Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Compassion. Drawing on something big.

At this moment Yours Truly works, as usual, but is taking a break to write to epinw about a moment that YT would like to say is fleeting but it is more lingering.

I believe we are all moment collections - lingering and fleeting. And in part that is why photographic documentation of our lives is tantamount to memory. They validate our existence, they document small things that we have, or could have, forgotten.

Tar Balls in the Heart.

These tar balls appear. I like to think of them as tar balls, bad memories old and young that I'd like a nice crew of people to scoop up with common shovels, place into bags, and cart away before they're stepped in or make the air more acrid.

Momentary break for a visual treat, a hideous mannequin in a lobby of a certain Middling City suburban hotel. The mannequin is perpetually serving up streams of champagne to be grabbed by imaginary guests from a precarious champagne pyramid. Surrounded by a watery field of fiery poppies. This stands for creativity in the suburbs of the MC.


At this moment the iPad - which insists upon listing all music in some Apple default alphabetical position - led to The National's Afraid of Everyone, a song that I've barely noted until now. Now African Sunshine by Foday Musa Suso.  Next will be Afro Blue by Dee Dee Bridgewater and only three more until the other Neil's After the Gold Rush. Who knew the alphabet could be so serendipitous.

At this juncture there have been a few moments when YT stalls in thought on the memory of what was happening a year ago - what the culprit has rewritten, manipulatively as some sort of writing experiment, an emotional foray that meant nothing, a rewriting that stars me as the culprit.

In short.
The classic tale of one's friend behaving in a very altered manner, the gradual physical change, the crazed behaviour that the person in throes and enthralled cannot see (yet) or cannot face, witness, or admit.

(nice: Cat Power's After It All. Cat Power, universal b.f.f. to everygirl)

Truth, a nice thing to know, or have, within reason.
YT led to Truth by a complete stranger.
And after that gleaning that horrid sense of all nerve endings gone electrically haywire, that dry-mouthed do-battle response.

All in all, it is over.
That crisis at that time.
I now muse on who it was important to tell of that break - who joins one's wagon circle when indeed the wagons need to be a-circled.

Agari Jo, by Yasuko Yoshida.
And now a hunger for Japan once again, that will be the next big destination perchance.

Should what could have ended ended.
There are good moments.
And then there are not.
There is a bond for certain, and greater good than bad.
And we do all miss certain people, I believe, forever.

If I could, I would some evenings be back in a certain restaurant in a certain city with a certain man - laughing, loving, walking along, thinking, speaking oso easily.

Guess we all have our recurring photographs.
It's just a matter of what is pursued, withheld, pursued, withheld.

Love as thick as tar.