at the same time,

it's really not all bad. what am i even saying - i love it, most of the time.

i went for a long walk around the north end tonight. and while there was nothing particularly special about the night or the walk, on some level it was profoundly memorable. i know i will miss it. i know i will never have it again, not like this. i can already sense the impeding shadows of stress that are just around the corner - stress about the show, stress about money, stress... about other things, bigger things, scarier things.

but right now and right here, there is a calmness unlike anything i've felt before. or perhaps i have, but not since i was a child. nothing can touch me here; i'm surrounded by some kind of golden shroud of peace, and i walk at an extremely even pace, and all my thoughts are so wonderfully lucid. i had a dream last night that they offered me my job back at the restaurant - "it was just a test, you're back on the schedule now" - and i just stood there, watching the boiling bubbling chaos of service industry hell around me, wondering what i could do to make them fire me for good.
i woke up laughing with relief. oh, it's so good to know it was a dream! i wouldn't go back to that life if they offered me twice what i was making. i'd rather eat nothing but kraft dinner for months.

i really would, you know. this is something i was thinking about while wandering around tonight: how it was all too easy to forget that living on a tiny budget can be more rewarding; how fully i had myself convinced in no time that i couldn't do without a serving job i hated, under a boss i didn't get along with. there is literally not a thing about it i look back at fondly. time slid away from under me like quicksand in that job, and so did all that glorified cash i was making. jesus, how much money did i throw right back into that bar? all i ever had there that's worth remembering was fun, but fun and being happy are so fucking far from being the same thing.
besides, come on - even the fun wasn't usually much to write home about. all my best stories come from other places.

i'm realistic. i know i probably won't love the next "real" job i get, either. but i'll be cautious this time, and mindful of what chances i take. it's far scarier to be owned by a shit job than to have to cook your own dinner. i chose the career path i did far from naively: i knew i would end up living in houses that look like junkyards, and that i'd have to budget for things that are bare necessities. i knew and i didn't care. i know how to function under dire financial conditions, it's what i know. i came from that. how to put money away and invest in the future? not so much. i chose a moment-to-moment kind of life, and when that moment-to-moment yielded more funds than i was used to, i spent it just as lightly as i had come by it. and then that's what i became used to.

concentric circles, though, right? i'm here right now, happy to have reclaimed a peace of mind that's been lacking from me for entirely too long. also happy to be in better control of how i'm living and what i'm spending. it will get old, of course, as being broke tends to. in a year i'll likely be making more than i was leading up to all this.
well, either i'll be making more or at the very least i'll be much happier. maybe both. but definitely one.

right this minute, i'm feeling pretty optimistic about everything.

"down here, we all float"

i look at my last post and i'm like, eye-ruh-neeee.

maybe i'm a low-level psychic or something. things have happened this way before - little echoes of the future, causing a stir in my mind that i can't understand or place. it's confusing, but also comforting somehow. almost like i already dealt with the fallout of this, before "this" became a fact.

stephen called to see how i was doing, for the fourth time. this was directly after i had summoned the courage to face my account balances. it had been a very grave and gruelling fifteen minutes.
"i don't have any money. none at all. i have negative-money. i don't own a cent."
"it's a good thing you have a me, then."
"i suppose i'm not going to die, am i."
"nope. you're not going to die."

then he said he was taking me out for dinner and i said, maybe i should lose my job more often. then i laughed the laugh of the temporarily insane.

well, hopefully the temporarily insane.

imagery:
i'm alone in the middle of a winter landscape which suddenly turns out to be a gigantic sno-globe. i only know it's not real because someone on the outside is shaking it. i'm weightless and tiny and bouncing off the glass, and the world is a flurry of plastic snow.

but sometimes, like say

right now, i just want a real life. a real job, with real people. who read real books. this false glamour of living in a world entirely made up of concepts and ideas gets so old.

i look at my hands, they've aged; they're these strange foreign objects now. my fingers scream of years spent in the service industry. not that there's anything wrong with that. my hands are so unpretentious, they've never even heard of nail polish or any of that cuticle cream jazz. i don't mind that. who gives a shit about cuticle cream??

i don't mind my hands, but i'd like to get to know them again. there has to be a new chapter around the corner somewhere, there has to... these days, my mind is always either on hold or in overdrive, and it can't be healthy and it doesn't feel good. it hurts, actually. all the time.

how did this take me so long to realize? i think some part of me honestly believed that i was living the dream. or a dream, anyway. well, i don't want it anymore. i want things to start being real.

i want that so bad it makes me cry.

this is a place and a time of

such sweet, precarious perfection. the north end, this house, this spring, this moment. i'm scared i'll blink and it will be gone, drowned out by the hum of bigger and more important life things.

but this is where perfection lives, that much i know. i do double-takes just to double-notice every gorgeous flaw, like paint peeling off houses in the sunlight. trying to read the paper on my stoop and the breeze not letting me. my feet ache because i bought a new pair of converses and then wore them all around the neighbourhood. so glorious.

i quit blogging in the summer of 2005 and i don't remember exactly why. i mean, not the ins and outs of it, anyway. it had something to do with a girl. i wanted to be alone in my head, maybe... it was a bad summer - beautiful, but bad. i only retain glimpses of it: bike handlebars, rain, a jacket that remained on my door hanger for too many weeks. then i became addicted to michelle tea and started missing those 5 am phonecalls.
and then, just like that, summer had turned to fall, and everything changed once again, like these things go. i stopped whiting out paragraphs of my inner narrative.

no, i didn't. well, i did, for a time. then i re-edited everything and i didn't do a very good job.

we travel in such strange concentric circles. i don't remember last summer at all. i want to remember this one. i would like to be new. i think i deserve to be new. i hope the narrative is here to stay, this time.

you know what.

frustration, at times, can be a beautiful thing.

i'm trying to learn new stuff about myself. i have this oddly constant feeling that i'm running out of time, but it's so vague and i can't place it, it's like a bruise you don't know how you got. keeps me in a state of alertness and makes me slightly high. it's not at all unpleasent... only worrysome.
complacency is the killer; worrysome i can do.