Riding in Vans with Boys

“There is no need to go on multiplying examples of an impulse that can produce no adequate examples- of a capacity that can’t be objectified without falsification. I’ve written in its defense, and in defense of our denunciation of it, because that is the dialectic of a vocation no less essential for being impossible. All I ask the haters- and I, too, am one- is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.” Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

There was a night in the middle of what I consider winter but everyone else probably gleefully describes as spring, when I was in Montreal and thankfully in a very comfortable room, when I felt fully warm and not just warm but excited, really, still so innocently excited about my life, the people in it, and punk. The night before I had seen Omegas, Torment, Mueco, Pox, and Sex Face at Katacombes and it had been a fucking insane, fantastic show. All the bands were great, none of my friends blacked out, and despite the language barrier I made some new friends (somehow still possible at thirty, a miracle unto itself). My boyfriend Kirk and I were sitting at our friend Mood’s house with my best friend Nikki, who had flown up from Miami to spend the weekend there. All of us have different backgrounds: Mood from a Muslim family in Canada, Kirk black and Jewish from LA, Nikki (Catholic-ish) and Columbian, and me (white atheist born in South Africa to communist parents). Despite being from different parts of the world and raised by very different people, here we were, sitting in a room drinking wine because we were friends, and we had become friends because of our interest in punk, or at least our interest in not being a part of the “rest of the world” and its interests. This sounds pedantic right? But it’s not, because I think as we get older and cynical, or as we get into punk and learn how to be critical, we forget the things that brought us here. We sat together in Mood’s room and drank wine and talked about healthy relationships, both sexual and emotional, and eventually left to the bar. Nothing too exciting, nothing wild, nothing scandalous...just three grown ups talking in a warm room.

I was incredibly thankful for that night, mostly just because it felt good to still have that thrill of intimacy with my friends. I think most of my close platonic relationships have been formed through playing music (when I say “punk” let’s extend that definition to mean DIY everything, playing music, setting up shows, touring, etc). To say nothing of the nuanced, incredibly complicated relationships I still maintain with people I’ve been intimate with (there’s some other posts about that) I think the things that I am most thankful about punk are my friends all over the country that I’ve made, some of them turning into life-long lasting friendships. There’s friends of mine who I see every year but we’ve never even lived on the same coast. That’s important to me. A lot of those relationships are with amazing, strong women, but a lot are also with men. Again, this sounds annoyingly chorus-to-choir right? But I read something on the internet the other day (I know…) that said that men didn’t belong in punk, and it made me consider my experiences with men. I thought about that night in Montreal, and about touring in bands with men, and about growing up before I got into punk. It’s a lot to consider.

First, I suppose I should say that as a woman I think we all understand the violence of adolescent. Growing up my dad and I were very close, but he moved far away when I was 13 and then we didn’t see much of each other. All my relationships with men from then on were sexual after that, and were neither fun nor probably healthy. Men scared me, they leered at me, and boys in school were worse. I was an awkward kid, I liked Lord of the Rings and had braces, but I also had boobs. None of those years were particularly fun for me (I’ve written about that before…) but I remember vividly when I started being happy, and finally having friends. It’s when I got into punk and had friends looking out for me (we looked out for each other) and people to hang out with (and avoid the Nazi skin heads together with!) and watch movies in bed and drink beer on the beach with...we weren’t dating, we didn’t date, we were just...friends. I ended up playing music and touring in bands with some of the people I met at 15. We made it through those terrible years together and began other terrible years but at least every year we could still talk together. When I went through a terrible break up almost a decade later at 25 I remember walking down the street in a town hours away from where we grew up and laying on my friends floor, my old bandmate, and both of us listening to the Radioactivity record and crying together. Platonic, lifelong friendships aren’t always sugar and spice, but having friends who you can count on to cry on their floor at 4am is meaningful to me. I doubt any of our parents still have friends like that, if they managed to keep their friends at all.

Without punk, I doubt I would have as many relationships with men as I do. I would even argue that there aren’t many aspects of modern American life where men and women interact outside of dating or work (unless you play sports or have like, normal hobbies, which we fucking don’t ok?). Playing in bands with men helped me have positive relationships with men. We would cook dinner at each other’s houses before practice, we would support each other during good shows and bad, and we would laugh (but not too much) at the things we might end up doing after the shows. I have had plenty of terrible experiences with men in the punk scene, because there’s always going to be men that aren’t willing to learn from their behavior or learn about anything other than what they want. But after I was assaulted it wasn’t just my female friends that had my back, but a lot of my close male friends and former bandmates.

These weren't jocks, they were also awkward teenagers that didn’t want to be apart of mainstream America, so instead they got into music. I think it should go without saying that punk provides not just an alternative lifestyle choice for women (I highly doubt I would be getting an MFA in poetry at 30 if I never got into punk...but I sometimes wonder if I would have been a doctor by now) it also provides a space for boys to experiment with gender and sexuality. This, to me, is what makes punk a safe space. But I can’t speak for other people’s experiences, and I don’t want to. I just want to publicly thank all my close friends who have been such a positive force in my life. I can’t imagine where I would be if none of my male friends hadn’t asked me to be in bands with them, or if when I asked them to start one they had blown me off. I also can’t imagine that my boyfriend would be such an emotionally smart, considerate, wonderful partner to me had he never played in bands and had platonic relationships with other women. I still don’t fucking like my dad, but I have plenty of amazing male friends who I see being good partners and good dads and it makes me happy. It’s possible for all of us to be healthy and emotionally and socially responsible, if not always happy.

Some of my best memories continue to be driving somewhere in a van, usually with strangers, on our way to a show or a party. Men are scary...other people are scary...but I have been so lucky to have the privilege of trust with most of the people I meet through punk. I can’t imagine under any circumstance that I would get into a van with six people I don’t know, but with punks, there is an element of trust that the average person would never have. This makes it especially saddening when that trust is violated, as it too often is. And yes, it’s fucking annoying when you’re on tour as a woman and some good looking punk dude asks if you’re the merch girl. There is violence and shitty people and shitty attitudes (especially on the internet, hi). However, like the quote above, it’s possible to criticize something, or stand up for it, or push against its boundaries while still loving it. So let all our criticism be exact, and well worded, and fair, in order to make it better.

An American Lyric

“You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.” -Claudia Rankine, Citizen

I heard a lot of people talking about Citizen when it came out, and understood it to be somewhat genre-bending while at the same time a powerful discourse about race in America. I bought it, because I like books, and because I especially like poetry books that push the boundaries of the genre, and also especially because I consider myself an ally of the Black Community, as in, 100% definitely not racist. And yet.

It took me a few months to pick up the book and read it. It’s worth mentioning that my partner, whose mother is black, read the book in one sitting at the bar while I was working and he loved it. He said, “the way it was written gave me a renewed sense of validation for my feelings, like of course I feel like this but it’s refreshing to see it in this language. The only surprising thing was that fucking tennis photo.*” Why did it take me so long to read it? Obviously, because I was afraid of feeling bad, or guilty, or complicit. Reading the book doesn’t change the fact that I’m already complicit in racism, because I both benefit from white privilege and also occupy space as a white person. These are things that I can’t change. I can however, check myself and not worry about how I’m feeling in order to listen to other voices- no matter how uncomfortable it might make me. I finally read the book, and I’m glad I could recognize both why I put it off and why it was important for me to read it.

The book is subtitled An American Lyric which seems appropriate, at a time when it seems like every other day a black person is killed by police in America (let’s be honest, this is nothing new, but the populist power of things like twitter and the direct political action of groups like Black Lives Matter has brought acute attention to these tragedies). As Claudia Rankine says in the book, “because white men can’t police their imagination black men are dying.” Split into 7 parts, the book takes on different forms. Some of the writing reads like poetry, and sounds like lamentations,

“To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about.”

These are ephemeral poems, oscillating between emotion and observation. Some are placed in daily reality, but some of these, like the “sigh” lines above could be from any part of her life. These are emotional and felt, in stark contrast to the way she objectively writes about the aggressions of her day to day life in the other sections,

“When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks at niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.

He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.

Now there you go, he responds.

The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stanger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.”

There are examples like that of “everyday racism” (which I put in quotes because it’s so foreign from my life, what looks like “everyday racism” to me is just “everyday” for someone in a non-white body) in the book as well as the absolutely lunatic-crazy narrative of Serena Williams, an incredible tennis player- literally probably the best in the world- who has had to put up with an incredible amount of verbal and physical violence in her career, and then told not to overreact or respond to it. That chapter in the book doesn’t read very poetic, not like the scripts she wrote for the Situation Videos (a collaboration with John Lucas) that Rankine puts together about Katrina, Stop-and-Frisk, Trayvon Martin and others, which read, without the video accompaniment, like poems. The Serena chapter instead serves to illustrates the swallowing of anger, the diminishing of a person in the face of this kind of aggression. The game always continues.

There’s another type of encounter in the book, the microaggression of either casual racism or just the invisibility of the body, not that they’re mutually exclusive.

“In line at a drugstore it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised.

Oh my God, I didn’t see you.

You must be in a hurry, you offer.

No, no, no, I really didn’t see you.”

There is a theme of invisibility. Of diminishing. Rankine’s body in these stories, as both author and character, is someone who is adjusting to make the people around her feel comfortable. She addresses this with a quote from Judith Butler, someone who has written a lot about the body vis a vis the world,

“Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and as insane as it is, saying please.”

This book is both poetry and sociology. It’s incredibly well-written, and thoughtful, and also unexpected (there’s a soccer sequence that mixes photos of a fight with Franz Fanon quotes, it’s fantastic). At the end I think it also reminded me to be alert, open, and to have that desire to engage that Rankine has. Required reading for sure.

*the photo depicts Dane Caroline Wozniacki, a tennis player, with towels stuffed down her skirt and shirt to depict Serena Williams, on December 12th, 2012 two weeks after Selena was named WTA player of the year.

An Unconventional Life

“This is even a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so.”*

*David Markson, This is Not a Novel

I’ve been a bartender for 5+ years, so I’m pretty used to this conversation, the one where people ask what you’re doing, or want to do, or if you’re going to school...some nice thing that starts the conversation that abruptly eclipses into something unfathomably rude like, “oh you play music but like, what do you really do?” or “you’re going to school for POETRY? Wow, your parents must be proud,” or just simply, “huh” or “why?” These are actual things people say to me while I’m serving them drinks. I can’t leave. I can crack jokes, “oh well I’m strictly studying poetry to make money” or lighten the mood, but I can’t be a jerk, or “overreact” because I need their money, it’s literally my job, it’s why I’m there. If I’m really lucky, I still have the energy to go home and write about it. This week I almost didn’t. After an especially awful conversation with someone, and not that it’s my place to judge but someone who despite his nice watch and black amex didn’t seem all that happy either, where I worked my butt off till 4am all weekend, to pay rent, and then woke up monday to go to my internship (which I love, they make me coffee and let me sit down at their kitchen table, oh the simple pleasure to be in someone else’s life even for a morning) and I came home and got into bed and didn’t get out of it for two days. I missed my favorite class at school. I didn’t write. I didn’t eat. I just stayed under the covers and lamented, for the first time in awhile, my unconventional life.

Maybe ten years ago I thought I would lead a conventional life. Maybe be married. Hopefully have my dream job, of a journalist, before the print bubble burst from the rise of internet publications...all that stuff seemed pretty real, for awhile. But then I played in bands for years and touring made more sense than graduate school. Working in bars and restaurants is an easy way to have time to leave town. I was happy with the music I made. I even got to travel more- my unconventional life was pretty privileged, and I’m not sure if I would trade it out (except for maybe that elusive, perfect dream job). Now though, at 30, that life doesn’t feel as privileged. I’m accepting the real fact that I won’t ever own a house, or probably ever have children. I’m going to be in debt from my MFA for a long time, and even aside from that, it’s hard to have quiet nights at home when you’re working in bars (there’s tequila in there you know) until 3am or later most nights. I have good weeks- with the “joy of writing” (credit: Donna Brook) and the affirmation I get from my friends who are also like me- banded together at shows or dancing or any other place regular people wouldn’t be at 2am on a Wednesday. Then there’s weeks where I feel permanently incapable. Where it’s tangible: real failure. Since I worked all weekend I didn’t have time to start an assignment for class, a class I really like, until Tuesday where I finally began to read David Markson’s This is Not a Novel under the covers of my bed.

It’s not, not even “not strickly” not a novel. It is very much not a novel. It’s a list of facts produced by the writer, who describes himself as the Author every now and then, but mostly it’s facts about writers. You don’t have to know the people in question, and it all start to blend together anyway, but when you do recognize a name or a reference it makes you feel triumphant. A ha! A familiar face. An anchor in the storm. The passages are like this:

“A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Aristotle himself added, re tragedy.

Wittgenstein had nephews fighting on both sides in World War II.

Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.

He dug a grave of the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels- 
three Russian ells- and buried him.

Ruben Dario died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Diderot died of coronary thrombosis while sitting at dinner.

I used to say them, Go boldly in among the English, and then I used to go boldly 
in myself. Said Joan.

He could not get rid of the idea that he was damned, and he would have 
drowned himself if he has not been prevented by force. Says the chronicle from 
the monastery where Hugo Van der Goes was a lay brother.

He was know to drink, which made things worse. Says the same.”

It’s a whole “novel” like this. Facts and quotes and the interspersed speculation of the Author- who insists he’s not a character. It’s an unconventional novel, from someone who wrote many novels, including a crime novel, and several books of poetry. It’s a testament to creativity and what’s possible, in the face of critics and criticism who follow conventional paths.

It’s also a testament to an unconventional life. These facts about writers, mostly all how they died, mostly of syphilis and diseases of the heart and liver, somehow cheered me up. Anecdotes of bar fights, being kicked out of schools, lover's quarrels, infidelity, etc were able to get me out of bed. Most of these people weren’t just interesting characters, they were bad people! Nazi sympathizers, womanisers, and usurers. That’s a good way to feel better about yourself, even if you don’t trust your own writing. There’s also the heroes (Sarte and Borges still hold up very well in these facts, much to my relief). But! Still! Morality aside, this text- novel, poetry, messy dictionary of lives- cheered me up by reminding me that while often not in good company, at least I’m not deserted on an island (as I think John Donne would agree). So yes, even a litany of deaths can cheer you up sometimes, and it takes all kinds of things to get people out of bed and to work every day, but at least in my case, I can sleep in a little bit later than most.

Interiors

"#179 When I imagine a celibate man-especially one who doesn't even jerk off- I wonder how he related to his dick: what else he does with it, how he handles it, how he regards it. At first glance, this same question for a woman might appear "tucked away" (pussy-as-absence, pussy-as-lack: out of sight, out of mind). But I am inclined to think that anyone who thinks or talks this way has simply never felt the pulsing of a pussy in serious need of fucking- a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ejaculations of the heart."

Be careful carrying these books around with you. They’re small, and perfect for casually reading, a few minutes at a time, when you find yourself commuting on the subway or waiting for someone to bring you food in a small cafe. Perfectly sized for your handbag, or to carry to work, and spaced out evenly so that you can pick them up, put them down, and even read out of sequence throughout the course of your day. The caveat though: you might end up crying in public. It’s an odd sight, at 3am, on the L train heading home after work to see someone crying holding a book of poetry. It even makes the drunk young people uneasy. Especially alarming to the people sitting next to you in a cafe, watching big, heavy, mom-sized tears rolling down your face. 
Bluets by Maggie Nelson is a perfect read for anyone who’s ever had their heart broken. Or has had to break someone else’s heart, or has been in love with the world too sharply, or fallen out of love with it, or even been in love with a word, as something as simple as a color. Her meditation on Blue is a compelling exercise with theme: each bluet is numbered, and while one might mention flowers, the next will pull the thread, maybe it will be about the painter who talked about the flowers. So there is extreme precision of flow, of each short prose block (or poem) leading into the next. As a whole, it should still be considered a book of poetry, but alone, each bluet could be a poem or a short essay. There are things I always think of as being blue, but Nelson also brings up all these other blues, like the underside of her friends foot after an accident. 

"#198. In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. “I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether that one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.” I find this forgetting quite heartening, and quite tragic, in turns"
 
So many people are represented in the book, from Cohen to Thoreau, and not just Americans but also French painters and Greek philosophers. An incredible amount of research must have gone into Bluets, and yet the book reads as simply, and is as digestible, as a perfect, light blue macaroon. 
Perhaps a more traditional book of poetry, but still following a much longer narrative than it might appear for such a small book, is Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior. In Bluets there’s a loose narrative of a heartbreak, of a severed relationship, but the narrative in Hahn’s book is her as a mother, and even her as an adult woman balancing divorce and lovers, how that still reflected on her motherhood. Most of the poems are incredibly simple, “I’ve decided to climb the rocks beyond the stand of pine to find the insect that clicks like an old-fashioned toy.” Highly steeped in nature, most of the things written in this book are thoughts she’s had while outside or while apart from her daughters. This is a form of Japanese poetry called Tanka, single lines and the use of seasons and nature. Most of the writing seems to be reflections of Basho, Kawabata Yusunari, and Shikibu. Writers I’m not familiar with, but understand to be tied in very closely with the author's identity as a writer. It’s a beautiful collection of poems and often left me in tears late at night, too late to call my mom. 

"This afternoon H heard something in my voice and asked me, What’s wrong? Anything wrong? And I said, I miss my mother. But I think I’ve always missed my mother. Sometimes I just lie down on the floor and cry, Mommy Mommy."

As a woman with a close relationship with my mother, and as someone who doesn’t know if they will be able to have children (timing, not biology) the book resonated with me. It’s an amazing portrait of a complete woman, with her desires, her annoyances, shortcomings and loves. And just as all these things are complicated, different, incongruent, so is the style of the book. Poetry, journal entries, private and public thoughts, and prose, all complete the final picture. 

Moving Across the World on Horses

“Moving across the world on horses / body split at the edge of their necks / neck sweat eating at my jeans / moving across the world on horses.”*



Out in the country. The real country. The middle of Florida, in the Ocala National Forest, where the only restaurant is a Kangaroo gas station. You could stay barefoot for a whole week and no one would notice. Humidity like a blanket. White sand and forest and Coca-Cola lakes.The guy that owned the ranch was a horse thief. Really. He sold people horses and then took them back in the middle of the night and then painted them different colors. They would come back to the ranch and he would say oh no, you’re mistaken. I think he was one of my dad’s only friends, and we kept our horses there. I spent weekends there for maybe two years. I was twelve, at one point, for sure. We would ride our horses all day under the giant oak trees and through blonde fields and sometimes across lakes, and come out dripping and relieved from the summer heat. Horse dust in my mouth. The smell of horses in everything. Even now if I smell horses, driving through the country with the windows down I have this homesick feeling for them. Then I was just a kid, I thought it was totally normal and granted that I would spend my days and nights outside forever. When my dad would go to sleep I would walk around the little ranch. The black lake looked blacker, and even I knew better than to swim in it at night. Horses aren’t afraid of snakes, they have a natural immunity. That’s true. But they are afraid of hogs and pigs. Avoiding the lake, I would walk (barefoot) up the sandy road to the pasture and stay still, wait for the horses to come to me. We smelled each other. When I walked back to the little cabin I would hear them, very quietly though, walking along the pasture, following me. That was our friendship. Recognition and presence. I would go back and sit on the porch and listen to all the bugs. A whole world of creatures making one noise in the night. In the morning we would go ride out again, my dad usually leading the way trying to find some trail he made up in his head. In the afternoons it might rain and I would walk to where the horses were just to see the steam coming up off them, to put my head against their neck and rub their wet fur, both of us probably thinking: I am here. 

*The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ongaatje 

The Books I Snuck In

This is in no way a list of great books from 2015 (check out last Sunday’s article in the New York Times book review for a good and comprehensive list of new literature) this is just a list of my favorite books that I’ve managed to read since I moved to New York. I found most of them at used book stores around the city, but a few I found new in paperback. If you’re in NYC check out Better Read Than Dead in the alley off Broadway and Spoonbill and Sugartown off Bedford Ave. 

Limassol - Yishai Sarid - “I’d gladly drink a shot of whiskey now and end the day before it started.” Dark, dry, detective noir from Israel. 

Unforgiving Years - Victor Serge - “If I’m still alive, it’s because I realized that we misrepresented the grandeur of conscience. You don’t have to tell me about the deformed or rotten or spineless consciences, the blind consciences, the half-blind consciences, the intermittent, flickering, comatose consciences! And spare me the conditioned reflexes, glandular secretions, and assorted complexes of psychoanalysis: I’m all too aware of the monsters swarming in the primeval slime, deep inside me, deep inside you. There’s a stubborn little glimmer all the same, an incorruptible light that can, at times, shine through the granite that prison walls and tombstones are made of; an impersonal little light that flares up inside to illuminate, judge, refute, or wholly condemn. It’s no one’s property and no machine can take the measure of it; it often wavers uncertainly because it feels alone- what brutes we’ve been, to let it die in its solitude.” Disillusioned in Europe after the horrors of WWII with fascism, and then bearing witness to the fascism of the Communist Party, the characters in this book drift around Europe and then later in Mexico, looking both inward at their own conscience and also over their shoulder. 

The Mersault Investigation - Kamel Daoud - “Night has fallen. Look at this incredible city, doesn’t it present a magnificent counterpoint? I think something immense, something infinite is required to balance out our human condition. I love Oran at night, despite the proliferation of rats and of all these dirty, unhealthy buildings that are constantly getting repainted; at this hour, it seems that people are entitled to something more than their routine.” Incredibly precise in its writing and also poetic in its language, this novella examines The Stranger by Albert Camus from the perspective of the dead arab’s brother. 

Carte Blance - Carlo Lucarelli - “It was an old farmhouse with charred, crumbling walls, without any more roughcast, almost in the countryside, in an area the city has reached before the war transformed it into a suburb. So black, solid, and squat was the building, it almost looked like a convent, isolated from the other houses. On the wall, low, far from the door, there was a message painted in red smudged letters: Get ready, murderers.” A detective tries to do his job faithfully while the country changes hands from the fascists, while also dealing with anarchists and communists struggling for power at the end of the war. 

Train Dreams - Denis Johnson - “He laid his head back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moaning of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. and that time was gone forever.” A haunting recollection of one man’s life in the wild, empty places of America in the 1800’s. 

The Vorrh - B. Caitling - “Dawn, like the first time. The lead-grey clouds are armoured hands with the weak sun moist and limp inside them. the night still sits in the high branches, huge and muscular, rain and dew dripping to the pungent floor. It is the hour when night’s memory goes, and with it the gravity that keeps its shawl spin over everything in the forest.” Still kind of unsure about this book, because there’s a lot going on in it (i.e. biblical references that went over my head, some historical references and also a lot of references to Heart of Darkness, maybe?) but every sentence is pure pleasure. There’s a mysterious forest, a few different hunters, a cyclops, and robots. 

Crush - Richard Siken - “Chemical names, bird names, names of fire / and flight and snow, baby names, paint names, / delicate names like bones in the body, / Rumplestiltskin names that are always changing, / names that no one’s ever able to figure out. / Names of spells and names of heces, names / cursed quietly under the breath, or called out / loudly to fill the yard, calling you inside again, / calling you home.” Punch drunk poems of love and despair from a young gay poet in America. 

Bluets - Maggie Nelson - “For to wish to forget how much you loved someone- and then, to actually forget- can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this paint can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).” Half poetry, half prose, this small book contains 240 short meditations on the color blue, love, loss, and self. I think anyone who has ever been heartbroken, or fallen in love, or been in love even with just certain colors of the world, should read this. 

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Tadeusz Borowski - “I think about these things and smile condescendingly, when people speak to me of morality, of law, of tradition, of obligation...Or when they discard all tenderness and sentiment and shaking their fists proclaim this the age of toughness. I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another- through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting.” A series of short stories the author wrote while in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Published in Poland when he was released, he became a model artist for the communist party. When his same friends who were arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp were later arrested by the then ruling communist party, he put his head in his oven and killed himself. 

Simone - Eduardo Lalo - “Writing. What other choice do I have in this world, where so many things are forever beyond my reach? But I’m still here, alive and irrepressible, and it doesn’t matter if I’ve been condemned to corners, to cupboards, to nothingness. I’ve taken the blows and I’m still standing. That’s about all I’ve accomplished. That is what writing or reading is good for, and I’ve devoted nearly my whole life to it. Now and then, I’ve known something akin to grace.” Just started this book that was recently translated from the Spanish (it takes place in Puerto Rico) about a writer who is being stalked by a student of his. It’s dark and funny and exactly what I wanted to be reading around the holidays. 

Dragging Anchor

When a sailboat drags anchor you wake up in your berth you wake up with the wood around you but you know something isn’t right you’re still in your berth but it’s like when you sleep with someone for many nights and when they turn you turn with them and when they breathe you breathe with them when they get up in the night to pee you feel that they’re missing and you know something isn’t right

so you wake up in your berth and you feel the wood around you and the smell of canvas which isn’t just salt air or age or sunlight it’s sails that carry those things but also time

you know the smell it’s the smell that all your father’s sweaters had and all the beach towels laid out for you in the summer it’s the smell of years on the boat but also something else

you’re in your berth and there’s the wood and the canvas but also the sense of time passing, too quickly, maybe you see the stars moving too but mostly you just feel it, so you get up and leave everyone else asleep you go outside and even in the middle of the summer there will always be that first chill of you alone, above deck, with the rest of the world sleeping and you see that the bow has turned around the wrong way starboard so you pull up the chain and it’s so easy, so light in your hands, and you pull it in and feel the boat really pull with the current now, it could just float so easily out to sea but you look forward and throw really throw the anchor out the other way left to the channel and wait for the anchor to catch and it does- the boat makes a small tug and you’re awake and everyone is still sleeping so why not slip

into the water with the chain, hold onto it and let your body also float along with the current, held against the steady weight of the anchor and see all the little creatures around you light up like magic, your mom taught you the word, phosphorescence 

your first moment that you can remember that was completely yours and years later

your mom is remarried and you aren’t in a ship but in a small house on another river and you want to go into the town to buy pickles so you ask your mom if you can drive and you’re driving and you ask about the journals, the years you all spent sailing, and why her voice isn’t there and why you can’t read them, and it’s not the first time you asked and she says

I burned them 

it terrifies you and you’re afraid to ask and you think about nights you spent awake at night alone, other nights where you’re sure someone should have been awake and who knows

what really happened

but your mom got remarried and you like him and you can all have dinner together in that little house on the river and at night you go to bed and you hear the wind howl and it’s a sound you almost remember and early in the morning she calls your name and you answer, that’s a sound
familiar like the wind, pushing against wood, against canvas, pushing the body of a boat out to sea. 

The wind on the river is different, fierce and Northern and it carries with it the smells of evergreen trees and the haunting mating calls of Loons, their red eyes glowing on the river which you can see from your small window in the house, so like a ship

and you wake up in the middle of the night to its sounds and walk downstairs and the rest of the house is sleeping and still and you know that’s it’s impossible for a whole house to drag anchor. 

Notes From 30

“The enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one has reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you could never become a difference person; that even if time and faith were still left for you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.”* 

 There’s a thing on the internet right now where it takes pictures of you and tells you how you’ve changed over the past ten years...yeah. I don’t want to fuck with that. Every year around my birthday I spend enough time going through pictures and trying to figure out how I’ve changed. I’ve looked the same for so long...but there’s been subtle differences, it can’t just be a hair cut, right? The tattoos add up. My breasts got bigger (how). My shorts and dresses, shorter, as I got comfortable in my body. Usually the same boots, the same half grin, two dimples before I broke my jaw, then just one after. 

 The constant in most of my pictures, as I look at them now, almost 30, is the people in them. The same friend in front of a band, or playing in a band, or in a van. It’s usually Austin, Scott, or Adrien. Two friends I met at a funeral for another friend (I still remember your name Doug, even though I can’t remember most) who I ended up playing in a band with, after high school (we made it though). I had a drink with Austin the other day. Scott texted me. I called Adrien. We are still connected, by our memories and our lives, for better or worse. We grew up together. I am not sure, a hundred years ago, if we ever would have known each other. We certainly wouldn’t have had the experience of playing in a punk band together, and we wouldn’t be talking now, after I moved across the country (up the country?) to go to graduate school. I am grateful for these things. 

 I understand that turning 30 as a woman is kind of a “big deal.” Like we’ve reached some age where society usually at some point dictated something for us...but I’m pretty lucky to live in an age where that isn’t true. At 30 my mom was sailing a 36ft sail boat around the south pacific, about to finish a trip around the world, and was two years from having me (I was born in South Africa, toward the end of the trip). She raised me, with the privileged of the age we live in now, to focus on books and school and “doing my own thing” so that, over the past several years, I haven’t felt pressure about getting married or having kids. I understand that I’m lucky in that regard. I got an IUD a few years ago, which has worked great for me, and has helped me, during my various relationships to prevent becoming pregnant. I could never have been the kind of mother I wanted to be, and despite wanting to be a mother now, I doubt I’ll ever be financially stable enough (student debt, the horror!) to have a child before it’s “too late.” I’ll be 32 when my IUD expires, the same age my mom was when she had me. And I’ll probably get another one. A mix of privilege and luck. 

 So these are the things I’m grateful for. My friends and my mom and I recognize that a lot of my agency is a product of privileges most people aren’t afforded. But I’m also grateful for a sense of understanding and sympathy that I have now at thirty that I didn’t have when I was starting my twenties. I know what I like, and who I am, but I don’t find the opposites threatening to me. I don’t view things I don’t know as “the other” and I have come to understand that everyone, mostly, has something to offer. As a young punk kid I thought the teller of the bank was my enemy, now I realize she just made different choices than me. I’m happy with the choices I’ve made, and I don’t resent regular everyday people for theirs (cue Pulp’s “Common People” please). 

 “Sure, we’re poor in some surface, dirty clothes way. But I stake faith in our instincts and intuition, our abilities and the strength of our friendships. If this isn’t progress or wisdom, at least it’s survival.”**

 There’s friends who aren’t around. People who committed suicide...or just got married or had kids and took different directions in life. I haven’t really grown up yet. I understand both choices. I don’t look on other people with disdain like I did at nineteen. I try to be understanding. I try to have sympathy even when I don’t understand. I’m incredibly proud of turning thirty this year, for feeling like a smarter person. And also, happy that I’m still connected to my friends. When Travis killed himself a few months ago I ended up at a punk show, crying and getting drunk, and then spent all night in bed with my friends, crying and laughing. The simple pleasure of a band, and a shoulder to cry on. I still find comfort in these things. 

 *Dostoevsky “Notes From Underground”
**`Travis Fristoe America #12

At the Start of Summer

"A day like the days I remember, a day like other days."*
I have to start writing my goodbye to Gainesville, so I'll start with the very end, at yet another start of summer. 

We left the springs around 6pm, and sped down country roads back toward Gainesville, with the windows down, and we had all tactfully agreed without speaking on country music- up loud. Everyone ate at Bev's Better Burgers, and everyone had the day off work except for me so I was sober-ish and drove while everyone slept in the car after, windows still down. Everyone's heads were tilted back toward their head rests, limbs pushed out away- already sunburned, breathing the deep heavy breaths of a day spent swimming. Swimming in water so clear it still almost makes me cry. Swimming and not just swimming but tumbling, jumping from shaky docks into the mouths of that water below, and not just swimming and jumping but mixing rum and cokes into Styrofoam cups, and sitting in the sun and watching everyone else enjoying their afternoon off. I drove everyone home and fought the urge to pull over and run wild in the moats of flowers that have suddenly taken over all the roads around Gainesville. The sun was still out, and my friends were still sleeping in the car, and I felt like how parents must feel watching their kids sleep. The whole world and everything in it suddenly seemed like enough. 
*Donald Justice, Variations on a Text by Vallejo

Two Gold Rings

"I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Or do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?"*

1. I used to want to be the kind of girl that had silver rings on her fingers. There were all these women that I became friends with, once I moved to Gainesville, that seemed so adorned, even when they first woke up, hung over, bleary eyed, happy and excited and complete, and yet also they all shared these features- dark eyes like me, but dark haired, and so small and petite, like white sand from a gulf beach poured into a very small container and dampened with something better than water- only slighter darker than white, with their big eyes so that you couldn't help but think of soft, grey mammals watching you in the night. Then at Christmas one year in North Carolina in a dark room- not dark in an impersonal way but dark in the way that only a room that has been lived in for so long can be dark- with deeply used oriental rugs and pictures covering the walls and records lining the shelves- very little room for white space or space between people in the room. My mom, grandmother and I sat, all of us in the dark room with pictures on the walls from South Africa where we all were in 1985, and all of us reading, and because it was Christmas between us and for us that meant just that, us sitting together in a room reading, I was very surprised when my mother handed me a very small box and said merry Christmas.

I remember in high school sneaking into my mothers room. She was gone a lot, not out of town but she left for work before I went to school and she came back a good three hours after. I had the house to myself, most of the day if I decided to skip school. We spent our evenings always in the kitchen, always cooking together. She cooked and I did the talking. Then we ate and she went to sleep downstairs and I went into the loft and stayed up at night looking things up on the internet and then in the morning it happened again. But mostly during high school I skipped class. I was a straight A student and everyone trusted me and honestly it didn't matter or even come up. Sometimes when I stayed in I'd go in her bathroom, which always seemed the most private area of the house, and look through her things. There was one basket of earthy, woven material, something that she must have got on the sailing trip, and I'd look through it. There were a few necklaces (silver) and a few pendants that seemed to be from unknown islands. Tahiti? I didn't know. I won't know. I'll never know the intimate details of those places my mother went to. I know that she was there, I know she tied up the sailboat to unknown docks, swam to unknown beaches, I know she was in love. I have the pictures, to prove that they sailed around the world together. In the pictures, they are in love and they are young and they are in places I'll never go to. Especially not now. When I was that age, at that time, I had already thought about their comings and goings, and I had plenty of time to think about their divorce. I had already lived through it. We had the shells around the house, the tapestries and the photographs. But in that basket that my mom kept in her bathroom I found all the unknown details, the things and totems I didn't know or understand. The only thing I could recognize in the basket was the ring. I knew the gold ring was when my dad asked her to marry him, when they were really in love. I always picked it up, I always tried it on- skipping school before my mom got home, before I snuck out to punk shows (through the bedroom window, over the garage, she already knew). 

That Christmas when my mom handed me the small box, I expected something small, but not the small gold ring inside. She said, "you're twenty five, and I don't know what else to give you." It was the engagement ring, very simple, and yet the ring I'd always put on secretly, thinking about her and my dad, thinking about their trip, when the 36ft sailboat crossed the whole world with at first just them, and then finally me, inside its hull. I shouldn't have to explain how much I cried and cried, and have never taken the ring off since. 

2. One evening in my early twenties, I was sitting in the bathtub with my nose just below the water, eyes above, knees peaking out over, and just sort of floating with myself which has been something I've always liked to do. I've always liked to be in water. But I was sitting inside the tub and looking at the white porcelain container I was in and suddenly this wild memory came back to me, of being completely inside a very dark blue ceramic container. I remember the bathtub completely. It was very high, and tiled, which is unusual at least in Florida, and I remember when I got to the house that belonged to the tub always immediately wanting to be inside it, probably for the way the dark blue tiles turned the water in the tub a mysterious, middle of the ocean hue, and then floating inside that space for hours. The memory of the dark blue tiles came back to me, slowly (tidal) probably because it took me so long to realize that the tub belonged to the house that belonged to the woman that my dad was cheating on my mom with. 

I don't know what it's like for other people when they realize they're becoming someone they never wanted to be. I know how it felt for me, but how it happened isn't even something I'm capable of figuring out yet. But I remember an evening where I was literally begging someone I was in love with not to leave me. I don't know if that means anything to you. Let me start over. I was on my hands and knees, in an apartment I paid for surrounded by all my shitty possessions. I remember thinking I needed to sweep the next day, because there was cat hair all over the room, and I remember even thinking that whatever was coming next, it involved sweeping. So a part of me was being rational. The other part of me, you could argue, was drunk, or deliriously in love, or horrifically in love, whatever way you could choose to describe it- I can only say that I felt like if this person walked out that door and left me that I would absolutely without a doubt die (I didn't, and that was the worst part). The next day, when I woke up alone on the floor (getting a white cat was stupid but then I guess you could also argue I've never really been alone) I had this terrible memory come back to me of me, maybe around eight or nine, peering out of my bedroom door and seeing my mom on her hands and knees begging my dad not to leave her. I remember even the memory itself bothering me for so long, because my mom has always been such a strong person (she raised me after that for eight years) but we had never talked about it. I felt like, much like all my biggest fears, that everything had come full circle and I was the person she would never want me to be (that actually might still be true but let's come to that later). I pulled myself up by my boot straps (literally) and charged my phone and called her about it. About that night when I saw her begging my dad not to leave. Much like any memory, I had gotten it all wrong. My dad, as it turns out, had already gotten four DUIs that year, and was drunk and trying to leave to go the blue bath tub woman's house. My mom was just trying to get him not to drive drunk, and was trying to protect him.

After my mom got laid off from her job in Melbourne she moved to North Carolina to be closer to her family. In Asheville she briefly joined a dating website but canceled, because she thought she didn't have the time. Somehow, the only person that emailed her the whole time kept emailing her and bugging her for dates. They ended up bonding over cast iron skillets and kayaking. When he asked her to marry him last year (she was 60) she said yes. When I went to the wedding, on the outer banks of North Carolina, she gave me a small gold ring. It belonged to his ex wife, who died of cancer, but it's an opal, and apparently good luck when you give it to other people, and he wanted to welcome me to the family too, so we both got gold rings that day. I shouldn't have to explain how much I cried and cried, and have never taken the ring off since. 

*Karen Joy Fowler "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves." 

The Future is a Slow Panic

"things are still the same, they're still not ok
we're clocked on and strung out on the day to day.
there's more to life than love and comfort,
there's more to life than books you know. 
don't give up on the big fear-
the one that brought you here.
the future is a slow panic, 
a necromantic, pedantic, reaganomic legacy
that still pits the organic vs. the machines.
so don't give up on nihilism.
there's more to life than love and comfort
college won't get you off the hook.
there's more to life than self-satisfaction,
there's more to life than books (yes, much more).
you were right when you were angry and scared,
don't second guess your fears-
it's still you and me against the coming years."

             I spent a few days alone in my apartment. Thinking I'd be out of town, it felt a little like a treat to stay inside and look through books, listen to records I'd forgotten about, and drink wine in the bathtub. I found the Scenery zine (#14) Fire as a Metaphor and read it this evening, with no plans and a that creeping feeling of nostalgia (dangerous, I know). The last time I read it was probably a year or two ago, but I remember reading it at 19, before I ever lived in Gainesville, and it striking a powerful chord with me because of it's topics of gentrification and where the punk community intersects with classism and economics (the zine is an illustration of an academic paper about those things). Reading it later, after I'd moved to Gainesville, it meant something different, since I'd heard most of the bands it referenced and met some of the people. Recently I went to a wedding with some friends and we ended up hanging out with Mike Taylor (the artist, look him up!) and trying to sneak into pools long after they were closed. The lyrics above, from the back of the zine, are from a True Feedback Story song, a band I'd listened to long before I moved to Gainesville, before I even met Travis Fristoe, long before he'd end up writing me my letter of recommendation to an MFA program I didn't get accepted to (no fault to him). The zine reads so differently to me now, so many years later. Reading about the intersections of NW 3rd ave & 8th St (hey I went to a party there the other night) and Pleasant St. (oh I lived at that one shitty house over there for years). Just like the stories and the people intersecting in the zine, my stories have intersected with those people, those places, and this town. 
            Living in Gainesville I spend a lot of time thinking about it. Thinking hard about it. Why do I live here? The original pull that brought me here- punk music and a good job, still seems pretty worth it. It also has a funny way of bringing people together- like that the person I traded mix tapes with in college works with me at the bar. My bandmates from the early 2000s still play in bands I can sing along to. I can walk into a crowded room, bar, show, anywhere, and know someone and feel mostly at ease. I like my stories; separated into our two seasons: summer and winter.

Winter: climbing on the roof of Wayward Council (RIP), looking down through the skylight at my friends going wild for a show. Innumerable punk bands, fireworks, too much beer, fingerless gloves and  biking home to houses I could see the ground through the floorboards. Biking sometimes not home but just to a friends bed, crawling in just for any sort of animal warmth, knowing who's doors were always unlocked. The first time I did XTC and waking my friend up to talk about punk music until I felt better. The block, rows of punk houses, at least Josh Rey still lives there. 

Summer: sneaking into apartment complex pools. Swimming at night, alone, the cops showing up and not even caring, but usually swimming at night, with too many people, and the cops still not caring. Biking down SW 2nd ave to the Junkyard at 3am when the show is still going on, at least for a few hours, somehow everyone is there, not surprised to find each other at a punk show on a Tuesday night. The whole town being at the junkyard on some nights. The whole town being at Wayward Council some nights. The brick falling on my head during Crazy Spirit and watching the rest of their set anyway, blood pouring through my hair. Sitting on a porch, quietly, watching people pass by on bikes. Finding random parties and walking in and making friends with everyone there. Summer storms coming through at the worst times, every day. The rain and the thunder and the heavy oak trees, weighing everyone down until the weather breaks along with the tension. 

            I could write so many stories about living in Gainesville. I know a lot of people have. I try not to romanticize it too much, I know that way lies only danger. Still...I can appreciate how other people's stories about Gainesville have intersected with mine, and how the Ark, Wayward Council, and the Junkyard (we still have the 911 house at least) will eventually get replaced with other stories, other characters, and other nostalgia.     
            Summer in Gainesville isn't just oppressively hot. It's also when the students from the university are gone (most of them, thankfully) and the town sometimes becomes unbearably small. There's swimming, at least. Biking across town at night can be beautiful without traffic, and the late evenings are cool, bright, and quiet. The town sort of feels like ours, just for a little bit. There's also an anxiousness that comes from your friends leaving in August, moving to New York or Portland, Austin or San Diego. Everyone eventually leaves, the stories disconnect. And another year I stay behind, biking down the same streets, singing familiar songs. 

Here at the End of the World

"Very slowly, standing there by that icy window with the condensation forming on it, eyes eagerly scrutinizing the peaceful stretch of road where perhaps danger yet lurked, ears alert for the sound of innumerable fine rain drops falling in unison, while the town beyond pullulated with a thousand sounds and lights, Besson felt a strange sense of intoxication surge up within him. He was alive, then, in his body, contained in his own skin, face to face with the world. Sensations ran together in his various organs, established a curious foothold there, jostled one another for place, struck up music... [...] It mounted straight towards the sky, dominated unknown space, plumbed the abysses of mystery and emptiness. The void, the enormous void, a living, breathing entity, was always there, eternally present behind each individual object. It dug out chambers beneath the earths crust, it forced its way through the stiff metal uprights of the street lamps, light was carried on it in tiny eddying vibrations, the void was present in glass and bronze and concrete. It had its own colour and shape. And what, finally, enabled you to see the void was nothing other than this sense of intoxication, which went growing without anything to support it. Like a bouquet, like some joyous explosion of giant flowers. Gleams of light all fusing together in a single mystical efflorescence, life traced its pattern on the face of the night. No ordinary ray of light could ever, ever make you forget the shadows. There had to be this irresistable feeling of intoxication, this joyful sense of being really there for one to comprehend the full reality of the void: to shiver at its chill contact, to perceieve the transparence of it, to hear the terrible, heavy roaring sound of silence, bare skeletal silence with its multiple voices, its tones that surge and swell and carry you up till you could put out your hand and touch it...to intone with it that agonizing song of the years going by you, the actions you perform, the song of all that is, thats triumphantly alive, that embodies life with an undying ephermeral glory in such immensity that when you have been dead and rotten for centuries it will still not have reached the first moment of its advent."*

                I wonder what else I´ve inherited from my parents other than my dad´s large nose and my mom´s slender wrists. My father´s restlessness and constant agitation? My mom´s tendency when talking to strangers to touch them, lightly, on the elbow? Their great affection for a cold beer at the end of a hot day, all of us, when we were still all of us, sitting on the deck of the sailboat listening to some echoing country song, drifting over a muddy river somewhere, enjoying the fading heat of afternoon and welcoming evening together, quietly. 

                I don´t think my mom believes in god because we never went to church, but we spent a lot of time out in the woods, by the beach or in the mountains of her north carolina home, and she always seemed to be really happy there, saying out in the middle of nowhere is where she felt at peace, and in tune with something else, something larger than herself. I learned that from her, the ability to sit still somewhere and to let myself feel insignifgant, and now I finally understand the word ascetic from a book I read on the plane to Argentina. I knew the word, but now it makes sense, why mom sailed around the world and spent so much time away from people, in the middle of nowhere. A ascetic finds peace in sacred places, not just empty marble churches but deserts, open oceans, small places on tops of mountains. I understand now that I know many people like this, and certaintly have dated a few of them. It ties in my answer for people when they ask me what I´m doing in Buenos Aires, alone, wandering around this melancholy city. 

               Nature is a place I´ve never felt lonely, but there is a loneliness in large cities that is unattainable for me anywhere else. I realized at nineteen walking around Madrid, Sevilla, Barcelona...I felt contained in my own body, alone but quiet calm, and enjoying that loneliness when compared to the world there, around me. Buenos Aires feels the same. In any country where I don´t speak the language fluently I´m forced to think what I want to say through, all the way down to each syllable. I have to clear my head and focus on what I really want or need to say. I have to listen with an intensity I am not capable of at home. The parks and giant, impossible bright green trees are beautiful. I enjoyed the sunset in Uruguay, but its the buildings and the rush of traffic and people that are truly what I´m here to see:

               Women on the subway, passing by me on the street. Each with her own perfume, a whole world of perfumes here at the end of the world. Flowers falling out of balconies, windows open leaking songs and shouts, fights and whistles and declarations about the weather. Open doorways spilling air conditioning, the smells of cleaning products, fresh and soft and welcoming. People buying grocieries to cook dinners I won´t eat, kissing people on the street corners, hurrying onto buses. Antique books I can´t read, the smell of dust and leather and fur in every store, in the market, like the smell of my grandmother´s closet in a house I´ll never see again. The ummistakable smells of summer, of diesel fuel and rotting paper and meat, raw and cooking and overcooked. I could never be an ascetic, it´s places like here where I feel alive, where I unpack my thoughts fully and place them, tightly rolled, back inside for the trip home. 

"That was Buenos Aires...a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allows Madrid style avenues and Catalan cafes next to Neapolitan avaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droit mansions, beyond all of which, however, the evening dew, the open plain, and also a melancholy that comes from nowhere except here, from the end of the earth feeling you get when you look at maps and see how alone Buenos Aires is, how very out of the way."**

                

*J.M.G Le Clezio, The Flood

**Tomas Eloy Martinez, The Tango Singer