You
guys! We’ve made it two weeks! And hopefully at least some of you are still
with me...
Today
is an incredibly lovely day. The sun is shining, the wind is quiet and the
temperature screams “Spring! It’s spring bitches!”. It’s the sort of day that
makes me want to longboard, or run barefoot through mud, or nap on the steps to
the Jeanette Rankin building. Days like this remind me of frisbee on the Oval
with TR and Bub, long walks by the river with Lucy, clutching lukewarm coffees
because otherwise our fingers might fall off. Pretending the cold doesn’t
bother us, ignoring runny noses and goosebumps. Winterskin desperate for sun.
Basketball shorts and chacos, despite the snow. I can picture the remnants of
snow back home, heaped in the shadows and gullies like deflated blimps after
the parade. There’s something sad about springtime snow. The novelty is gone. It’s
dirty and tired and ready to sleep it off, like a hungover prom queen (or
something comparably cliché).
[Note: when I was eighteen I had a lot
of feelings and I wrote things like this poem…]
March
9, 2007
Pale
spring sun on paler winter
shoulders.
Barefoot gliding through
green
space, kicking up gravel. Dust. Trouble.
Losing
myself in that
chigga-chug
rhythm, the
squelch
of cold mud between bare toes,
the
ring of unfamiliar laughter.
Some
days restless is appeased by
the
smell of wet grass or a stranger’s
handshake.
Some days I just miss
the
birds.
Open
my body, let the sunshine bounce
off
pale ribs, fill me up until there’s no
room
for stupid head tricks.
Take
each second as I can, losing
myself
in the open corners of your kiss, the
warmth
I’ve found curled up in your arms.
Is
forever always, or no time at all?
[Note: It’s like baby emo b took
the words right out of my mouth and injected them with a little extra dash of
angst!]
Sticking
with the alcoholic food theme, Friend and I soaked gummy bears in vodka for 5
days… They swell to about three times their original size and burn the roof of
your mouth. Really it was easier to just swallow them whole, because then they
burn in your stomach instead. I ended up feeling a lot like this:
 |
| Hogan wasn't actually drunk, just sleepy |
Never
again. Next on the agenda (if I ever fully recover from the last experiment):
vodka skittles. I’m hesitant to tackle any more fruit-flavored candies, but I’ve
heard good things about this one.
“Hello, it’s me again, it’s three days
now you’ve been in my dreams…”
Lucy,
you’ve been on my mind a lot lately. I hope you’re happy. I’m glad to hear the
butterflies are back. I wish you would call… No other bookend feels quite
right. I still crumble at your name.
“I know I’m to blame, but it kills me
that I made you hate me. Like you’ve erased me and now, I know what they say,
they say that you’ll be happier. Better off without me.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about control (mostly because
I feel like I have very little of it). Is it arguably as courageous to forfeit
all sense of control as to maintain it perfectly? Throwing ourselves to the
wind, committing whole-heartedly to the unknown… There is some degree of bravery
in every gamble we make; tumbling down the rabbit hole without stopping to
consider how deep it goes.
Sorry guys, my adventuring has been limited the past few days
so I don’t have much to tell you. Not to mention the weather is driving me to
distraction. So! I’m going to leave you with this poem about spring…
“Spring is like a
perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of
Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which
people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing
placing
carefully there a
strange
thing and a known thing
here)and
changing everything
carefully
spring is like a
perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old thing,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here
placing
an inch of air
there)and
without breaking
anything”
E,
26 more days! I hope you’re excited (and yes, of course I’m counting too…)
Update:
This afternoon after “studying” (code for drinking a lot of coffee and working
on my blog posts whilst reading Autostraddle) I decided to walk home. But as I
mentioned, the weather was absolutely beautiful. So I found myself traipsing
around town instead. I think I ended up walking about 7 miles. I stumbled upon
an Art Walk over on Hawthorne. A short list of the things I saw:
1.
A
man dressed as a pirate buying yellow flowers from a street vendor
2.
A
girl chalking a neon hummingbird onto the sidewalk. She may have been high on
something (or multiple things), but it was really beautiful
3.
Darth
Vader. Riding a unicycle. Playing the Star Wars theme song on bagpipes.
Seriously, I couldn’t make this shit up.
Sometimes
this city is like glimpsing a familiar feature in a stranger’s face, making
alone seem less lonely.
Until next time, I love you all.
-b
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