Am off on one of my bizarre road-trips tomorrow. Already, I am wrung out , and I have at least 5 days of other people’s booze and sight-seeing and work and terror ahead of me. Going to see Krakow for the first time. Well, technically it won’t be the first, but my childhood memories of Krakow are completely nonexistent. It’s a blank space. As if someone once held up a cigarette to a particular newsreel.
I’m so tired. I haven’t slept a wink. I’m so tired. My mind is on the brink. Etc.
I used to listen to the Beatles on the floor of my bedroom in Charlotte. Just like today, my room was draped in garlands of lights year-round. But back then, staving off sleep was a game. I took pleasure in delaying it, painting my nails at three a.m., John Lennon murmuring in the background, knowing that when my head hit the pillow, it would be all the more sweeter.
The contents of my head at present, on the other hand, prevent it from resting well. To illustrate them, here is the wonderful Janet Finch:
…I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. – White Oleander. (A book I first read in Charlotte, of course).
Finch’s follow-up, Paint It Black, was also excellent – David Lynch really ought to do a screen adaptation, goddamit – but it’s White Oleander that’s always going to sit somewhere inside my ribcage. The roots go deep.
I like to think I have roots in this world.
