Today is June 22

Well, at least it's not June 27. Or thirty-seventh, which is what I typed first.

So much is going on, and nothing is going on at all. Tonight I am away from work, so to speak, so I'm sitting in my apartment with nothing to do.

Because I have taken a leave of absence from my damned muck-up of a school career, finally having made that appointment with my adviser, and honored it ("Well, you seem to like school a lot! Here, fill out these forms and see just what you've been up to." -Thanks for the reminder.), I have secured the summer off. It's time to regroup.

Grades were really awful this time around, an incomplete and a failure, absolutely chiding my procrastination, absent stole, general position in life right now, et. al. Thanks, Grades! I love sarcasm with a healthy dose of symbolism, and stuff, you know, I was ready for another Semiotics Entry. Ah, but the grades are not to blame, they're my own damned fault, let it be. Even if they are glaringly indicative of everything that I don't want to admit.

The Castle is splitting up, and I need to decide if the last six classes are worth the few additional thousands of dollars in students loans that they're going to rack up. Of course they probably are! Married to this decision is the necessity of a new place of dwelling, likely another year-long lease, and all at the expense of the amenities that Karfilov and Beatrice provide--Internet, without which I wouldn't be able to not keep up with Something Else, and, in a pinch, hard liquor--like the other night, when I got jumped by three guys, one of which split my lip wide open. All they took was a lot of blood, all they walked away with was some perverted sense of drunken satisfaction. The West Philadelphia Hyenas, settling for second-hand slop.

On a somewhat related note, thanks go out to the asshole working the Cube on Saturday night, because I'm really glad I wasn't drunk when these guys jumped me.

Also, I think I have to start paying back the student loans I already have, unless I can get those deferred.

A plan would be finding all of this out while seeking out a better job than the one I have, uh, what's that called? Getting on with my life? I'm painfully content right now, too much so, with sitting here, in the miserable heat, and not doing anything. Not spending money, not going out...except that I'm already bored to pathetic tears, and this is only the second night I've spent like this so far. I'm going to need more money, or something to occupy my brain. Alcohol works, other things work too, and those things need to be the better ride. Get on board, the bell is ringing! Read and write...ah, but now we're being forced to take initiative, aren't we! Once that threshold is crossed...but you've got to lift one leg and cross, that threshold isn't going to move under you while your feet stand still.

Karfilov is-

Beatrice is-

Maow is-

Everything. She sat me down last week. The night before Karfilov was to graduate she looked at me and told me to get it all together, and she's right, and I have so much to do, and I blame the motivation that I don't have, or that I've buried, but I'm sure it's all right here, somewhere, under the grease and sweat of the last two years in Philadelphia; there's a boy, a man, a writer, a dreamer, a performer, who can do so much, she said, whose voice can be heard and should be, who has something he needs to accomplish, before...

And she's right, and I owe it to her, and I owe it to many other people. Wake up calls here, there...stories in my brain, characters, screaming to get out, screaming so loudly, so vividly, that they wake me up in the middle of the night, and stay with me all day, when I try to work out their messages. They don't leave me alone.

Maow is-

--not here. I wish she were.

I'm listening to new music on my third Pandora station, "Inner Universe". It's based on a Yoko Kanno composition of the same name (theme song, Ghost in the Shell) and the work of a house band called iiO. Nadia Ali is incredible, and it was her legs on the cover of 2006's Poetica:



...that will entice me to buy the album when I see them in a store somewhere. Until then, I'll have this music thumping on while I work away the summer.

I've got a play to finish, after all.

Beatrice's Job

Hello, readers! [snort!]. If you've been following this blog for a year tomorrow (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!) then you might have some idea why I haven't written in almost a month. That's right, it's the mid-to-end term slump! Fortunately, I'm in much better shape this term than I have been for the past three, late taxes and unknown school future and miserable job and lousy apartment situation and no money and the pressure of living and general exhaustion aside. Wow, looking back things haven't really changed. I'm listening to music on the television, though, and I've just heard that The Bird's the Word, only the Rivingtons told me, not the Trashmen. To be fair, the Trashmen's bird was a Surfin' Bird.



But enough on that. I can't even begin to recap everything that's happened over the course of May. A night behind the line, Un cochino de ensaladas y nachos ranks pretty high on the list; just getting back from West Virginia:



were I spent a weekend with family and family friends and had an amazing time; wavering between Katharine and Kansas, actually, spending time with Katharine is fun while it lasts, but she'd never go see Just Wright with me, which wasn't the original plan but it's what we did anyway, Kansas and I, and I'll bet she doesn't have a spare VCR in her closet, like Kansas did, that she'd practically throw at me after a freakin' 9:30 staff meeting on a Sunday morning, for the love of God, Kansas, please don't get yourself fired, I wouldn't make it there without you; and then there was the woman, the teacher, I met a few days ago when I was waiting for the train, four hours is a long time to wait for a train, but I showed her and her four-year-old rosy little daughter around town, and we got coffee and she really enjoyed the quaint obscurity of a place she's been visiting for years and never gotten around to knowing; reading Virginia Woolf and feeling intimidated by the possibility of meeting a comrade right there in the pages of her mind; the bikini contest at the Cube the other night, that was fun too, even if I couldn't see a damned thing.

Buying copies of ELO's Greatest Hits, Sly and the Family Stone's Greatest Hits, and, out of left field, The Blueprint 3, because I absolutely can't get these songs out of my head; enjoying my homebrew recipe Queen Bitch so much that I want to make it again; sunburns and cuts; playing a Marshall cabinet that's probably four feet tall, and standing in front of it with the volume all the way up and my pants rattling around my legs and me not even caring at all; catching a two-foot long Drum (I insist it was a Bass, of course) with my screwball brother; the Flyers; laughing at the guys at the Cube who, on dares, chuck baseballs at the tall church roof across the street and of course narrowly miss the large stained-glass windows; upset that one of them used my friend, who is a more beautiful person than he'll ever deserved in ten miserable lifetimes; buying my boss (the hot one) a beer, and finishing it anyway because she left; the weather, which can't make up its mind; starting a play.

Yeah, this is the top of the list. If I remember anything else I'll throw it in there, in red though, so you know it's an edit.

If my May appears exciting and memorable, though, you should hear about Beatrice's month, because it will absolutely validate mine. His has been full of sitting, and occasionally standing, he visited me at the Chain one Monday; reading, a touch of writing, some guitar playing but not much; and doctor's visits, and subscriptions, and pills. Eating, stretching (his latest obsession), and one visit home, for another doctor's appointment, but also because he needs to do laundry and the washing machine is jammed.

For a long time I have wondered what Beatrice would have done in a previous life, because in this one he's not suited to much. He's lazy, a recluse: he wakes up late, with a regular morning routine of television or the internet until sometime in the mid-afternoon, when he takes a shower. Then he reads more, or may occasionally venture out for food or a change of scenery. He's stingy with cash. He talks and is narrow-mindedly opinionated, knowing only what he reads, never what he experiences; he's a fine speaker and performer, when he generates an audience, which he can do but only amoung the congregated unsuspecting. He has dreams and goals but none of them are within his reach, making him a constant, pathetic dreamer. Above and beyond he is celibate, though his sexuality is certainly questionable at this point.

So I says to myself, Self, what kind of job could have possibly existed for this kind of person back in the olden days, back before the Internet?

The answer came swifter than I expected. Beatrice is a Priest.

Lassen wir uns nicht fremden!