Winterlude

Yesterday, hit up a couple record shops in Fells Point, down by the harbor, with Johnny L. Despite some of my friends having trouble dealing with him (and vice versa), I still find him easy enough to interact with. We took a cab down after meeting up at the Barnes & Noble. First stop was Own Guru, quite literally a tiny house ("shack" might be more appropriate) in a little courtyard at the end of an alley that wound through a crack between two buildings on the avenue; it was virtually undetectable from the street, save for a chalkboard sign pointing to the alley's entrance. This alley was fronted by a black metal door; we had to ring a doorbell and wait for someone inside to come out and open the door before we could get in.

The interior was about the size of my living room, walls covered in posters and record sleeves, vinyl packed from wall to wall, a lone classy-looking turntable and amp system set up for sample listening. I don't own a record player, so I headed for the lone revolving shelf of CDs. The owner of the place was a rather fat older guy with thick glasses, whitening goatee, and a beret, and he cursed loudly at the computer (massive futuristic-looking iMac, looking quite out of place amongst all the vintage vinyl) when he was out-sniped on eBay for some old record or another. Standing in that store, I felt like I was rappelling down the rabbit hole into High Fidelity wonderland, dangling from a fishing line, or something. But I didn't get anything there. Wrote down a doom metal and a Japanese experimental band to check out later, though.

Next we hit up Soundgarden; this is the really massive store that everyone in this city knows about. Big storefront, lots of customers. I rifled through just about all of the used CDs in that place. Came across the second Hell is for Heroes album; was reminded of a time and a place I used to like that band, and of the little emo-listening, stuck-in-high-school part of me that still does. Didn't end up buying it, though. Left with three CDs: the second Exhaust album (post-apocalyptic drums-bass-tape-clarinet Mile Enders on Constellation), some sort of ambient/glitch thing, and the kicker--a Kronos Quartet album called Howl, U.S.A. featuring the quartet playing against recordings of J. Edgar Hoover, readings of "hitchhiker's inscriptions from a highway railing at Barstow, California," and a reading of "Howl" by the late Ginsberg himself. That made me happy.

Later last night I stopped by the Deli for dinner and ran into Vijay, and a girl named Lauren I met for the first time. She said she'd "heard" about me; I said I didn't like the sound of that. They were drinking a Dog's Head Tavern beer called, I kid you not, "Raison d'Etre"; I knew that there would come a day when they'd bottle the meaning of life and sell it six-pack, but I had no idea it would come so soon. It was pretty good, though. Brewed from green raisins. Character.

Ended up talking to them about an hour and a half. Nonsense, mostly: Jenna Jameson's cousin, strippers, the Midwest, and so on. Things that have very little to do with what people in our position might consider real life. Then again, maybe that's just me. Wrapped it all up with a rapid-fire debate about the necessity of absorbing avant-garde music (shouldn't one immerse oneself in the times even if one does not like them?) and called it an evening.

Was going to hang out with Sterling and John a couple nights ago. Sterling had gone out to dinner with "a friend" and was supposed to call us after he was done. John and I had a brie and fruit plate at Xando while we waited. And waited. We went back to John's place. We waited some more. I called. I called again. We waited some more.

Later Sterling would tell us he "fell asleep" after coming back from dinner and claim that none of my two or three calls had registered on his cell phone. Fuck knows just as well as I do what really happened, but one obvious hypothesis presents itself. I've never been one to jump to conclusions. Heard from John something happened with Sterling and a girl who's probably stuck around too long over New Year's that I wasn't around for. On the one hand, I suppose if it's true, then he got what he's wanted for a long time, but on the other hand, rather anticlimactic (no pun intended, brusque diction to blame) considering the duration of drama invested: is that it? Further proof that none of the obsessions that keep us scraping at the air over our heads is really as revolutionary as we'd like to think. Or are they? I don't know. Leave it I guess. Last I heard, John himself got dumped four times in as many days. I see plenty.

Sometimes it seems that, as much as I like the people I give my time to, I can't help but notice that spending time with them never seems to change anything. Hang around someone enough, and you notice patterns in your interaction that cycle back upon themselves leaving you where you started at the end of every day. Rituals and monuments that mean everything, encapsulate entire histories and spirits to a select few, but little to the rest of the world; references that, though obscure, have the ineffable power of making someone feel not alone. But take a step back from that whole scene, or fall out of step with that flow for just a minute, and I always realize how absurd and meaningless these shared moments are from a removed perspective. I don't know what excerpts of my life deserve to be flushed into this category, but I suspect if purged all my fetishized memories of their significance, my entire existence up to this point would end up looking terrifyingly hollow.

I just finished listening to the Howl album. It amazes me that Ginsberg, and the beatniks in general, had so much belief in the legend that they themselves were creating by the simple act of living that they were able to conjure these earth-moving works of literature from their collective mythos; Howl, On the Road, all those works, all of them revolving around the zealous faith of their creators that what they were doing, what they were being, was singular, massive, and vastly significant. The faith that slideshow, slipstream anecdotes spinning out of their own lives were somehow glimpses into a greater meaning that revealed itself in boxcars and shivering young men who had no money and entirely too much to drink.

I think I used to be like that, in my high school days; I remember writing about Virginian bonfires and rum on the beach at dawn like they were revolutionary acts, like we were tearing down walls and raising flags. But at the very end of that era, I think, I lost my momentum, I lost my will to keep up with the stories we were creating, and so, for me, the meaning crumbled and fell away, and I couldn't help but think that we were all just being a bunch of post-adolescent assholes chasing tail and chasing our own tails (pun intended). It also came out of the standoff with Pham, I think, because I had the chance to observe a group of kids just like mine, off in their own separate world, indulging in their rituals and eccentricities, and the more absurd that seemed to me, the more absurd my own seemed to me.

It's not as though my present life is completely free of symbols of fabricated significance (tangerine skies come to mind), but for a large part, I feel rather blinded and desperate for something to blow me away with incontrovertible significance that will stick in my mind despite all my attempts to dismiss or disperse it. Things would probably be easier if I had any clue how to change my life and my immediate world; but after years of banging my head against the issue, I still haven't gotten any closer to figuring it out.

I've been back for a week and have felt zero motivation to meet up with the band and play something. I wonder if that's a bad sign. Back in high school I was all gung-ho about making "meaningful" music, but that sort of faded out with Paper Jet Fighter. The impulse has come back as a twitch reflex a few times since then, but I can't really sustain it as a drive anymore. Ironically, as of right now, school and my so-called "career" seem to be the things that put up the best fight, because it seems pretty self-delusional to say something I'll likely devote the rest of my life to doesn't matter. But if that actually turns out to be all there is, some heads are going to get punched.

Maria says I ask for a lot. That's absolutely correct. Maybe it means I'll never get all the answers that I want. Maybe that's the way.