words fail

It's nice how some people can remind me what I'm supposed to be.

do you miss me, Miss Misery?

I have a summertime cold or sinus infection or allergies or something. I'm deleting duplicate audio files in iTunes and listening to Elliott Smith from a mix I made for the all-state orchestra festival in 2001. I feel nervous and restless and hopeless. I am easily betrayed and just too sensitive. This summer I've spent too much time in isolation, with too much time and imagination to spend on my worries. I wonder and doubt whether anything will ever really satisfy me. Surely nothing will as long as I feel so hesitant and unsure of myself all the time. I hate how RM can't really dig me out of this gloom; in fact, tonight he was busy making it worse by hanging out with his ex, unannounced. I wish that didn't bother me, but it did. And someone else important ran off to New York, and it's hard for me to accept that I need to abandon the ice cream vendor who won't (and never will) give me the ice cream I want (I'm paraphrasing some crazy truths Joey Comeau was spitting on A Softer World recently).

I am desperate to travel.

"Life is simple Hide Life is incredibly complex." -- Kenneth Koch

narrowly

Tonight I heard a song I liked but didn't know -- it was sung by a woman with a strong and sure voice -- and I heard it in an awkward location that made me think of Beezer's dirtiest story and a strange night (why?) in Dekalb with abandoned music. After my dear boyfriend Richard purchased something it's not right to talk about in polite company, I asked the cashier who wore a hooded sweatshirt and a flat, dreary haircut, "who is this that's playing?" and it was Neko Case. She sung lyrics about Minneapolis, and it turns out that the song was a Tom Waits cover: "Christmas Card from a Hooker" in my city, my former and probably not future city, my imagined unreal city (you have killed me!).

Last week, I saw E.E. in a restaurant with too many tourists and we walked together to his hotel of rumpled bedspreads and deceptive drapery. The views of Chicago from above looked like scenes seen on a screen, not real visions, staged only in their idea of randomness and not in their composition.

The summer hasn't been too hot, and that's good. My days, though, have been too long and too empty. I'm a nervous wreck (my mother labeled it) and I don't have the right insurance money to keep seeing a therapist. When I set out to do something, I usually get interrupted, and a few nights ago I dreamed that I lived in a yellow bubble shaped space car that was parked inside a garage in some snowy hilltop town that I loved as I invented it, sharp corners and shadowy unknown neighborhoods and all. I went to California in June to play the oboe, and it's been nearly four weeks since the last time I played it. Only a small, old part of me is sad about that, but when I accidentally found Celibidache conducting the Afternoon of a Faun on my television late at night, it just didn't seem fair that I have perhaps been pushed out entirely, forever, from the world that can make that kind of slow but unbelievably cohesive, sinewy shining magic happen. I was misled.