What have I listened to today? Calexico, of course, guero canelo, after that version yesterday, Joey Burns and Gaby Moreno in the light, and the Regent generally doing what it does best, being a symbol of the resurgence of Downtown Los Angeles, once so sketchy and dimly lit and unsafe, and crack addicts on street corners, and homeless people everywhere. I've been here three years, I don't know how much it's changed since the 90s or whatever, but I've seen transformations. New bars, restaurants, old shut down theaters opening up again, prettier people, well I can't really tell about the last bit, LA always has pretty people, always, without exception. It's a superficial city, and it's been changing me every day, for good and for bad. I'm not going to be editing this shit, not right now anyway, give it the free form spontaneous bad grammar feel that my once idol Ti Jean advocated. Well, I guess I still admire him, it's just, it's just, people told me I would outgrow him, and what am I if not infinitely guided by other people's opinions. I haven't really, I still think of reading Dean's description of Sal as the most exciting parking lot attendant in the world, and feeling an old 26 as compared to Sal, 21, so full of life and the universe and exploding roman candles, and feeling like life was ahead of me, all of it, and at 15, it was. Now, I don't know anymore, I'm as old as Dean, and I'm not sure if the paths I'm treading are anything but trodden. I hear fireworks outside in my neighbourhood, other times of the year, I'm half-afraid it's gunshots. I like living here though, the 'sketchy' part of LA, that's a word I learned after coming to America, that's a word white people use a lot to describe predominantly hispanic and black neighbourhoods, but that's the way of the world. I want to read Doctor Sax now, let Ti Jean take me back effortlessly into the phosphorescent childhood of a person I've never been, in a place I doubt I'll visit, why would I want to go to Lowell anyway? Take me back to the ghosts that haunted him but not me, I know no Gerards, but we all have our ghosts, and sometimes they know each other, spectral acquaintances through this constant flow of unreality that is our dream-like childhood memory recollections. But I digress, I was talking about this neighbourhood, South Central LA, Fruit Town Brims, and fireworks that reminded me so much of festivities back home, festivals of light, unfettered, unbound, the streets lit up, the skies saturated with falling stars, your lungs filled with as much smoke as freedom can afford. Reminded me of home, took me back, made me traverse the dreamlike channels that memory so effortlessly affords. Different events, different places, different light, different that they actually occurred, but they did, you know that, and they do take you back, take me back, to things that shaped me, and are a permanent refuge. We never really lose them, they change, and grow, and sometimes shrink, but they stay with us, and return, voluntarily, when the present reality of the world starts to become overwhelming, or involuntary, like the smell of burnt firecrackers and a pretty girl's face through the red smoke of the aftermath of a 4th of July neighbourhood carnage, well, my neighbourhood anyway. I'm listening to Howe Gelb now, and I want to move to Mojave a little bit, but not too much at this point. I'm not very excited about the wind turning my skin to leather, but I do like the idea of fires in the night, and the people that you see pass through the flames, and the whiskey that warms you even as the desert turns to ice, but that's just me romanticizing the American wild west. I do like watching the dying embers of a burning campfire though, there's something so obviously poetic about it. I think I'll write everyday, well, almost everyday. I think that's something I need to do. Are you reading this? Are you? What about you? I don't know if I care. But if you do, please tell me you liked it. I'd be crushed otherwise.
The piano reminds me of fading light in the evening.
Excursion Disruption.
