Aargh, terrible physical pain, of all the ghastly boring things to be upset about. But I'm listening to Nine Black Poppies and I'm not at the awful club EN went to. True, though, it can't be the best of all possible worlds until she invites me to the club and I tell her no. It's a step towards that social perfection where I become cooler than everybody I know by dissing more and more of what they do until I transcend this mundane life completely and wake up naked on the �le de la Cit�, surrounded by a chorus of chickens in Swiss Guards costumes.
"Baby you could be famous / you could sell the world a new look and sound / baby you could be famous / if you just get out of this town..."
Am I quoting pop song lyrics? Do I think I'm still seventeen? Well, I didn't really do such a bang-up job with early- to mid- adolescence. My relationship with my body was at most diplomatic. I eschewed substances and dangerous people with the fervour of a maiden aunt. And best of all, I was still listening to Viennese classicism and German Romantics. I don't think I bought a single non-classical record until I went to college. I have failed as an American teenager. I didn't learn to drive until I was nearly twenty. And here I am, on a summer night in New England, listening to a midwesterner with an acoustic guitar sing something more than meaningful -- it has pierced right through associations and hermeneutica, right through to something dark and squishy that I'm not sure I want a name for. It's "Masher", song 4 on Full Force Galesburg, yet another wild-eyed and honest Mountain Goats album. And the next song (Chinese House Flowers) says, mockingly "I want you, more than I want anything / I want you the way you were...". And I remember being in EN's car on the way up to Boston, spring break of 1999, passing over the Tappan Zee bridge with her, and with that very song on her snazzy new mix tape that she made off WSRN, and I was thinking, "not now: not her". And now, suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I want her the way she was.
All right, for those of you joining my diary for the first time, let me explain: I am not romantically interested in EN. She's a lovely girl, but that's not particularly how we connect. It wouldn't be fair to say that the fact I'm gay prevents that sort of relationship with EN, but it's a convenient shorthand. Rather, despite never being especially close-close in college, there was something perfect about living together with her. And we decided so to do, and it happened. Granted, we got another roommate somewhere along the line, and, at the risk of writing a huge chapter in just a tiny morsel of a sentence, that didn't work out. Which is one of the major blocks EN and I will need to work out.
Went to see Memento with SW today. I love the Kendall, so I didn't even mind that I paid for an extra ticket (SW was late and so I just went into the movie). We went for Thai food and then ice cream together. I like her a lot, but I'm in the middle of this depressive, soul-searching, friend-epistemology-problematizing, yucky, hyperanalytical periods. Hope it'll work out. I think so. But she's moving to New York soon, and I don't think I'll see her much, there.
I love Sweelinck. He was a funny, funny man.
thanks for reading,
alastair