cyclic behavior

I would say I’ve been unfaithful, but that would mean I was writing on some other blog and that isn’t it, that isn’t it at all. 

I always feel strange when I return, suitcases in hand. I’ve never been so far before. Is that true, exactly, or just how I feel? I can’t tell. I can’t tell if I’m returning triumphantly or with my tail between my legs, and isn’t it all subjective, after all, and don’t all my adventures take on the flavour and texture of a dream, isolated from where they took place? 

And then there are the adventures, the experiences that will always seem like dreams, no matter where one stands. 

I’m back, for whatever it’s worth, for however long it lasts – and whomever I actually am, nowdays. 

skills

I feel with a deep and absolute conviction that I would be very good at not working.

I also sort of feel like painting that on my wall. I’ll call that shit a manifestation.

on vacation

I could live on vacation forever – I mean, if there were a way to extend this into a permanent way of life, I would excel at the occupation.

As far as I can tell all it entails is drinking far too much coffee and watching nouvelle vague films. There may be the occasional deep existential thought tornado involved, but nothing more coffee can’t fix.

But maybe everyone wants to live like that too.

rather

I wonder into how many languages “I’d rather not say,” can be translated?

halved

Sometimes I feel halved, as though my heart were somewhere entirely else and separate from my body.

I dismiss the feeling immediately.

comic/relativity

I got in the car tonight and started shivering. I thought the heat from being indoors would have carried me further. I thought the glow of cheap red wine would have lasted longer. It all seemed to evaporate as soon as I sat down on the squeaky seat. I’m so cold, I thought. So cold so cold so cold. I turned on the heat but only a cough of dust came out. Great, my life is a stupid hipster art-house comic. I looked at my hands. Who am I kidding? I need gloves.

Eventually it was warm inside and I began thinking about how thirsty I was. I looked at the floor mat. Could have sworn there was a bottle of water rolling around there yesterday. And then suddenly I realized that I didn’t care about anything but getting something to drink because the cold was taken care of, and that that was analogous for all human suffering, that when one pain is taken care of another seems so much greater.

Which is to say, in the first panel one character says to the other ‘My life sucks, I’m dying of inoperable cancer’ and in the second panel the other one answers ‘That’s terrible, have I told you about my sprained ankle?’

meant to say

Sometimes I like it, and sometimes I don’t – accordion music. Sometimes it seems to me indicative of everything that’s wrong with the world, the –

That isn’t what I meant to say. I meant sometimes I drink so much coffee I believe I can conquer the world –

Still, altogether not what I meant to say. I shouldn’t let anyone into my house. I should never have guests.

Or maybe I should never have anyone over that I actually like.

moveable

Someday I’ll be in Paris, and I’ll see if all that about a moveable feast is really true.

Vienna Blood

In the afternoon I watched the sun burn pale orange after a day of intermittent rain, and I felt convinced that everything was okay, in that wide and sweepingly perfect sense. Had the new year come then I would have, without doubt, welcomed it broadly.

It did not, of course, and later I stood with a bag of cold raw food that will later turn delicious with heat and spices, looking at the nighttime sky, looking at the moon, and I smiled at the person next to me because I had been able to afford everything I needed for the new year. Well, almost everything. I had a new pair of cotton underwear in my trunk and I had the aforementioned frozen food and I had systematically picked out every bit of trash from my car, and that was something.

I don’t know if it was the radio or an old cassette he had – I only knew that suddenly the car was filled with the sounds of ‘Vienna Blood’, instantly recognizable, and I stopped eating my cucumber. It went on, played in its entirety, and then there was silence – at any rate I didn’t hear anything. “Are you thinking of your childhood in Vienna?” he asked me. “I suppose I would be awfully homesick if I were you. It is Vienna, isn’t it? Or Granada? Or Lucerne? Same difference, right?” I gripped the steering wheel and watched my knuckles turn white. This is the last time I will wonder if he is purposefully riling me, I told myself. I would rather be alone with a bottle of champagne and drink until I saw Vienna, or Granada, or Lucerne and believed myself there than ever, ever wonder this same thing again. I have no need for friends who are only sometimes kind.

They say – I don’t know which they – that if you listen to ‘Vienna Blood’ you will know what it is like to feel Viennese blood course through your veins, even if you can’t spell it. They say watch ‘Gone With The Wind’ to see the Old South. They say you have to dance the tango in Argentina to appreciate it fully and you have have to drink Cuban coffee to say you’ve had coffee at all. There is a dictate for every food and experience and dance. Perhaps they’ve issued dictates for smells as well.

And in between these spoken and printed words are the people of these places, whose flesh and blood give rise to subsequent generations of the same flesh and blood. They are the delicate fauna that tourists watch closest of all.

My heart is like a peony, large when it is closed and larger still when it opens. Across an unforgiving ocean of time and space there is a very delicate fauna, a singular one, who knew the city where I was born and the city where I spent my childhood and which colour of the sky was my favourite – which is to say, who loved me. And because of this imposed delicacy I wonder if he – if he is living, still, and if he does, does he live well? Does he listen to ‘Vienna Blood’ and does his chest constrict like mine? Does his health remain the same, or has it deteriorated further? You would think there would be no longer any questions like these in this modern world, in which one may travel to every corner to experience the dictates of pleasure and knowledge, in which I can talk to you as intimately as if I were whispering in your ear.

There is not only one of you though – there are more. There is a fluctuating number of ears and most likely a limited attention span. I doubt we share the same blood and of course we do not share the same heart and you can no more tell me if he lives and how he lives than you can tell me the shape and colour of my dreams. I would like to believe that some feeling comes across the keyboard, something travels through my fingers right now because I am writing and publishing this at this very moment, and so the feeling, the spark has no time to cool and perhaps travels up your fingers as well. I would like to believe that we are all united in a wish and desire for a better year, a kinder, luckier one – even if we are wishing the good only for ourselves.

And if you can feel this feeling, this spark, this echo of what I mean, even if you do not care for old Austrian cities or cucumbers or peonies, if you can feel it at all, then you know that I wish you a Happy New Year, everyone, anyone who reads these words. And even if you do not care for all of these things or new years either and you believe these human markers of time are only the illusions of fresh starts, even so, please wish him well. I believe that his heart, somewhere, will feel it. And perhaps the delicacy will fade, his health will return, and these wishes will pass over that wide ocean and it will dry, and cease to exist. I believe they can pass, I believe a human heart can somehow feel what another wishes it, because I have to believe, because I want to, and because perhaps in the end blood is only blood, and despite the little differences hearts can beat the same – my heart, your hearts, and his.

Happy New Year.

dormant

Sometimes I don’t know if it’s closure I’ve achieved, or if the time and distance have deadened feelings that are still alive, but dormant.