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The Rolling Stones - Sweet Virginia
My boyfriend keeps harmonicas in his car, and sometimes while we drove around the cold streets of Chicago in circles, smoking cigarettes and singing along to rock n roll, he’d play along to the intro to this song.
I played it on the radio recently, passing out alone in the station at 4am. It’s a good song.
I’d like England to give him back, now, thanks.
Because between last night and tonight I’ve gotten a cold, because ever so suddenly fall is here, because my telephone won’t work–
Because I’m in love with someone on the other side of the ocean I grew up with.
Because my friends are breaking each other’s hearts, or moving away, or getting old, or staying the same, or getting into bicycle accidents, or standing in the middle of a room after a shower and looking at a reflection in a window and thinking, jesus, what am I doing with my life?
Sometimes you are standing, 22 years old, at a bus stop that is not even a bus stop, eating Lunchables out of a black plastic bag, on the verge of tears, or maybe just a yawn.
Sometimes you imagine a woman lying naked on a huge block of ice, and a patient man with a razor, shaving the ice into snow.
Sometimes even though you hate hate hate airplanes, your golden birthday is coming up, and all you want is that ticket, and those eyes.
the only piece of furniture in my bedroom is a tall, queen-sized bed, a gift from a man who taps his long fingers across linoleum and black fabric, thinking about death and how to stop it.
the only clock in this house doesn’t run, and I see the cemetery through my windows.
walking past the stones each morning, a chord rushes itself into my thoughts, one syllable:
O Fortuna O Fortune
velut luna as the moon
statu variabilis, stays changing,
semper crescis ever waxing
aut decrescis ever waning
among the images on the wall alongside my bed, a self-portrait– a girl who died in a bathroom in venice. i remember: the bruises on her arms.
you would think, with all this, you would think i was a sad girl.
on the verge of fainting on the train ride home, an hour of sleep in a chair after a night of strange airwaves, I feel and look like hell.
but honestly? honestly, these days i am feeling full to bursting with the fact that i’m alive. yes. yes.
yes.
Right, right, so I keep saying I’m going to write things here.
Instead, I fall out of my windowsill backwards, trying to install a curtain rod without a drill.
Instead, I drink campari out of a vintage creamer and spill it down my bra.
Instead, I wake up in the middle of the night hungover, and I look out my window at the graveyard, and I think about being alive.
I swear to myself, yet another time, that I will never again sleep with a boy with a rickity loft bed, because I’m an adult now. I drink absinthe and get lost in the woods. I catch the bouquet at a wedding. I feel bad about my family. I take the first bath I’ve taken since 2006. I make to do lists on legal pads, and lose them. I think about writing letters overseas, or passing out in a Brooklyn subway station.
I need to stop being intimidated by the action of putting words places. I need to start getting more sleep. I want to yell, at everyone, all the time, just how much I love them, and I know they’re having a rough time but of course they are, we’re in our early 20s and everything is a mess. But it’s gonna be fine, I love you, it’s gonna be fine.
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the amount of response to this in under an hour brings me a lot of joy.
(you can’t see it if you’re not my friend, but I said “anyone have book suggestions on these subjects: Wagner; Russian émigrés in Western Europe; a broad overview of the history of feminist theory; the early development of psycho-analysis” and everyone I know is a huge nerd)
Haven’t been writing, things have been hectic, I have been homeless. I move into an apartment this week, and then I go to New York for my high school best friend’s wedding (congratulations, Ally and Gavin), and then I get back on Monday and will still have a thousand things to do. But by the end of this week at least I will be moved into an apartment that is actually mine for the first time in months and months, plus it will have a view of Graceland Cemetery and will contain the companionship of one Griffin Sharps, Renaissance Man.
I am trying to write a play, but I’m very much caught up in the intense amount of research it may or may not require. Here are some books I am thinking about:
Lou Andreas-Salome - Freud Journal; Fenitschka; Hymn to Life a bunch of other stuff
Rainer Maria Rilke - The Duino Elegies; Sonnets to Orpheus; okay actually everything he wrote
Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy; the Case of Wagner; Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Benjamin - the Work of Art In the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
Adorno - On Lyric Poetry and Society
Agamben - The End of the Poem
Kant - Critique of Judgment (on Aesthetic Judgement)
Freud - the Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures
W. H. Auden - In Memory of Sigmund Freud
a book or two about Wagner, a history book or two about Russian emigres in Western Europe, some feminist theory, some Lacan, a bunch of other crap and various biographies, oh my goodness
shakespeare lady thoughts
Note to self: something I was talking to my friend Amanda about earlier that i’d like to write about here and will maybe perhaps do so in the near future: why I am actually more excited about the idea of maybe one day getting to play Queen Gertrude than Ophelia. (this is somewhat related to my thoughts on that time I played Lady Anne in an adaptation of Richard III.) I would write it now but it’s 3 am and I have tech in the morning for this show I’m working on which you should see if you’re in Chicago. but maybe if I put something here I will feel more obligated to actually write my thoughts on the subject. awesome.