When's a Day?

Earlier this semester I mentioned my very attractive Biological Physics TA, Corinne. Today I went to pick up my last two graded homework assignments. I happened to be wearing my Dinosaur Jr 2005 t-shirt:

Corinne: "Hey, do you like Dinosaur Jr? Their new album came out yesterday, you know."
Me: "(Are you fucking kidding me?)"
Corinne: "Aren't you a little young to be liking Dinosaur Jr? [If you only knew...] I'm too young to be liking Dinosaur Jr...I'm 27."
Me: "...um. They were still putting out records when you were a teenager, right?"
Corinne: "Yeah, but they were...eh..."
Me: "Without Lou?"
Corinne: "Yeah."

Once again, music and science conspire to taunt me for not being born ca. 1979, give or take a year. Goddamnit. Why can't I ever meet a girl who's into science and Dinosaur Jr and is not seven years older than me?

Today I was sitting outside Carma's with Sid, downing caffeine and talking as one does, when Peter happened to walk by. I don't see him very often, and talk even less, even though he was one of the regulars at Eric Han's "speakeasy" back in Hamill. As I talked to him--how's things, how's the band, I got kicked out, are you leaving town (yes he is--I envy people who aren't depressed by the prospect of going home for extended periods of time)--it struck me that I was going to see him graduate again, after sending him and the rest of Lawrenceville Class of 2003 off four years ago. Maybe things do go in cycles...still, it was a really weird feeling, not quite deja vu, not quite nostalgia, not quite wincing in empathy with injuries past, but something akin to all of these.

Last Writing Sems undergrad reading of the year was last night. Senior guys', it was. Blaha, Chunwoo, Max S., James Z., Josh C., and Fox, in that order. Most of them far better writers than I'll ever be (I can't match Blaha's skill, but his aesthetic disagrees with me 80% of the time), and most everything that was read was great, if not new to me (I had classes this semester with Blaha, Max, and Fox). The high point to me, though, was when James read a story ("Napalm") wherein he and the other senior guys (names cleverly disguised, but not quite) became boy scouts lost and famished in the woods, and the others (poets) were just about to kill and eat him (for writing fiction) when the senior girls (Brooke and Kat, abandoning all pretense of fictional characters) showed up, declared that they "suck" and "will never read at tonight's reading!" before jetpacking into the night sky and calling in perennial not-Writing Sems-guy Vijay in a helicopter to firebomb the helpless senior guys, concluding with Fox's and James' fictional manifestations bemoaning, "Do you realize how much talent dies here tonight?" and "What a waste! What a waste!" as they and their colleagues succumbed to a glowing, napalmy fate.

(For whatever reason, I liked the other, more "serious" story James read as well, in a strangely empathetic way, even though it was way too much Hemingway fucking meets New York City, or something of that sort.)

"Why me?" Vijay would later ask me. "Because you're just a tool in...never mind," I replied, cutting my jab short before it crumbled into innuendo. I'm hyper-sensitive to these things.

It sort of reminded me of that poem I wrote four years ago caricaturing the then-editors of The Lit, except that wasn't as well executed, and was done more out of malice than sentimentality. All the same, though, I hope someone does something similar for the Writing Sems kids in my year a year from now. I hope Jessica does it. Or Stephanie. I hope both of them team up to do it, actually. It would be hilarious. I wonder how the Writers next year are going to turn out. Patrice and Tom are running things, but I wonder if they'll be able to pull in the east Charles Village hipsters (I hope they don't, regardless). I wonder if I'll hang with them at all. I'm sure I'll go to the readings and such, and maybe even read something once in a while, but I don't know if I'll be around on a regular basis, or if I'll keep drifting in and out of orbit, like I've been doing so far. I think I'd enjoy being the non-humanities interloper; or me and Garrett, perhaps. We could split the job.

One wonders what my present status is (isn't that always the question?). Case one: last week, I was walking back to my place from One World when a dude I'd never met stopped me. "Are you going to be there next Tuesday?" he asked. I was confused until I realized he was referring to the aforementioned senior guys' reading. I told him no. He introduced himself as Mac; he wasn't a student, but his dad taught here.

"Didn't you read at one of those things?" A few weeks ago, yeah, I said. "I really liked what you read. I asked Fox, 'Does this happen a lot?' and he was like, 'About once a semester.'"

Wait, what? Did Fox mean "awesome, Will read one of his rarely-revealed gems" or "that stupid science kid fucked with our shit again, and he's even wearing a goddamn JHU Biophysics t-shirt"? Poetry writers can be so inscrutable. I see the Writing Seminars people as being somewhat exclusive; John does not share this opinion. I don't know if I'll run guns with them, anyway; I like a few of them, but a few others I am not such a huge fan of.

Wandered up north in Tevas (!) Monday afternoon to find the fabled tulip garden, which everyone talked about (especially the Writing kids) but which I had never seen in my three years' residence. I walked under an unhesitant sun, under low-hanging jasmine branches, around sprinklers, maybe picked and scattered a dandelion clock, can't remember. It was some sort of spectacle, all right; beds of tulips in every imaginable color scattered across a patch of greenery the size of a small park or a very big yard. Many people were there, and I had to get ready for DC anyway, so I only walked through and around once before heading home. It wasn't until I found myself across the street from the ghost house that I realized I was in familiar territory, after all; I had been there before, once, with Patrice, two years ago, but it was raining and out of season (must've been before), so I didn't realize it was the tulip garden. I remembered sitting on one of the stone benches...and the ghost house, the one with the two massive cauldrons on tripods in front of it, was familiar too, and of course I thought about that night standing under an umbrella for an hour, before finally ringing the doorbell and slipping in the mud as I ran away. Memories...I've idealized them, no doubt, to the point where I don't so much remember things anymore as recall vague, abstracted, symbolic images detached from times and places that actually were.

After the '90s party (at which I spilled candlewax on my left Doc, and was persuaded to be, and then utterly dissed out as, an iTunes jockey within the span of minutes) I sat on the porch with Lindsay, and somehow the subject of conversation turned to people of my not-so-distant past...wasn't even close to drunk, but when asked, I tend to tell, to the best of my recollection. "But it must've been so good..." It's always nice to have Lindsay put things in perspective for me, if only because I don't feel so bad about taking things so seriously if other people tell me things are serious, that goddamn loneliness and security are issues for me because of history and not some sort of neurotic obsession on my part. (But then again, if you believe Freud, those two things are translatable.)

I must admit that it's been rather difficult, this past school year, to run into her wherever I go when we don't even talk anymore. Can't seem to have a conversation without feeling like the words are coming from and going into a void, can't seem to make inquiries and responses connect in a meaningful way, blah blah blah blah blah, so on and on. We don't seem to talk unless we disagree, or I wrote something I maybe shouldn't've somewhere I maybe shouldn't've written it (why I removed almost every single reference to this blog from profiles etc.). Que sera not necessarily sera, but qu'a été most certainly a été--or something like that, I don't even know if I used the right form of "to be," though I'm sure Jessica will tell me. All the same, there haven't been too many instances in my life where I've lost my grip on something I held onto tightly...I suppose I just haven't gotten used to it. Will I ever? Can I? Do I want to?

I can't even remember if I've been over this before. I've been doing some digging in some forgotten corners. "The inevitable things are the good things"...I said that. I said that. Not the same person, I am.

Cut it, cut it. I didn't mean for this to turn into such a rumination. Too good at making closing comments. Too good at fashioning dramatic exits. Shitty at everything preceding.

Monday night John and I went to DC for Fujiya & Miyagi + Peter Bjorn & John. (Au Revoir Simone were there too, but I don't know anything about them.) We missed the train and didn't get to the 930 until while Fujiya were playing their last song (I could hear "Collarbone" coming from inside as I stood helplessly in line at the door). Despite being at the very rear of the club at the beginning of Peter Bjorn & John's set, I managed to weasel my way towards the front; bastard I know, but I had a mission. Peter Bjorn & John's set was superb; lots of guitar heroics, to my surprise. Peter reminded me somewhat of a bespectacled, Swedish, and more awkward Ira Kaplan. "Chills" became an extended, tense, Krautrock jam. They were good with the stage banter, although John's accent was very heavy, and I couldn't understand most of what he said. They brought on one of the girls from Au Revoir Simone for "Young Folks." Peter threw his Telecaster on the ground after clanging his way through "Up Against the Wall" and bludgeoned it with a shaker before picking it up again and playing on.

When Peter walked back onstage, alone, for the first song of the encore--"Poor Cow"--I'd gotten to within two or three rows of the front of the crowd, and finally did what I came all the way from Baltimore to do: I pulled a CD-R of my own "Chills" remix and waved it at him, shouting, "here's a present for you!" "How kind," Peter said as he took the disc. Here's just hoping they don't throw it away, don't hate it, and don't nail me with a cease & desist order.

John and I crashed at Deal's house that night. Or, to be more accurate, I did; John wandered out in the middle of the night to CC's dorm down the street and stayed there. I slept in Deal's roommate, Jenn's bed, which I noticed had been stripped of its sheets. In the morning I learned Jenn had gone home for the semester. I wonder what one can possibly do for someone when the only thing that person wants to do for herself is die, but I know that I want to punch a wall and yell, goddamn, someone should be doing something.

Deal's always good company, though, even if she was writing a paper on Aztec poetry and didn't really have time to talk...I felt bad for being out of it in the morning (unshowered + unfamiliar bed), and therefore being more reticent than usual (having forgotten my allergy medicine didn't help). She's a wholesome human being the likes of whom I know too few in college.

Later, when John and I were sitting outside Thurston, CC's dorm, waiting for her to come downstairs and go to lunch with us, a toothbrush came flying out of the sky, foaming toothpaste and all, and landed splat on my backpack, which was sitting in my lap.

Still later, as the three of us sat around a table with CC's roommate Dasha at the vegetarian restaurant where CC worked, John and I listened to CC and Dasha tell stories which made us wonder how the fuck we ever ended up at the same table as these people.

Chalk one up for absurdity, I suppose. Or two.

I just remembered I still have Zach's roommate's Jacob's Ladder DVD, which I borrowed over a year ago. Goddamnit.

Finally, for no reason other than Jessica did it: