Sometimes the old, familiar fog settles in, the inability to be present.

This room could be any room.

The sun shines in, weightless. I hug my pillow for sensation, and it is soft, but not so much that I want to keep holding on. I get into the experience too deeply, and it doesn't seem all that pleasant. The fabric of my body weighs. I feel like something massive had struck me, and had knocked me out of my body, and we just don't know yet, my body & I.

Sometimes the world inspires very little feeling in me. Some internal holding pattern, and I don't know if the plane is going to land, or if it ever lands. And if it crashes, I'm not feeling a thing.

fanny has adventures in nola-land

i. Flew in late Thursday night; dinner at some swank-esque place; food (braised beef cheeks) was melt-in-mouth perfect, wine was dry Austrian. Good wine always reminds me of former lovers. Waitress was a Stuy-girl, and well, I love my Stuy-people. It's brethren; finding a Hunter-kid never happens, so Stuy kids are the next best thing. We know & run adjacent city-social-circles. Bought her a shot; her husband is currently doing Batman comics, which is awesome.

Staying on the Champs-Élysées. (If I could time travel, I'd have a chat with Roger Zelazny about his literary use of the Elysian Fields.)

--There is a nickel-loading automatic music box at the foot of my bed. Forget paying for ad-free Pandora; for the price of a loaf of bread in the early 1900's, I have saloon piano tunes.

ii. Friday was wrecked houses (I love decayed, decrepit structure), & fried chicken at Willie Mae's.  I don't feel like reviewing the food; it makes me feel like I'm doing a literary instagram. Would've rather explored the remains of the neighborhood than nom on greasy bird, but whatever, I can do that when I'm not traveling with my best friend.

Swung by the art museum on a whim; the temp exhibits (Mel Chin, Camille Henrot) were interesting. Chin was cool, the work was good, but his thoughts/consciousness was loud. I liked Henrot for not getting in the way of the work itself. Art is cerebral amusement/beauty, this era anyway. I harvested a few concepts: ocean of thought/subconscious, & multiple perspectives/experiences on one visual.
In the reg. collection, the statues from the Hindu pantheon creeped me out a little, though not to the degree that the Met's collection does. They were my family's ancient gods, prior to their migration across the ocean & lands in the late 1800's. My mother's patron bodhisattva/goddess was standing on the top floor, time-worn & alone. It was a strange note, to find something core to my family lineage, from gone centuries, on this other side of the world. She was worshiped; people prayed or meditated to her, and now she is a permanent piece on the topmost floor of a beauty-mausoleum on the banks of the Mississippi.

Afterwards, decompressed on the grass & made a bouquet off the bayou. Hit up a Creole sausage establishment for gator sausage, wound up on a spontaneous tour around the factory. Nadine fed us freshly smoked sausage: gator, spicy, boudin, french chorizo (chaurice), cut from endless yards of hot links with a machete-esque blade. We picked up gator meat for our city-foodieboys & stopped by the local supermarket. 

Couldn't find wine that suited my mood, although there were the essential Sancerres and Riojas. A local boy tried to flirt and impress with his taste for Verdi sparkling wine (sketchy bodega sugar booze!) He was friendly, rambled about football and the Giants. Seemed like a good guy, but dude, not that I'm a city-slicker kinda chick, I mean, I'm pretty weird/idiosyncratic even for New York, but sports aren't up my alley, except when I want to put the discomfort/sense of psychological distance into the guts of my academic/nerdy ilk. Plus giving up things for Lent/religion isn't in my thread of a happy existence. I give up nothing for mythos. Not that I could really be with a boy who talked Joyce or pretentious-literary either. Truly loving a thing, deeply, is one thing; talking endlessly about it, is like a dude who talks about how he's good at sex to anyone who'll listen. Anyway, enough commentary. At least Freud was coked up when he got into the psychology of things. It helped him bullshit, self-assured. At the core of it, dude was saying, "Yes, you." & I was saying, "You? No."

We prepped dinner; standard garlic & olive oil on everything for the grill. (Oil for cooking, butter for baking; not a rule, but nobody has to eat well as a rule either.) Then we hiked out, saw Washboard Chaz at The Spotted Cat. The bartender was new. You can always tell. (No, you can't.) Music was great; got me nostalgic for New York jazz & people though. I try to be present. It's hard sometimes. Home is home, so I like to forget it for a bit, even if I love it. It's right where I left it, with all my good sentiments. Was excited to leave the city & am happy to be here, but I'm pretty happy and content with life. It's a recreational vacation, not an escapist one. / Everyone (drunk) streamed in as the evening grew late. Our hosts were enjoying themselves; everyone was dancing. I stepped out for air, chatted with the bouncer (Honduran first-gen); he looked like a cuddly friend I once knew in my teens. Then I hit up the art market next door. 

People keep talking about how friendly people are here, but I think people are as friendly or unfriendly everywhere.

Dinner is dinner, was light & lovely in the backyard.

Me & Alair (alair & i) afterwards wandered the quarters, found the local bars (opposed to tourist bars; less vacation partiers and more people just having a drink or two), hit up The Spotted Cat, again, & then wandered the open air gallery.

On a side street, I ran into a poet with a typewriter. He's 27 and from the city (NY) too. Was a native, but not my kind. He was a private-school K-12-er and I was public school magnet. Post-bohemian money versus cutthroat intellectual meritocracy.
I requested a poem, and offered one in return. He typed, & I scribbled in dark green ink on my heavyweight notebook paper. He was selling his poetry to drunks. I started readings in the city. It's worse than two communists in the same room; it's two native NYC poets of different circles on a New Orleans street. He had his bottle of hipster beer that he kept spilling and I had my novelty go-cup of scotch. We read our poems and exchanged them. I wished him in life, everything he deserved, no more & no less.

Afterwards, me & a. wandered the empty streets and window-shopped the closed storefronts. We found ourselves where we had dinner the night before. There was a young couple sharing a sandwich on a doorstep. They were in love, & happy. You can always tell by the way they look at each other. I wanted a bodega sandwich, so we had one, and it was good. Late summer-night bodega sandwiches are always a highlight.

I noticed some incredibly shady guy turned around from his path to follow us, so I casually modded our path & lost him; we slipped down a long dark alleyway, & into an open-air atrium of sleepy apartments in the dead of night. I've been losing creeps for years. Also finding secret tranquil places of gorgeousness. It was moonlight & lamps & water fountains. If this was Starcraft, my hero units successfully avoided detection from lame enemy units and entered a cinematic cut-scene.

We sat & talked about dating, and how we'd fail Bechdel on a technicality if we were a movie. Sometimes we love people we know it won't work out it, or how sometimes we fall in love with ideas or a relationship but never get to know a person. Dating is difficult; I've kinda been writing off everyone I'd ever meet in my twenties. It doesn't even matter if they're the right person, because I'm not ready, but I'm thinking, maybe that's the wrong way to go about it too.

It's easy to love people at their best. It's when you love them, even at their worst and most flawed, and you know you won't kill them, that you might work out. Maybe I write off love, & people too easily. I get so avoidant. I don't want to commit to something, just to have it fail because hey, I'm kinda a little guarded bitch when it comes to my feelings, but eh. Suck it trust/control issues. Just gotta let go to be happy. I've gotten excellent at going with the flow in most arenas, except love. The more emotionally invested I become in someone, the more guarded & detached & distant I get, and it sucks. It's that stupid hangup that once I let myself believe in something beautiful, it's going to break, and then I'm going to be so damn sad. The funny thing, I've learned though, is that even if I write off something on a cerebral/rational level, apparently, the ups and downs are still there. Tenderness still happens, and soul-gutting heartache still happens. The only difference, is whether I'm honest & vulnerable about it when it still matters. Crazy sex is easy. Love, & the willingness to be emotional when it's infinitely easier not to be, that takes guts. Guts. Who gives a shit about sexual godhood when you're a copout when it comes to feelings? !!! Intimacy & trust is sexy. And really honest communication.

Anyway, afterwards, we wandered into the local Irish dives. We pretty much found the best lowkey places and avoided the rest of the world.

We hit up late-night voodoo shops.

And then, I spotted pole-dancers in a sketchy looking window in a sketchy part of town. Alair was iffy about going in, but I promised to get one-drink only and we could leave immed' if it was too sketch, and it was victory! Pole-dancers were up front, but then I was like, hey, there's a back! And we went. It was a huge diva drag show/mostly nekkid twerk party in the back. So good. Made the night.

The dancing ended. We wound up chilling along the dewy Mississipi; it reminded me so much of Bensonhurst. We ended with pizza. A mistake, because when people outside of New York order pizza, they are ordering a disgusting, fat, bullshit, tasteless travesty that passes for pizza. All good. It was 4am, which meant it was 5am in NYC; which meant it was almost bedtime.

Cabbed home. That's like, at least 15 different things crammed into a long, long day.

We're hitting up the swamp next.

when i'm down, she puts the water on for tea, and water for the orzo.

i wish i could be a little bit of something else. could do with a little love.
everything is so different when the feeling sweeps me from myself.

i don't like the disenchantment that i live with. i want different eyes and a different heart; i want my ease to fall. i'm too young to be like this. i want all those things that made me harder, to erase away.

yes, there were bad choices, and yes, there were mistakes. yes, someone took something from me.
i didn't let it kill me and make me rot, but it's another scar on my psyche. i wear all these things.

up and down, i don't know who i am, and then i do.
i'm starting to think about buying out on my mind. who needs this navelgaze garbage in me? i don't need this in me.

everyone's gotten different. people who were bright have dulled out. it's always cold. people aren't warm anymore; they just lack that life. dead fires all about. it's the mellowing. i'm so exhausted of feeling that nothing holds. this numbness becomes mine too, more and more.

i'd rather hurt than feel nothing. i miss the pain. all this impotent, flattened, restless rage.
she was unhappy, and then she was numb, and then she stopped being the gorgeous girl she was.
i don't want to be like that. i don't want the internal death.

bodily mortality is nothing when there is a chokehold grip that suffocates from inside.


..okay. enough bullshit. gonna shower it off, gtfo, & find a good laugh.

wherever i go, i'm still there.

sometimes, coming to terms with yourself means coming to terms with the things you can't change. i could learn a new language, write a new song, paint something moody & lovely. i could dance. i could drink, but it's not an escapism i care deeply for, and i drink for the taste anyway.
life is whatever you fill it with. i don't want a lot.

maybe i could do music for a while. what is love anyway?

i remember existential ennui at two and a half, and now i'm twenty five and a half. all the flavors but everything starts looking the same, feeling the same. self-medicate with everything, music, sex, drugs, afternoons alone, novels, art, television, paint, strangers, friends, urbanscapes, wandering.

at 8, on an august day, the baby was asleep, so i sat on my window sill with the voyages of dr. dolittle in a favorite skirt. there was no guard rail or screen; only myself on the little ledge, right over the backyard. and i thought, if i jumped, i'd break bones. or i could grow up. i could become a lawyer, or anything else. and maybe things would be different. maybe life would become magical. i didn't believe that good or evil existed. there were only brief people, with their streams of drives & desires, some doing pleasant things, others, unpleasant things. i was waiting for the age to begin, where i'd have my multiple careers, my art, my lover, my children, and my cohorts.

and the world has progressed and merged a little more, but my interiors haven't really changed. the same emotions & possibilities exist. people drift in and out of my life. i try different jobs and arts. some appeal more than others, depending on the day. i am the same girl i was at 8, but with an older body and more awareness thrown in. what is joy? books are my companion, as are my own thoughts. i love a lot, and i don't love a lot. tastes & colors, i am an easily bored experimentalist trying to find something that sticks. and i don't want romance. and i don't want ugly cynicism. there is only reality. the rat races go on, and materialism goes on, both spiritual and physical, and people weep, from happiness or suffering, and i am a strange outsider with only a taste for the unworked truths.

i want the world, and all the worlds that exist in souls. i can stay put, which is a hard choice, but nothing holds me down.