Thursday, January 2, 2014

Day Job- a blue book's worth of meandering

I swear, the full moon has lasted three nights in a row.

I ride past it on my bicycle toward all conceivable destinations while it calls its silent shriek into the black cool nights of late May.
Girls in skirts and boys in conveniently inconvenient footwear are agents of the summer to come. All of them altars upon which to hang good or bad fashion.
Me? I listen to records (Beethoven, Jazz, Punk compilations never to be released on CD) and clean my room and try to think where to go for breakfast that won't be closed on a holiday. (It's a holiday.)
I keep up with bike riding and try not to misplace my helmet and wheels after a night of drinking and wandering off.

Now morning skies are gray as the damp rains they portend. Threatening to extinguish barbecues and beach-bound afternoons. But so what? If your city never stops, then you do something else. Like maybe resist the urge to break into poetry...
To fall back toward the pits of lingual pleasure... until you are no longer able… Then- it's time for a fresh sheet of paper…
You may never read it again, you'll just get it scooped up right out of your system and into the wastebasket (off of the waist) and that's alright. If it was from around the middle then it probably wasn't worth listening to or re-reading anyway.

And you know, if someone said "Pack. We leave for Paris tonight." I know exactly what I'd take. I'd be ready in just about 30 minutes. "Give me a half-hour" I'd say and I'd shower and shave and toss my goodies in one bag (I could get another bag later.) And so much then for the perfection of departure- a really meticulous thing all laid out and premeditated with a few moments to consider every decision…
Which brings me to the point of hotel rooms. Hotel rooms are a nice place to be naked. I enjoy very much being naked in the privacy and warmth of my own hotel room that I have paid for, for more than one night in a row. There are places that if I ever go back, I know where I'd like to stay. I make lists, too. All the time. And each list insists a camera. Another always good-idea for a take-along include vitamins and a notebook. But perhaps I'm being too practical here. I don't believe, anyway, that the first trip anywhere should be the time to go husband shopping. Always fall in love with a place first. Or don't. Regardless, more full moons will manifest, and boy-oh-boy will some of them get you. Yow. You can't print out all your French poems and read them badly, haltingly, stumblingly into the winged statues in forgotten gardens and think that will be of any help. Nope. Sorry. Just vanity twinging in your asshole and psyching you up to believe you'll be OK. The poetry will be fine. YOU are going to have to take all the vagina you have and wring about 40 years of blood out of it first. You're going to have to twist it up like it's a mean rat tail your mother snapped on you with biology and get screwing. Screw your way out. It's kegle time. Which is another fancy way of saying "play the game, sweetie." Go on, throw a dart at that map and move it. Comic books and barrettes and monogrammed stationery are not travel. Cincinatti is not Tangiers. Too bad for all that, but it can't be helped.
There is good news, however, and that's breakfast. After you've struggled your lot under that electric-grass fed moonshine, tomorrow will arrive just the same and you will find yourself actually craving the standard culinary surprises of dawn, past pre-noon, past the hotel room windows, where you have not stood showing off your hot-crossed buns or other yum-yums down into the streets. Those mild corridors that sing with sweet scents or savory relished happiness- you go thru them.

So put the moon back in its can, and get back on your bike.