along with its color and film are indicators of health and disease.   So I read and how can it not be true?

Major developments since last coherent message tossed ashore: none.

My thoughts are not me.  I am not my thoughts.

We get what we need to meet the faces we meet in the mirror in the street.  Writing is like chewing and it takes a while to get going.

Coming

I’ve been in Chattanooga two days now, plus ou moins.  Met up with old friends on Friday and caught an art show in the recently white-washed Main St. “district.”  Then we chilled with the big crowd at the city-sponsored free music-thing before ending up at Alan’s apartment, where I fell almost asleep on the deck until it started to rain. 

I am realizing the extent of my domestication by big-city living, graduate school, and (gasp!) aging.  “Go home, nothing good happens after 12 o’clock!” Kevin and I shout in Somerville coming home on weekend nights.  They can sort of keep a lid on things what with controlling the means of transport and all.  Of course some people must party all night, and there are many cars, but I do not know these people, do not want their means, and in any case, “if God does not exist then everything forbidden.”

 First of all, you can buy beer in convenience stores down here, or rather, since Mass turns out not to be the center of the universe, you can’t buy beer in the convenience stores up there.  I have become a lightweight. Liberal-Puritanism 1, Other Side 0.   Alan and Steve go on a beer run at 11:30, and take a requests, I sort of shrug noncommitally.  “mm, I don’t know I just want like 1 beer.  Can you pick up something unfiltered?” They look at each other.  “Umm, maybe, we’ll see what we can do.” 

Now is this an unreasonable request?  Certainly if it really was 11:30, and probably in any case, when the evening gets down to the fundamentals, as in we’re not talking about something to complement a nice home-cooked meal at a dinner party.  Anyway, what I got (and I so wish I had a picture) was a 40 of Icehouse with “Unfiltered” written in magic marker on it.  So I’m a weird pseudo-yuppie now apparently.  Bad clothes still, but I tuck in my shirt and sometimes shave. 

And then last night, from which the above picture comes, there was the third night of this massive punkfest somewhere out easterly.  This orgiastic crazyness deserves many many entries of its own, not to mention video, but all I have time to offer is: American Cheeseburger is mighty fine.
 

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN19435659

there’s no question: i could not live like Bukowski. Years of isolation, prowling the shelves at bars and public libraries. real aloneness and not a phase. I need. meaning, friends, morning time sun.

But then, i can’t get away from him either. the jobs that come and go, even not getting fired or walking out. mentally leaving, checking out for a few months. seeing the crazy people who are well-dressed and disciplined. the movements that fade out into abstraction because the thing concret is at best monstrous or more likely simply ineffective and shallow. today i walked up the hill to Rosenstiel feeling thrown back into everyday life. what is everyday life? vegetative existence, not necessarily lacking computations, but without decisions, or with a certain plane of decision that is parallel to its support. Everyday life, with one and only one decision: the decision to continue.

Thursday I’m going back to visit my family, the first time since X-mas. Then I felt like a traveler in-between worlds new to Boston and hating it, separated from Tennessee and growing distant. My semi close friends looked at me like I abandoned them (which is true), my acquaintances were barely aware I had left, my close friends were just that. I waited to get comfort back, walking the streets of my old neigborhood

North Chattanooga, currently under demolition by the same old clique. It never came. Holidays came and went, I came and went and returned, to something.

Since then, i’ve mostly come to realize that comfort is just gone. that comfort really can only exist inside discomfort, sitting on top of the head of the snake.

blah blah blah, filling up the blog, filling up history.

Dear Blog,

you and coffee and various non- and un-non-sexual fantasies are what I need to do productive work in the mornings. i hope wordpress makes a billion dollars off of  you, because they deserve it.

me

This city faces inwardly. Its better not to have opinions about large abstract groups, except this one of course.  They will surprise you after all.

Yet tonight I realized the best place to meet people seems to be Great Oats, or whatever they call it, where the food is very expensive and partially organic.  The shelves are so narrow in this old building on Prospect Street, and everyone’s half sweaty or perhaps it’s just me being totally sweaty and I’m averaging out, so you’re constantly bumping into people and sharing a very tight space.  However, while i might assume this would lead to uptightness and bad feelings – which surely it does, just not tonight – instead people seem almost happy to share a stranger’s sweat.  I mean, hey, you must have good taste to shop for food the same place as I do, right? :)