Alestar213: Nah. It's time, y'know? I mean, the idea of moving out has been passed back and forth for about two years now. And. I don't know, maybe it's not time-- but maybe it is, and I need to do it.
Alestar213: I don't know. I'm no authority on sane living. :-)

calicobackwards: i think you should....there's something very spiritually fufilling about living in your own space.

Alestar213: I think maybe so. And, I mean, I have enough shit to decorate sixteen apartments-- and I can't use any of it here. And I don't a *me* space here, y'know?

calicobackwards: i totally understand that...i was like that when i was living next door with my grandparents. it drove me crazy.

Alestar213: I can imagine. :-)

calicobackwards: i think it would be wonderful to have your own place. then i could go hang out at "erin's place" and that would rock. :-)

Alestar213: Hah. That *would* rock.
Alestar213: Erin's place. Like the sound of that.

calicobackwards: so are we still road-trippin'? i put it on my wish list.

Alestar213: Plans were never my forte, darling . .

calicobackwards: *grin*
calicobackwards: one week, we'll simply call eachother up, and say "hey, let's go to new mexico!" and then we'll be there. :-)

Alestar213: Hah. I'm all about it. :-)

calicobackwards: i even purchased a travel-book so i can get my travel energy flowing. ;-)

Alestar213: Oooh. You're the man with the plan. I'm envious. ;-)
Alestar213: Actually . . I'm more tired than envious.

*

the beat dream:

People swarm around Jack Kerouac. He seems a little harassed, but as he's talking to the crowd I realize that when he references the conflict between his restlessness-- his wanderlust and desire for madcap adventures & people-- and his responsibilities-- his guilt over his mother and his desire to finally escape samsara into stillness-- he's also talking about the drugs, about how he couldn't be interested in writing without benzedrine or in love without mescaline; that the desire to go far out like that, out of the atmosphere, to make one's soul monstrous, as Rimbaud said, is the larger incarnation of that restlessness, and that it is also the opposite of home. I think about how this conflict is something I will have to resolve with myself-- not with drugs, 'cause that was never my scene, but with my equivalent struggle to leave the atmosphere.

I wander away from the crowd, lost in thought and a little sad, down a gravel road surrounded on both sides by thin forest that I think I can see through to other roads. Neal Cassady comes up alongside me and touches the 213 on my left shoulder without looking at me-- I'm wearing a tank top-- then hooks his finger into the armhole of my shirt and walks beside me like that, with his other hand in his pocket, looking down at the gravel road, not saying anything.

I don't know what to say, so I begin to quote what in the dream is a poem that Jack wrote about Neal but what in reality is a poem by Sekou Sundiata that I listened to in the car with Disa, driving aimlessly around Orlando a couple of summers ago. I say, "'Those long summer nights...waiting for war or heroin or revolution.'"

He doesn't look up. "'How we made poetry there, I do not know, except to say that you brought it to us. Poetry and sex-- burning in our minds, born again, writing and oralizing--'"

I say, "'pressing our verses against the moon.'"

Neal smiles and bobs his head bashfully at the ground. "See, I know it."

I know that in Jack's works Neal embodies the surrender to restlessness, the abandonment of home and the surrender to adventure and drugs, and maybe even a path through samsara, through the restlessness and madness, to the other side. But with Neal walking beside me like that, holding onto my shirt, hanging his head and understanding everything that Jack says about him, he seems more grown-up and self-possessed, a sad whole human aside from Jack's muse.

We come up to a wooden porch, with stairs that lead up to the screen door of an old country-style wooden house. As we climb the stairs, Neal finally raises his head and I say, "You know, when I was little, my teacher told me I needed to memorize lots of poems--"

Neal laughs and says, "You had a teacher?"

"--but I don't."

*

the update:

The truth is that I've become a little sick of my own sentences. But everything's okay. My father's fine and home again, I'm summa cum laude, my apartment is (mostly) clean, doqz's quilt and lise's story are very close to being done, Christmas passed without warning. I've pretty much camped out in Devon's apartment for the Winter Holiday, allegedly to burn CDs with her fancy technological equipment, but really just to plug in the christmas tree lights and drink coffee and stare out the window.

My sister Christina has started her period and now she has breasts and pimples and all that, and her face is lengthening and starting to look more like mine, with a gawkiness that will probably stay with her until she moves out on her own and her face gets thin with hunger and she develops deep hollows under her eyes, and maybe beyond that (see photo below). My mother bought her a leg-shaving kit for Christmas. Hayden, in the meantime, likes guns & sports and so I struggle to keep the contempt off my face whenever he tries to talk to me about those things; but he really is a superstar, he was recruited to a Knoxville all-star basketball team.

As for me, I'm also fine. I feel exhausted and a little stranded, but not unhappy, really. I had dinner with Cinderella, who probably you know all about. I expected it to make me sad by highlighting all the changes that life has wrought in me since I last saw her, or else to bring back all the hurt of our break-up, but instead it was only the pedestrian sadness of crackin' jokes with your beautiful ex-lover. It wasn't even bizarre. The chemistry and hyper-awareness was the same, nervous with each other, our dynamic and flirtation were exactly the same. I guess it always will be. She made me take my hair down, and she said, "I wish you'd had long hair in high school. Your long hair would've been like my belly button ring." That is to say, an acute sexual fixation. That belly button ring, guys, holy god.

She took a picture of us on her digital camera, and it is here. The picture doesn't capture the true measure of Cindy's loveliness, nor does it grant me any of the looks I'm going for in place of Well-Meaning Farmgirl; but you can see Doqz's quilt draped over some boxes in the background.

I have a bit of superficial thrombophlebitis in my left hand, which is an enflamed vein, and it's not very noticeable but sometimes I stare at it.

Other than that, the only exciting news is a small dangerous moment in the parking lot of Kohl's, a clothing and home decor store, a few days ago. I was walking away from my car and a gust of wind hit the side of my face, from the east, and I turned to look and saw the hills. Knoxville bleeds west into Farragut which bleeds west into Lenoir City and my hometown of Loudon. As you fade out of Knoxville, the buildings get smaller and the hills rise up, with long stretches of forest and field. So I turned my head and saw long nighttime blue fields, dark blue and looming hills behind them, a dark sky above them, all of it frigid winter cold and threatening. The cold wind hit me full in the face and a strange excitement exploded in my chest. I haven't felt anything like that in a long, long time. It was like pressing your cheek to the chilled glass window of the world.

--al