“Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.”
–Renata Adler, Speedboat

I sat on your couch on Wednesday and it came up that i am bad with lists and unable to name favorites. It’s true: I never decided on how the lists should go and i equivocate about favorites. I was not rising to the occasion. Other people have a favorite flower. Favorite color. Favorite food. i felt boring. At once too easy and pretentious. Like maybe i hadn’t actually read much or engaged music seriously enough to have those High Fidelity lists ready to go. Maybe i just didn’t want to alienate you. Then i came home and realized that maybe there were too many choices. Too many piles of books, too many albums played over and over, me on the floor next to the record player trying to conjure the person the songs were standing in for–the song matched the desire exactly, but no matter how many times i flipped the record and listened again, the music never took human shape…When you rock and roll with me…Maybe i loved that album really hard and trusted it and it let me down, so the lists never took shape. Maybe the lists were someone else’s all along…No one else I’d rather be…This is the best Led Zeppelin album. This is the last good Bowie album. The Buzzcocks. Gary Stewart. Neil Young. Millie Jackson. Roxy Music. Bob Dylan. Patti Smith. 426 albums in the room. More in storage. EmmyLou Harris. The Byrds. The Avengers. Everything seems obvious. The Ramones. James Gang. Scott Walker…Nobody down here/can do it for me…
i go to the flower market with its international bounty and there’s snow everywhere and there’s nothing and everything…In the year of the scavenger/the season of the bitch…What’s in season as both a valid and an absurd question. i receive a letter and it asks why flowers? i miss your writing and your obsession with time. i chew on a word i re-read a few days ago in one of my old journals–who knows what i’d actually been looking for: intempestive. i wish it was prettier but i love its specificity: “untimely; inopportune; out of season.” What are these lists supposed to explain, anyway? Who are you? What do you like? How carefully do you love it and do we do it differently or in a similar way? i’m convinced the methods but not necessarily the ingredients have to match; otherwise, there will always be misunderstandings about our capacities for intensity...One thing kind of touched me today/I looked at you and counted all the times we had laid…i would choose engagement over collection any day, but i’m also not very good at planning for the future.

i just re-read the Raymond Carver short story “What we talk about when we talk about love.” i guess a lot of people have been doing that lately because of the movie. Whenever i read Carver i think of my Dad. The men who think they’re mild-mannered who are both that and quick-tempered. A certain expectation of gender resolve and gendered manners. A misunderstanding of and desperate need for armor and ego. We, you and i, we talk a lot about sex but not too much about love…We’ll build a glass asylum/With just a hint of mayhem…My roommate told me a sweet story about her childhood best friend who judges paintings by whether or not she likes the colors and whether or not it seems like the person was having fun when he or she made it. i try to say something about art and politics but my heart isn’t in it.

After you left i flipped through your ipod and settled on Diamond Dogs, which i hadn’t listened to in years. i surprised myself by knowing every word to every song. Heart muscle memories that still hurt. Every song so excitingly strange and long and sexy and romantic. My attachment to this album is already claimed and undoable. When i read Raymond Carver i’m back in my parents bedroom on their waterbed with the grey and peach calla lily bedspread under the ceiling fan with the seagull mobile dangling from the tiny pull chain at the top and there is a breeze and it’s early evening and there’s weed in the air and divorce on everyone’s mind. When i hear Diamond Dogs i’m standing in front of a hollowed out piano stuffed full of records and this one is spinning and there’s a fat black cat on top and i’m petting his belly…I know you think you’re awful square…and my pulse burns because i am lit through with this record…But you made everyone and you’ve been everywhere…and the person who showed it to me. Every line is packed with the gigantic life we stumbled into and bumbled out of. I stretched out on your floor and liked the confusion of that absent presence pushing its way into the wrong place and time…Just another future song/Knowin’ it’ll never kitsch….