Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Rainclouds and Cigarettes: Pretend You're Flying

10-17

Something like 5 pm: Pennsylvania

"Lawrence County Line", snow on the ground, etc. Oh, Pittsburgh. ideas ideas.The trees all look spun from gold.

Eastern Pennsylvania is beautiful. This is one of those blessed days, listening to Loveless and watching snow fall in the mountains.

I've taken to writing the following day, it seems, rather than at the end of the night. Probably because the past few nights' ends have been drunken and busily euphoric. Euphorically busy?

We stayed at a huge house in Pittsburgh last night owned by a true Dudebilly named Junior. He had a full bar in his basement, and we stayed up late as he refilled shot glasses and got choked up talking about Wanda Jackson. I smoked Dirty Johnny's weed out of an apple with Timmy, and sat around bumming cigarettes and sipping glasses of Disaronno.

Junior's house was Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillbilly Pennsylvania Nightmare; an old, sprawling three story monster nestled on a cliff side overlooking a lushly tangled holler of glowing green weeds and wrecked Cadillacs. An oasis in the middle of a city that, for all of its industrial magnificence and tiered cityscape, will remind me mostly of being cold and wet, all the buildings the color of factory exhaust. I love it all, though. Everywhere is home.

Something like 6 am: Brooklyn

Spun, twisted, and confused in NYC. A splash of images, structure. Superstructure, infrastructure. I was a damn fool tonight, maybe, but I successfully navigated Manhattan bridge traffic for several drizzly hours, sweaty-palmed and smoking. There are no rules here. Ignore lane markings, speed limits, traffic lights. Honk for no apparent reason. Wave at New York's finest as you drunkenly carry beer out of the bar and stumble straight into them, or while you hotbox the van with a sweet big guy named Dirty Curtis. Shiver-fits. Coy glances and monstrous puke sessions. Lost under bridges, wondering about definitions.

Shea informs me tonight's a good night in Springfield. I'm in New York City, a million miles away, and I'm lonely. Loneliness is becoming a natural state for me, neither positive nor negative. Just natural. I can deal with it. I miss Springfield and I'm lonely and a million miles away. I'm in New York City, just another lonely kid in the loneliest city in the world.

I can deal with it. Sometimes you just have to free fall and pretend you're flying.

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