Hi, Wes - good to hear from you

everything i listen to lately has the shelf life of milk in the sun.

except the first movement of gorecki's third symphony.

i haven't been writing, though i tried to fool myself into believing i was. i get drunk and scrawl madly at the bar, hoping no one will bother me. hoping someone will bother me. i keep getting drunk and listening to other people's problems. their loneliness just bleeds out of their wounded mouths. what happens when i drink too much: i play bad 80s music on the jukebox and become increasingly violent towards myself.

so, nothing changes. i don't even like bad 80s music. i just play it because i know everyone else at the bar will love it. i rarely do anything for me. asked myself that on the porch yesterday morning, smoking a cigarette. what do i do for me that makes me happy?

i forgot to mention. i'm officially a waiter this coming Saturday. after two years and a handful of months, i'll be making good money and working a schedule which includes some day-time shifts. force me to get out of the house. to be awake & alive during the day.

and all the sad people are lonely & getting lonelier. the crush of winter is here, and we're all bending our backs, craning our necks, in anticipation of the first snow.

wrote an email to my mother. she's no longer with my stepdad. they broke it off. my mother moved out. then she bought a house a county over with my stepdad's friend, who is also her paramour. she recently retrieved all of our family's things from the basement. the weird assembly of nostalgia. mentioned she found a lot of my "old journals," which could be anything. asked me if i want them. she has hundreds upon hundreds of photographs in albums. documenting our lives.

here is something i wrote in the bar.

& where is she? there she is, in a dim spot, reading Anais Nin. she is throaty, guttural with it, chortling at the men & murmuring at the whores. her in the cold, buttoned up to the chin, scarved & mittened. the heat is broken, won't pipe into the house. she is drinking shitty red wine. it is coarse on her tongue. he can feel her sadness. she is a pulsar, throbbing like an untended wound. the bulb in her reading light is flickering. she doesn't notice. on her shoulder, a writhing mass of tattooed vines, seeming to hiss. when she smiles, it is faint... a wan shape that begs a crescent moon. her eyes move over the page like a cursor, blinking once, twice - a metronome - as if every blink is a swallowing, digestion of what she has consumed...

the din of self within self, a constant angry grappling. narrowed eyes in the mirror. reflection seems a fraction of a second behind the actuality. where hesitation lives. he leaves the house minutes after having armed himself.

twins, working the bar, bizarrely syncopated in every motion. they barely speak to one another, yet work in tandem. for them: anything. men lean over the bar, leering, & yet they remain chastely aloof - though not without occasional smiles which seem beatific. they float, yet are earthbound, which causes them to become attainable by any standard - yet like soap bubbles, evade the slightest semblance of a grasp.

these are three things which have everything to do with one another, yet it is completely unclear how.