State of the State

I’m feeling like the sixth minute of “Hey Jude,” this refrain is getting so damn familiar: I got the will to drive myself sleepless, I got the will to drive myself sleepless, I got...hey, isn’t that a Soul Coughing song that a disaffected housewife whose lip ring I wanted to spend a June 1999 Saturday at Stanford mouthing put on a mix tape for me between Tim Buckley’s “I Just Came to Chase the Blues Away” and the Rolling Stones’ “Love in Vain”? Damn RIGHT my memory is just as good as my command of prepositional phrases!

So instead of lying in bed thinking about - why would I lie about these things? - the ways keys fit into locks (tumblers flush with the notch and groove), I decided to get up, read the same damn chapter about the cult of domesticity that I always seem to read in my teacher’s edition of in A People’s History of the United States, and gorge myself to unconsciousness. Sad to say, all that’s resulted from the eating-Yogi-cereal-till-the-soymilk-runs-out plan is new late-night project to find a footlong hat pin with which to spear and deflate my distended belly. I have been sitting on the futon for about half an hour now, squinting at various objects around the living room in an effort to squander my still-undiscovered talents of telekinesis on utterly trivial tasks, like washing the dishes with well-timed movements of the irises or tapping out “Cecilia” on my new $9.99 tambourine with a coupla kathakali eye etudes. It’s not working, but I chalk this up to my fading ear infection, which clouds all sound in my left periphery such that by comparison my right ear hears everything as flanging tweeters, not the failure of my extrasensory perception.

I would like to spend some more time describing the way the keys and locks looked in my mind just before I climbed out of bed to wander around 2092 8th Ave. but I think it falls into one of those ineffable categories of experience - like sweat-twisted jersey sheets and getting kicked in the balls - that are so wonderful as to be impervious to explanation.

I’m going back to school tomorrow, a.k.a., in five hours, and I have managed to spend my break doing lotsa nothing. I guess it’s to be expected, but I was hoping to read a little more than the mediocre Italian whimsy-porn novel I finished in that crowded ski lodge at Northstar Tahoe. Oh well. I've spent the last few days:

1. Playing the one crappy drumbeat I know how to play on the drumkit at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and then
2. Composing, singing, and recording with Laura a mildly inappropriate two-chord song that simply repeats “Boo is our groom and we are his brides”;
3. Revisiting my favorite paintings at the Guggenheim’s Russia! exhibit before they’re torn from the walls and burned in a big springtime fertility rite/shipped back to the Hermitage whenceforth they came, which you would be a FOOL to miss (there are three days remaining, I know you can take the time to make the time, especially if you’re a former museum worker yourself and you have a free pass to the f*king $18 museum and you only live twenty blocks away from it and you can spare one hour of your day to look at “The Ninth Wave,” “Letter from the Front,” and “Barge Haulers on the Volga” and other paintings that will make you realize with some measure of stupefaction that oil painting can survive as an artistic medium);
4. Plotting a spring break Tennessee bike trip (Dollywood AND Graceland!!!!) on a maxipad in a horrible Upper East Side bar filled with 38 year-old fake blonde bachelorettes;
5. Getting hypothermic on wind-chilled midnight Central Park bike rides, losing all feeling in fingers, wondering if I could remember enough of Wilderness First Aid training to save those fingers I cherish most (thumb, fore), trying not to open my mouth so that my cavity fillings wouldn’t freeze and hurt my sad metallic molars;
6. Caramelizing onions;
7. Gossiping about the worker bees who make queer politics run;
8. Drinking melted Queso de Papa cheddar cubes out of cavity-carvingly sweet Puerto Rican hot cocoa;
9. Amping up the war against the Juliuses with new weaponry: Brillo pads stuffed into apartment orifices, sticky traps with ultrasticky glue, spring-loaded poison darts, buckshot and a sawed-off shotgun. We (read: Laura) finally cleaned under the bathroom sink, where Julii had been feeding upon Boo’s food, and found a constellation of mouse poo. Constellation is not the right word - a galaxy? (Galaxias->lactaceous->lactose->Milky Way! La(c)tin turnz me on.) No...a fucking SHITLOAD of desiccated mouse shit blanketing the floor of the bathroom sink. And in the guest bedroom closet - Gravy Train kibbles! Julius has been dragging Boo’s food into the bedroom closet, that clever bitch! And then shitting and pissing all over our sleeping bags, tents, and ground tarps. But I’m happy to report small triumph: we found one mouse so long dead that its eyes were either gone or sunk somewhere into its skull in an ancient, overlooked glue trap by the record player. I covered him with a plastic bag then felt his hard little head through my plastic prophylaxis, then again felt like a Norman Bates for wanting to keep the corpse in my basement and call it Mother.
10. Reading Dred Scott v. Sandford and learning all about Taney’s theory of foundational political empowerment: if you don’t have it from the start, you ain’t never getting it!
11. Blibbity blibbity blah. I make too many lists. I’m gonna list myself into bed now.

Sorry for the public/private spew, folks. But you know, I've found that nothing puts me to sleep faster than bloggi......zzzzz......huh? Wha? Where am I?

Leaving for school in 3.5 hours kill me gaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh