set the sails, I feel the winds a'stirrin'

I write to you by candlelight, the bright lights of Manhattan dancing on the horizon outside my window. Inside our apartment, everything smells like cinnamon and autumn and I drink a beer that tastes like cloves. Everything is warm these days, and I want to live forever under blankets, reading, writing, thinking. Then, when forever is done, I want to take the train for the next forever, riding into sunsets, past the places we have all, regrettably, forgotten.
Tonight I bought a cd by the Low Anthem and it's beautiful, songs about train rides from Louisiana to Ohio and it, as so many things do, makes me want to be wearing gingham and far away from computers and e-mail and all that which I'm not sure has made us a better people.
I loved tonight, watching the new Coen brothers movie (A Serious Man) and drinking tea in the bookstore until midnight and dancing down Broadway to the subway but, ah, what I would give to buy and live out my days in that bookstore in Idaho.

pining for the moon

My friend Andrew convinced me to actually keep up with this blog, so here I am, at 10:36 at night, sitting in my friend Kim's house before going to bed and writing to you, my dear unknown reader, of things close to my heart. I am back in the place I truly have missed more than I believe it's possible to explain. It doesn't make much sense, I suppose, to miss a place where I lived only for six months, but Wyoming, and Pinedale, have such a pull on me. I felt so emotional that I almost cried when I crossed the border from Idaho to Wyoming, listening to Bob Dylan and Carrie Rodriguez and, passing Fremont, I breathed. Understand I love New York City and I know my time to really hunker down in Pinedale has passed, but I write secret love letters to Wyoming all the time, believing those thoughts will somehow meander across the country and land in the tree branches now covered in yellow and soon to be gloriously, genuinely bare.

those were the reasons, that was New York

Now, there is Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel" and dim lights and melting snow and it's spring, already, I think.
(p.s. "all men shall be sailors until the sea frees them")
The city is grand and all nooks and crannies and full of people who are so inspiring and shall never know it. There is the man who works two jobs for his five kids and who sleeps an hour and a half many nights but is so happy and shows me around the thrift shop where he works and points out all his favorite orange shirts and says, "don't I have a great job? I get to sing and dance all day long and nobody tells me to stop." When I leave, I wave goodbye and doubt I'll ever see him again. How is it possible that so many people sift through our lives, indent it, but fade to a speck on the horizon of memory?
I want to write honestly, truthfully, with force, but does anyone do this anymore? I distrust blogs, their faux-realism, their bluntness with no point. What will I be like at 80? At 27 (27?!), I already miss paper, its mustiness, its imperfections. The screen - it doesn't bend or yellow or crinkle with age.
I have too much to say and never know where to begin and so I skim only the surface. So, here it is, the surface: I am reading Lush Life by Richard Price and am loving it so far. I sometimes love my job but wonder if I am not meant to have a little cottage in Alaska/Maine/Montana and grow my own vegetables and grow old in silent moonlight.
In these months, here in New York City, I have wandered around Chinese fish markets, eaten honeydew near gutters, watched the lights of Manhattan appear, slowly, from my window in Queens. Alley cats fight outside my apartment and everything in this city can be so mean and so forgiving all at once. A homeless man holds the door for me and I want to cry.

it's all half-light in here

it comes in small pieces, little bits of your cabin with gingham, lots of gingham. there's your email that hits, hard, and i think about it while listening to yo la tengo and the new old 97s cd and jonimitchellbobdylanalways. my hair gravitates outside, tired of the inside of this toyota corolla that doesn't have the character of my old, rusting '91 honda accord. i almost died in that car, on the side of some wyoming road in the middle of a blizzard and when i thought i had lost you, it was me in that car, all wool sweaters from mexico and tears above Fremont Lake. it was me and my roommates and talk of Life, What's In Store? and rilo kiley in the background and avocado sandwiches and we shrugged and laughed and said ah well as long as there's letters by candlelight i guess it will be alright. there's too much light these days, too many ceiling lights, not enough non pretentious dingy bars. here, the lack of light is on purpose and otherwise it's a flood of halogen, an assault on your senses until you adapt to an all fake world. your email hits, hard, and my heart subsists on google images and the light that emanates from this laptop. there's so many silences and so much other-meaning behind my words and i think i'll die with novels having been written in my pauses and ellipses...

and the night, i think

sometimes, i think i could be quiet for the rest of my life. i would make sounds, of course, but not really speak. i could clap instead of asking for cheese or ice cream, and gurgle when wine drips from mouth corners and stains wood and cotton. most of all, i could stare into fire until, finally, i stop feeling so young and insignificant against the backdrop of something so relentlessly ancient. every fire i light reminds me of death and the Sahara and nights spent on the dock overlooking the dirty jammed up river next to my dorm room and where i shouldn't have been in and everything i've meant to remember and forget and dance to and laugh with and at and the end.
the song "Brockwell Park" by the Red House Painters only exists once on youtube, and even then, it's just a cover. it's comforting to know not everything is online, available at the tip of your fingers, only a couple keystrokes away. what's so wrong with searching, with taking trains and more trains until finally you can find a record store where the song does exist, by the artist, and you can take it home in context.
i need to call back so many friends, but instead i've been wishing for a pen pal. i'd tell her/him about apple picking and how i can't wait for fall because of the too big sweaters and everything being red and all the sadness everywhere.

bursting into light

"Autumn Leaves" plays and a thunderstorm has just subsided and though it's summer, I can smell fall. Everything is burning and red and I'm living smaller these days, more carefully, less rhythmically. An old friend of mine told me my e-mail was an "opus" and I laughed, smallishly, because I write so few e-mails and letters these days. And none of them feel anywhere near the War and Peace-length pieces I once wrote. These days, my e-mails are all about the gray winter, the waveless ocean, the cold cheeks smashed to sand, to rock. I find myself tensing, easily hurt, quickly climbing into myself, wanting to bury my head amongst my own marrow.
I prepare for another move, another round of feeling slightly out of place. I'll be happier there, I guess though I'm clearly not sure, tucked somewhere away from the strip malls boasting too many CVS stores and even the pizza shops grate on me, being a constant, albeit silent, reminder that I'm here. When I tell people about Morocco, they tell me I'm brave to have gone there, and that makes me want to cry. I'm tired of explaining myself. I'm tired of never feeling like I entirely connect to anywhere. Except, of course, Wyoming and Morocco.