3:51 p.m. - 2001-05-03
extra suspenders
My life is a box full of dirt.
(That's from "zoo music girl" by The Birthday Party...I think. In any case, the little voice in my head that keeps screaming it sounds like Nick Cave)
I posted it last week in the midst of an exceptionally lame (and typically unrewarding) music research gig. Technical difficulties had arisen, with the end result being that I had to stay at the studio about three hours later than I'd anticipated, rerecording and reformatting...with nothing to think about except this super brutal e-mail I'd received earlier that afternoon. Brutal on the love tip. I kept reading it and then hiding it under other documents on my desktop...but always leaving a sinister little corner to peek out from behind whatever else I was trying to distract myself with; something for my eye to gravitate towards and my cursor to follow. Then I'd find myself reading it again...positive I'd missed some hopeful turn of phrase or some nuance of language that might soften the blow. But really, nothing.
Which didn't stop me from picking and picking at that picky scab on my scabby heart...I just kept clicking back no matter how bad it hurt.
Anyway, I finished after midnight and had to hike several blocks east to catch a hollywood-bound bus. When I arrived at the stop, there was a fat old man with a cane leaning on the sign singing like, sea chanteys. In a crazy attempt to deal with his epic girth, this fat genius had devised an extra-suspenders system: extra suspenders ran at 45 degree angles from where the main set intersected in an X in the middle of his back. The six points where all the straps fastened to his jeans described the perimeter of a giant denim egg-cup; in which was nested his ovular, ancient, and (if the chanteys were any indication) piratical torso. He turned to me,
"Good lord, but it's freezin'. Whatever possessed you to come out in shorts and a t-shirt, sir?"
"Um, I had to work late...and it was actually really warm today when the sun was out"
"True, true; but imagine if our sun were to to die and go dark...it'd be this cold all the time! Black as night and freezing! Cold all the time with nothin' to look forward to but a dead black sunrise!"
And, as is customary with statements like this, he followed up with a solid minute of maniacal laughter...if I'd been a gecko, I would have popped my tail off right about then. Too much weird and stressful input for one day.
But anyways, yeah. Heartbreak and shit. Since then a friend of mine from SF came down and held (just held...she was all fucked up over some married dude) me for a couple days and she gave me this beautiful blanket purchased on safari in Kenya. I was wearing it down at Venice beach and she gave it to me 'cause she said I looked tall and skinny and noble as a Maasai in it. And after weeks of painful rejection, to have someone say something that nice...it sounds weak, but man- it helps.
Oh yeah also, we went camping this weekend up at Caldera Hot Springs with about six other folk. The whole coastline was socked in with clouds and mist when we left Saturday morning, and as we ascended and hairpinned up the mountain it thickened until we could barely see beyond the hood of our car. And don't get me wrong, the dripping bluebonnets and bougainvillea, the jewel encrusted spider webs in the dagger yucca, that great moist smell of the mountain, all that shit is fine; but I really didn't want to sit at a campground in the fog all weekend. At some critical elevation though, we punched out through the top the clouds and oh, man. The sky was like, gas-flame blue...and after all the fog and the heartbreak, I dunno. It felt like the fist of god smashing through the windshield.
OK I gotta go.
