Jeffrey Lewis - Moving

It went well,

You didn't have to do it all by yourself.

Some friends came over and helped,

a hand truck, a friend with a van,

and you're moving out again.

Remembering when you first came,

it's crazy these streets look the same,

they looked different when they were strange.

And it's always weird to erase

every personal trace

from a place you called home for a while

and see all that you own in a pile.

A place that had become a friend,

to return it to how it had been,

to be friends with whomever moves in.



And you stick around

after all the boxes are down

the fridge is empty- just one ice tray,

and you swept and mopped more today

than the entire time that you stayed.

It's a shame you now have to leave,

the place is actually nice when it's clean.

It wasn't hard mopping the floor,

why didn't you ever do that before?

Now the van is down on the corner,

and you've done everything that you're gonna.

There's some pennies and dust on that shelf,

but the landlord can clean it herself,

and you're not sure, but you're going to claim

the blinds were busted like that when you came.



Man, so existential in that room,

so existential with that broom.

Cause the room looks the same

except there's no life left,

and you start thinking about death.

When you die, will it be the same?

No more thoughts decorating your brain?

An empty space for the world to reclaim?

You're on the verge of thinking something deep,

then you hear the van give the beep,

then you take one last look around to make sure,

then you take one last walk out the door,

and you'll never again see the angle

of the street you saw from that window.

You take the key out of your pocket,

you close the front door and you lock it,

drop the key back through the slot,

sure hope there's nothing you forgot.

I didn't say it isn't, but I never said it was

I don't have anyone to blame this space on, even though I've been trying. I am sad for the length. When can I have a worthwhile dinner? I wouldn't have minded a party. People must be tired of my parties. What is three years? Three years ago I was in a different country, did anyone expect me to stay? It's like watching yourself die and then living to see the world go forward, hearing the plans for seeing a show, without you, go to their new job--I will do it too, but right now I'm just sitting in an empty apartment dealing with sudden echos. This time I figured I'd just slink out the back door since any sort of organized "see you later" usually doesn't solve what you think it will solve. I'd rather not know the last time, but instead to have someone's absence leak in on its own. Three years will see most of you in and out of so much. Will you recognize me when I get back? Am I coming back? When am I coming back? You're getting older, and I'm getting older too. Eventually we may get too old for this shit, you may just get too old for me--I don't know how I'll be able to explain myself after this. I guess I'd be scared if I wasn't so goddamned lazy.

Squash

every week into a day.

I am a geographic. External processor until I ingest something nasty, oh hello life little pelican hunt out on the dock! How are you doing this fine evening? What is that? You have nobody to drunk dial now smoking your fag from your pointy orange beak, etched with 10 or 20 indents proving battles or ill wills or poor decisions oh isn't that the worst? Isn't that the absolute worst, darling? To invest all that time, all of your money hoping to shed yourself enough to be loved, to be engaged only to walk home alone and fuming? To walk home unsteady, unprepared for the creepy morning, dark yellow and insidious flowing from all corners? I get it. The gust from under a feather. A poke at something you knew was dead. Empty chalis, ringing with your metal hitting the rim, it doesn't stuff it up. Nothing stuffs it up. Where will you go? We're all tired of saying goodbye. I'm tired of hearing it. Adieu, nothing comes of it.

some lonely night we can get together
and i'm gonna tie your wrists with leather
and drill a tiny hole into your head

Bears and My Body

Bears. If I were an animal I would be a bear. I'd be a big black bear. They're cute. They're cute. They go to sleep for a long time. They have a big sleep. I get tired a lot. Bears are powerful. Me too. My body is work. My body feels angry sometimes. I sweat. My belly hurts. I try.

Eating some jelly

Kerala what is your problem now i gave this fat bitch a tamborine and asked her to fucking sing for me like lungs could lift a fat ass up for a walk down to the bodega for some over priced sharp cheddar but she just stood there slack-jawed and oh my tits she wasn't wearing any liner or floral patterns and I wuz lyke u hambeast dyke lol HOW DARE YOU. One of these dayz she's going to ooze out on the sidewalk and I'll accidentally step in her before stumbling too close to a speeding taxi which by the way, taxi maxi pads i won't miss your shit at all. Big city, same bars. Long songs, same keys. Young kids, am I a young kid now? The fact that I'm older now than I was in 2003 makes me flip a hip shit whenever I think about it. LINEAR TIME IS FOR FAGS. Can I watch you do your make up? I always wondered what it is about women that makes them women--there's such an orchestra of effort that I hear whenever they clamor by, all knees and tit drapes, mascara running away from their sockets. Do you scarf and barf? I want to watch other women put on their sundresses in the morning before they take the scenic route to Bergdorfs to charge some lyrca purple stretchy contraption to their card subconsciously humming about how men are such sadly visual creatures, how much more sad it is to be the creature that caters to that acetone, ACETONE GIVES ME A MIGRAINE. I think it's Fergie's fault, that dumb bitch. Do you order your dressing on the side? Do you spit or swallow? Does the new Miley Cyrus song give you a hard on?

I have an entire dance routine planned and it involves elbows and ribbons and baby bird feathers being sprinkled from above on a fat woman named Kerala speaking in tongues to the beat of ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL!??!?!? I'm going to record it and then I'm going to blog about how this made me feel deep in my lower intestines sandwiched between my lunch proteins and then I'm going to put it up on Youtube and become the star I always knew I was. What do you dream up while I lick you down?

I always like the pink cloud days of the beginning of another promise of sobriety I make to myself. I literally feel my body start animating itself again, my brain spinning a little slower when I get on the subway with every day that I'm clean, the feeling of a head full of salt water sloshing around draining out with ever extra hour of sober sleep. Once I start navigating myself around the city on overdue errands like a normal member of society around the one-week mark, I start to feel those unfamiliar washes. Pangs. Small stubs of a psychic toe. Weird sensations of giving a shit. Hanging up a phone call and not knowing that I miss somebody but feeling like I miss somebody. For most people it's very trivial and expected to feel as though you care about someone else, but when you're a real drinker your lines between an authentic, slowed down, deliberate feeling and a juiced-up, hyperbolic one that only comes out when soaked with a lot of whiskey is non-existent. Things get strangely cerebral on the bottle, believe it or not. In your complete irrational way of living the way you relate becomes very black and white. I am here, I am with these people, he's an asshole, she's my friend. I want that person. I don't feel like I want that person, but I know that I do. I know that I want that person around, but I don't feel it. Science explains this, how habitual drinking leads to a complete restructuring of chemicals in the brain--your neurons blossoming extra receptors to compensate for the avalanches of dopamine you send to your brain every night. Then when the booze isn't fueling the deluge, the receptors sit there in your brain, hungry and wilty, your mood static and hollow. Unless you're drinking, you don't have a single emotion register on the richter scale. A literal, real alcohol fueled robot. Then you decide, half with whatever rational thought you have left against the pure and direct requests from your private chemistry--satiate now, or wait it out.

Let's say you choose the latter. Then the pink cloud, the aligning, the sobriety you are so proud of--you want to laminate it, frame it, coddle it. Amazing how you can suddenly be so willing and able to smash it in the laziest of ways. How you can be so drunk in your sobriety on real emotions, you just cannot imagine how you ever lived any other way. And then you feel threatened. You feel bored. You start hanging out with your drunk friends, and they ask where the fun version of you went. You realize you have nothing in common with the people you spend the majority of your time with and feel resentment towards them. You start worrying that they're feeling resentment towards you too--didn't you realize? You had a function, and it was not to have meaningful conversations about politics or god or your soggy emotions towards an old lover or fuck knows what else it is you're blathering on about so awkwardly. You were fun, easy to be with, down for whatever. You always made the night a little edgier, a little more haphazard, a little more F.T.W. Who's the traitor here? Who's at fault? They never mislead you, never suggested that you call them in the afternoon to catch up. You're the one who changed, you can't complain.


I swan dived his weekend, and I'm trying to really understand why. I remember a really uncomfortable realization that the person I was looking at had played a significant role in my life and that I missed them. They were sitting right next to me, and I was sober, and I missed them. I remember touching my hair too much and making a couple inappropriate jokes that nobody laughed at. I remember thinking one beer. I remember thinking in between gulps about a story I read about a man who was sober for 3.5 years and decided to conduct an experiment with a bottle of scotch. He sat alone in his old drinking chair and took a shot. Nothing bad happened, he took another. 4 hours later the bottle was empty and the man stood up, and to no one in paritcular said, "The Experiment has failed." I remember sitting on the john 4 drinks later with my head falling down by knees and saying "OK THAT'S IT." I remember looking at this person and feeling immense jealousy for the way they were looking out the window. I remember the bartender making me a shot, he winked at me, it was in a highball glass and tasted minty. He touched my arm and I remember thinking it's too late now and how liberating it was to just be bad again, like I was finally being honest with myself because isn't this what I do? What else am I known for? It's not their fault, this is how I've always behaved. I provided a sketch of myself to others. I can't get angry when they don't choose the right colors to shade in between the lines--whatever macabre and specific colors I had imagined myself consisting of without any sort of proof.

I remember sitting on my floor, passing a bottle of Jack in between us because I just wasn't there yet. I was still touching my hair too much. I hadn't departed psychically, to my planet bullshit, my debut on a film reel of a more authentic, feeling person. I faked the feeling, I knew it was fake, I tucked myself into the falsity and hit my marks, knowing it was fake but high on my peptide wave of feeling this right now I wouldn't have been able to offer much clarity on it in those moments. I remember waking up and feeling like the left side of my brain was engaging in open-fire with the right side. I remember feeling like at any moment I would lose motor control and vomit everywhere, over every living thing in the world, over all of my possessions and it would just keep shooting from my gut until the organs themselves lept out from my mouth--a stomach hitting the back wall, a heart against the window. I remember thinking this person looked really great in the shirt they were wearing, and that I wanted to touch the sleeve but I couldn't because I was too busy keeping my body from erupting. So I went back to sleep, feeling retarded. You know, really retarded.

Today isn't a landmark. I'm trying to keep tabs. I finally returned somebody's phone call who had been trying to reach me for weeks, really upset that I was leaving. I remember not understanding why they kept saying they would miss me, how they were able to be so honest. Then at some point during our conversation I realized that we had dated for like, 3 months. I had been so fucked in the head, so separated from the reality of my actions that I literally didn't know this fact until this conversation. It was shocking. I was sober, sitting by city hall, realizing that I had been in a relationship without my knowing. There were no tricks, no shenanigans, we went out a bunch of times but drank out even more. But they weren't the only one, I knew I cared about them but I didn't feel it. I was sober. I was sitting by city hall with my visa documents in my lap, realizing that I had really fucked up. Say it with me now....I always knew I was fucking up but I never felt like I was fucking up. If anybody has every wondered how I have had such a natural talent for treating other people like shit, this is why. If you don't feel it--the flush, the intrinsic knowing instead of the theoretically knowing, than you can't possibly give a fuck.

I remember apologizing, hanging up and for once in the past two months not feeling as though I was on the precipice of a humiliating, crippling panic attack, that I was lucky to have someone who was able to forgive me, that I have so many people who have forgiven me so many fucking times and truly cared about me despite me not really existing like a normal human being, of being reckless and quite often cruel and always messy. I went home and wrote an honest letter. I felt like I would miss this person, like I would miss a lot of people.

I signed my full name, the one I was born with.

Taken from Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

"[...]Longing for intimacy and terror of it: a wish to merge with others and a fear of being consumed; profound uncertainty about how and when to maintain boundaries and how and when to let them down--weren't addressed with much texture or depth.

"No is an extraordinarily complicated word when you're drunk. This isn't just because drinking impairs your judgement in specific situations, like parties or dates (which it certainly may); it's because drinking interferes with the larger, murkier business of identity, of forming a sense of the self as strong and capable and aware. This is a difficult task for all human beings, but it's particularily difficult for women and it's close to impossible for women who drink.

"When she describes this, Meg talks about a component of anger and rebellion: she was in her late twenties and early thirties at the time, and she'd spent the better part of her young adult life responding to her fears about intimacy and sex by shutting men out, steering clear of relationships. There was something about drinking, something about getting drunk and sleeping with men she didn't know, that gave free rein to a host of buried feelings, to an undercurrent of neediness and longing she'd kept compressed in the darkest corner of her soul for years.

"The drink released this current, let it stream up and out. There was a fuck you, I am going to get what I want, Even if I feel I don't deserve it. Frustration and shame and fear and self-loathing and release, all rolled into one, all liquified and drained away by drink. She drank and she just did it, just said fuck you to her own complicated mix of feelings and did it. In some ways this worked: drunken, anonymous sex gave her the illusion of intimacy with none of the attendant risks, none of the aching vulnerability of sober sex.

"If you both long for intimacy and fear it, if you feel worthy of it and ill equipped to receive it and ashamed of yourself for wanting it, alcohol becomes a most useful tool, a way of literally drowning out the conflict. It's a way of giving license to the part of you that wants to say yes. Yes to life and yes to deep connection and yes to touch and comfort and love. The sad thing is, whatever sense of affirmation you get from anonymous, drunken sex is usually metabolized away with the booze in your system. Meg would wake up in the morning and feel like an idiot. She'd feel shame and regret and confusion.

"Oh shit. Head pounds, hands shake, mind races. Oh shit: what have I done?

"Drinking, drinking. Drinking and loving men, drinking and loving men who drink. I never once went out with a man who didn't like to get drunk. Never. Right from the start the idea of going out with a man who didn't like to tie one on was unthinkable to me, and would be for many years.

"This seemed perfectly reasonable, to choose drinking men. Alcohol can numb fear, and allow you to fake it, and take you places you literally don't want to go: strange beds. But it can also give you access to romance, a bridge to the positive sides of sexuality. Alcohol felt like the cement in female sexuality, at least it did to me: over the years the two would become so deeply linked that for the longest time I simply couldn't imagine one without the other. A first kiss without drinks? Forget it. Sex without liquor? No way. Drinking was integral to my sense of sexuality as a body part: no more, no less. And sometimes that form of integration was effective, amazingly so.

"I can almost feel the drink, feel how central it was to my experiences. Deaden the shock; facilitate the exploration. Voila: No problem; I can do this.

"Truman Capote once wrote that he saw in Elizabeth Taylor an 'emotional extremism, a dangerously greater need to be loved than to love.' Me, I was too cautious and inhibited and scared to give in to extremism of any kind in sobriety, emotional or otherwise. But when I drank, it happened. When I drank, the part that felt dangerous and needy gre bright and strong and real. The part that coveted love kicked into gear. The yes grew louder than the no."