all the time we spent in bed
counting miles before we set
fall in love and fall apart
things will end before they start

sleeping on lake michigan
factories and marching bands
lose our clothes in summertime
lose ourselves to lose our minds
in the summer heat, i might

-- sufjan stevens, 'holland'


'for a moment he vaguely remembered those summers that adolescents have, when they think they are about to irrevocably change.'

-- william t. vollmann, 'the atlas'

at the end of july i'm thinking about the way i was living a year ago today, or two years before that. the changes happen, but they come on slowly, imperceptibly; your life changes before your eyes like the moment the sky becomes the night sky officially, taking on black. you never see it even though you promise yourself you'll look harder the next time the sun sets, and night after night you start to forget, until you don't know why you cared in the first place. flux happens, just as it always did, life as a river, but it's no longer your focus.

dracut is a place where i made a lot of stupid, life-altering, friendship-ruining mistakes connected, directly or indirectly, to youth, ignorance, or inexperience. in other words, it's the place i grew up. i always have mixed emotions about going back, as evidenced by probably nearly half of this blog's content, if not more. see here, for example. catherine used to call it 'dracutting' when i went home for a weekend during freshman year, as if it were a kindly jaunt, but with a subtext of self-mutilation. in my creative writing non-fiction class last semester, i wrote a piece that included a bit of a rhapsody on this issue, based on a particular post from here that got a great response from those of similar age.

all of which means i spend a lot of time wondering if the people i see when i go back (when i see people) see it the same way as i do when they have similar feelings. and i spend a lot of time wondering about this peculiar aspect of myself that wants to back out right before longed-for situations. i'll really want to see someone but have nothing to say when the moment actually comes, even though i've been depressed about not seeing them for such an inappropriately long time beforehand. i've always been like this; i've always been vexed by it. how i'm almost scared to head dracutward for emmie's party tomorrow because i don't want to drive through the unfamiliar overdeveloped outskirts and make the requisite stop at my parents' and have to see a room full of relics of that past life, especially now that laura and i are racing through time towards the little place by the water, our imagination made brick. a week from today the move begins, and a visit to the past is last on my list of things to pack.

but there's plenty to be said for the spontaneity i've been missing out on all these years, and if i can let my analytical self go for a few hours i'll happily alight out of salem in sasha towards the friends i should have had all along and a town devoid of negative associations, since i don't have to live there anymore.

every time i get around to checking a month or so's backlog of unread dinosaur comics, it's like a breath of spring 2006, a feeling which is the very definition of sawesome. maybe that's why i save them for such large doses.

'you want me to talk about myself, right? let me tell you what "self" means to me. the self, myself, the self as i see it, is composed mainly of selected memories from my history. i am not what i am doing now. i am what i have done, and the edited version of my past seems more real to me than what i am at this moment. i don't know who or what i really am. the present is fleeting and intangible. no one in china wants to talk about his past, because nobody wants to paint his face black. our past is not a flattering picture, and no one wants to look at it for long. yet what we were is fixed and final. it is the basis for predictions of what will be in the future. to tell you the truth, i identify with what no longer exists more than with what actually is.'

-- anchee min, katherine

'...the reason we love eden is that we've been expelled from it.'

-- william t. vollmann, the rifles

i wrote this a couple of years ago, and parts of it are universally relevant, i'd like to think, even though it no longer applies to my own situation. i don't get that kind of lonely anymore. my lonely now is an entirely different sort which i describe often, that of bonds forged and lost; also, the more tragic: bonds imagined and never created.

i had a long dream this afternoon which can best be described as an alternative reality nightmare. everything about the setting was different, and it died upon my waking. people and places, vividly rendered, old friends, fading with the reminder that they were never bright in the first place. never real. and what is real fades similarly, which is why i was originally driven to sleep today in the first place.

see, i've been poking at expelled from eden: a william t. vollmann reader and i came across a selection from his book thirteen stories and thirteen epitaphs entitled 'the ghost of magnetism.' i only got as far as the editor's introduction, where, introducing the piece as essentially vollmann's description of a farewell party his friends threw for him, it is described as:

one of the most startling displays in all of vollmann's work of his remarkable powers of memory, 'ghost' simultaneously evokes his tragic awareness of the limits of memory and art. thus even as we witness vollmann's furious effort to give expression (and hence preserve) these precious shards of 'memory flesh' before he forgets them, we recognize he already senses that even his own remarkable powers as an artist are helpless to counter the forces of change and loss-- that everything is already rushing away from him and slipping into the dark emptiness of the undifferentiated past (mccaffery 39-40).

and suddenly, despite the fact that no one was around, i vocalised the following: 'i'm so not ready for this.' sleep instead, even though i haven't had any restful sleep in weeks, such are the dreams. better those than a much stronger authorial voice than my own reminding me of what i already know, the way you get upset when you're already upset and someone tells you to do something you already know you have to do. but in this case the point is there's nothing you can do, and i suppose we all want to be told otherwise. you could argue that there's beauty in the trying. maybe that's all art is.

the world of my dreams, with the neighbourhood i lived in and the friends i had, the place we all spent time together and the five years later when everyone had moved on, all of that faded, just as real life fades-- just as the post i mentioned earlier is merely a dispatch from a time i spent long evenings on the porch in dracut trying to sort out my post-nicole life, listening to a lot of everything but the girl and terrified of the loneliness of sleep, even if i wasn't fully willing to admit it then. i am now, but that will pass as well.

'righteous.  wait a second, righteous?  i apparently became a surfer just now.'

-- genevieve

'alright, dude.  shake it easy.'

-- genevieve, moments later.

believe this for a second, young believer: every time you sleep it's winter and every time you dream it's christmas.  you sort through the bedroom closet of your youth for long-lost articles you never owned, and there's a long drive in the snow and dark ahead towards a place you'll never get to.  people are waiting for you, and morning never comes.  

enchanted in recent days and weeks by flashes and booms of passing thunderheads, wishing only that they'd hang overhead a bit longer. grass is always greener, sky could always be darker, the mornings more grey, more foreboding. but this is more than last year, when even fifteen minutes of thunder around this time would send lizzie and i out on to the deck back at the old place with some level of wonder. the wind could always be more turbulent, doing some actual damage rather than the suggested damage of severe thunderstorm warnings that never seems to happen. or when you almost think it actually will, like the short storm that picked up late evening the other day, jets of cooler air, refreshing, in through the windows of the upper storeys.

other than that, early july heat of strengthening summer, caesar's month. warm wind carrying firecracker celebration of the botched republic.

i'm living with laura on geneva street. like her, i hate the man next door and believe he and his seed should be wiped from this earth.