Currently Listening Edith Piaf: Her Greatest Recordings 1935-1943 By Edith Piaf L'Accordeoniste see related

memoirs from kutztown, as relevant now as ever.  read and enjoy some rambling writing from yours truly:

i long for youth, the removal of an overwhelming staleness that follows us all into adulthood. the tears pushed at the floodgates of my eyes at the loss of common beauty. i swallowed them, so much bitter, heated water mixed with the phlegm of my week-old cough. this is not a medicine. this is downing vial after vial of slow poison. it eats at my stomach as surely as the burnt coffee i drink now to get rid of that acrid filthy taste of regret in the back of my throat. this is dying painfully through each quick pack of cigarettes, smoking out the minutes, my very own beekeeper for my very own hive of bees.
people laugh somewhere in their nighttime lives, don't they? no matter that my heart expands and hurts, or that i keep my time on my wrist and the clock beside me, but i still am unsure of the day of the week. i am so excrutiatingly conscious of the passing of time that i cannot sleep for more than a few hours without waking, lost for those first blinding seconds in every instance.
there is a sadness sliding inside so large and indescribable that i can't even touch it, comprehend it. the incandescent grotesque metal flowers of the gas pumps know. the broad, back-boned snake-trucks, hinged to slither down the lazy map of highways know. but i do not. nor will i ever, until i am on that beautiful fringe with them, looking in through some dirty imaginary window, the objects on the other side of the glass too vague to be anything but impartial about. yes, beautiful, the observer, the watcher and the thinker without the cauterization of the action, without the attachment or the detachment or anything, really. just watching and thinking and continuing to watch and think and watch and think. give me that outside, the absence of the obligation to participate and be human and belong to other humans in ways even we can't fathom from our inner sanctums of morality, of principles, of emotions. spiders see only the gossamer strands; the woman looking up at the corner of the doorframe sees the web in it's entirety. for all it's beauty, for all it's deadly purpose, she sees it's connectedness and it's whole. the spider will live out it's life on one simple thread if left undisturbed, never realizing that if it extended a single clawed leg, another line awaits.

great humming cars nose down the street below the window like gargantuan beasts of the night. they rumble and purr along, regardless of hour or day, regardless of me just inside the only still-lit house, curled on the bed, bookworm, and jealous. so many different places to go, so many lives being lived out and moving speedily and efficiently by. and the behemoths upstreet, the bus company, the tourists, the locals, all clashing, crashing together and just as violently apart. the tread of each foot on each stair into each bus is a different account, a different view, a different life and set of dreams. i want to know them all. i want to be them all. one lifetime isn't enough.