June 8, 2008

Crushing heat (again) and it’s only 9 AM. I think I’ve lost the window of opportunity when another bike ride was feasible.

Darren had a party last night, a very loud and prolonged one, probably for the opening of Antony and Cleopatra at Montford. I’m several doors away and pretty tolerant of such things, so I wonder if he got complaints from his nearer and tenderer neighbors. Cars were parked crooked all over the streets, including in front of my house, edging so far into the right-of-way I wonder why it wasn’t wiped out by traffic. Lying in bed listening to the din I was thinking complicated thoughts. I liked the sound. I had to push away the tatters of conventional response, which suggested I should have been indignant. I wasn’t invited, but would probably have been welcomed had I appeared. Did I want to appear? I actually wanted to be there and at a distance, listening, at the same time, and the strange liquidity of perception on a summer night almost allowed that. Individual voices were sometimes very clear over the din. I listened to tell who they were, but all voices shouting sound pretty much the same. Half in my dreams, I thought it sounded like an invading army, but a happy one, one to which you wouldn’t mind conceding the victory. Broken bottles glittered in the street when I walked to Mountain Java, the orange party lights looking peaked in the dawn. I wonder if before I die I’ll abandon myself so much at a party that I’ll have to sleep on the couch, or flopped on a bed with a brace or two of others in the same state? Time passes, and now such an outcome looks unlikely. . . . alas. . . .

Jinx was incredibly cute and giggly at the studio today, almost another, and lighter, person. Then I saw the beautiful girl he was with, and that explained it. She took almost her own age off his.

Encountered a colleague at the Fresh Market. His huge-eyed daughter Eva (about 4?) looked me up and down and said, "Where’s your mother?"
"Uhm. . . she’s in heaven."
"Why is she in heaven?
"She died. "
"How did she get died?"
"Well, she got sick, and–"
"You have COCA COLA!"
I finally realized where she was going. If my mother were here to watch over me, I wouldn’t be buying the nasty junk that was in my shopping cart.

A director in Atlanta requests a copy of Bathory after reading it in and preserving his notes from 1988. Have I really being laboring at this that long?

Scarlet lilies blooming in the back yard, in the afternoon shade or at evening so intensely red they look lit they’re artificially lit.

Tom Thompson sends a list of 31 classmates who are deceased, as part of the preparations for this summer’s reunion. I have a clear image in my head of thirty of them. Almost all I "knew" in some capacity deeper than being able to identify them across a room. Three were, at one time, relatively intimate friends. Three I had a crush on. A surprising seven of them were from a group one would at one time have called "hoods," and have assumed that early, perhaps violent, death would be but expected. Two of these were in the "crush" classification as well. With one, Cathy Casey-Billings, I feel a bond that is not only lingering, but mystical. We were separate from our classmates from kindergarten on up, and made a classification of our own, though neither of us talked much about it then. Or ever, but once, when she came to buy a book from me, and she was very ill, though she could not bring herself to say it.