Abundant sunshine. Hot. High around 95F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph.

i'm restless.
it's late.
the city became a fucking oven overnight.
that's all.

the transformation, by juliana spahr

reaffirmed my polyamory and gave my doubts comfort. we suffer doubts, we make mistakes. there's no conclusion; we try to work through our messes. as work grows more intolerable and difficult i'm learning to float above the stress. get the job done, and let the niceties go. support the people around you and look out for your own sanity. i stayed late because i had no where to be and certain individuals seemed to think i had time for more projects. after, i went into the courtyard and bummed a smoke from gaston, more overworked and cheerful than i. i lay on my back on the dance floor and spread out my arms. blue blue sky, drifting clouds, the red walls of a building i love surrounding me on three sides. a perfect summer evening. when i come home drunk on the subway i feel tall and stretchy. feist coos to me and i try to look more fierce than vulnerable. there were thoughts i wanted to write down and no pen in my bag. now it's time for sleep. in the morning i take another crack at it.

it's a good night for writing. i'm all pensive and restless in head but not in body, listening to the saccharin sweet mix on repeat. it's mostly mountain goats with guest appearances by the smiths, feist, the sugarcubes, matty charles, and the magnetic fields.
john darnielle seems to have done a lot of stuff and experienced many interesting things, but for his first who knows how many albums he made up stories about people. compelling, intricate stories about fucked up people with broken hearts and chemical addictions. sometimes they don't make any sense to me. the rest of the time they make me want to cry with relief or jump up and shout and scream THAT'S BEAUTIFUL! DO YOU ALL SEE HOW BEAUTIFUL THAT IS? he sings like someone whose body has been taken over, rocking forward onto his toes and lifting his face to the microphone with his eyes closed.
the snake is nosing around. he looks thin. so do i. it makes me angry that that makes me feel good.
it makes me angry that going to weddings makes me lonely. i made a decision years ago that to be true to myself i had to find a way outside of the traditional monogamous western couple. no white dress, no one true love, nothing that is easily explained to the parental units. get me on a soap box and i can go on for hours about the morality of my position and the foolish optimism behind most marriages. whence comes this piercing longing for one perfect lover? perhaps it is vestigial. i ignore it and carry on, but it betrays me. my actions are inconsistent. am i growing up? am i a grownup? is this the time when i learn to do the things i'm supposed to, because i'm supposed to? perhaps i should suck it up, have my cake or eat it, and recognise that i have been acting like a selfish child for years.

mark sent me a tsuba, the disc that serves as the hilt on a japanese sword. it's decorated with three rabbits that chase one another's tails. one side of the disc shows their bellies and the other side their backs. i tied it with a string and hung it from my bedframe. they look a little cramped in their circle, almost like crawling cats. it has a nice weight to it.
since working at ps1 i've developed this irrational fear that i'm growing stupider. i don't understand or learn things as easily as i used to, and they say your brain is pretty well shaped out by the time you're twenty-five, so i'm stuck with the person i've become. of more use than becoming stupider would be to become simpler. my capacity for complicating the simple unfortunately has not diminished.
when will i want what's good for me?
when will i stop dreaming and start living?

bad luck today. i couldn't muster the motivation to take the bus upstate, or even leave the house for most of the day. i did plink around on the mandolin a bit, though. it's starting to get fun and frustrating as i experiment with little riffs and chord variations. there are pages and pages of song lyrics in my notebook that i would like to put to music.
so i finally decided to leave the house and went downtown to go to meeting for worship with an odd feeling in my stomach. when i arrived i was the only one there. the reason i like tuesday meeting so much is the thickness of the silence, but with just me there it was a bit too silent. i went for a walk down to the atlantic ave shopping center instead and looked at shoes, thinking about belonging and not belonging, wondering why i feel so shy and nervous. thomas lent me a book about a threesome that move to hawaii. he led me to expect the book to be about the threesome, but really it's about being an outsider in hawaii.
got back in the subway to go see akie and kyle play, and it turned out akie was in the hospital with his tonsils.
no meditation, no music.

and that's me, stage left, shaking my shake thing. i bruised my palm and ring finger, and i haven't had that much fun, oh, since dancing at luke and leroy's. or maybe the very first matty charles and the valentines show that i stumbled across in hudson.
thank you mike for spotting the pictures!
thank you miles for the generosity of your music. i am happier knowing you exist.

lord, open my heart
lord, bring me near
lord, open my heart
lord, make it into a mirror
to reflect the myriad colored lights
of love
and space

picture from the akron/family show last night, stolen shamelessly from danfun's flickr page.
that show was effin' amazing.

i knew i didn't like the image on the cover of if on a winter's night a traveler, and i liked it less when i confirmed that it was a painting by de chirico. a listless image, poorly reproduced, but perhaps it is totally appropriate in this context. a painting about paintings on a book about reading.
stephanie was reading the first chapter aloud. it addresses you, dear reader, and your choice of this book. i didn't think i liked it. when she set it down i picked it up, and the first page i flipped to commenced with a paragraph on the differences between having something read aloud to you and reading it yourself.
perhaps i will like this book.

essays on art by octavio paz
-didn't even come close to finishing this, but by the time i had finished struggling through a fascinating essay on glossolalia and native languages the brooklyn library was sending me you-owe-us-money e-mails. perhaps i'll try another time.

perdido street station by china miéville
-this fantasy novel didn't fuck around. miéville likes to make you lose faith in his main characters before he kills them off ignominously. it became a slog towards the end, and i found it too over the top. miéville also overuses s.a.t words like chitinous and puissant and bathos and blench. every once in a while i stumble across an adjective i suspect he straight up invented, but if i paused to look up all the words he uses that i'm not sure about i'd end up owing more money to the brooklyn library than i did to the irs this year. on akie's advice i went ahead and borrowed the second one, the scar, from rebecca. it was much better. the third one, the iron council, i liked less.

the jungle by upton sinclair
-slogged through the first few chapters of this and realized it was the grapes of wrath set in the meatpacking district of chicago. i've already read the grapes of wrath, thank you very much, so instead i read the extensive introduction. it sketched out the plot for me and told me what i was supposed to get out of the book (not that meat is bad, but that capitalism exploits the workers), and i left it at that.

the death of ivan ilych by leo tolstoy
-i read this because stephen harper was reading it. it was good. i've never particularly liked short stories. there's no time to get lost in the story, and there's usually some moral getting crudely bashed into your head. the death of ivan ilych was no exception, but i did find that certain stillness to which yan martel was referring when he chose this book to send to stephen harper. ummm, to summarize: ivan ilych does everything that he's supposed to adequately. he never rocks the boat, he works just hard enough, and he achieves pretty much what he wants to: family, friends, bourgie house and lifestyle. since he's never done anything special or really loved anything, he dies disappointed. everyone mourns him exactly as much as society dictates and not one jot more. food for thought at a time when i'm seriously wondering why i struggle so hard to work in the arts when i could be doing exactly the same kind of work for reasonable people and making twice (or more!) as much money.