I'm at Polly's house. I'm supposed to be revising a stupid short story I wrote, but I can't; it's all too stupid. There is a printout of a
poem on Polly's bulletin board & I keep reading one of the lines:
But that fervor must be somewhere.
I'm so tired. My brain isn't working properly. I can't sort out the problems in my story, I don't know how to make it work. I am drinking a wine called Les Heretiques & I am resisting the urge to go home & sleep. I need to sort out this story but I can't. I can't figure out if the ending is the only part of it that's worth anything or if it is hopelessly out of place. I can't figure out how to pull the narrator in any sort of direction. I'm wondering if I should write one of the main characters completely out. It's a very little story & it doesn't mean anything to anyone, at least not anymore. I can hardly write this post; I don't know what I think I am doing. Why are some days so hard to live out? Today seems interminable & yet it is slipping away from me, in that dread-filled way of all Sundays. It seems impossibly hard to finish the wine in the bottle & that is oddest of all.
In bed the body's glorious grasp of its anatomy
will move off with its pleasure, and the shape of the bones,
the muscles and tendons must all be relearned.
I have an idea for another story, about something I saw over the weekend. It is a better story than the one I am not working on today, because it doesn't have anything to do with me. That seems better, smarter.
I am considering not going to work tomorrow because somehow I feel like that will enable me to get done all of the things that I ignored over the weekend. I need to find the subway-violation summons that I lost & I need to do my laundry & clean my room & pick up my new bike & go to a coffee shop & work on my story without a horrible hangover putting my brain on mute. I want to clear more space in the closet for my new roommate & put my record albums in order & mail off my Netflix so I can get Buffy season seven in return. I'm so tired that I feel I need a day off work in order to put the Netflix envelopes in the mailbox. An entire day just for that, at the very least.
In spite of this it has been a lovely couple of days. Lots of drinking. Lots of glasses & bottles being drained & discarded & swiftly replaced. Lots of everybody loving each other. Friday I went to see Live Girls!!! at the Pussycat Lounge & it was a veritable love-fest. Unless that was just me, transfixed by this redheaded stripper who was wearing cat ears. At the Pussycat Lounge the strippers are way behind the bar, which reminded me of the
Lakeview Lounge in Chicago, only there it's bands, not strippers. One of my friends slipped me a dollar to give the redhead. I wanted to give it to her in a sexy way but it was pretty stupid cos there was so much space between us so I more or less had to give her the old smoldering eye & then sort of reach over & just hand it to her across the bar like an idiot. After that she gave me the old smoldering eye back for awhile & I felt terrible because I had only given her a dollar & you could tell those girls probably don't make any money, being so far away from the clientele, as it were.
At this point I've been neglecting my story for 2 hours or so & I'm going to spend the next 20 minutes finishing the Heretiques & then I suppose I will head home so I can catch The Simpsons. Sigh. How I loathe Sunday evenings.
