Dear Diary,
I think I may get through the boredom of this horrid day. On top of it being Sunday, it was cooler than it was all week, and Pittsburgh Sunday Grey. Not cool, Vegas. And the store was again sold out of black smudgy eyeliner. Is there a cache of punk chicks around here that I don’t know about that goes through a lot of eyeliner? This is insane. I’ve been trying for a month. I may just fucking pay the shipping and order it online. I’m tired of waiting.
I got a “tacit” agreement to the rats, Melody and River. I brought them up for a couple of days, and then while we were going over the long-term budget, I mentioned that my goal was to buy Melody and River, themselves, by the end of the summer, which meant buying an Amazon Prime membership and then assembling the rat supplies on my wishlist during the meantime. That’s about $100 a month. That’s about my discretionary funding per month, so he saw no problem with it, and agreed to it. I’m waiting for the part where he realizes he has also agreed to bringing two more living, eating things in here.
We’re also going to mount the TV to the wall. The sound is really fucking with me. I have problems hearing and the echo doesn’t help. And mounting it would make room for the rat cage, so that works out really well. No over crowding, and a blank space on the wall filled up with something neat. Something interesting to counter the Picasso print.
I had this whole new set of memories the other day. It was so intense. It was so real. It just took over me. I mean waves of all consuming emotions just carrying me away from reality to places far away, out of my control. It was . . . surreal.
It all started with “Guardians of the Galaxy”. Yes, the Marvel Comics movie starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, and a host of creepy people in great make-up. And it features a soundtrack not from the mid-to-late-80’s, as is so common, but the late 70’s-to-early-80’s. People who’s names you probably don’t remember, if you are my age, but whose songs you know every word and guitar riff of.
At first, I was resistant to it. I deemed it “Oakland” music, from that era in my early childhood, and put it away, not wanting to deal any further with it. But, as we all know, I fell in love, obsessive love, with the movie, and watched it upwards of a hundred times. The music just got into me. I started humming it. Finally Doc downloaded the soundtrack on his phone and sent it to my email through some wizardry and I put it on my music drive and cued it up and put my headphones on, like Quill does all through the movie, and turned the soundtrack on.
That is when the large iron doors I had never noticed before opened up wide and released all of these vivid memories. An unstoppable onslaught, almost too fast for me to get them clearly or fully understand them. There were a lot of similar impressions, feelings . . .
Sun-filled classrooms with gleaming white tile floors with grey and blue and red flecks. Red, yellow and blue desks made of some unknowable material that felt like buffed granite, matching chairs, built to fit us. Music playing. Always music playing, Dancing. Happiness. Acceptance.
It’s so complicated. I have no other bundles of memories like this. I have never uncovered any treasure like this in my mind that wasn’t pure fantasy. And I know this isn’t. There are certain things I know, ways I can tell. Details I remembered that I was able to look up in documentation I had (my mom kept copious notes). These are real memories. And the music really triggered them. And wow. Now I have to take time out to listen to it on my headphones, I can’t just put it on the ears and work. I can put it on the speakers and work, but not on the head. Too concentrated.
One of the search engine optimization programs that I use on this site has chosen the phrase “poise brut” as the prime keyword phrase for the site. In French, it means Raw Poetry, it is the companion to Art Brut. It is the greatest compliment an algorithm could possibly give me.
This morning at 5am I submitted my pitch for a docuseries about me rejoining society and the scene here in Vegas to a local production company executive. And I mentioned that I had some thoughts about potential funding, even though I know their production schedule is full and they don’t have room for a new project. Still, if he thinks it is a viable idea, he may pass it on to a film maker, or producer, or someone. This is just one window I am crawling through, not the big door I am opening. I know that. I’m cool with that. I asked, and he answered. The first one to. I will remember this. Even if I don’t hear from him further. I will remember that he sent me his email address. I will give him credit for giving me hope when I was about to give up. Just by giving me his email address.