Dark faux-Irish rooms, filled with nuns and well-wishers. For some it’s merriment with emptily positive purpose, but even the sisters can’t seem to begrudge anyone this wanton strain of fun.
Driving down the home-town on the kind of day that even trees’ shadows dropping down the hills next to the highway seem the height of beauty. Nick Cave was singing of longing. 2 couples sat atop a steep embankment, cupped, watching the city and the traffic.
Jack stood outside in the brilliant sunshine chain-smoking. I went out to him at the bequest of his wife, for the purpose of business: bill-paying. A nun walked by, going inside to the Hoolie, and appropriately addressed him thus with a “top of the afternoon to ya!” to which he replied, with the first Celtic-spirited-style saying that came to his mind: “May you be in heaven half an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead!”
2 days later, my other great uncle Jack dies of Alzheimer’s and far-metastasized cancers, and I wonder how my already morbid grandmother, his sister, is taking this, she who is 12 years his elder.
Tin-top ceilings, lazy fans, cigarette smoke, chrome legs, Sunday drunks. The old times anew and askew. An old guy rifling through the 99 cent stacks at work gets me into conversation. It starts with an inquiry into my knowledge of the McGuire Sisters, whose LP is on the top of this selections. This 83 year-old man with his sunken upper cheeks but protruding if not also politely imposing cheeky opinions keeps me anchored as a depositing point for his lamentations upon the modern order of things. I was right there with him, even, for a while. Even after he essentially called the women of my generation tarts, the way he condemned us not entirely uncharming: “Used to be you had to date a girl 3 months before she’d even kiss ya. Now if you don’t go to bed with ‘em on the first night, they think something’s wrong with ya!” Eventually at some point into this “community service”, as Joe called it, he ventured into the inevitable anti-homosexuality and thinly-veiled racist territory and I had to call it a day, but it nonetheless made me wonder what post-post-post-post modern conditions will be soon enough, in the not-too distant future, chafing my old ass.
The air was warm, I recreated recipes of success. It is just another thing people do on a regular basis. I scanned old-time real film slides of Ireland, 9 years ago with an old friend, re-friend that was at the time mine, with 9 years enough to illuminate the depth of that time’s jagged lines. As for the un-straight perception within seeing those images of your previous self. The obvious things are that your teeth were more straight, your eyes more sweetly tired and wide, your frame slightly more slight, but yet you were still you, aren’t you?
Films in our American rain of the Spanish countryside. The air is cooler but no less alive. At the same time, plenty of things have died. And I have a dream of false forks in the breathing, waking road, of internal dichotomies, dialectics between self-doubt and self-assurance, but mostly of unresolved and unmanifested subconscious messes. In particular, a long kiss, a parting, a public declaration of ill-will (outside), a defiance and persistence of belief, a radio missive, and a frustrating awakening, mostly for the fact that this particular was ever, in the first place, a disappointment to be had. Perhaps, or rather unmistakably, stemming from all of these years of that reality existing abysmally, leaving only this parody.
I know, being unlived, that it is to be lost, and that it should be lost, no matter that it wants to be manifest—what a kiss to never have to just sleep-think to forget—slow at first, then so serious, late to work almost, not giving a shit, a producer of declaratives all too awfully transparent. But, in its being unlived, the most possible one-day memorable.
Drove Tyler to the airport at 5 in the morning and then leisurely traced the desolate back roads to home. Blackness, the blackest of course, despite the discreetly imposing (without a hint of contradictory standing) tightly bright half-moon. In bed, at last, drifting through the biology-play of my predatory felines making kill-whimpers out at the dawn birdsongs, drifting off to the half-life to again trace those faintest of lines between all of the seasons of existence.
