Saturday, August 31, 2024

Adeline the AirBnB manager showed us around briskly, garbage is through that door over there, someone left a popsicle in the freezer and you can have it. Keys, shower, towels. The washer’s here and the dryer’s there. She said a woman thought the dryer was the washer and put in soap, wide eye roll, what a disaster that was. Try to clean soap from a dryer, I am telling you. I’m here for you entirely, je suis entièrement à votre disposition, she said before leaving in that way French people say things and you know they don’t mean it.

We ate at our favorite place that night, the two sisters, and clumsily I asked if they have ice when there was ice obviously in the drinks so the younger sister looked at me and smiled and said of course we have ice, exclamation mark.

The air conditioner appeared to work and then it didn’t and I stood below it for half an hour, working the remote, putting it on fan only and back again, turning it off, turning it on, dialing the temperature down in desperation, Googling the force reset and the meaning of a blinking green light. I futzed with the vent by hand, knowing it was a bad idea. Finally I gave up and went to bed. In the early morning I had a happy dream I was somewhere that an AC worked. When I awoke Sara told me she got up at two o’clock when it was way too hot to sleep and pressed the button and it worked and it never stopped working after that.

I was inattentive and unadventurous for most of the trip, losing at online chess, leaving the freezer door wide open. I tended toward the uncolorful gelatos, the salted caramels, the chocolate family, though I knew the fruity ones were better, the mango and the passion fruit. But maybe this is what vacation is. A respite from trying.

Thursday, August 15, 2024

I discovered an email I’d received seventeen years ago, from a CD buyer, with a tally of what it was paying me for my entire collection—a dollar here, two there, sometimes $8.50 for some obscure reason. As I scrolled down the list there were titles I recognized, some I’d completely forgotten. The artists, even. But I realized this was music I loved, that I listened to again and again—physical objects in my possession, occupying space in my home. Necessarily I played them. Necessarily I loved them. But since I’d sold them—impulsively, heedlessly, but not unwisely after all—they were out of my life.

So much has been lost. And maybe, realizing this, something might be regained.


Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Damn American flag with its stars arrayed like cheerleaders, specifically Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders except fuck the Cowboys.

Monday, August 05, 2024

The Enterprise - 61

Brett and Tom and I had been playing tunes, Brett on drums even though he’s not a drummer, Tom on bass even though he doesn’t play bass. I felt guilty playing guitar. Brett had a room in a storage facility in Chelsea where he rehearsed with his band. Climate controlled and powered. I didn’t know such a thing existed. I thought storage rooms were dark, dusty and cramped, a place for things not people. In this building the hallways were bright and clean and the spaces big enough to live in.

Brett had made a carpeted space for a set of drums, two amps, and a mic stand, ringed by miscellaneous belongings, furniture maybe, some clothes, appliances. Maybe they were his. Maybe not. Maybe this was all his bandmate’s shit, his bandmate’s space. I took advantage unthinkingly, ungratefully. Here we were. We could plug right in and play.

We played weirdo covers, a hard rock version of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” We played one or two of my tunes and Tom’s. Was there a point? We had fun. One time we thought, we have enough to play a set somewhere. We should play a show, one show only, start and end in a blaze of glory. But we never did.

After playing we’d go to a bar. Maybe that was the point.

We drove to Baltimore one weekend to see their friend Jim, the drummer in their old band, play a gig. It rained hard on the way and Brett was driving fast, peering below the windshield fog. This was DC Sniper time and we were heading into his territory. He’d shot eight people already, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven. I imagined him laying in wait in a perch overlooking the freeway. Maybe we’d be next.

We stopped at a rest stop just over the border in Maryland. There were teenagers hanging out, like this was the place to be in whatever fucking town this was. Racing through the main hall, twisting the knobs of gumball machines for something to come out. Two boys wrestled as they walked, smirking insolently, getting in people’s way and not caring. This is how they interacted, with arms and hands. How they communicated.

At the table next to us a girl gushed to her friends, “I heard he shot five people in a single day!”

We went out in the streets of Baltimore, bar to bar and down some ruined streets with the houses boarded up. Slept on a couch in Jim’s house. On Saturday night we watched his band play fusiony prog rock at a hipster bar crowded with young guys in beards. A confederate flag hung on the wall with no apparent irony.

Thursday, August 01, 2024

Things That Are Mysterious

The number of rows of shingles on the south-facing side of a roof in France and the spider web of cracks in the windshield of a car struck by a branch and the song that’s playing at a party when someone spills their drink.