love in the alley
2002-07-20, 10:42 a.m.



I know, I know, I have no business writing poetry -- but hopefully none of you took it seriously. I started out writing an actual entry last night/this morning and I felt myself wanting the ability to encapsulate my life or at minimum, the evening's events into a haiku or something. But I've never practiced writing poetry, or haiku, or anything particularly poetic, even when I was writing songs in high school.

And speaking of writing songs in high school, yesterday I pulled out my box of cassettes with the goal of locating some recordings I had made in Nepal. (The nice lad who recently performed at work had mentioned that part of his website included one-minute "vacations", just little sound files that the cube monkeys can access to escape -- we got to talking about Nepal and I'd said I'd look for something to go on the website.) While sifting through a strange archive of Catbus musical history, which includes such gems as Duran Duran's "Rio", AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" and the Circle Jerks, I came across some old recordings from my high school peace punk band. Most of the lyrics were either written by my brother or in collaboration, and covered environmental issues, animal rights, human rights, vain consumerism, etc. Bro's got the master copy of our 4 track recordings, I think I'll see if he'll let me transfer the tracks to CD -- sometimes you just need a trip down old idealistic nostalgia lane.

So I feel like I smoked a pack of cigarettes last night. I managed to watch the bands I wanted to see (Prof. C, Deerhoof) in the claustrophobia inducing Smell without succumbing to panicky retreat, which is good. I think just having some sense of what conditions (unconsciously) induce panic for me is helpful -- I managed to stand in a place that had some breathing room, so all was good. I really really like Deerhoof (hadn't seen them live before), so that was huge incentive to quell any inclination to flee to wide open alley spaces.

It was also quite nice to chat with old and new friends -- despite the fact that we were hanging out in a urine-soaked alley down misery lane, there was a nice aura of warmth and friendliness.

Speaking of friends, another thing resurfaced yesterday afternoon that I hadn't thought about in a while -- a dirty rhyme that my mother loves to recite:

"Friends may come and friends may go,

and friends may peter out you know,

but good friends stay through thick and thin,

peter out or peter in."



last - next



old | profile | notes | rings | diaryland