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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


03.07.04, sunday night

Last night I felt very old, although, prior to the party populated (or so it seemed) by coked-out art-school socialites dancing nervously to awful music, I had eaten birthday cake in a bar before a very large window. Had I chosen to ignore the language that was spoken around me, I could have imagined I was in a cafe in Spain, drinking wine with a dear friend with whom I had learned what was most valuable about being alive.

With its curtain of stars and its moon dipped low and large, night seemed like a grand stage. Earlier, when we spied it hovering above the earth among the buildings downtown, Jimmy and I could not help ourselves; we avoided the freeway on-ramp, to follow that incandescent body round an ink-black lake. We've caught the moon, I said. No, he corrected, We captured a photograph.

. . .

This morning I woke, hungover. We ate fried eggs with beer and coffee, but not before I objected. Hair of the dog, he assured and although I still don't understand that expression, he was right, drinking beer after a night like last night did take off the edge; it dulled sobriety's serrated blade, so that only my flushed flesh tingled. Later we walked along the train tracks near our home, ate greasy noodles in Chinatown, and drove toward the Port, past police arresting members of a black motorcycle gang, to watch the sun set behind San Francisco. Like the life of a moth dancing around a candle's flame, the last light of the first real spring day of Oakland quickly burned black, stubbed out into night by the passage of time.

. . .

Now I don't remember why I began to write here. I think I wanted to write a reminder to myself, here where I feel most accountable, something about not sleeping on things. Or people. Or my writing. But then I wrote about last night and a little, just a little, about what happened today, and I had to chuckle, at myself, for my own blindness, for thinking that I sleep on life, for dreaming if only, if only. Writing, yes it is, is like drinking beer after getting too intoxicated the night before; it is the hair on the dog and though I still don't understand that expression, my flesh tingles with all the luminescent bodies within me.




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