such a comfort in the long run.
[tori amos – tear in your hand]
It was coffee but not TV for us, sitting in cars smiling and singing along, trading tapes and long car rides to eurofag in the first and best Bessie, on towards frustration and more unconditional love* (*with conditions) and whispered secrets in sleepless dark on white leather clouds. You? Me too. You too? Me. I knew you. I saw you. I heard you. I know. Truth? Not really tonight, not really ever, but closer then for a few moments than anytime since. Just don’t say the R word. Made you a shirt once, skinny superhero drawn then to toilet bowl and silver in own room, drawn now to chessboard and own room but different in small ways, better? Hopeful. Love for you like for Peter, more so in some ways, not protective bigsister but protective lovely for the strength in you that keeps you standing and self-started – you and only you own you, and it’s a rare thing indeed. Modest mouse in corners and blur in chairs, love you love you love you, boy. Someday you’ll get you away from here, and you’ re not dying anymore.
[blur – coffee and tv]
Want to be in my bed in my books with my pen, winding rivers round my fingers on rivulets of ink running to my elbows in luxurious excess of those few well-spun silks, hoarded to be drunk in when nobody’s watching. Better than masturbation and more sensual than any communion.
[radiohead – in limbo]
Tainted by letters not meant to be seen, even before I would have known it by the sight of your hair and the sound of late-night driving home through the inevitable ghetto. She was unknowalble to me then, still is now but then, then she was a mystery of parties and people and thoughts I couldn’t share, books I wasn’t to read and pens whose inks would dry up at my touch but flew in her fingers. The blue woman, doubled up and weeping most inside the brightest laugh and loudest protest. Not really true, any of it, but that too is true to form. We exaggerate for each other, weave pretty cheap cloths for the world and for each other and for ourselves, not knowing what bolts of softest wool and purest cotton we have stashed away from childhood’s games of kiss and don’t you dare. We put on grandiose forms, give our sorrows and agonies the names Sorrow and Agony instead of fucking hurt, sleazy ouch… form over fiction becomes NOW.
[portishead – wandering star]
Reading Perks on the concrete outside the greyhound station downtown watching leaves and commuters swirl by, just a few every once and again as I sat with headphones and book breathing in the beautiful cool clear sky, a late summer fall sky in the middle of what it shouldn’t have been – a moment frozen in New England’s autumn air escaped for a moment to give a furtive stolen kiss. The sun never loved me so much and if kissing passers-by was at all me I would have, but I just wanted to be quiet and still and look, really see. Really see. Calm and peace. Serene. happy.
[smiths – asleep]
xo
8/16/02
A little playlist s-o-c, good for the tired climber.
[gomez – we haven’t turned around]
The music I’ve chosen makes it fall of 2000, Garage time, Cakedemons time, razorblade time, dewy morning barefoot time, RAINN time, clothesline time, PRIDE time, sesame-seed bagel and chocolate milk time, stray cats outside the low window time, french homework and week in bed time, exploration of the spirit time, time to fly, time for A’s until October, time for inevitable failure, time for sickness and sleep, time to hide from work and school and the people I know will know me well enough to make me stand when all I want to do is collapse into coma. It’s three in the morning in my head, white sheets still only two months old, greg in jacksonville on long-distance and instant messenger, tori on the speakers janeake in her room hiding from me hiding from her, quiet except for typing away on healingvictiminfectiousbandaid sites for survivors of ourselves and our own self-rotting post-trauma tendencies. The victim culture is alive and well in my bedroom. I am just 19, the carpet still smells like a new car and the bathroom is full of hairdye and the bed is so clean, so clean, clean with brownie crumbs and sesame massage oil and sweat, clean with tears and unspoken never-known pain and new sex, clean with love and frustration and the passing of two souls like ships in the night. (I’m just beginning to get the hang of you, now two years later and so much farther away.) No wise man sleeping in his jeans to comfort this strange wild thing, this birdmadgirl, could ever be such a comfort in the long run.
[tori amos – tear in your hand]
It was coffee but not TV for us, sitting in cars smiling and singing along, trading tapes and long car rides to eurofag in the first and best Bessie, on towards frustration and more unconditional love* (*with conditions) and whispered secrets in sleepless dark on white leather clouds. You? Me too. You too? Me. I knew you. I saw you. I heard you. I know. Truth? Not really tonight, not really ever, but closer then for a few moments than anytime since. Just don’t say the R word. Made you a shirt once, skinny superhero drawn then to toilet bowl and silver in own room, drawn now to chessboard and own room but different in small ways, better? Hopeful. Love for you like for Peter, more so in some ways, not protective bigsister but protective lovely for the strength in you that keeps you standing and self-started – you and only you own you, and it’s a rare thing indeed. Modest mouse in corners and blur in chairs, love you love you love you, boy. Someday you’ll get you away from here, and you’ re not dying anymore.
[blur – coffee and tv]
Want to be in my bed in my books with my pen, winding rivers round my fingers on rivulets of ink running to my elbows in luxurious excess of those few well-spun silks, hoarded to be drunk in when nobody’s watching. Better than masturbation and more sensual than any communion.
[radiohead – in limbo]
Tainted by letters not meant to be seen, even before I would have known it by the sight of your hair and the sound of late-night driving home through the inevitable ghetto. She was unknowalble to me then, still is now but then, then she was a mystery of parties and people and thoughts I couldn’t share, books I wasn’t to read and pens whose inks would dry up at my touch but flew in her fingers. The blue woman, doubled up and weeping most inside the brightest laugh and loudest protest. Not really true, any of it, but that too is true to form. We exaggerate for each other, weave pretty cheap cloths for the world and for each other and for ourselves, not knowing what bolts of softest wool and purest cotton we have stashed away from childhood’s games of kiss and don’t you dare. We put on grandiose forms, give our sorrows and agonies the names Sorrow and Agony instead of fucking hurt, sleazy ouch… form over fiction becomes NOW.
[portishead – wandering star]
Reading Perks on the concrete outside the greyhound station downtown watching leaves and commuters swirl by, just a few every once and again as I sat with headphones and book breathing in the beautiful cool clear sky, a late summer fall sky in the middle of what it shouldn’t have been – a moment frozen in New England’s autumn air escaped for a moment to give a furtive stolen kiss. The sun never loved me so much and if kissing passers-by was at all me I would have, but I just wanted to be quiet and still and look, really see. Really see. Calm and peace. Serene. happy.
[smiths – asleep]
xo
8/16/02
A little playlist s-o-c, good for the tired climber.
