at the old crow medicine show concert

my body felt limitless
i danced in the aisles until my hair was glued to my back
i realized that the person next to me looked remarkably like sean mcbrady, legend of slauson middle school
more remarkably, i realized that i didn't care
the music was living and so were we
i felt like this was a new city
by the encore, everything was 33% more complicated

night walking

last night i went to a devendra banhart concert with a friend and his cousin and some others. it was wonderful and alive and we danced the whole time. the room was terribly hip, like we were all on our way to a williamsburg-themed costume party, there was a strange transvestite heckler, and devendra didn't play my favorite song, but it was all great. afterwards we all went back to someone's house- i'll call the owners dan and jb. it felt like minutes but we were there for hours, talking and making music- i left tipsy on cheap wine and the bright absence of everyone who shifts in and out of mattering. jb walked me home. it was cold and our whole bodies chattered. the walk home always looks different very late at night and usually it is, there's a heightened sense of circumstance and why. some people seem different at night, where there's the danger of falling for them in that strange space of what you make them out to be and which you'll spend days trying to bend them to fit. walking home has that same duplicity and at night it's wonderful and secret and new. sometimes i think about ann arbor and see it all in walks home late at night, it becomes the best city there is.

fifth st. yard drama

While my father is at work building the Winter Palace, the lady hens are celebrating their womanhood with squawks and murmurs. Gladys, Bessie, and Doris have all laid their first eggs. One at a time they go up the ramp into their little house and nestle down in the hay while the others stand guard, yelling chicken yells. Edith, big and red and brassy, makes a point of being the loudest. She is the town crier and takes this job very seriously, but in her most private moments she worries, examining her body, wondering why no eggs have come yet. She will never let the others see this fear. She makes up for her egglessness with seeming big and important, she knows that volume and stature can work wonders. The others know they just have to put up with her. They follow her lead, clucking quietly behind her back that really they are the mature ones, that Edith does not understand the true and wonderful secrets of chicken adulthood. They pity her. Edith feels their pity and tries so hard to lay an egg she thinks her feathers may pop right out of her skin. She is tormented. If only they knew, she thinks, how shameful it is to have to question one's womanhood. If only they understood the pain I live with every long and eggless day! It is very hard to be a hen. Edith knows she knows more of the trials of life than Bessie or Gladys or Doris ever will. In the yard they regard each other with cordial bitterness. They peck at bugs in the dirt and comment on the weather, clenching their wings.

last night

I had a dream about Phaethon, who was bald, and we were in a room outside of a big theater putting on a terrible version of a nameless Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. The room was connected through small hallways to many other similar rooms, and people kept walking in and out. It was a very interrupted dream, and in the end nobody quite said what they had begun to, and in fact no one really said anything at all.

instructions

go to the grocery store after work. stare at the wall of bulk flours and remember the last time you were there. remember you bought spices. remember you felt grown up. notice that everyone around looks like someone you wish you did not know. wish everyone you knew was a different person. wish everyone you wish you did not know was actually there. mindlessly scoop flour into brown bags, forget to label them. pay too much money for a persimmon. walk home eating it, feel as if your mouth is full of fur.

decide you will bake bread. cover the counter with bags of flour. do not open a cook book. do not use measuring cups. pay too much attention to the music you play. pour one bag of flour into a big bowl. in another bowl, put yeast, hot water, and sugar. stare at it while the yeast tumbles and puffs to the top and realize that the fact that it is alive makes you uncomfortable. on the stove, melt butter. add milk, honey, eggs. add this to the flour. add more honey. remember you hate things that are sweet. stir and stir. stir until bob dylan stops singing from the stereo. open another bag of flour. add the yeast to the big bowl, wishing it was dead. open all the bags of flour. pour all of them into the bowl. beat the dough with your spoon and wonder why you are angry. wish you had added oats. look everywhere for oats, find instead bags and bags of frozen berries. find instead sunflower seeds. keep looking for oats until you want to tear down the kitchen. wonder why you are sad. add handfuls of sunflower seeds. feel the dough turning thick and elastic. start mixing it with your hands. stop when you hear something. turn to the stereo and listen. it is antony & the johnsons. close your eyes and turn your heart off. when it does not turn off, turn and yell at your bread dough. open your eyes. notice it looks like the faces of everyone you wish you did not know. remember why you are sad. think about eating it now. remember what arie said about kindness and baking. touch it as kindly as possible. lift it up like it is living. don't allow yourself to hear the song end. when the next one begins, put the dough on the counter. joni mitchell is singing her song about drinking a case of you. knead and knead the dough. whenever the line about being bitter and sweet comes, want somehow to ruin your bread. wish somehow for it to be bitter. feel how tough it is. think that it will be terrible. wonder if it will rise. wish that it won't. consider tossing it now. pick it up and go to the trash can. feel like crying, slam it back on the counter. knead until the counter feels like it swims. remember the counter in the house on felch street. feel like a child.

rub oil in a large bowl. take your dough, lay it in softly. turn it once so that its back glistens. cover the bowl with a towel. promise to trust it. beg for it to rise. let it swell like a belly. touch it and feel it collapse. know this is your favorite part of the baking. do it again: waiting, rising, swelling, collapsing. lift up the dough. feel how heavy it is. know it may taste terrible. put it into the oven, don't let yourself think about that.

song of the day: kettering, by the antlers

It's a beautiful day, warm and stretching on too long. In that way it's very much like other days, which are less beautiful and long and cold. I don't know how to break out of myself. I don't know what I'm looking for and I think I've stopped looking. In a newspaper today I saw a picture of Sundararaja looking old and uncomfortable. Seeing it made me uncomfortable and I laughed and tore it out, then not sure why I had done that, threw it away. I have his kung-fu dvd in my bag. If he wants it he can have it. I'm tempted to mail it to Postsecret, but don't know what the secret would even be. Even this leaves me with the same waxy feeling that isn't quite sadness, is too dull for sadness, though its true I took a detour up his street last week listening to two choice Ani Difranco songs on repeat and thinking about jade plants. That was more like anger. I'm trying to turn it all into a story, but the narrative hinges on a kind of absence that he doesn't quite have yet. I want the present absence, when by being nowhere someone is everywhere; he has just been deleted it seems. And I'm rewriting in the blank space, rewriting him back in something we'll try and call fiction.

Yes, everyone feels very far away, I am drawn to astronomical comparisons. No one is truly the sun, Phaethon learned that and died learning it. I learn it and promptly rename everything, happy proof of how little I really did learn. Last night I had a dream about someone who I shall call Phaethon and whose face was two-dimensional and slid in and out of focus as if on a piece of paper moved too quickly in front of your eyes, like a reflection on water and the water being mopped up. I think I just want everyone to become stories. And then once they are there, I want them terribly to come back to life.

cool/creepy things about house sitting

-going through the kitchen cabinets
-using the owners shampoo
-photo albums full of people you've never met
-desk drawers!
-rearranging things, or thinking about how you would do so
-the moment of sitting on the fancy delicate chair, and it breaking
-experiencing the magic of cable, which your luddite family finds completely unnecessary
-walking around the neighborhood and chatting with people as if you actually live there too
-moving all the furniture a couple inches to the right
-ripping the owners' musical collection
-trying on their clothes
-taking photos of yourself in their clothes
-if there is a pet, taking photos of yourself in their clothes, with the pet
-thinking how uncomfortable it would be for the owners if you printed these pictures and replaced the nice black and white shots of paris in the kitchen with them
-leaving, hoping the owners won't know all the strange ideas you had about the private living space they kindly shared with you for the weekend