I am up late, remembering how exciting this frozen-cold overnight realm used to be. For years I stayed up until sunrise, working on web things and loving the seclusion, but eventually getting tired of the lack of daylight, the solitude, and the constant chasing-of-day.
I just spotted this cartoon from my old magazines project and thought of me as I like to imagine myself,
,though I would consider myself a flâneur, not a Bohemian, and a non-slipper-wearing non-smoker regardless.
I have been rummaging around the tombstones at Calvary again, looking for something that might not quite be there. More on that later (it’s all for fun) but I thought of it a few weeks ago whilst running around that big yard lecturing my friend C. on what is where and whence is whilst. Whilst stomping on century-old graves I described the morning after I fucked a woman I met at a bar, and how disgusted I was with myself, how I was out of my hubris with existentia and mental spiralation. It was the night my father called to “straighten out a few things” (or however he said it) and for as much anxiety as erupted from my spine that night I confronted the reality of the matter by blasting off into bars and cemeteries, staying awake for 36 hours, fucking a bored barfly, swilling rancid wine left overnight in her kitchen, and passing out on the cemetery floor. I found my shoes and took my stuff from her kitchen and rambled off, not sure if I closed the door behind me.
For a while in 2003 and 2004 I stayed awake/stayed awake/stayed awake then I slept/slept/slept, no regard for time of day or sunlight or any regularity. It gave me headaches and the shits so bad I had to settle in on some kind of routine, which ended up being the up-’til-sunrise/sleep-’til-whenever thing. That lasted a couple of years but I vividly remember that morning out at Calvary, feeling like a pig but a confused and frothing pig, a copy of Darkness Visible, by William Styron, in my ass pocket, this book recommended to me by a long-time friend and correspondent. I had never been at Calvary in the early morning. It was August and already it was 90 degrees and humid as hell. I ran around, running through Section 1 and then Section 4, listening to WFMU through the Treo and landing on the ground at the Alsop Family Cemetery. I fell asleep, probably for no longer than a few minutes, but when I snapped to I had no idea where I was, why I was asleep among 18th-century tombstones, and why a copy of William Styron’s suicide & depression memoir lay on the ground between me and an infant’s grave.
I will never forget that day, though I remember little of it. I thought of that day last week. It was the morning after my father called for the last time. I knew something was up but I did not know what. He had a plan, and soon enough he followed through. I thought of that whilst looking at these and other things at Calvary last week:
