revisionist history

So I have this old friend, and I saw him last night like I have seen him before, like I have been seeing him for two shards shy of twenty years. His eyes are cerrulean and his fingers are tapered, he's got pigeon toed punk rock in his gait and a timber in his voice that used to make me curl around the cradle of the telephone. For years and years of passwords and shifting addresses and bank account numbers and social security numbers and passports and flight times and gates and foreign currency and I could always pull his parent's phone number from my addled brain like a white rabbit from a top hat. Just like an incantation. Just like good medicine, the three parts simple syrup to one part spinal fluid.

And then time stretches and contorts. It gets all silly putty and newsprint, and the soft spots get hard and the hard parts get soft, and you just keep going ass over tea kettle because velocity is a bitch of an autocratic taskmaster.

So there you are sort of all grown up, in a downtown restaurant drinking rose with the very first manchild you would ever really love, and you let his voice rain down and into your ears and out your pores like sharp tinkle of shattering crystal.

You never really can ever fall in love for the first time ever again. You can love deeper and you can love better, but nothing could ever be like that first time, a pair of unravaged hearts and the audacity of innocense, beat-up cars running on guile, borrowed bedrooms when lucky, summer warmed cemetaries by default.

I was, of course, a precocious nincompoop. I had wanted Blue Eyes since I had seen him on his skate board in the summer before I started my freshman year, I could see the sparkle across the parking lot, and I longed to kiss it's nose. He was, of course, my inattainable bliss, I was two years younger and I thought hopelessly not cool enough. I can still remember exactly what I was wearing the first day that we spoke as in prelude to a phone number -- all perfectly orchestrated and calabrated by the shadowy network of the highschool cabal. What was I wearing? It was 1986, I had on a pair of mauve cut off sweat pants and a white hoodie and my hair was longish and still my real blond, it was late spring. What I remember is directly after the exchange of numbers I was feeling so credulous and also hot in every sense of the word that I turned right around and walked directly into the nearest pole. And could have died on the spot.

So we had a heady summer of making out, of haints on motorcycles, rattlesnake winecoolers and the real, raw flush of love.

But before we could get there, because intuition told me I was going there, there was a certain little state I needed to divest myself of. Because really, how cool is a virgin. So I thought. Because in the throes of love and I didn't want to be fumbling and bumbling, I wanted to be competent, I wanted to be experienced.

Many years later when I finally shamefacedly told the tale, he told me how much he would have liked to have been my first. So let that be a lesson to all virgins, everywhere

And on the Saturday before Halloween on a warm evening of ghouls and shimmer we are revising history over spring rolls, because by rights he should have been and was my first, and we agree that dint of administrative oversight I get to be his and he get's to be mine.

And so all is well and momentarly right in the world until reason is deserted in the far corner of a crowded bar and I wake up, having skirted propriety, but having toed a certain discretionary line, to find him on my side of the bed. As if I were seventeen, with my own apartment and a bigger bank account.

Except that we are not kids in cars anymore we are nominally adults and therefore are Not Supposed to Fuck Around or engage in behavior that is damaging to other's and to ourselves, toed lines be damned, ethically we are still in the same boat as Rush Limbaugh with his loofah.

So we were civilised, and went to the museum, and used rad as a modifier and descriptive adjective far too often, but some habits are hard to break.

*and I know I am garnering some serious karmic juju, he just happens to be raddest kisser ever. It's like summertime and highschool. But mostly it's like kissing back to innocence the first and very last kiss without the excess of expectation. The fun of it, the art of it, without artifice, the sport of it. Who makes out until dawn these days -- we did. And that I really don't regret.

Just for the record little brother it's byotch not beaaach, that's just beach with a few extra vowells. Get it straight.

Frere Emma left this in the comments....

(and it's so good, I am proud to be the elder sister)

We two who are so similiar.Here is me in mid-October. In this new age of minor upheaval and petty complaint, I am alone a lot. I think on this often and marvel at my clipped wings and stupid little cage. It seems to be a common enough affliction – loneliness. I see the yearn and burn in friends who live with lovers. Sort of brings me back to the age old question, “Is there really such a thing as not being alone?” Maybe it is more appropriate to consider whether my idea of love is possible. But I know myself. I know right where I am in this world. It is a question of time, really. All that feels immediate and relevant now is just a matter of time. I was conceived thirty-one years ago. In thirty-one more, I’ll be sixty-two. Who will be who and what will I do? I can’t help but feel paralyzed. It just goes. With or without me. It just goes. Desire, pain, and joy are all the same. It just goes. Like it could care less. And the paradox is this: The more a person gives in to the gravity of time, the more momentum a person gets. Things actually speed up. There is the joyful exhilaration of speed and the illusion of freedom. (I remember how my calves burned as I tried to pump up the steep that was Crystal Wells Rd. I couldn’t make it all the way up. I practiced zigzagging and sweeping the plain of the hill to diminish the pull of gravity. Finally, I conquered the small hill - sweat dripping off my boyish frame. My tiny yellow and black BMX turned sideways, one foot down as a kickstand, shoulders back as I surveyed the view. Pride welled in my eyes. The pavement glistened a little with moisture. It was a crispy autumn day, pine and pungent damp earth. The air had that quality clearness that comes with cool and clean rain. I saw a lot. The half rotted stump by the side of the road covered in ants. The bulging drop of dew tentatively clinging to the end of a pine needle gleaming in the middle with a miniature sun. The wet-slap of pitter-patter forest splatter on the wide dry oak leaves across the forest floor. I smiled and felt the flush of physicality color my cheeks. I exhaled a cloud of steam and angled the bike down the defeated hill. - - - There was a rush of air in my ears and a pleasant hum from the knobs on my tires. I gripped hard on the handlebars. A stop sign. I applied the brakes and skidded to a halt. That is all I remember of the descent.) The letting go doesn’t last very long and what is remembered is fragmented at best. It just goes. There are only moments. Particles that float through infinite space - some kind of matter in the void - these moments that we create somewhere in between the climbing and the freefall of time. So, back to being lonely. I wonder if, in the end, love is really just a shared collection of moments in space. “We were there together. We are here together.” Love is a mutual remembrance. Love is some kind of validation that there is space between two points. Maybe the rest is just fucking and fighting. Besides, desire doesn’t just go away. Satisfaction is only temporary; it’ll leave you after a while. It won’t matter what hill you are standing on. It won’t matter the view. You’ll still want more. Still, I long for touch on the back of my neck. The furtive hand on hand. The warmth of Sunday morning with another. The hotbreath. Le petit mort. The expectation of a full report. A petname. A parental secret. Perfume on a pillow. An understanding about silences. Us against the world.I long for the giddy delirium that love brings, despite its impending deception. I’ll climb again and again the small, but daunting hill, in order to see just for a moment before the fall. This is the great Sisyphean joke of love, desire, pain, and all the rest .PS - Coming to visit for Thanksgiving. You better get ready to cook, beaaaach. Oh, the friend I'm bringing thinks you're hot.

I've got some highlights in jackassery and I've got regret

And the jackassery is funny indeed, how could dancing in a stripper cage in a felt lobster hat replete with googly eyes in a cheesy bar on Catalina not be funny, or the part about singing Welcome to the Jungle and flailing so desperately, that following an inside joke I blurted to the entire restaurant and lo, the sidewalk that I could shoot cherries out my hoohah, which for the record is unattempted and therefore unproven. Good times. Maybe someday I will tell the tale of the crashed bachelor party, but I will probably keep that little gem to myself and my girlfriends, also it's the only part of the evening not on video tape, and so, uncorroberated.

On the morning of my drive south I awoke choking back a sob, and my googly eyes were swollen and tinged with red, like don't fucking tickle me Elmo, and I was hung over as fuck all, because I had souped myself into the stratosphere, and I had misplaced my debit card, read, left it at the liquor store, and was an hour behind schedule, an hour behind putting the miles and miles and gasoline fumes and loud music fast between me and my still cooling bed. I drove hard against the bile pooling in my stomache and from guilt, south, right to and then right past the source. But that wouldn't be for hours still, I still had all of the straight two lane loneliness to contemplate what I had done, all the farm towns and prison towns gilt golden in dust and stinking of manure, sailing past wreathed in steel and feeling ambitious at 95 an hour, leaning into curves and passing with abandon, tightly insulated with the a/c sending tendrils of shiver throughout my extremities, sunglasses on. Flying past ragged stands of Eucalyptus and the sudden SoCal liquesence of the Pacific, seesaw iron horses of the inland oil fields and oil dereks on the horizon, all of us on fault lines and twelve lanes of traffic idiling on the 405 burning gas, burning time, burning patience. None of it any sort of atonement.

I did somebody wrong, because I am not as good as I thought I was, and I did him wrong probably when he needed a friend. I have been trapped in the memory vacuum, like I am listening to a song right now that was playing on the stereo some years ago somewhere between the snowcapped peaks outside of Santa Barbera and downhill grade before Buellton, if speed is my allegory and my metaphor, than I am going too fast and not nearly fast enough. I need smoking brakes and a jackknifed big rig, the raised trace of tread on black top, the deep inky viscousness of hot tar and friction.

And in that tar, sticky and conflicted, atoms and emotions collide, and I turn by turns into all that I despise, whinging harpy, shrill shrew, all because I cannot not compare apples to oranges, jesus christ apples to oranges.

And so I cut myself off from my good friend, my great ally, the one I tell the things I can barely utter to myself, I said goodbye, telling myself that it is probably best for us both, so then why does my heart ache so? Why, after so many years do I weep so?

And to you, my friend, all the wise men say - so it is and so it goes. She will be alright and the two of you will find your way, and you have and always will have my quiet good tidings. And someday when I am all grown up and have fought off the whinging harpy and the shrill shrew you and I can have a fine lunch of briny oysters and a cold bottle of muscadet. That is, if you can forgive me my trespasses.

Still hot

I've got the windows upon and there is a ripe, but waning moon over Haight street. Some enterprising neighbors have dragged their TV out to the side walk for what sounds like a game, what kind of game is mysterious, but the season tells me it is the confluence of baseball and football, but I only have ever cared about hot dogs so what do I know.

A hot wind has set the leaves skittering down the sidewalks and I'd like to take a bath and listen to the leaves but my flesh is already poached. God bless we San Franciscan, we are nothing if not capital about bitching about our seriously mild weather - I can say that now that the fog has receded....

yeah, it's me again

I know it's late, but it is hot and the moon is full, I am in a tank and half a skirt, but then again it's October in San Francisco and how we relish our short almost hot Indian summer. I know it's late and I will pay in the morning but I spent an extraordinary amount of money tonight, mind you no sprees were had, no I don't have a sparkly pair of shoes or a shiny bauble, or even a new top. I got squat.

But you can rest assured that the government is feeling a little bit swell at my expense. I suppose that I should feel elated at being debt free, but it's a full october moon and what I really want is a good excuse to squander, on baubles and bubbles and the like.

It's a desparate trap to be caught between your means, which is precisely why I am going to buy a new tennis racket tomarrow, which is precisely why I went to the de Young today - it was free. I was pleased, I have monitered it's going up from the far side, not pretty. Every time I pass it, which is every day as it is on my route to work, the chorus in my brainicle starts humming the darth vader death star tune, but from the front it's quite organic, and the copper doesn't bother me, and the gardens flow, and most importantly the turtle pond has a new and even lovlier incarnation. And I had forgotten the sphinxes and the roccoco urn, all restored, and the plane trees and the fountains are still behind chain link fences, but I think it will be lovely again. I have always loved museums, especially the ones that house all of my old friends, I am always happy to meet new works, but when you cross a piece you have seen before, connected to, it's like meeting and old friend. Which is why I have a particular soft spot for the musee d'orsay which I visit every time I am in Paris, just like I kiss the plaque in front of Notre Dame, it's all about sentimental edumacation, also, for the plaque they say if you kiss it you will always come back to Paris, and I would kiss anything as a conduit to get me south again.

Speaking of going south, I will be threading the line of demarcation on thursday, I will be getting in my car armed with music to skid and brake down highway 101, and speed just a little to catch a chopper to Catalina for another wedding. So I am not going to say anything only that I am going South, and it is soon to be summer there.

A city girl is a city girl, but a country girl in the city has got to have her park, it would be fair to say that I have got eighty percent of that park mapped like my backyard, I know where to find what is in bloom, and the awesomest trees in the botanical garden. And there I go topically skipping from topiary to topiary, or from arbor to harbor but perhaps I digress... just a bit.

Tripping the light fantastic mid indian summer

And really that sums it up succintly.
Ignore all the messy tangles and the hair clogging the drain, because it is 70 degrees and balmy out and the sidewalks are knotted with all kinds of flesh. And I am closing in all kinds of regret, and I am this close to being embalmed in self pity, but I heard a black bird sing and I saw the ungainly egrets falter so smoothly in mid-air, and I told myself that evrything was going to be alright. Not that isn't already. No really, not that isn't already.

It's just all that ruthless clutter that scuttles the mind, and then memory, and then memory comes with it's gigantic snout a rutting in places long neglected, dredging, laying bare. Fuck that, I shall not be beholden to that song or that moment or that year or that man.

I seem to be in a semi permanent stasis of partway drunk and halfway addled recolllection and I am flying nowhere fast, and my voice is full of smoke and I haven't felt fuckable in months. Except when I do, accidentally on purpose, and then it's only the perverse thrill of being sore and exceptionally unhinged in the aftermath, and all the tears that I don't shed, and my fingers reeking of my triumphal bedding, and swell and swelling and yes, and yes and all of that. And I could and would and did saunter into work unshowered and unashamed, verily did I sidle

Yes, well, nevermind. Consequences sans doute to enusue. Onward and everupword to the geektastic, I am disc four of firefly and I so desparately don't want it to end, I only want to ever be a space cowboy. I want to employ rutting in all earnestness and I'd like to be able to curse in Mandarin.

In the mean time I have been spaminated, I keep getting comments from spammers who would like me to purchase their dog food or some such, in an unrelatated note I can't seem to get enough sleep, like there is not enough sleep in the universe.

side note to my ficitious reader, you of the salt and pepper hair and yellow house. The day you broke my heart was my great schism, when my church and my state were forever rent asunder. It was all my fault, I couldn't help but be besotted, I couldn't refrain from total despair, you have been hovering in my dreams of late and though I would like to meet you again, but that is the stuff of dreams and precarious confluence. And that's fine, I'm to shortly to gravitate to the tub, where all I can hope for is flash of scalding heat to rectify my bones and nourish my veins, so that all the sweet blue pulses at my wrists and bluing at junctures, sweet God let it course, let it course, let me be not so dismally alive. Wake me up, wake me up.

I don't wanna wake up when it's over, I only want to breath fire like your friendly neighborhood dragon, everybodies got a soft spot.