technicolor blackout

going all the way through.</p>

see you on the other side.

Inspiration.

If T. H. ever emails me back.

Such a mean mood today. The wind is calming, the sun is coming out, it's beginning to resemble may but I feel october.
I need a space that resembles me.  But I don't have it. I don't feel like I can afford anything, ever, anymore.  Nobody seems familiar. No comfort.

 

Student loan debt feels like being followed by shabby little men in torn, dirty suits, who make no pretense of not tracing your steps a few paces behind. Their presence is perpetual. Every payday they catch up with you, removing sections of your flesh with old razors. You don't even feel them cutting anymore. It looks like they're taking sections of very rare steak. Once in a while, when they realize you're numb to the process, they put one of your fingertips in a pair of rusted pliars and squeeze until the fingernail snaps. You grow numb to this, too. The twisting, the laughter, and the cutting. They wrap the flesh in brown paper and stuff the packages inside the pockets of their suits and continue walking behind me, talking in their low, sullen way. They will do this to me for a very, very long time and I will submit to this treatment until I give up on having a credit score or flee the country.

 

T. H. is so delinquent in his email etiquette that he posted an explanation on his website that it takes him two weeks to a month to respond to emails, that sometimes he just loses emails, and that he's not accepting new clients right now. I'm not worried about the latter, provided he can remember that we met last october and a half-dozen emails should hopefully have secured me somewhere in his queue. The email thing is bafflingly unprofessional, but then again, he's a tattoo artist in high demand. I understand the wait. I know this industry, its lassitude and vicissitudes. It's still been a bitterly disappointing experience on every conceivable level.

Yesterday felt like summer. Not in a good way. Hot and humid, and it didn't even look like sunlight so much as the side of the light, the sharp way that light looks when reflecting off a sharp knife, long walls of blind turns.
Windy morning today. Back to spring. There's a stillness in summer, the dead of it, when the days are eighteen hours of sunlight. These are quiet days. I haven't been writing. It's not there and I'm not inclined to force it. I'm far away from all of it.

Today at work is so fucking slow it feels like russian roulette with no bullets. Like if someone did blow their brains out, everyone would yell, "Yaayyy!" Including the person who pulled the trigger if there's any electrical activity left to experience joy. Just to be happy something actually changed. I'm sitting here thinking about designer body bags. The purse industry could break into funeral wear in a big way. Louis Vuitton needs to smear a casket with their meaningless echo of frivolous wealth. Gucci urns. Prada mourning veils. The funeral industry is already a corporatized industry of exploitative vultures- why shouldn't the fashion industry spoon up some of that sweet grief spending?

The pain broke on sunday.
I got eight hours of sleep, and the torrent had reduced to an ebb. I took my last percocet sunday afternoon, and by monday I felt like a new man.
I went to the dentist on monday and they nonchalantly found nothing wrong. Some of the worst, most  protracted pain in my life. The antibiotics worked. On something. The dentist said something probably got stuck in the wisdom tooth. I'm not surprised. This is the same prick  that refused to give me an rx for painkillers and I was in the er 12 hours later.
Monday was for me. Quiet day. I meditated, I read, played video games. I thought about taking a percocet for recreation instead of necessity. Decided I was tired of it, stuck with sugar-free red bull and strawberries for lunch.

 

Tonight I'm meeting astrid for dinner at french roast. After the weekend I had, I'm hoping to keep things amicable, especially after the weekend I've had. Things are delicately peaceful.
I brought leonard cohen's beautiful losers to read on my commute. It reminds me I need to take more risks in my writing; there has to come a point when I honestly get into the low valley of everything that's really happening to me, right now. I'm finding it difficult to detach  entirely in the apartment. Enough to write. It's not my apartment, it's hers; both names are on the lease, I pay the bills, but it was ours, a museum of us, us in every object. She's moved out but she'll come back when she can afford to pay the rent. And then I leave. It's not my place, I'm just holding it. I don't feel any desire to change the space, just keep it clean and wait until things change. Things are changing every day, but I'm thinking of
the next major step.

Failing and Flying
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.