At 7:30 a.m. we were on our way to pick up car share, and it was that zen weather that only comes to Philadelphia in September: air cool on our bare arms, sky a perfect cloudless cerulean blue.
“This is a perfect day,” I said to Elise.
day in the life
Gilt & Hail
While out in the world I am constantly seeking out details to ferry back to this little white box.
Some days are just as plain as the box itself, monochromatic and empty, and so the smallest sensation of actual life sticks out. Last Friday, a fever, riding home in a cab from work. He had attached a small plastic hose to the passenger a/c vent, and it pumped air under the divider, directly onto my naked ankle. In my hyper-sensitive state the sustained blast of air was alternatingly soothing and intensely painful.
I sank into a kind of paralyzed trance, in rhythm with the throbbing veins beneath my skin.
Other days the world is so vibrant with narrative color that I can hardly take it all in. Not if I had a tape recorder for my thoughts, or a camera for the view. And so I marvel at the human mind, and how in a life full of gadgets it is still the best recording device I’ve got so long as I make sure each aspect of the world is remarkable in its own way.
I prise away at every little detail.
A beautiful voice is emerging from the post office boxes. At first I think it might be the radio, but it slips remarkably from disco to R&B to lullaby without changing key. I don’t think digital satellite can do that.
I peer through the keyholes and tiny windows in the doors of each box to try to catch a glimpse of her. Gilt, but fading, each door is set with a key hole surrounded by a multi-pointed star, each of ten successive letters marking its points.
I don’t understand why. I still can’t see her.
A pleasant-looking woman in a Ft. Lauderdale shirt strolls in with her toddling son, adorable with untied shoes. In line behind me he too is drawn to the singing, or maybe just the gilt, and strays beneath the nylon divider to investigate.
“Get yourself back in here,” she croaks. She speaks like a bull frog, lower and more destroyed than a woman who had smoked for twice her age. She yanks him under the rope and lays a firm smack across his midsection. It reverberates across the tiled floor as he looks up at her. No tears, still quizzical.
She catches me staring, and I hold her gaze for long seconds.
The posters, I notice, are coded. A star means to leave them up indefinitely. A plus means they will expire; their shelf-life is printed below, white on black. And it isn’t just the posters – laminated mats and signs as well.
The tiny woman in front of me is trying to pick up mail in her maiden name; she drops pennies into her purse and they make a peculiar clinking sound, like the inside is made of tin. At the next window the clerk informs a man that he was lucky to receive his package, as it had no address on it.
I can’t figure it out, either.
I am at my bullet-proofed window. I think I could slip a pvc tube around the edge and spray aerosol poison into the face of my clerk. But that wouldn’t be an effective way to pick up my package. She is fussing with her watch, which is clearly two or three links too small for her wrist. Had it swollen suddenly?
There are scratches everyone on the inside of the bullet-proofed window; who is trying to escape?
The woman behind me bobs, up and down, back and forth. The stamp machine does not take dollars. There is a mural on the wall of some Midwestern settlement, and I can’t understand what it has to do with post offices or Philadelphia.
I fiddle with each tiny ball bearing that chains the pen to the bullet proof window as if they are rosary beads.
I pray: remember each detail.
Dying On the Vine of My Mind
In the elevator we all pushed our buttons, some boldly and some surreptitiously.
Mine came out the lowest. Hard to do only seven floors from the top of the building – like skating out of a round of hearts with a Jack. I shrugged off slight sneers and enjoyed the head rush of expressing past fifteen intermediate floors of the high-rise.
I do my best writing in my head while I’m in transit – in an elevator, or walking down the street – which is maybe why so little of it actually finds its way to the page.
It’s not so unusual; I write the best songs while I’m falling asleep. And, in high school I used the write the best French essays in my sleep.
Composing blogs in wakeful daylight may seem more convenient, but my two sleep-adjecent habits are easy enough to manage. For French it was just a matter of jotting it down when I awoke. For songs, if it’s a good one I wake up, walk down the hall, sing it into a microphone, and go back to bed. (And, I have finally relented and put a pad on my night table, for those occasions where the quality is more questionable).
I had disliked her immediately as she sidled up the bus shelter while taking a long, insistent drag off of her cigarette, exhaling her haze in my direction.
Then, as if sensing she was already on my bad side and had nothing left to lose, she conjured an empty coke bottle from her handbag, contemplated it for a moment (taking another lengthy pull), and then crouched down low on the curb and quite deliberately shoved the trash into the gutter.
Quite involuntarily, my face churned into a sneer; i was hardly inclined to resist.
Why can’t that be punishable by death instead of hypothetical $300 fine, I wondered. Can she really be making a positive contribution to society if she can’t walk five steps out of the bus shelter to throw that in a trash can?
Writing is another matter. I write in my head in my written narrative voice, rather than my speaking voice. It doesn’t necessarily translate to speaking, so recording my thoughts via my cell phone is often for naught – the text doesn’t hang together when I transcribe it. And, since I type three or four times faster than I write in longhand, pulling out a pad doesn’t always capture all of the dimensions of my phrase.
I create too many phrases that wither and die on the vine of my mind. I can’t tell you how many witty blogs and music reviews and media critiques I’ve lost in subways or while crossing streets.
What do real writers do? What do you do?
Dit Dot Ditty, Dit Dot Ditty Ditty
(Also w/r/t my sleeplessness, I experienced a highly unexpected psychotic break into hysterical tears at of the intersection of Broad and South while singing along to “Morse Code Love.”
At least, I think it had to do with sleeplessness. That’s not one of my typical welling up into tears in the middle of the street tunes.)
Life In Cartoon Motion
A few scant weeks prior to the birth of this blog in the summer of 2000 I had been working as an Orientation Leader for Drexel, helping to guide and socialize pre-freshman during their summer campus visit.
It’s nearly impossible to be a camp counselor to people who are only a few months younger than you, and by virtue of being an Orientation Leader you are a major geek in their eyes, so the only real solution to holding their attention and respect (for me, anyhow) was sheer, irrepressible, unavoidable, kinetic energy.
I had so much of that energy built up the evening before our first group of students arrived that I absolutely could not sleep (this was before the days of Benadryl w/vodka chaser, god bless my 18-yr-old soul). I remember the absolute hopelessness of it – the clock facing my dorm bed inexorably ticking closer to our 6:15 a.m. call time.
Around five I just gave up – sleep can’t be forced. I just enjoyed the lying still in my bed, counting down the minutes.
The intersection of insomnia and excitement worked. Spectacularly. I’ve always been of the manic, excitable persuasion, but that night was the catalyst to a major transformation: my metamorphosis from excitable boy to something akin to a walking cartoon – rabidly energetic, and afraid to stop moving because I might just pass out.
(Probably a contributing factor to my broken collarbone, but that’s neither here nor there. More Germain is that it was tangentially the template for my participation in Blogathon; I would have never dared to believe I could blog and sing and record for twenty fours hours if I hadn’t going through my insomniac-energy boot camp the summer before.)
I’ve been thinking about that all day because it has been one of those days. I put in a twelve-hour shift of mixing and recording last night, and if you consider when I usually get home from work you’ll realize that subsequently I wasn’t left with too much time for sleep between the end of that endeavor and the beginning of my new work day.
I usually dread getting up and out for work with less than four hours of sleep, but today I loved my barely-two. I was up and out of the house like a catapult, remembering all of my electronic accouterments, walking rather than taking the bus, at work and in constant motion.
The only detraction is that I can’t speak anything resembling English while trying to leave a voice mail, but that’s what the “do-over” button is for.
(Except when you call outside clients and bang the do-over button and then mutter “fuck” because you realize you can’t do-over on their system, and then you realize you just muttered “fuck” in a professional voice mail and the tape is still rolling.)
Today was an exception – I don’t do sleepless nights nearly as much (or, nearly as well) as I did back then – but it’s nice to pitch one in here and there to remind myself what it’s like to be not just unwilling, but unable, to stop.