2.18.01 - 11:39:44

1542 mp3's, which translates to 105:56:09+, according to winamp. which means i could listen for four days and never hear the same song twice. maybe five, depending on what exactly they mean by '+'. it just sounds like a challenge. like something i need to do. i'll have to think about that some more. not like i have four days to blow just any old time. ha. yeah.

the street names change so many times and i don't understand why. it's so i get lost, but not lost enough. lost so i'm frustrated and angry. not so lost i can't find my way back. stuff is like that and my room is a mess.

i met him at the airport in paris and he bought me a drink at the bar but i didn't think anything of it. the french are either terribly rude or extremely friendly, based mostly on your level of mastery of the french language. he was nice. like they are. we started talking and he was an artist, and i love artists. people who do what they want to do. what a concept. then we went to la cemitiere du pere lachaise and he showed me oscar wilde's grave. then we visited moliere. and gertrude stein. and i understood then, but i didn't really care because i was in paris and i was coming to pere lachaise anyway, but what bothered me was that they had taken the bust from jim morrison's grave and all i saw was a block of marble, covered in graffiti, declarations of love and devotion and revolution and the like. isadora duncan was cremated and there is a block with her name on it at the crematorium and are her ashes behind it? i would use the ashes to build bricks. rebuild. i wouldn't, really. couldn't. dust to dust, how it should be.

i don't approve of human cloning, either.

later he asked me back to his apt for a drink, his apt with bay windows and "a view." a wall of windows to let the northern light in. blank canvases in line, waiting patiently to be made up for the show. when he was 12 his mother was killed by a shiny renault with faulty brakes, yellow as a canary. he doesn't paint with yellow, but you wouldn't know if you weren't told. there is orange and white and peach and cream and green and lime and flirting with yellow, but no yellow. but you wouldn't notice if you didn't know. unless you would.

watch this. i file it away with all of the other memories, the color of my shoes the first day of elementary school, the name of my fourth grade teacher, the name of the first cd i ever owned. walking through the rainforest of biosphere 2. butterflies lighting on my shoulders in a glass pyramid, remembering silence of the lambs and something i read a long time ago about how you shouldn't touch their wings, how it brushes the powder off and they won't be able to fly, how it kills them. getting on the same paddleboat as the group of handicapped elderly persons, sitting on a bench facing the waves, wheelchairs circling around us. the women at the nursing home who would hold your hand with their own hands, the skin like paper. the zebra finches that stuttered. the one time i was so hungry that i actually ate a snickers bar. tori doing a cover of landslide, live. the time she slept with her hand on my back to make sure i was breathing. the time he laid with me under three blankets, hot and sweaty for hours, because i was too scared to be alone, too scared to do anything but wait. seeing don maclean get up on stage and wondering if he ever does a set without american pie in it. guatemalan worry dolls that i put under my pillow to make wishes come true. staring at the ceiling for hours on end, trying to see through it, above it all. bored and cranky in tucson with nothing to do until night falls and we feel the shock of the stars, never really knowing what the smog hides, here. playing by heart until the lights go out, but my fingers won't stop so i play on in the dark and wonder if someone comes to chase people away. like the library. the one time i ever had a book recalled, and how happy it made me, that someone else wanted to read barthelme enough to recall it, and then the sinking feeling of possible required reading, but watch, i can choose to ignore that. the contradiction of required volunteer service hours. the melody from sexy sadie in karma police.

there's a lot that makes you who you are and when people say, you're special, i've never met anyone like you before, how could that be anything but true for everyone you meet?

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