Some scratch-notes
November 29th, 2005,With some friends, dates are very important, and I can relate with glee the bizarre stories by which we met. Others, I haven’t the slightest clue how long I’ve known them, or how we met. It seems, often times, that they have been a part of my life forever, and I find the idea of ever having needed to BECOME friends with them a foreign idea. It’s strange, because I enjoy telling the stories (the **good** stories) of those bizarre first encounters, but I think not remembering how we met is a sign of greater friendship.
Bella Donna Reed told me that she was having this problem where everything happened two years ago. Two years ago, in 1998, I met the MoonHowler Kids, though all three of us insist we’ve been friends for decades. Shortly after that (but still two years ago), I met Sade, who later teamed up with Blue Beard. Then, about two years ago, I started actually hanging out with all these strange folks outside of the circuits we normally met through.
Unpaintable Canvas, Blue Beard and Too Busy For Anything came over for photography last night. It was supposed to be just UC, but TBFA’s cat died yesterday, and we wanted her to have company. I’m not exactly sure when BB and TBFA met (it was probably two years ago), but BB moved down to Chicago to live with her earlier this year, the summer after I moved here.
I still can’t quite explain the awesome power I feel coursing through my social life. Other people have felt it, too, this sense of an unmistakable gathering of Good People. We’re readying ourselves for the next apolcalypse.
I had coffee with Never Lets It Get Her Down while back in the Burgh. She kept telling me how much she enjoyed my stories, and was encouraging me to write them all down, make a book. I’ve been considering it: a seemingly disparate collection of stories, bits of fiction, and photography. Interestingly, I see those stories written in the form of short stories about me telling the stories, rather than just writing the stories themselves down.
In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, we often encounter Morpheus’s vast library, filled with all the books ever dreamed of but never written. I have this idea silly notion, describing a dream in which I traveled to that vast hall and found the book waiting inside my own dreams. I awake, and write out this theoretical book as half-remembered passages I read while dreaming of reading the book I never wrote. This sort of circularity has always appealed to me.
And, odder still, if I never do write this book, then there is another book in the dream library, waiting. Or perhaps there is still only one, and this new vision trumps the old one?
It is a slow and sad day, I feel hung over from the intense social binging that was Thanksgiving. Like the painful Sundays following a weekend of rampant insobriety, I am listless, and barely able to move. Like an alcoholic, I call up a friend for a shot of conversation (two fingers of talk, no ice!) and bolstered by a swallow of the dog that bit me, I accomplish a few things. But not enough. Not enough to suit my tastes. I’m still wandering around my apartment, wondering where the hell I hid my Emergancy Pants.
Ah, ye cruel and mocking gods. Did you mean it to be such a torture, giving us so much to do, and see, and be? To hell with faith or virtue! Show me a man who can choose and I will show you the path to heaven.