Bad Vibes

Something was fucking with me last night.  I'll blame it on the moon.  I almost forgot to go out and look at it as the night was cloudy and I was wrapped up on the couch watching movies.  I got an email from a friend, though, with a picture of the moon, and I quickly said, "We need to go see."  We staggered out around ten to look up and watch it for a moment as the clouds thinned and swept quickly across its face.  "I would have felt bad if we had forgotten," Ili said. 

We are so lazy together and are not much for crowds.  A small cafe or an intimate restaurant are fine, but bumping up against people over and over again is just tiring.  So we went for early evening cocktails after my beauty appointment (which takes a very long time) to a local bar she had not yet been to.  One cocktail and out.  It was not our sort of place.  So we picked up some Thai coconut soup and had a beer at the small bar there as we waited, the waitresses all winking and giving me the eye because I was with a woman and not alone as I usually am when I come for takeout.  Then we stopped at the liquor store where I bought some Campari and a bottle of Kettle One, and then we were back home.  Earlier we had gone shopping for a curtain rod since the fixit man had finished raping me (though he did give me a lesser price) and we tried to hang it.  "You're being too forceful," Ili said just before I broke the rod. I am not a handy man.  "At least I bought expensive sheets," I said as I had purchased an extra set of 720 thread count white something cotton bedding.  I try. 

Ili made a whiskey sauce to go on the bread pudding she had been making and came to sit and eat and watch the last half of "Annie Hall" which she had never seen (it came out the year of her birth).  I wanted her to see that Diane Keaton was the precursor to the star of "Kissing Jessica Stein" which we had watched the night before.  "It won an Academy Award," I said defensively for the film really doesn't hold up so well now. 

When it was over, I rented "Factory Girl."  She'd seen it, and I hadn't, and she liked the film very much, she said, and wouldn't mind seeing it again.  The film put me in a bad mood.  Or maybe it was Ili's recounting tales of her former "decadence."  I like the metaphoricity of drugs, I said, but not the way they make me feel.  Pot puts me to sleep which is good, and codeine takes away the pain of illness which is wonderful.  But for walking around and enjoying life. . . . I grew up around too many druggies--heroin addicts and glue sniffers and meth users and weekend acid freaks--and they were very, very boring at best and insufferable at worst.  Those all were wasted hours.  And privileged kids who wanted to get all ghetto never interested me.  By the end of the movie, I was in a terribly shitty mood. 

And the day hadn't gone well, either.  The fucking post office doesn't return my calls or emails.  The package tracker says the camera is still sitting in the same spot as it was five days ago.  I contacted the seller on eBay and he sent back to me the post office response.  Ili says I'm almost certainly right, the package has been stolen and has left the system.  I am despondent about it all. 

And so under the Blue Moon, I tossed and turned and felt like a drug addict, images from the film haunting my semiconscious dreams.  I would wake in fits and starts every five minutes unable or unwilling to breath, my lower back hurting as badly as it has in a long while.  And if I didn't wake to my own starts, I woke to Ili's who seemed to be doing no better than I.  I felt as if morning would bring me no respite from it all but only greater and deeper depression and misery.  I couldn't sleep and was afraid to rise.  All the world seemed rotten or broken like the sad and horrible plight of Edie Sedgwick.  I would be surrounded by Andy Warhol and the Factory workers. 

I used to stay at the Chelsea Hotel when I went to NYC beginning in 1975.  I read Jim Carol's "Basketball Diaries" with great relish.  I love the music of the Velvet Underground and am amazed at Warhol's precociousness in enacting in art the ideas of postmodernism.  I wanted to see it all.  I wanted to be there for a minute and then go home and go to bed, a momma's boy waking beautiful and healthy in the morning. 

And now it is morning and the rain has gone and the skies are turning a dead gray-blue, the tinny light promising heat and humidity and oppression. 

But perhaps it was all the fault of the Blue Moon.  I am witless and without the camera I so desire.  I will need to exercise for a long time and sweat this attitude away, rev the engine and blow out the bad vibes.  A million push ups.  A thousand pull ups.  Gallons of clear water. 

Something. 

I'll post an ominous-looking picture today, a creepy street magicians performing for a group of kids.  It seems apropos.