the alchemy between us

late night dark room lovely

i wish i could write music. be in a band. have some camaraderie like that. someday i think i will. i feel like my skill set dictates i could be a serviceable bassist if not a rhythm guitar. someday. i get so sick of somedays.

we spoke in bible today of ecclesiastes. i'd never read it before... any part of the bible, really. before this class anyway. well, the gist of ecclesiastes is that we could die at any time and that we should find what we really enjoy in life and throw ourselves into it completely. and i thought of being 32 and having worked at the hospital for years and still not be making any money. i mean money isn't something to judge a life by but it is a path to enjoying other things. i just can't see, right now, enjoying waking up every morning to go be a bitch to authority. it kind of buried that idea for me. leaning more and more towards working somewhere fun and doing something i enjoy. what that is... i'm not quite sure of yet. maybe i'll hike the AT someday. takes money though. as does opening a pizza shop or a coffee place that serves alcohol and plays music.

i can see myself in my coffee shop in some big, interesting city. i'm sitting behind the counter playing electric guitar through this little amp when somebody walks up. they don't know what they want so i play a little while they decide. i want to be that guy, i guess, sometimes. you know, if you walk into a coffee place and the owner is there playing guitar behind the counter... that's somewhere you'd want to stay. where there's local art on the walls and the music is coming from the guy's computer. this isn't starbucks. i want that to work. i need capital somehow.

i'm a writer for a british motorcycle magazine. i take photographs for a living. i document the real world, one way or another. a photojournalist. untrained. i don't have this little layer of flab around my stomach.

every time i close my eyes, it gets harder to open them.

a couple days ago, in basic lab safety training - read, "two hour powerpoint lecture" - nobody was paying attention. well, the two kids beside me were whispering and got bitched at pretty badly by the speaker. i didn't even look at them. i wasn't paying attention either. i scratched a sonnet on the inside of my folder. if i'd had another hour, i might have finished it. it's still about 6 lines short but whatever... i changed the last two this morning anyway. i'm trying to get over the idea that i can't edit anything i write because then it's not the same anymore. not the same paragraph. not the same pome. not the original, what came out. anyway, here are the first ten lines:

a year before we meet on Baker street
you left my coffee cold and freezing wind
that time i told you we should just be friends
the leaves were not so red on Baker street

the corner shop is now a pizza place
all robot art and nineties indie rock
still sit outside until they close the park
the winter breezes and my burning face

i heard that you were doing pretty well
from deep within my knock-down drag-out days
..........................................................................................
it hurt enough to think i had to stay
to wait so you could find me when you fell

the trees are still the same on Baker street
dead leaves in whistling breezes spin around
two small hot chocolates and a displaced town
it's warming up a bit on Baker street

it's not even about anybody in particular. the last 6 lines i just wrote right now. i hope they work. the last two lines before the break used to be "i heard you lived your life, i had a cage / a fool-proof metal jacket down inside / you left for home the day the music died." the last line was going to have something to do with a stage. returning to a smaller stage. something like that... felt too much like a rebel hippie thing, though. i don't know. it's done.