Now, as always, I am thinking about you.

I spent a considerable amount of time today going through some of the small images– photographs, magazine clippings, pages of books, drawings– that I’d shoved into various notebooks and folders. Decorating my apartment, I wondered about the overall visual effect of Gertrude Stein’s flat in Paris. (And Picasso, he, like I now, once lived in an apartment overlooking a cemetery.) Still more to go through, I always manage to have piles of papers.

Saw someone I rarely get to see tonight, he is moving back to Chicago soon and hearing his enthusiasm about returning further fueled my own enthusiasm despite the daunting approach to winter. Other thoughts about this to be articulated soon.

It was decided today that this year will be my first Christmas spent in Chicago. My parents and my brother will come out here from New York. I will get a Christmas tree. I’m quite excited. I am, however, taking a trip in December, earlier, to Los Angeles. I’m super excited about that too. 

okay so this has been making the rounds.

it makes me a little uncomfy, because calling very public (read: internet) attention to the delicate identities of young children makes me worry, because how will he feel about this when he is 14 and trying to get a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever or just doesn’t want to be someone who was low-key famous on the internet. especially with the post title that makes such a strong identifying statement, even if it is qualified at the start of the post. and it is naive to not expect a boy in a girl’s outfit to be made fun of, especially in a church preschool. it sucks, but it is generally how things go.

all that said: I truly and intensely admire this woman’s unwavering support and love for her son. It’s beautiful, and ballsy, and what the world needs more of. I very nearly cried reading it.

–

At a family reunion over a year ago, I saw a bunch of little cousins from the Southern branch of my family, some of whom I hadn’t seen since their infancy. I can never keep track of them, it seems a blur of multiple marriages and tan children named after rural places. But one of them– I can’t even recall his name or which of these many women is his mother–is very clearly trans. Textbook. Super feminine, doesn’t like his name, and according to the Branca gossip mill has come to his mother crying, telling her he hates his penis and wishes he was a girl. I worry. I worry. I don’t know. I want to be there for this stranger, this child, I want him or her or whatever to know there are people who will understand, or if not understand then love him anyway. But I have seen this kid twice in the last several years, I’m not in contact, I am the strange Midwestern outcast of this sprawling family that I love so dearly. So instead, I jet thoughts south from my cold apartment, hoping somehow everything will be alright.

Even when it is the fault of my own over-crowded schedule, my self-imposed flustering from location to location, stopping for harried meals and half-distracted conversations, grabbing shelter in an archway from the downpour, it pains me when the gears of our conversation slip off track. Every excited thought of mine, some part of it is for you. Or rather, my ability to become invested in some idea, some item, some moment, is now entangled with the desire to share with you that which matters to me. Part of my enjoyment is in the refraction of that pleasure in those I hold dear. Not to have you here at hand is to walk with a limp along autumn gardens.

Of course there are others, friends, collaborators, lovers, and my attachment to you does not sever those ties, but you are the precise you to you me. Even as other strings thicken, draw taut, they are of a different color, a different texture. Strips of brown leather, lines of black silken thread, bright red yarn that will fray but not break. There are infinite ways, for everyone and for you. You and I, too, we shift, the transmography of time and place and character does not cease, nor would I have it so. But they do ache, my arms, from holding up a telephone wire across the Atlantic, and the heavy watch-chain on my shoulders.

this is admittedly a placeholder for a post I want to write about the film Cache, which I saw tonight. 

(key words to remind myself: sons, timing, faces, language)

It is often only later that I can fully appreciate the neurotic peculiarity–sometimes even desperation–of actions I have turned to so readily in the past. Fear, inertia, the drive for comfort, these are powerful masters.  

Filling a mug with water in my kitchen, sock feet on swollen checkered tile, a memory:

living in Paris, I often would make my tea by reaching into the tiny alcove that was my bathroom, all shower, and turn the faucet as hot as it would go. Steam rising everywhere, I would fill my mug. Good enough for the cheapest black tea sold at monoprix. But there was a kitchen just down the hall, usually unoccupied during the odd hours I kept. I even owned a pot I could have used to heat the water instead of the microwave. But something about that just seemed like far too much. The possibility of seeing others, especially other American strangers, was overwhelming in its horror. In those panics, late night, early morning, mid-evening, alone, I did not want to see anyone. There were of course many nights I went out, bought drinks to both hide and forget my poverty, spoke awful French with charming, well-dressed foreigners, did a great number of other things, but in Paris I slept alone. I spent much of my time alone, locked in that room drinking tea and trying to write. I do not, in fact, have much writing from that period. But I did spend a lot of time trying, and a lot of time alone, and that was how I did and did not want it.

for a moment today I felt bitter and pissy, and I thought,

Sure, I could write a better poem than you
with words bloodthirsty, wet, and true

for while you play allusive bombardier 
I do not find your hagiography sincere

I would give your diligence its due–
for what man’s a man that knows he’s through?

if I had charms to put to sleep
all but the tenth of you that I would keep

Sweet Christ I really am no good at rhyming. It’s fine, it’s fine. I’ll just… avoid it. Contemporary poets can do that, right? Or start writing in German…

The pattern continues. A rephrasing, more explicit, of a previous thought.

Around 7pm, I am seized by mania. I can barely keep myself from sprinting down the street. My clockwork head is pressed to the ground, is rushing past in hurried conversation with ghosts. My rag of a body is whipped through the sky. My hands shake, my vision blurs. There are so many words they almost choke me. The miracle knowledge that blood pumps through my veins overwhelms me. I feel a desperate and moral obligation to contribute all I can, to pour myself into the world.

By 9:30, I’m a pile of ash. A bus stop garbage can. A thick ink that seeps its way into telephones, crawls out the other side in a keening whine. Sometimes something intervenes: a book, a body, the cloying taste of sleep. Sometimes not.

By now, at least, I have learned to let the waves pass. 

I had actually forgotten– last night in a daze before sleep, I decided to kick it into retro with some “automatic writing”. I use scare quotes because I mean less “messages from Mars” and more “high school English class”. Putting pen to paper while barely awake, without thinking about what word may follow the next. So, unedited, the notepad resting on my sheets:

  it does not hurt to take a walk around the neck of night, at times the whistling birds of home fall silent, dropping feathers in the porcelain bowls old Italian matrons.

  "Look,“ I turn to you and said–

  The leaves are losing their shapes, the stars are cascading like watermelon seeds

  the sky is full of children, small and racing

  the heavens are a baseball diamond parking lot

  dirt and anticipation

  "Look,” I said, “do you know her?” We both turn to look at him, long fingers on her long coat and you said Let me lay my arm upon your shoulder a while.

  Night closed in on us like an Atlantic wave. We hushed.

  I sent you a letter full of pearls but the wind caught them, scattered them across all the dirt between my hands and your mouth. Small trees sprang up, and creeks, and the drive to adventurous conversation, strangers passing through suddenly moving their lips to express our anticipation.

–

Then I thought I’d make a quick attempt at reworking the above text to see what would happen:

It does not pain me, to walk around the neck of night
when whistling birds of home fall hushed
feathers dropping into old Italian porcelain

“Look,” I turned to you
the leaves are losing their shapes
the stars are children, watermelon seeds

Night, the great Atlantic wave
floods the baseball diamond over me
and I hush against your dampened coat

Wind scatters your letter full of pearls
feeds the dirt between our apartments
trees spring up nourished by your mouth

Strangers passing through
catch on our frequencies
and feel our words, knocking at their teeth

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I am going to try and get my writing-shit together, even if only a teensy bit, by trying to write something every day. Generating content while trying to avoid any judgement of its quality.

It speaks to my personality that I don’t think I can do this without at least the illusion of an audience, some collection of internet ghosts– ghosts that will silently hold me culpable for my failures. I suppose I could create a new, separate space, but I feel scattered enough already, I want to avoid something that would allow even the tiniest bit more hesitation.

I considered picking a project to work on, shit sure they all need it, but I’ve got too many things on my plate (and too little certainty or focus) to pick something. Perhaps as I try to write as much as possible, something will push its way to the front row. For now I am content to push for whatever words will come to me.