After dealing with a few days of boredom, I borrowed my mother's car the other night and watched Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) with Rachael and her brother.I hadn't seen the movie in awhile, and I'd forgotten how good it is. I strongly recommend you see it.
I mean, look at that picture. How bad-ass is that?
The Holidays are over. I spent New Years in Rhode Island. That was fun.
I'm trying to sum up just what this holiday break has been for me, and I must say that it's mostly been marked by boredom, with a few splashes of something strange (Platoon, Tim's absurd fireworks display on New Years Eve, trying to teach Rachael to throw a hip check, etc.).
I bought Henry Miller's Tropic Of Capricorn because I'm halfway through Dave Eggers' What Is The What, and I don't know how much hip San Francisco writing I can take. No luck locating the Houellebecq book I've been pining for, so Miller will have to do. I've heard this isn't as good as Tropic Of Cancer, but we'll just have to see.
I wish I had a stupid job.
I turn 21 in nine days, and I'm going through the process of renewing my license, which, I am told, cannot be done prior to the exact date that the license expires, on my birthday. I really hope that I get pulled over on my way to the RMV and I get guff for an expired license. It could happen, I know it could, and with my luck, it may very well go down.
Jesus, I never thought I'd say this, but I want to go back to school.
The days of catching up with your friends and feeling good about things in general over the college breaks are kind of over, at least, in terms of this winter break. Summer is an entirely different story, I think, but this season has been a bit of a drag.
I see these people and I no longer know what to think. They're not at all the people they were when I really knew them, and I am no longer the person that they knew, and we try to get around that fact. We talk about what we're doing now. Our boyfriends, our girlfriends, our major, who's going to grad school, what the best plan of action is, the peace corps, who's going to get married- all of it. Why? No one is hanging on to anything any longer. No one is keeping up any kind of an appearance.
I left a friend I hadn't seen in over a year today and said "It was good to see you." She agreed, and I stood on my lawn, fumbling for my keys, overcome with the sort of sadness I feel when I drive past the old toy store my mother and I frequented, the boarded up Purity Supreme supermarket- all those stores are gone- it's an entire place I left behind.
Everything changes, and everything has always changed, but recently, it's changed a lot. Maybe you've felt it, seen it as well.
I sit next to Rachael, in my basement, watching John Cusak do his best Nick Hornby impression, listing off the Top Five Reasons For This Or That, and I think that my eyes are no longer my own. I think of what they've seen in this basement. The other people that have sat in her place, the other things I've seen on this television. I should be able to see the similarities, but I can't. It all feels so new. And it makes me think that maybe all that which happened before was for nothing. It's dead now in a way that only a memory can die- as if it never existed at all.
I know that there is a part of everything that will always stay with me, the part that has shaped me, and that part comes to me in abstract memory; in scents and colors that I've never seem, born on my eyelids when I shut them tight and I'm looking at a certain sky, a certain road, a certain face. I can hear it in a laugh, the cry of a bird in the morning, but I find myself looking away quite often. I don't want to go back there. I know it's waiting to burst forward, to the front of my head, push at my eyes and my mouth and try to free itself
"YOU CANNOT REMEMBER ME, YOU CANNOT REMEMBER I, YOU CANNOT REMEMBER THIS PLACE BECAUSE THERE IS NO NEED. THERE IS NO NEED TO REMEMBER A WORLD YOU NEVER LEFT."
I love my friends, and they transcend this reminiscing. They don't exist in my memories. Memories of them surround me, surround them, tie us together in invisible knots.
It's the pain that really sits in memory, and my memory's good, just as sharp as the sting of it all.
- - - -
I guess I've just got too much idle time. I wish I had a stupid job.
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