Mornings are tough for me. Usually, I don't have a lot going on durning the day and I love sleeping, so I never look forward to getting up. I rarely ever feel renewed in the morning, no matter what my sleep was like the night before, six hours, eight hours, twelve hours, it is always a struggle to get out of bed.
Part of this probably has to do with my love of coffee. As far as addictions go, this is one I can allow myself. I usually don't have more than one cup, but I have to have coffee most every morning before I feel awake at all. Coffee is a joy. I remember when I was a little kid, my dad would give me a sip of his coffee and I would be disgusted, but slowly my love affair grew, starting with bottled frappucinos and then mochas and then regular coffee with cream and sugar, now I just take cream.
It makes me feel sharp and alert. I usually never drink coffee if I am going to sleep within the next six hours, but at this point, I can drink a cup and usually go right back to sleep.
So, this morning I woke up and had a cup of coffee and read the newspaper for about an hour. Nothing really interesting in there this morning. When I was having my manic episode, the news was much more interesting and scary to me at the time. The day I drove to El Salvador there were stories about a man riding a shark under water for seven minutes with no oxygen and a robot made to mimic human activity on space ships built with tons of infrared cameras.
Today the stories were all about bail outs, Italian debt, Joe Paterno, a spotlight interview with one of the higher ups at Spotify, all and all, nothing too "new". Now I am back up in my room, listening to Sufjan Stevens, sometimes I will go back to sleep at this point, but not today. I will probably watch the Daily Show and Colbert Report from last night, then go make myself lunch, ugh.
I feel guilty for being so ambivalent toward being where I am right now, in this beautiful house. When I look out the window right now I can see the whole coast line, all the way to Palos Verdes, and today, since it is clear, all the way to Catalina, but all I want is to be back in Silverlake. I miss getting up to my friends downstairs, making coffee, watching ESPN, getting ready to take on the day. I am just lonely is the main thing. I'm not much for talking on the phone and don't interact with people a lot on facebook or gmail or whatever.
When I was having my manic episode, I actually believed that when you contacted someone wirelessly that you were in contact with a doppelganger from another Earth, that was like this one, but not exactly the same.
I am reading the book Infinite Jest right now, by David Foster Wallace, it has this whole segment about how people don't like to use video phones because on the regular phone you can feign interest in the conversation while doing other things, or making faces to the people in the room and seem like you are totally engaged in the conversation.
I think about this kind of stuff a lot, the lack of true human connection between people. I have a strong inclination that there are a lot of lonely people out there that force themselves to walk around looking happy all day. When I was growing up, people always said I looked upset when I was the happiest, I think this was because I didn't feel the need to fake anything when I was actually happy.
Well, good, that took about thirty minutes of my time to write, here's a poem I wrote the other day, I think it is a pretty good one. When I told my psychiatrist most of the poems I've been writing lately were more to vent and were kind of shitty, she looked at me oddly, like how could you judge something that was an expression of your emotion like that? What I meant was they weren't in meter, didn't have rhymes or wordplay or alliteration, or much attention to word placement, things that are important to a "good" piece of poetry. Here it is...
Inside of My Car/Outside of Your House
Your silhouette projected from the streetlamp light,
the night air swollen with the smell of summer oak,
gentle silent strokes brush down your face, painting a
portrait of our tangled fates, shivering with warmth.
Your heart is beating shrilly, the sound of a snare,
the night air damp with the dryness of August heat,
your voice expressing timidly, you’ve let our love
go. We hardly held it for a passing moment.
Your deep brown magnetic eyes forever pulling,
the night air ripe with the chirp of the nocturnal,
my tongue sticking out, licking for the infinite,
tasting only you: my forever fleeting friend.
11/7/11
This poem is about a moment I had with Kim, the girl I drove to El Salvador for, after we had been on a day long journey to Berkeley and North Beach in San Francisco. It was an amazing day. We walked all through Telegraph and then took BART into the city, where we walked from BART to North Beach and up to Coit Tower, then we had some beers at a bar and talked for hours. I held her in my arms on the way back, then at the end of the night, we talked about our relationship with each other and made out, inside of my car, outside of her house. She cried and told me she would always be there for me no matter what happened, after I told I wasn't sure what would happen to our friendship if we ended up with other people. Her tears reminded me of when I cried when I was in the middle of breaking up with my last girlfriend, like, I felt so bad that I was the one crying, even though I was breaking up with her. Those were the tears she was crying. I knew it at the time, but I didn't say anything. I just enjoyed the moment.
Right now one of my favorite songs is playing, it is called Casmir Pulaski Day, by Sufjan Stevens. I love the part at the end when the girl he is singing about dies and he sees God and he says, "The Glory when He took our place, but He took my shoulders, and He shook my face, and He takes and He takes and He takes." It is such a sad truth about "God".
For the record, I don't know what to say about God, except that there is something here, not nothing, so I can't really get behind atheism.
Well, it's about time to look for jobs for a bit, then maybe a run. I have an improv show I am performing in tonight to look forward to and probably need to get over to the other side of town to check out my mail situation, I lost a lot of it in the move.
Nice, now it's been forty minutes. Haha...
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