Scene Report: 2006
I kissed Sarah tonight like I would have in high school, had I known her then. At the end of the movie, as the lights and soundtrack faded and there were no sounds left in the world but the bubbling of a water pipe, the humming of a million little motors all over the house, and the quick and tired gasps of our own breath.
Yesterday was high school, or so I called it. I stuck some safety pins through my ears, put on as many pieces of punk rock flair as I could, and drank King Cobra from a paper bag at the bus stop. I broke bottles on the ground and bled all over the floor. But it was't high school so much as a minstrel show. It lacked sincerity, in the way that most things lack sincerity.
In all the ways I've learned to sell myself over the last few years I've lost a lot of that sincerity.
On the porch, Krissy laments that she doesn't know any interesting people like I do. To be honest, I'm sick to death of interesting people, or at least right now, this moment, I feel like writing that I'm sick to death of interesting people. Everyone in this city is so damned talented and busy, people to name-drop, and tell stories of, and brag about knowing, and Krissy, in all of her stoned suburban-ness, doesn't realize that she's one of the most beautiful people in my life right now.
She has secrets. Little ones. She plays the mandolin, but no one but her mandolin teacher has ever heard her play it. She will never read this, and I admire that about her.
It was about ten years ago that I went to high school and started meeting people with enough freedom to be interesting. Mike was a fifteen year old runaway, who slept in the basement of a building he'd once lived in. When the basement flooded, everything he owned was ruined. For a whole summer, he wore the one shirt he had left. It was a Marilyn Manson shirt and he had to wear it inside out because the back said "I Am the God of Fuck."
The difference between Mike and Cris, who was a skinhead, and Jacob who was a hippie, and Tom who had been a Latin King and Michelle Luellen, who chastised me for jokingly using the term "feminazi" and Jill DiGiacomo who was one of my many, many shoulders to cry on and me then, versus me now, is that they weren't living their lives as some sort of a performance. Cris was a skinhead because it made sense to him, because he hated the cops and the class system as much as he loved his father and Chicago. Mike was a squatter because his mother was addicted to crack. We were full of passion,and big ideas and the direction of where we needed to be heading, if myopic, was clear.
On the street, getting off the bus, I see more familiar, beautiful people. They've surrounded themselves with ugly people who only look good when I'm jerking off. My first thought is that they have dead eyes and shallow personalities. My second thought is that I'm projecting.
I wonder what it was like in Seattle and Olympia in the late eighties and early nineties. If it was just like it is here, right now, and then everybody started getting famous, and it all changed.
I wonder about five years ago, when this city seemed open to so much. There was a resurgence in poetry, in puppetry, in noise, in peace and in play. I wonder if 2001 really was all those things or if I was just 18, and I was the one who's shut out the world of possibilities since.
I saw Miles today, and Freddie and Ida. They were the youngest people to see the high school version of me. The one I've worked to kill, for better and worse. They're that age now, drinking on the street and rambling mad in a blur of sexual confusion. Again, I may be projecting but it seems like that's how the scenes all implode: everyone gets high, gets famous, or is done in by incest. More eloquently than me, Kristiana Colon wrote once on how the poetry movement of 2001 fucked itself to death.
I'm taking my first month off soon. My first whole month away from Chicago. I'm a little scared, not so much of leaving, so much as that I won't. Life will intervene and my thirty days will be a week, a vacation, a bygone, a dream. I've got my couches lined up, and I'm looking for work. It feels like I'm commiting some act of treason by willfully interrupting a five year tradition, but, to be honest, it's just a party that I throw every year and, for better or worse, there will be parties to take its place.
[Currently watching "Foxfire"]
Yesterday was high school, or so I called it. I stuck some safety pins through my ears, put on as many pieces of punk rock flair as I could, and drank King Cobra from a paper bag at the bus stop. I broke bottles on the ground and bled all over the floor. But it was't high school so much as a minstrel show. It lacked sincerity, in the way that most things lack sincerity.
In all the ways I've learned to sell myself over the last few years I've lost a lot of that sincerity.
On the porch, Krissy laments that she doesn't know any interesting people like I do. To be honest, I'm sick to death of interesting people, or at least right now, this moment, I feel like writing that I'm sick to death of interesting people. Everyone in this city is so damned talented and busy, people to name-drop, and tell stories of, and brag about knowing, and Krissy, in all of her stoned suburban-ness, doesn't realize that she's one of the most beautiful people in my life right now.
She has secrets. Little ones. She plays the mandolin, but no one but her mandolin teacher has ever heard her play it. She will never read this, and I admire that about her.
It was about ten years ago that I went to high school and started meeting people with enough freedom to be interesting. Mike was a fifteen year old runaway, who slept in the basement of a building he'd once lived in. When the basement flooded, everything he owned was ruined. For a whole summer, he wore the one shirt he had left. It was a Marilyn Manson shirt and he had to wear it inside out because the back said "I Am the God of Fuck."
The difference between Mike and Cris, who was a skinhead, and Jacob who was a hippie, and Tom who had been a Latin King and Michelle Luellen, who chastised me for jokingly using the term "feminazi" and Jill DiGiacomo who was one of my many, many shoulders to cry on and me then, versus me now, is that they weren't living their lives as some sort of a performance. Cris was a skinhead because it made sense to him, because he hated the cops and the class system as much as he loved his father and Chicago. Mike was a squatter because his mother was addicted to crack. We were full of passion,and big ideas and the direction of where we needed to be heading, if myopic, was clear.
On the street, getting off the bus, I see more familiar, beautiful people. They've surrounded themselves with ugly people who only look good when I'm jerking off. My first thought is that they have dead eyes and shallow personalities. My second thought is that I'm projecting.
I wonder what it was like in Seattle and Olympia in the late eighties and early nineties. If it was just like it is here, right now, and then everybody started getting famous, and it all changed.
I wonder about five years ago, when this city seemed open to so much. There was a resurgence in poetry, in puppetry, in noise, in peace and in play. I wonder if 2001 really was all those things or if I was just 18, and I was the one who's shut out the world of possibilities since.
I saw Miles today, and Freddie and Ida. They were the youngest people to see the high school version of me. The one I've worked to kill, for better and worse. They're that age now, drinking on the street and rambling mad in a blur of sexual confusion. Again, I may be projecting but it seems like that's how the scenes all implode: everyone gets high, gets famous, or is done in by incest. More eloquently than me, Kristiana Colon wrote once on how the poetry movement of 2001 fucked itself to death.
I'm taking my first month off soon. My first whole month away from Chicago. I'm a little scared, not so much of leaving, so much as that I won't. Life will intervene and my thirty days will be a week, a vacation, a bygone, a dream. I've got my couches lined up, and I'm looking for work. It feels like I'm commiting some act of treason by willfully interrupting a five year tradition, but, to be honest, it's just a party that I throw every year and, for better or worse, there will be parties to take its place.
[Currently watching "Foxfire"]
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