Thu, 31 Aug 2006

nacht
It is not right to call it daylight, as this is not yet a time for activity, for plans and schemes and duties, this is a middle-time left empty for preparation, for mirror-staring and deep breaths in the shower, and this is why I like to stay awake until the dawn, taking in all the preparation of all the people in all the houses while I creep back to my hole, racing the daybreak to rooms without windows and piles of quilts where I spend the better hours in sleep, where I am happy, and when I open my eyes again it is dusk, the settling time, the point between the hours you sell for profit and the hours you keep for yourself. This schedule of mine was endearing when I was twenty and spent the better part of the small hours crawling out of my skin wooing difficult post-feminist scholars impressed with zine publication and orange blotter, but I am thirtythree now and by all accounts not aging well. This doesn’t matter; I am a night person deep in my rotted organs and there is no changing this trait as my habits are not suited to sunny hours. I am not a person who appreciates hard work and prudent planning so much as gory details and drunk-dialed confessions and insomnia-sick rants and blurry-eyed promises. I like playing Galaga for twenty bucks a game with shiver-sweating truckers out in Elk Run, I like sitting beneath the big elm at Mount Olivet Cemetery with the tape recorder picking up spirit-sounds, I like breaking and entering foreclosed slaughterhouses with flashlights and sandwiches, I like staying up past my bedtime and telling secrets and I am okay with not being at peace. If I have betrayed my promise it was only to sidestep obligations that never had anything to offer and I refuse to be sorry for breaking promises I never made. There’s still some dark left outside and there’s a million places to go even here in the middle of nowhere and if you can’t sleep you can always give me a call.
(03:30.08.31.2006) [/scrytch] #