Sunday May 27, 2012:
It is the hour when the afternoon turns on its heels towards night, and a darker hue transposes itself upon the almost impossible blue of the sky. I am on my porch, sweating a little, opening the collar of my work shirt as the far off shouts of children, the quiet hush of traffic, and the chortle of a lawnmower disappear into their own memory. I am lighting a cigarette; the scene is twilit, the mood existential, the outlook tragic.
The street is ghosted with the smell of charcoal and the sizzle of burgers being dropped onto hot grills. My chest swells with the anticipation of summer and the memory of lithe female bodies, half naked and sweating, lain out under a New England sun. It is the hour when our sorry hearts cry out for what it is they dreamed they have lost, when the off-orange of the streetlamps begin to flicker on and the ever increasing distance between this moment and your youth becomes insurmountable.
Across the way, in an open yard, a gray-haired woman is taking white sheets off a clothing line, billowing slightly in the stirring up breeze; the last gasp of winter’s breath. And I am haunted by the sense that my long season of solitude has delivered me here; to a cigarette on a May evening when my sadness is as abundant as it is without explanation.
Soon the restaurants will open up, and the seaside bars will illuminate their neon signs – Rolling Rock, Budweiser, Shipyard – and swell with girls in their summer clothes, and men feeding quarters into the jukebox. I used to think I wanted my life back, but when I discovered this was my life, I only longed for love. It is the hour when the absence of love fills us with love. I am sauntering slowly into the incandescent night, and in the increasing dark of the sky I am watching the blinking red and white lights of an airplane, hanging like a man-made star above our own little America.
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STRIP CLUBS, TAMPA
By Ken Meisel, 2006
Everyone has a story,
even the woman dancing here
in front of me fully undressed,
and waving herself like a palm tree
in front of my face
at a strip club in Tampa,
way back in 1983
while the music thundered
through the booths like a flood.
Can you believe it?
So I asked her to quit the lap dance,
and not to do anything else,
but simply to tell me
how it came to be this—
if there was an answer, it fell
into reasons
that have more to do with
the economics of love,
and how and where it is lost
or found in the eyes
of say her father, or her brother,
or her first time lover,
and less to do with money
for college, or for the trip to LA,
although she didn’t want
me to know this,
and, besides, it was for cash.
And for the black eye
she once earned for speaking up.
And it was for the aggression
that she felt in her belly
when she saw the men squirm,
and want her,
and pay for her time
like she was the Goddess Shiva,
dancing here on Nevada Avenue
in Tampa Bay, Florida.
And, if all this wasn’t reason
enough, there was also her
younger sister, who was raped,
and pregnant,
and there was also the reason
she gave which had less
to do with sociology,
or broken dreams,
or psychology and all of its
subterranean motives,
but more to do, she figured,
with passing the time
before the lights of the bay
dropped to their hard core,
and, alone in her silence,
she could wonder how it is
dreams get lost in the crab traps
of our small unraveled lives,
and end up here,
on another lit stage,
in the limelight of men’s lust
or misbegotten affections,
or mishandled attention,
and then finally end here with me,
a guy asking her questions
that she said everyone asked her.
And, whose answers,
like a handful of raw oysters
get misplaced somewhere
under the water,
perhaps in a bed of fish hooks
or collapsed in pilings,
and so she could never
really answer why.
It doesn’t matter to anyone,
is all she could say.
Some nights, afterwards,
you’d see them gathering
in a circle, giggling,
as if they were school girls,
before the pressure to dance
consumed them.
And you’d wonder
what kind of young girls
they were before the thongs
and the wine coolers,
and the hot little panties
stuffed with wads of cash
filled their personalities up.
Way back in the days
before the silver nipples
and the nightly ritual
of rubbing ice on them
cooled their breasts,
and also their hopes for true love.
And you’d wonder what
it was they’d once
wished for in their beds,
before the stripping naked
for us
chilled their sweet hearts.
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(Source: everyhalloffamer)
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Or at least one episode of a podcast, it’s about me trying to be better about connecting with people. You can check out the first episode on my other blog:
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A few days after graduating from college I packed my belongings into a two door Hyundai and moved from my Bushwick loft back to my parents house in Portland, Maine. Multiple news sources assured me that college grads moving back in with their parents was the new statistical norm; a fact that offered little comfort since I was the only person I knew in such a position. As my high school friends took nine to five office jobs, I spent a whole summer sleeping till noon, utterly perplexed as to how they had emerged from the same decade I had – one that kicked off with the fraudulent election of George W. Bush and ended with a bullet fired into Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ face – with an optimism that enabled them to rise trim, erect, and bright-eyed every morning. It was not simply the pitfalls of 20-something angst, but also the relentless headlines bringing daily news of economic instability and liberalism’s apparent failure that made me find the most simple of tasks – small talk with a barista, perusing apartment listings in a newspaper – indescribably difficult. As I sunk further into self-loathing and my casual weed smoking evolved in a twice a day habit, I began to find myself empathizing more and more with Lindsay – whenever I was in line at the super market and saw her hung over face gracing the cover of each Hollywood rag, I couldn’t help thinking she was facing the same existential crisis that had been slowly swallowing me up.