May 16, 2002, 8:07 p.m.

No-one's going to drag you up

back & forth

Current music: The recent re-issue of old Mountain Goats cassettes and EPs and whatever. The Mountain Goats are appropriate for any time of year, of course, but they become most heavy and rich in the summer. Whether you like them or not, the Mountain Goats are a large white house on a hill, in a field of overgrown grass. There's a kind of shitty old car in the twin-rut dirt drive-way, but you can tell somebody loves it. Next to the door are a bowl of water for the cat and an old pair of boots, the stairs down to the driveway are flanked with little plastic windmills which spin without any particular enthusiasm. There are flying insects, huge and green but gentle. Inside the house it is cool and linoleum, or the floor is wood but painted off-grey. And there's a young woman in the kitchen, and she is pruning the houseplant over the sink. And if you don't get it, you won't ever get it, and you are irredeemably lost.

My Frescobaldi came today, from inter-library loan, and I paid my thirty cents for it. Inter-library loan is the reason I would never live in the past for too, too long: MG was telling me about his mother, how her faith in American-style democracy is all about public libraries, and ... yes. New England small-town libraries are still stuffy with the idealistic eighteenth-century farmer air that fanned the War of Independence. I feel they're my people, in their fawn suits or batik caftans, because they underline passages in the New York Review of books, because they have gardens and upright pianos and well-loved copies of Emerson's essays.

I miss JF. I can't talk to him over IM: we don't know one another's signals well enough for that, and so it all turns into an earnest exercise in mis-speaking to one another. I want to talk to him about all the things that I would keep in my treasure box, if I were Caspar from Amahl and the Night Visitors, but I don't want to impress him. It has to be shared, the way that cool rocks and comic books are easy to share. O and I wish that he hadn't said that visiting a medieval manuscript exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan had been "disgusting. ... All that gold and time, in the celebration of a text!" -- I can suffer a great deal of disagreement in a relationship, but to say that the Western tradition of art is ugly because of the regrettable economic circumstances upon which it is predicated cuts too close for me. It's too perceptive, too clean, and makes me feel like shit for devoting my life to it.

Alas. I have drunk too much, on top of a Percocet, and am chiding myself for this indiscretion, and am listening to such sweet melancholy. And it's warm, which always leads me into the labyrinths of the happy, helpless ennui of summer. I have vague dreams of escape, of going out to the country, as if getting away from the city, and from the charming suburb where I live, is a way to co-opt the authenticity in which I want so dearly to believe. No. This is where I live, this is how I live, and what changes happen to me will happen imperceptibly, a retrospective surprise. No sense trying to hunt it down.

And I'd like to repeat the question: what's with all the Portuguese water dogs?