saturday september 22 2001    |    9:26 p.m.

andrea: i did go see the faint last night!

vic and his friends tati and alex rescued me from the house. we drove an hour up to west palm beach, where he worked his connections and got us all into respectable street café. the place was unreal: like a new york city lounge adapted for the tropics, with the indie-est crowd i think i've ever seen in my life, and an outdoor patio framed with creeping vines, balconies, and power lines. very surreal. and then the faint. SO SEXY. was having a hard time deciding where to look: flock-of-seagulls-sans-wings-'do boy, or long-shaggy-mop-'do boy. (i'm sure they have names, but i can't bother to look them up just now. besides, we re-chirstened them last night.)

the show was pretty good, not as much energy as i'd hoped, but that's probably a reflection on the crowd more than anything. why don't indie kids dance, dammit? also they blew a fuse in the middle of the first song, and then another (or the same one) after they repeated the first song post-fix, and then their set turned out to be pretty short. but i drank overpriced beer and even rocked out a little bit and had a great time.

then the drive back to miami, and revolver, where vic again worked the hookups (martin from the kitchen! again! very reluctant to get alex & i through. still a prick after all these years). i had another, this time heinously overpriced beer, and eventually danced. it was a very very good night.

so now i'm set for the week. oh and mental note: never ever ever buy drinks at clubs. ever. again.

tomorrow my mother and i are cleaning out the storage deposit and moving into a much smaller one. tossing most of the stuff, donating most of the rest, salvaging whatever we manage to make fit in this tiny cluttered apartment.

we went today for a bit to check it out and appraise the situation. boxes of toys, books from when i was little, trastos from the old houses in madrid. and i'm telling you, each one jogged memories i didn't even know i had. i remembered each one. the book with the baby mushroom who wants to see the world but learns he can't because he's stuck to the ground, and because human mushroom pickers will pick him and grill him and eat him, so he learns to be complancent (what kind of moral is that for a little kid? give up your dreams and stay put? what?). kid artwork and stuffed animals and notebooks of drawings and stories. a box of antique iron lanterns that once belonged to my grandmother, which got my mom and i talking about family.

turns out my great-grandfather was a republican (that is, pro-republic, anti-fascist) career soldier who fought in the spanish civil war. after the war, franco took over, and my great-grandfather was thrown in jail for a few years. a cell not big enough to lie down in, it was so cramped and overcrowded. he got sick, and died soon after his release. my grandfather, his son, was twenty then. all this time and all the stories about my family, and i didn't know that. there are so many stories. i think i've heard them all, and i'm always surprised. amazing stories. i'm scared i won't be able to memorize them all in time.

anyway, good weekend all around. thus far.

oh yeah, if you're still with me, go give vic some guestbook love. he's starting to wonder about his readership, but i know y'all are just shy. :)

(yes indeed, i just wrote out "y'all". and what? florida is, after all, technically part of the south.)

now off to have a cig and sift through old things.