sunday january 21 2000    |    11:30 p.m.

i've been writing poems this weekend. so i don't know how many words are left over. but i have to write more, lots more, so maybe this will weed out the unnecessary stuff.

not terribly coherent. tired. my backpack almost went up in flames just now. twice. (unstable ashtray.) listening to blonde redhead. en français, for good measure.

this site tracker business is great. in the past week people have google-searched for this and this and this. but the most exciting find was, undoubtedly, this. it was the first listed search, like a little nod in my direction. she agrees that it was fateful. as for me, i'm a believer.

the next one will have to be serge gainsbourg. the gray rainy dark smoky eurotrash factor. bring it on.

i'm waiting for the boy to call, and smoking too many cigarettes and wondering which poem to deal with first. or whether i can start another with what i have. tomorrow i have class at 1 in the afternoon, so sleep isn't really a factor here. the night is young. but when isn't it.

jules and i traded books this weekend, by the same author, richard bach. i might have brought him up here before, i might not. i re-read jonathan livingston seagull this summer and felt more things beginning to make sense. i gave julie the book for her birthday, and then her older sister gave her the bridge across forever for christmas. which julie just let me borrow. and i gave her my copy of illusions. philosophy for the working class: bach's legend of duluoz. i'm working on both. and i just remembered. the book comes before the poem. i can't wait.

stick jonathan livingston seagull in the suitcase alongside the town and the city.

wondering whether to light up another cigarette and write more, or to quit and commit myself to nighttime. it's so final when the music stops, and it just did. the homework (dante, frank bidart) was done last night. there was nothing to do and i'd seen the film society movie three times (sleepy hollow, o tim burton!), so the alternative was japanimation and natty light at john's. i was back in my room and reading by eleven. i talked to erick, who was in the middle of getting ready for a rockabilly show and making me a tape. he left and i read the bidart for class and then read and read f. g. lorca and wrote and wrote. it was daylight when i finally went to bed.

and today i got paid for translating poetry for two and a half hours (that is, nobody showed up needing help at the writing center), and i talked on the phone to my mother, and i talked to julie, and i rearranged my bookshelves. productive, eh?

also this weekend i sent an e-mail to jenny, who was my best friend throughout elementary school when i lived in spain. she moved to seattle the summer i moved to miami, and i haven't seen her since, but we've always kept in touch. that's ten years this may. we would ride our bikes to jamie deutsch's house and terrorize him, would get sent out of math class together for talking to each other too loudly, would listen to new kids on the block and madonna in my room after school, would plan midnight meetings at the garden fence for the years we lived next door to each other. one of us would write a chapter of a story in a notebook and pass it on to the other so she could write the next chapter. we got in the pettiest, most earth-shattering fights imaginable for fourth-graders. and we were literally inseparable. and now it's been a decade and who knows how many miles and moves and friends and things, and we're still writing like we saw each other last month. this is a beautiful thing. but a little scary, too. what if i see her at some point soon? will we still have things to talk about? how do you bridge a ten-year gap? it's coverable in letters, non-committal almost, but in person i wonder if essentially we're still the same people we were back then. i wonder. we'll have to see.

my friend cameron (from the young writers at kenyon thing in high school) is coming down to visit from kent state soon, and indieboy dusty is getting back to columbus soon and he says euphone's coming to town, and ben is also in said town, so these are all things to look forward to i hope, if they happen. kenyon tends to keep the outisde world at bay. and i've noticed that i link it up entirely too much here.

this more than anything makes sense to me now:

No preguntarme nada. He visto que las cosas
cuando buscan su curso encuentran su vacío.

*

Ask myself nothing. I have seen that when things
are searching their course they encounter their void.

-Federico García Lorca
 "1910"
 Un poeta en Nueva York