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May 17, 2007
vox
i slept until mid-afternoon again. again, i just can't find the reasons. i can't find something, something, anything, to call hope.
tonight, i wanted to back out, but for the third week, i walked up on stage with my friend mandy at the tiny club with the small and friendly crowd. the weeks before, i sat on a stool next to mandy, gripped the seat, held the lyrics and hid behind them, let my voice cut out when there was risk of it being heard. this week, though, i had nothing to lose. i pushed the stool away and stood free, left the lyric sheets at home, drank beer before i sang, and i sang free.
i forgot lyrics, filled them in with the wrong ones, couldn't reach a couple of notes because of the beer's effect on my throat, but my legs stayed strong, and i sang out true for the first time, and i stood relaxed, held the mic with one hand, the other hand in my pocket, and i tried to sing not so much from wanting to sing, as from everything i was feeling today, from everything i've been feeling from these past many weeks.
i made eye contact with people, as if they were her, and i sang to them, and i tried to make them feel, which is all it's always been about, and everything it should be about.
still not perfect, not even enough for me to be truly happy with, but the progress was good, it was far better than the two previous weeks.
i walked off, happier with the effort, and waiting to hear what people would say. these weeks, this last month, so much meaning, so many hopes have been taken from me. some are too far behind me to recover now. some are slipping away, as recently as yesterday afternoon, at lunch under towering pecan trees.
something, something, my god, all i need is something.
mandy smiled at me and said it was good and meant it. someone said her boyfriend said i reminded him of cat stevens, the second person to have said that. i've never listened to cat stevens, which is, suddenly, a good thing.
the next act after mandy's students came on, suzanna choffel, a great writer with a beautiful voice.
i sank into one of the club's red leather chairs with my beer, and enjoyed a rare time of just letting the music and her voice wash over me.
then, between songs, she pointed at me and said, "you have a beautiful voice. you sound like cat stevens."
something, something, even if, at the end of the day, it's nothing. i'll take it, and hold it close. i wonder if it will still be there in the morning.
Posted by Rob at 03:25 AM | Comments (5)
May 10, 2007
passing time
so, a couple of things. right now, i'm just poking around, trying to see what has survived. recent events aside, some things got lost along the way, and now that other things are gone, and i need and want to return to those parts of me that i once believed were the best parts of me, i question if they're still there, if i can get them back, if they were ever really there at all.
so, for now, this space is going to be a scratchpad. i'll just write, and it may be dull and arcane, but it's the best way for me, personally, to do this. some of you have some really boring jobs, or none at all, though, so, hey, feel free to keep reading.
as for this bit, this is from sunday night. the faux third person is so transparent as to bore even the most novice armchair psychologist, but it just was easier that way, at the time.
and as for how this from sunday night describes me now, on thursday night... it comes and it goes.
his mouth stung on the rim of the glass, and the faint sheen of lemon oil on the surface of the iced tea broke like a tiny wave against his upper lip, insuring that the point was made.
he looked at the glass, inspecting it as he inspected his lip with the tip of his tongue. of course, the glass was not glass at all, but plastic, the rim well-beaten and notched, but nonetheless not to blame for the tangy sense of a cut he tasted on his lip.
he had shaven at 7:59pm on this, a saturday night, immediiately prior to an hour and a half of aimless spider solitaire on the computer. he was hungry, but the cards glowed their impersonal virtual challenge to him. the game itself meant nothing to him, which gave them no less meaning as anything else at the moment. 25 wins, 166 losses. the computer kept statistics, but he only cared about the game before him at the time. he had to play until he won, and when he won, he clicked "yes" to start a new game, wondering if he could possibly win two in a row. if he didn't, which of course was almost always the case, he had to play until he won again, starting the whole cycle over again. when he did lose, he would usually restart the same game, to see if somewhere along the way, he might catch something he had missed, or just luck into a useful card with a different choice. just one different choice, just one turn of luck, and maybe...
he had emerged from the shower at 7:56pm, for the first time since friday. ok, maybe thursday. before the shower, he had leaned over the edge of the tub with the clippers and shaved his head with the .13 inch guard. small, fuzzy caterpillars fell from the slicing teeth as they skimmed the ridges and dove into the shallows of his scalp.
his cat sat and watched. the cat had been content to sleep the weekend away with his friend, only rousing him twice with light, cautious taps of a small paw on his cheek.
the afternoon before the shaving and showering and the arrival of the tangy-tasting nick on his upper lip would, in a film, have been represented by sproadic flashes of dreamt images and blurred light and noise, interspersed by great expanses of darkness. he had slept a determined sleep until 4:27pm, preferring oblivion and the risk of glimpsed dreams to the very different oblivion of another day.
before that, at 11:12, he had woken long enough to call his parents. he tried to sound awake (and failed), and he tried to sound like everything was ok (again, he failed, but his parents were satisfied by the bits of information he gave them, and remained happily oblivious of the entire truth).
and before all of that, he had given up at the break of dawn, returning to the bed and the sleep he had surrendered at 7:34pm on saturday night. and before that, more sleep, more scattered, unremembered dreams that only left the feel of uneasiness. there had also been the early-morning headache born of dehydration, born, in turn, of the collision of mania and most of a 24-pack of lone star, and two white russians, all flowing down with surprising rapidity, downstream against the upward surge of manic, often disjointed stream of consciousness erupting from him throughout friday night.
and before that... before that, tears. tears when he ran, tears watching sitcoms, watching a movie, sitting on the couch and watching the leaves wave slowly and quietly to no one in particular, tears watching the weakening struggle, the long falling action after the climax that that seemed maybe, finally, to be the end.
another sip of tea, and again, the sting.
he really needed a straw.
Posted by Rob at 07:31 PM | Comments (2)
May 05, 2007
dance, motherfucker, dance
the alamo showed the big lebowski at dart bowl. i watched in the parkng lot, laughed, safe in the chair that my friend morgan brought, braced by my friends, jane and mandy and kellie and phillip. laugh, laugh, laugh.
then we bowled, and i drank some more. mandy said she'd drive, and she declared we were going dancing, at a gay bar, oilcan harry's.
i dance like i run a 5K. push, push, push. believe it or not, nothing matters when i run a 5K, except the chance to pull my heart out and show it in the hopes that someone might see, and nothing matters when i cut loose and dance, except the chance to pull my heart out and show it in the hopes that someone might see. imoved smoothly, quickly, with all the balance and body control i used to show in the lane when i played basketball against people younger, lighter, quicker, more skilled. i moved, i stuck with it, i went the distance, dancing my heart out.
that's my whole life, isn't it? truing to show someone, anyone, what is in my own heart. who gets it? it's how i define love, it's how i define myself. it's how i define my life. and i can't get there. no one seems to see it in how i run. no one has heard it yet in my voice. did i mistake her smile for seeing it in how i danced?
somewhere in the mayhem, in the rare release i found dancing, the glasses slid off my head, crashed to the floor, fell underfoot, crushed flat beneath a single step in the rhythm. mandy drove home, i rode, just a blur of lights across my eyes. when we got to her place, i pushed the lenses back into the frames, said, yeah, i coulddrive myself home. drunk enough to see, sober enough to know that what i saw didn't matter.
i drove home, not so much drunk, as seeing sharp points of light, smeared by the desperate fingerprints on the lenses, pushing my car homeward, to my bed alone, to the television glowing bright and hollow, to these words echoing in an empty room.
no, no, no. no more.
Posted by Rob at 01:47 AM | Comments (0)