1.09.2008

autobiography

September 2001: I get high for the first time by myself. The space between the minutes was so wide -- how had I never noticed? And when I made it to bed outside a car drove by leaving a sound that resolved into a song as it faded, waves of air pressure swinging back and forth until the room went still and I slept and did not dream.

Incredibly enough Eve got me started. I wanted to fuck her so bad, knowing she was there right through my bedroom wall in her Led Zeppelin tee and eyes becoming more and more bored, the world was boring, smoke a bowel, stay awake for a little while... I told her on the blanket she laid out behind 36th Street and then nothing turned itself inside out and we agreed that was what this was all about. High times, long minutes in a boring world.

*

But we are in the world to love the world. I made a promise to myself, to the trees at Frost Valley. To Maureen. This is not about her. This was before Tiah came and turned trees to enemies who wanted to take her apart and she fought and fought and only after giving up did she see they were on her side from the start; it was a mental thing: to be held vs. taken apart, it was how you made up the meaning, what memories filled you up, and with what kind of feeling.

It's always women trying to take me apart, or else I'm dying to dissemble and my clothes are off and she's got bored eyes on, bored and boring me through and through.

Back on the blanket in the shadow of Hill College House underneath a billion invisible stars we are finally getting really high. Lights go on in rooms and you can trace connections between them like constellations changing as boys and girls go to bed or come back home. The building is a complex labrinyth of college freshmen and faculty and graduate students studying and eating and trying on talks about God, acoustic guitars... instant messengers drop a few words and then are idle... idle hands, touching hands, hands asking questions, hands on private parts, their own, someone else's. "Cold hands warm heart," says Tiah, so I write into a song on acoustic guitar for her when I am far away from 36th Street, lost in myself, after I've stopped making phone calls or opening the mail. Out there I thought: If I lose Tiah, at least I'll still have getting high. Where I counted cars that one night, bad night, first time doing an overnight at ATI and Heather locked herself in her room, reneging on the ride she promised, which meant reneging on everything, without warning, her eyes blue and bored. Tired of handcuffing herself to the couch to get a rise out of me. This is not her story.

*

This is about me; I am writing so I can see myself. I have heard we orbit our memories, and not vice-versa; so here they are, falling like tea leaves so I can read myself out of the patterns. Because we are in the world to love the world, and I am another limb; I am ready to be taken apart by words so I can be held by time. The women are all gone now. I can hear cars outside my apartment. There are so many songs, and it is not just the pain of things Last week I saw the milky way. I played mandolin with a stranger, we sang, "Hey I got some news for you..." When the chance came, I put my lips to the bowl and inhaled into my mouth, and then out into the stars.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Or, maybe we're in the world to destroy it, and that is what we love. And maybe because life today cushions us from the ability to destroy it, we love letting it destroy us (Tiah/ texts/ meaninglessness) and maybe (we let) women destroy us too now, busying idle hands, because we wouldn't know where to put them otherwise. But if we could still hunt whales ... (Cut to Ahab, in the cabin; by the stern windows; sitting alone and gazing out; at sunset; addressing "ye great gods," as regards his dismembered leg…): "Ye've knocked me down. But I am up again, and ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's complements to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!"

Moby Dick pp. 183.