20:16 - June 21, 2003 whirlwind of
Summer is the most fickle time for me in terms of keeping promises to myself... always a good test, and I always fail it. Every year at the Custer St. Fair I brush past every beautiful girl in every expensive sundress with every gorgeous boyfriend and I know, suddenly and with absolute certainty, that I am still shallow, and still travelling in circles. With every day that passes that I find everything else to care about other than looks, and boys, it is all negated by this one fucking season, summer, the season every boy in every movie raves about because girls wear less clothing.
Note the overuse of absolutes, and I definitely do, but I hate hate hate feeling jealous of other people instead of happy for them, and I hate that I sometimes can't help it. I watch incredible things just seem to come to people without them even trying, or reaching for them, or even being very good people in general, so karma is ruled out, and motivation is ruled out, so what's left?
If I had to explain to someone why I would have to wait, maybe forever, to trip on mushrooms, it would be the best explanation of my psyche ever; that I'm still scared of the impact my own thoughts can have on me. I'm not ready to handle what I throw myself, I can't face something I haven't prepared.
But at the same time all I really want is something I haven't prepared, something to surprise me and dazzle me and take me completely by surprise, and wonder. I keep thinking I have to do something about this, not rely on people.. or.. try to be at peace with something inside me I haven't found yet.. or.. something.. As an opposite of some, I'm not confused because everything is a whirlwind of wonderful.. I'm confused because I keep waiting and wanting and nothing ever comes, nothing.
23:56 - June 19, 2003 ice, or glass
Life just jumps up and surprises you sometimes. The phone rings last night at 11:00. 'Hey man, this is Andrew,' says Andrew. 'Guess where I am?'
'Where?'
'Evanston, Illinois.'
Perfect timing. The wind is ripping across the broken expanse of the lakefront, and everywhere else, with the fury of a feral cat's claw. Welcome to Chicago, motherfucker. (A Kill Hannah song...) It is freezing and blindingly sunny. Walking down the street is like struggling through a very strong and stubborn lake of air. Waves of it. Andrew, his friend Zach, and I try our best to brave the wind for the sake of smoking on the rocks facing the Chicago skyline, but the wind blows the joint apart, the weed from the bowl, and tears the lighter from Andrew's fingers and tumbles it down between the sharp and narrow beachfront rocks, never to be seen again. The other beach, the one close to my house, has been blown flat by the wind. The sand is like a sheet of ice, or glass. Our bare footprints are as obvious as red paint on a schoolyard fence, weaving in and out and back and forth, veering away from the dead alewives that have washed up on shore, that wash up on shore every June, stopping and turning around at the flattened wooden fence. Each time a foot sinks into the perfect surface I feel like I'm stepping on God. The wind blasts from one angle, the front, blows our hair straight back, our clothes plastered against our bodies. It is so much that is impossible to get sandy. As soon as the sand begins to cling, it gets blown furiously away.
And the forest preserve is infested with tiny caterpillars, covering every leaf of every tree in the whole block square radius.
I am still ill. My face feels on fire, my throat scoured raw, my appetite kind of nonexistent, except for Brie and crackers, and grapes, and water. And egg. But I seem to climb better like this. Mike and I went the the wall after dinner and I stopped paying attention to gravity and could make myself feel like I was floating up instead of fighting up. My head blared, blares, like a stereo.
00:11 - June 18, 2003 why society puzzles me
So we're all sitting in Don Juan's stuffing steak and crab into our faces when one of the two presumably off-duty Chicago cops who have been eating a few tables away gets up and starts talking to the little kid at the next table like the restaurant is a police education class or something. I'm not sure how it got started; I wasn't really looking, but I start paying close attention when she takes out her handcuffs to show him. 'Should I put these handcuffs on your mom?' she asks in a syrupy little-kid voice, you know the kind I mean, and he nods vigorously so the mother offers her wrist and one cuff is snapped on.
'Do you want to put your hands in the other one?' she asks, and the kid hesitantly holds his wrist out. 'No, put them together, wrist to wrist in front of you,' she explains, and he does, and she snaps the other one on him.
When she takes them off finally, after some good-natured teasing about how she's lost her key, the mother has red marks running the length of her wrist. The cop launches into this explanation about how people always complain about bruising, but bruising only happens if they struggle, so struggling is never necessary. 'Metal doesn't give,' she stresses. 'It is not forgiving. We didn't do the bruising, that's what everybody thinks though. If they would just keep still all they would get would be a few marks, like yours there.' She pauses, looks like she's going to leave, but doesn't. 'Is there anything else on my holster you would like to see?' she asks the kid.
He shakes his head and mumbles, 'no,' but she pulls one pouch off her holster anyway. 'Do you know what this is?' she asks. He shakes his head. 'They're bullets,' she says, and shakes them into her palm. 'Can you guess what goes in here? No? This is a radio for us to communicate. Can you hear people talking? Put it to your ear. Can you hear them? In here I have mace.'
(Next to me, my dad is breathing in disbelief. 'Hopefully she isn't going to demonstrate,' he whispers.)
'Now,' she finishes, pointing to her gun holster, 'can you guess what goes in here?'
The kid, excited to finally know something, shouts, 'your GUN!' and is shushed by his mom. He ignores her. 'Can I...'
'You can't see it,' she interrupts him, 'but you can see the bullets. Here, they won't hurt you, they're useless without the gun. Here, touch them.' He doesn't want to, so she takes them back.
'Now what do you do when you see one of those?' asks the mother, trying to regain control.
'Not touch it,' whispers the kid.
'That's right,' the cop breaks in. 'Never touch a gun. See, this knife is just as harmful as a gun,' ...she picks up the steak knife by his father's plate... 'but if you don't touch it, it can't hurt you. If you touch a knife, you can kill someone, and if you touch a gun, you can kill someone. But if you don't touch either of them, you can't hurt anyone with them.'
('What about someone hurting him?' asks my father, next to me, louder. His girlfriend, Martha, kicks him under the table.)
The cop is still going. 'Maybe when you get older your daddy can take you to the shooting range, but only do that with your daddy's permission. Guns are dangerous. Now I love my gun, I use it for protection but I am not reckless with it. I'm all for gun safety. Keep the gun OUT of reach of the children, period. See, kid, this gun weighs five pounds. Do you have handweights at home? It's like that weight. It's heavy. And powerful. A gun could knock you backwards if you tried to shoot it. It might even knock your mom. So you would have to wait until you got older to go to the shooting range, and ask your daddy first.'
(My own father is extremely loud now. 'Yeah, ask your daddy first if you want to go shoot someone,' he says, extremely sarcastically. He sounds exactly like me. 'Don't kill anyone without Daddy's permission.'
'She sure loves her gun,' says Martha. 'I mean, she really really loves it. Listen to her.')
Her partner is lingering by the door, obviously impatient to get going, but the talking cop is on a roll. 'Yeah, I'm a good shot,' she's saying. 'Aren't I a good shot?' she yells back to her partner, who nods and rolls his eyes. 'I'm a good shot,' she says, 'because I've had lots of practice.'
(I don't hear much after that because I'm laughing too hard, even though it's not funny, it's not funny at all. All I hear is the mom saying uneasily, 'now what do you say to the nice lady?' and the kid mumbling, 'Thank you,' and the cop somehow even managing to make her exit self-importantly.)
01:40 - June 17, 2003 this took forever
Stolen from Ryan because it's fucking awesome.
Deep-thought scene: Faith No More - Paths of Glory
Regret scene: Silverchair - Emotion Sickness
Lesson-learning scene: Frank Zappa - We Are Not Alone
"Life's okay" scene: Return To Forever - Majestic Dance
Party scene: Incubus - Shaft
Happy dance scene: Less Than Jake - Scott Farcas Takes It On The Chin
Flashback scene: Tomahawk - Flashback
Death scene: Radiohead - Exit Music (For a Film)
Closing credits: Living End - Closing In
14:58 - June 15, 2003 back asleep
The last 48 hours are a wonderful haze. Just got back from Madison, where, at 1:00 in the morning, I decided I needed to sit in a dark room in the corner on the thin, lumpy mattress with the moon streaking through the filmy window and eat a cold apple from the cooler in my backpack. For some reason, 150 miles north it gets unbearably hot and sticky. I opened my car door to swamp air and the third floor apartment door to swamp air moving slowly with the fan. Everyone's skin was muddy with the heat, so we grilled hamburgers on the front porch and they drank beer. By the time we all had filed over to the lakefront to hear a band play, it was strange enough to be effectively super-existent; me floating after a group with people streaming past me in this high ceilinged building and through faux-cobblestone streets, and suddenly there's this huge lake and a terrace, and steps to sit on. And the whole time me not even caring that if I had to, I wouldn't be able to get back to the house I was staying at if someone gave me a billion trillion dollars, because I had not been paying attention, not even one little bit, while I was floating along, though I do remember something about a fountain and skateboarders falling down stairs.
Anyway, it was very much like being back at college, the same way I'm not noticing as the days pass. I woke up in Andrew's bed in the middle of the night... Andrew was sprawled out on the living room couch directly in the path of the fan... and me thinking, 'oh my god! where am i??!' and then not being able to figure it out and then thinking, 'oh well. it doesn't matter.' and falling back asleep.
