last night, for the life of me, I could not remember the name of my favorite cemetery in Florence.  I didn’t even guess the cardinal direction from the Arno correctly.  And to think, just a few years ago, like Fellini’s dark dreamers in la Voca della Luna, I practically lived there…San Miniato al Monte.

It was no where in my immediate memory.  Not the name anyway, just the climb, the colors, the stones, the breeze, the view.  I am deeply grateful for the journals I kept while I was there.  Especially my handheld moleskin filled with Italian vocabulary and directions and memories and notes about the nouns (people, places, and things) that I never wanted to forget.  But, like scattering ashes, in time, we forget. 

This spring, I met the writer Wendy Waters.  She talked to us about writing.  Not so much about how to do it, but why we do it.  How to get started and the value of doing so.  Write everything.  My journal group leader in the same program reminded us all that there are times that you cannot go back to.  Sometimes they are exactly the ones you want to go back to.  So by writing them, you can go back.  You immortalize your life against your dying memory.  I want to get back into my life, I want to get back into my writing.  It takes ritual to make ceremony.  

not like me

Reflection on Saturday/Sunday Oct 25-26:  1:30AM-3 AM

He’s giggling.  Again.  He’s always giggling.  It’s sort of annoying and high pitched, but it’s the way he laughs when he’s nervous or stoned.  I think he was both.  He walks both of us into his room, flips on the light. “Urgh! TOO BRIGHT!”  He walks over to switch on a small red lamp and turns off the TOO BRIGHT overhead light. Looking at the bed, he sees his kitten, “AW! Kitty!”  I plop onto the foot of his bed while I pet the kitten that his housemate found on the side of a busy road a few weeks ago.  A searches noisily for a match and lights some patchouli incense then joins me on the bed.  Z takes off his shoes and sits on the hard floor.  He played with the kitten there on the ground using his hand and apartment keys as toys before joining us on the bed.  The incense continue to burn and A insists on playing music that is evidently only irritating to me.  The boys are ecstatic to listen to all the songs they always dreamed about listening to totally stoned.  Z sings along and he’s laying next to me on the bed, all crumpled up, folded in half because it’s the only way we can all fit on the bed together.  His chest is vibrating with his voice and I can feel him next to me.  His wrist lays loosely on the mattress next to mine.  I see a ring on his index finger and wonder what its significance is.  We are all still fascinated by the kitten who is taking turns pouncing on each of us.   Each of the boys announce a profound sense of déjà vu and I am again left out of their hallucinations.  Once in awhile my tired head rest on Z’s shoulder.  A is still talking though I desperately wish him to hush.  I just want to enjoy my company in silence while we each breathe in the incense and contemplate our own lives and the careless placement of our own hands too close to each other’s.  Z finally responds to the tempting proximity of my hand to his; he begins lighting tickling my fingers with his and I follow his lead.  I think about how it must feel different to him because he’s stoned.  I’m just bored. 

The scene reminds me of bits and pieces of a relationship I participated in several falls ago.  The similarities are as follows: the boy was a friend of a friend, we listened to music late at night, he had an artistic flare with long brown hair, we held hands and he fell quickly, sometimes he was stoned and sometimes it caused problems. 

And I just read on his profile that 6 minutes ago he ‘just wants to be close to you’ and that he ‘has a tendency to fall instantly in love with anyone who shows him the least bit of affection.’  Brilliant.  

a fly between the wall

There’s a young man who lives in the apartment next door to me.  The walls in my dining room press up against a lively room of his.  The walls are thin and sometimes, when I am sitting in here, I can hear him sneeze.  I say bless you when he does.  Maybe he can hear me when I’m sitting here late at night singing to myself, or crying all alone.  But what I am listening for, is the chance to hear him laugh. He has the most beautiful and joyous laugh I have heard in a long time.  I love to hear him laugh.  Because he sounds so happy.  And because he reminds me of my long lost friends.  

casket party

I just returned home to the city from a business function.  It was a dinner party to celebrate the launch of a local casket distributor’s new website and a series of 18 gauge metals.  The venue was oddly enough the exact same location (same hall, same room, etc.)  as my high school senior prom.  Again I wore black.  Again I wore heels.  Instead of alone, this time I was invited and escorted by two of my co-workers who drove in from my hometown.  Where the dance floor was in 2004, tonight were nine full-size caskets and a full display of corner cuts.  The evening was pleasant.  A good chance to meet and to greet and to be introduced.  All in all I spent the evening schmoozing at a casket party.   

convoluted

early this morning, I had a dream. Believe me when I say that I could not have made this up. I’m simply not this creative in the morning nor did I reckon that my mind and heart were so politically charged at any time in the day.

I was watching the results of this November’s presidential elections. The announcer did not proclaim a name, instead the camera panned to a man. It was not Obama. My heart broke; my hopes were dashed (or damned as it were). But the man accepting handshakes and waving was not McCain either. It was Saddam Husssein. And he wore the creepy McCain smile. And I cannot imagine anything more terrifying. The camera moved to Obama who was throwing a party for the young voters. He had a female DJ who quieted the music and announced that it was time to get ready for Obama’s last speech.

I was so disturbed by this dream. How strangely our dreams express our deepest fears.

full body

Studying anatomy goes best with red wine (or a partner). 

breakfast

I’m currently reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs.  So far so good; I like things I can relate to which so far is at least 2 of the chapters (I’ve been ignoring the ones that are composed of pop-cultural references that I do not understand/care about).  Thusly the chapter’s I’ve enjoyed are “This is Emo,” “Billy Sim, “What Happens When People Stop Being Polite.”  These chapters are about cultural constructs of love & romance (and how we will never be able to have true love because of our crippling expectations), The Sims (and how we play video games about living instead of living), and The Real World (and how members of our generation, instead of being who they are, now choose the type of categorical identity they think they should be based on the archetypes available on some 21 seasons of this pseudo-reality show), respectively.  Which, to me, is totally fucking brilliant. 

And I also love the way Klosterman has defined postmodern, because the term can finally be put into perspective.  He quotes an uncited source in the footnote on page 35: Postmodern—“Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, art.”  

perception & reception

Last week, I came around the block on my way to the laboratory.  A man approached me in a near panic: “Where’s Receiving?!”  He took me by surprise and I did not immediately recognize what it was he was asking. 

“Receiving for what?”  I guessed that he was referring to the Shipping & Receiving area for one of the buildings.  But then it came to me quickly: he was asking about the City Receiving Hospital. 

 He asked me, not only because he really needed to know, but, because he figured I would know.  He figured I would know because he thought I was a doctor.  He thought I was a doctor because I was wearing scrubs.  But I was wearing scrubs because I was on my way to embalming laboratory.  I did, of course, know where the hospital was, but not because of my familiarity with its waiting room, but rather its morgue.  

tipsy

After class, I poor myself a glass of wine and walk across the room, balancing the glass in one hand and carrying my laptop in the other.  It occurs to me to move with poise and caution as to not spill the red wine on the white carpet.  The image of red wine on white reminds me of a boy I was entertaining flirtations with at the very end of 2007 and the first few days of the ecstatic state of 2008 (which seems like ages ago now).  

He was a total train wreck of a man—a boy living in the body of a man (he still is).  Late 20s, mortgage, frozen dinners, deadbeat roommate, a steady job at his father’s company where the prodigal son reigned supreme—he had it all with nothing at all.  Nick was a total clown, always looking for attention, and loving anything he got.  He dressed to impress the Abercrombie crowd, sprayed ‘Obsession’ cologne all over his body, and drank to excess for the entertainment of others more than his own.  And it was so appealing at the time.  And as the story goes, I was feeling reckless in a 20-something moral whirlwind myself, so I found myself spending my entire Christmas break, day and night, at Nick’s house which was like vacationing at a fraternity house.  It didn’t take long for me to notice dark red wine stains all over his white carpet and also his bed.  When I mentioned this to him, Nick told me, matter-of-factly, of the night he spilled red wine all over himself and that he had matching stains on a pair of white underpants (which he promptly showed me).

Thusly I walk carefully so that I never end up like Nick.  

Playlist from that New Year’s weekend romance:

“Sweetest Girl”  Wyclef Jean

“Take You There”  Sean Kingston

“Moments Have You” & “Fallout”  John Frusciante