091218 the easiest things to do are the hardest things to get yourself to do. crank up the car. it’s easy to get the car to-- you know what? let’s play a game. no metaphors tonight. said a lady in a long satin nightgown, half open to her sumptuous navel. you can see the moonlit slopes of her breasts; follow the valley of the V of that open nightgown down, smell the perfume and musk of her as she leans over you, arms opening, and the nightgown falls open just a little bit more, a curtain opening on act one, scene one: interior, night. A beautiful lady with a husky voice leans over you and envelopes you in a sense of plush safety with stirrings of hot curiosity. You are young. You are vulnerable. You are positively clueless. You are a tad excited. It’s a fun place to be. Go on into the back room, she says when you wake from your reverie. You are glad you have the skill of not looking like a pervert. You smile with the half of your face that can still move, and try not to look like you’re trying too hard not to sashay as you move past her in the narrow aisle of the vintage clothing shop. Who is she, and where did she come from? You haven’t the presence of mind, because there may be something wrong with your mind, to really sort it out. You’re impatient. You’re here for a reason. To see the man in the back room. But on your way back, as you get closer and closer to the back of the store, time slows down. You have more and more time to think about who she is and where she came from. Some of the people whom you regularly see in here tend to call her “mom.” You’re pretty sure she’s not actually the mother of any of them. She sometimes acts like she’s the mother of the cat that sort of lives here. The cat comes in sometimes when it’s getting colder and then stays in all year. Goes to sleep on a stack of books. Startles customers who’ven’t been here before when they realize she’s real, the cat is real, hey! they ejaculate, hey! that’s a real cat! I thought it was a statue or a stuffed animal or something. Then they go back to shopping, unless it’s one of the kids, in which case they tend to abandon the shopping in order to talk to the cat. The cat talks back. They talk about lunar phases. Eclipses. Comets and meteors. Doorbells. The way the light on a certain porch in an old neighborhood can make your heart turn its oven on and start pumping out cookies of nostalgia. While you stand there in the street, bodily remembering every time it was almost ready to start to snow. And you knew you needed a place to go. A place like this vintage clothing store. And you meandered across town, squeaking like a rusty bicycle, seeing like a camera, until you made it here, and you pushed open the door, and the bells hanging from the door made a heavy glassy jangle, and the weather strip at the bottom of the door made a sweeping noise against the floor, and your reflection in the glass of the door when you opened it seemed to show two of you no make that three: the you you are now; a little on the older side, still kind of nice looking but a little craggy, a little rueful; the you you used to be; more lithe, earnest faced, a little smug but fun to play with; the you who turned into a cat and swirls around the ankles of the majestic ageless woman who inhabits these aisles, these stacks, these shelves, this maze of amaranthine curiosities in hemp and silk, cashmere and wool. I don’t know. I don’t know about this last thing at night thing, dude. I feel like it’s not really working so well. Occasionally it does, but it’s just too easy to not be here. I’m pretty fuckin spent by the end of a long day these days. I need to find a more nodal moment for the evening sesh, I think. If it’s important which it is. I prematurely assumed I had mastered one of the basic kata. I need to go back on the wheel. Tie me up and throw darts at me again until I get back to where I can drop and do fifteen any time, any where. Cuz right now, tonight, I feel mostly like I’m avoiding something. And I’m too goddamned tired to fight about it.