not enough in the end

"Even those wild memories of his mad youth left him unmoved, just as during his last debauch he had exhausted his quota of salaciousness and all he had left left was the marvelous gift of being able to remember it without bitterness or repentance."*

I like New Years. A lot of American holidays (yes I'm biased because I am geographically deficient) carry a certain amount of nostalgia but New Years Eve happens to be one of the holidays in which it is totally acceptable to talk about it. Every night at the end of the year people make lists about what they'd like to do differently in the forthcoming year, but all of the lists are tainted by what they've done wrong in the year before. Personally, I'd like to not be an asshole or do anymore dumb shit in 2012, but I'm only saying that because I know I've done enough of it
this past year.

We want to do better because we've done so much wrong. I don't want to sound cynical because I like wallowing in it, so to speak. I hate the sting of nostalgia but it's easily accessible for me. After all, this blog is named after a novel dedicated to nostalgia. I rode my bike home tonight through the growing fog (the night, has been- perfect) and I missed a few people so bad that it hurt. Really missed them. You, you might be reading this and think, "me? surely not me," but really, I mean you. I think about people I'd really never want to talk to again, but I miss them. I could blame it on Time but I know at the end of the day I'm just as responsible for pushing certain people away from me. No, that's the sweet version.

The bad version is that I've been a horrible person to people that put their trust and their hopes on me, and I couldn't be the girl they wanted me to be. I don't just mean boys, that sounds like the right answer but it's not (and they should take some of the blame of putting all of their hopes on me because that is, after all, a product of the Patriarchy which is too big of a footnote to include here) but I also mean my mom who wanted me to go to graduate school and my dad who wanted me to go to law school and my friends from out of state who expected my band to tour and my bosses who expected me to stick around all summer even when I wasn't making money (everyone seems upset when I go off and do my own thing, and I know at some point I'll stick around, I promise).

I want 2011 to end with a big, wet, warm apology to everyone that has been disappointed in me, but I don't know if it would matter at this point. I rode my bike home thinking about the friends I can't call anymore, not just from my own volition but also just from Time and Distance, and I wish I could wake up tomorrow in the new year and be able to. The shitty thing is, is that I won't be able to pick up the phone and make it better. Sure, tomorrow morning I'm going to go meet my dad out by the highway. We're going to drink a beer and he's going to ask me what I'm doing, but he sure as hell won't ask me if I'm happy. Just the same, happy new year to you, wherever you are.

*One Hundred Years of Solitude, pg. 341

Something That Heals

"Time, I thought while lying in my bed, doesn't exist. What is exists in the movement of matter-or better- matter in motion, because //motion// doesn't exist any more than //time// and //space// exist; it's just the word we use to describe matter in motion. Time is not a thing. When asked what time is, we can't point to some specific object, the way we can if we're asked what a chair is, a column, a lancet window, hemoglobin. Time isn't tangible, just as space isn't tangible, and the idea that we could turn these artificial (yet useful) terms into something tangible, into something that heals, into something you can kill, or something you have to fight against, this might be one of our last great myths." *

"When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after- as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day- the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?"**

I woke up in Pensacola in room that was probably the average temperature of Iceland, woke up John, and we drove to the hospital half drunk and confused on sleep. I should have brushed my teeth. I should have combed my hair. I shouldn't have stayed up all night doing fake speed and drinking. Still, I had to go to the hospital (not for myself, my health problems seem to be getting better with copious amounts of allergy pills and antacid tablets). No one, not a single fucking person helped me when I got lost not once, but two times trying to find the ICU. Finally, I just stopped a nurse and asked. You'd think with someone like me walking around they'd want to make sure I wasn't stealing pills, but I guess now I know that the Sacred Heart Hospital will be my first stop when I go on some sort of Drugstore Cowboy rampage across Florida. So I found my dad, and he looked yellow (probably from the Iodine, I don't know if you know this but when you go into surgery they love to wash you with Iodine and it stains your body for days). He was sitting up and watching the weather channel, and didn't seemed surprised to see me. My step mom didn't look happy, she looked stressed out, but I don't think I had anything to do with it. I kissed Parker on the forehead and we talked about bullshit for five minutes (the weather, bullshit, my band playing a show the night before, bullshit, et cetera). He explained the surgery to me and it made me feel pretty sick to my stomach. I don't want to think about anyone's ribs being opened up like that, and veins in their leg replacing the deflated, empty veins in their heart. I got one of the nurses to get him some more morphine, they put the needle into the IV and put a fucking lot of it in his body. My step mom walked out to talk to someone and Parker starting telling me a story about my mom, when she and him were sailing out of Haiti and he broke his finger. I've heard the story about a thousand times, but not since he got remarried. Luckily, he finished the story and nodded off before I really started crying. My step mom and I hugged goodbye, and I walked alone through the mostly empty hospital and waited for John to come pick me back up.

Rose Cross played in St. Augustine, Gainesville, Pensacola, and Tallahassee. All the shows were fun, and I met some nice people, and I don't feel totally awful now that we're back. I read the quotes about time while we were driving on I-10, which can seem kind of surreal when you're eating Taco Bell for the third time in as many days and you know in a couple hours you're going to get really, really drunk. Sitting in a van being quiet can be hard for that part of your brain that thinks about choices and "what you're suppose to be doing." I'm sort of incapable of making any choices right now, I just want to play shows with my band and come home and listen to Agnostic Front's Victim in Pain on repeat. I just want to wake up and get coffee and maybe eat something and read a book. The bigger decisions can wait a little longer. I told someone this last week and I'll stick by it- don't make life decisions in the winter. Let's just wait for warmer weather, then we can resume freaking out.

*Marco Candida, Dream Diary

** Blaise Pascal, Pensées

A: And Poetry? Q: And Poetry.

"How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid."*

I woke up early today, before noon, to ride the Hawthorne trail and enjoy wearing shorts (sunshine, thank god, finally). Robbie asked me how my blog was doing and I felt a little uneasy. That's right. I'm suppose to be documenting everything, and I forgot a little. It's really just the same, I went a day or two drinking within my limit and then Friday I blew it way off field, stayed up until 5am so drunk I couldn't see and then slowly transitioned into feeling weird and then just bad. Saturday was practically ruined on a hangover and Sunday I stayed out too late again and watched two of my friends try to fight each other. Or maybe that was Monday. Either way, the same up and down issue I've been having. So yesterday I made a decision to just steel myself against drinking. I have to stay sober and be alone no matter how difficult it seems. It does seem difficult, let me assure you. I've been reading Moby Dick, the Good Thief, and 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair the past few nights but being sober leaves me with a kind of restlessness I'm not accustomed to. Easily mistaken for loneliness, it's the realization that thing's aren't going to change. I have to stay in my room at 3am, and it doesn't matter if I'm awake, alone, and thinking about how much of a loser I am (or nuclear holocaust, or Discharge records, or books I'd like to write, or boys I'll never meet again), I have to deal with it and go to sleep anyway. When I'm really drunk, everything is funny when I'm alone at night. I can go to sleep without feeling restless, I can go to sleep without feeling anything at all.

Instead, I'm going to try to spend more time alone. I'll ride my bike everyday if I have to. I'll finish Moby Dick. I'll write more (actually write, not just blog, sorry). I'll act on all the sickening feelings and restless impulses until I have something more to show for myself than a hangover. Eh, we'll see.

*Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair