The strums
I love summer tourist season. Especially when it’s hot and muggy. The suburban vibrates through my grid like ancient black holes compose music for the universe. The husband and wife in matching Cubs gear or sacrifices to St. Louis. In the lobby of the Willis I watch the foreign families place orders. The men take care of the children, the women take care of themselves. The stateless hide here, the fallen, while on the skydeck you buy tickets and pretend to fall. When I leave the lobby I greet the smell of human sweat in the wedge of revolving door. I go around again, I do it all before, my contribution to our stench. On Michigan Avenue I am the gray urban man. Oohing and aahing the climate control on my way into your experience. I embrace my role as a Karen. Stop riding your Divvy on the sidewalk! I am the cop, the trembling Russian soldier, the notetaker, the lookout. In the median strips of Mag Mile the state troopers idle. They protect not you, not me, they protect Neimans and its mormon products. “If the message of western civilization is I am alone,” you won’t find any notifications here. One thing I love about originality is doing the same thing all over again. Like dropping a thirty dollar bill in the beggar’s cup. This man is older than my arrhythmia. Mein herz gets medicine but his is still beat. It doesn’t give me the blues so much as the strums.
I am the body in joy. My happiness complete. It’s hard not to get sentimental about vinyl records, when you pull out a Nonesuch and hear, the first movement of Horenstein’s Mahler 3. Last week I streamed it three times after the barista made me the Purple Eye. He wanted to prove to me it was a real thing, three shots of espresso and drip, he showed me the listing in his training manual, a binder of three rings. On Monday morning I found the Horenstein vinyl. Gregg told me he’s not so into these slower tempo interpretations. Gregg pauses when I talk about my love for Tinter’s Bruckner 2. Tinter even got mad when people killed cockroaches, and you know those Europeans have seen a lot of vermin, and you know to be a vegetarian you must take things as they come. I watched All Quiet on the Western Front. I wasn’t moved, like the war’s advance. You can just read current events if you must be moved by World War I. An exhibit in progress.
Every June, happy intern parade, we love you Miss Hannigan. My conservative girls are poetry stars from eight years ago, frescos up their quads and down their hammies. With Uptown girls you need to talk, find out what they’re interested in, quote Pennymaker, quote Badioo. You’ve got to say things about boygenius like, Phoebe is the waitress wearing a mask, Lucy is the waitress not wearing the mask, Julian Baker is the waitress in the back on her smoke break, and then Uptown girls have to call you a romantic or a misogynist. You talk the same time they talk, like Iris and Nate in Dimes Square.
Downtown my girls are different. You can say um or for sure and not feel like an idiot. What are they carrying in those shoulder bags? Mischievous and tight and testing the sexual patience of the men on this commuter train. Even I can’t concentrate on my cancer while she does her eyebrows. The Evanston of the Mind. The Digestive System of Lake Bluff. She sees my hard chest in a Performance polo, licks her lips. Maybe I’m not like every other award-winning dentist who chose the quiet car. We’re back at her hotel and when I go to leave I see Nordstrom Rack price stickers on the heels of her heels.
Back at home they’re all asleep. I sink my feet into the bowl we use for salads. After seeing the home runs I put on California Split. Elliott Gould once said “blogging is not writing it is graffiti with punctuation.” That’s more Monica’s Dad on Friends than Charlie Waters, his character in Split. I want to write Patrick back about all the thrilling stuff he said about Succession and tell him it has the word success in it. He made this typo for “like” as “lips” and he corrected it and I said, don’t correct your typos, don’t bother writing, just keep typing, because when I’d read “lips” I’d thought it correct. The topic made you wanna open your trap, loosen your jaw, and let the spit that gathers at the collective corners of our mouth water the lawns of our brains with meanings. I want a creamy white sweater like George Segal wears in Split but it won’t look the same on my frame.
Yeah, I will write Patrick, all cunty poetry a footnote to Ginsberg’s “I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.” I think there’s a lot of cunty poetry out there but it’s still very academic. We’re using cunty in a good way. I feel like I heard a lot of cunty stuff in Seattle this year with Charles, who manages to find the cool things. When I go to those creative writing events I always end up applauding a White guy who lives up to his capitalization. But all the freakazoids Charles finds, they’re working through interesting stuff, as those types usually are. Yeah, it was the best stuff about Succession. Better than my sentencing mind. Dad had to die early in the season, “an absence that needed to be felt in order to feel the full force of Kendall’s ecstatic embrace of fascism in his eulogy at the funeral, a funeral that he transforms into a black mass, baptizing himself as one of the True Killers…” we all want big fat letters like this stringing a zither across our navel, not “the hostile shafts of paid critics.” What I really need to tell Patrick is I wouldn’t have California Split without him, the two-toned credits my safe space, the absence of music but the engorging sound just like an OG Columbo episode, the murderer money, the finest example the elevator thrumming at the beginning of La Notte. Have you ever noticed the sign outside the titty bar. When Gould’s just walking up. Licking his likes. Lipping his money. The sign that says the titty bar has “the worst piano player on earth.”
My son says Daddy, what do you call the lines you string, do you call them the plucks, and I say you call them the strings, and on the strings you strum, but you can call them whatever you want because I will never forget the things you used to say. I wake up just after midnight and reorder the flow of the deck. In the morning I carry my son’s bike up the street and ride him around the track. Tears come to my eyes when I say the thing you need to do is look straight ahead, tighten your tummy, and think about what this will feel like when you don’t need Daddy’s help. He says that won’t be today. I say it could be today. He says it will probably be in, like, 200 days. I say it could be in 50 days. He says it won’t be tomorrow. I say, well, it could be today. The lesson of western civilization is that our children grow up. I’m sweating and overusing an underutilized part of my shoulder, the name of the part I forget, my masseuse says it helps with the initial lift. Helping with the initial lift is my business.