I'VE BEEN LOW - PART 3

DIARY

Every year I have a ritual of going out at the end of January or beginning of
February and buying the music I've neglected to buy during the rest of the year.
I went overboard this year, and it was wonderful.
I bought the first two singles released by the band Lush, Radiohead's Hail to
the Thief, Peruvian folk music, Taraf de Haidouks, Snivilisation by Oribtal,
Everything is Wrong by Moby, Nothing's Shocking by Jane's Addiction, Paul's
Boutique by the Beastie Boys, the first EP of Jurassic 5, Spice by the Spice
Girls, Steal This Album by the Coup, and too many Techno compilations to
count. Don't ask me how much I spent. It was decadent; absolutely decadent.

When I said that the Nocturnal was the one thing that kept me going, I lied.
There was one other thing, and deeper, even, possibly. No, definitely. My
novel, Urbàntasm, which I have been working on for eight years now. It's slow
going. A long, hard slog. But the longer it takes, the more passionate I feel
that it must, must, must be completed, with or without its consent.

The night that I bought the music, I went home and went to sleep.
The night after that, I came home, and listened to a Lush song, Etheriel, as I
tried and tried and tried to bang out the end of a chapter that has preoccupied
me for six months now. At the end of the night, I had only written a
paragraph. Eight or nine lines for eight or nine hours. I went to bed with my
heart sinking through the mattress and into the floor.
The next morning I put on the song "Jane Says," by Jane's Addiction. Mistake.
The words are slightly sad. Jane says Have you seen my wig around? I feel
naked without it. The tune is slightly happy and hopeful. Beyond that, I
don't know how to describe it. I mean, it's got a guitar and steel drums.
What more?
I had to stop and sit on the radiator and cry for about ten minutes. It just
broke. (By the way, I don't really keep many secrets anymore. I don't know if
anyone's reading this blog, with its sentiment and too-long entries, and if
not, then it's certainly a moot point anyway. If you are, I don't care, I am
proud of the person I've become, and I don't have to keep any secrets, like,
say, crying while I sat on the radiator.) And of course, as the sound wound
down, I looked crappy, so I had to put on my shades, which are violent, and
make everything appear much sunnier and alive than they are, and that was a
jolt as well. I took the train to work. I went through the day in a haze.
And that night, when I was staying with friends in Hyde Park (the South Side by
the Lake), I wrote an appeal to seven friends and colleagues urging them to
form a new group with me, the Occlusion Group, not a theater group, a group
that would just be, a group that would just be together and enjoy being
together, and drive itself to be happy in the world, and most of all, heard.

This is the new new group I have started, and we are going to come together
this summer.