Boulder is both not as bad as it used to be and way worse than it seems. The frat boys and untouchable sorority girls in tight yellow CU T-shirts don’t faze me as much as they used to, as I’m no longer a second class citizen in the scene that they rule. I’m now officially well into my in-betweenness: I’m not a college kid, and I’m not some swinging rock club promoter, and I’m not a grown-up with a goddam career, I’m just a hanger-on. Which is bad sometimes, like the time I was parked behind a building in-between a little park and a field somewhere in Illinois (I think it was Illinois, it could have been Missouri) and I woke up, moved my shield of pillows and peered outside because I detected someone close to me and it was a little old lady—a nice little old lady with a bright red coat and white hair glowing under the rising sun—just out walking her dog. She’d already been checking out the van I guess, and her eyes widened when she saw me moving inside of it. She walked away quickly, peering back at me nervously over her shoulder.
Sometimes it’s good, like the time in Urbana, Illinois when I couldn’t find the place where I was supposed to play and I pulled up next to a meek Asian-American college girl who was just getting out of her car to ask her for directions and I swear I could feel her hands tightening on the little canister of pepper spray her father gave her to put on her key chain. Yeah, beware, little darling, I’m a stranger in your town.
But being a stranger in Boulder is worse because I know this place, and I know it well. I even kind of ruled it for a while, albeit disdainfully. Which is to say I had a reputation here, and people were a little uncomfortable around me, but respectfully uncomfortable, not just creeped out like they are elsewhere. [God, I’m so sick of my writing, somewhere along the line I learned how to talk down to people in my writing and now that goddamn middle-class condescending middlebrow has covered my real writing like kudzu. At the very least, this journal has taught me that I have a limitless capability for whining. Boo fucking hoo.] I want to talk to somebody, but not just anybody, I want somebody to want to talk to me. I don’t want to have to go out and look for it. It sucks coming back here and having everything be the fucking same as it was when I was seventeen, living with my mom and my sister in a cold bare apartment, none of us with any friends or any money, my mother’s continued high spirits only wearing us further down, all of us desperately lonely and wanting friends with the same intensity with which we resent all of humanity. I gotta get the fuck out of here and back to Allie’s loving arms.
There’s a kink in my back that I’ve had since, oh, about Alabama and it’s not going away.
Stunning scene on the Pearl Street mall today. After my huge success at Penny Lane the other night (selling three CDs to cute college girls!!!) I decided I had to try my luck at busking because, who knows, I may be great at it. After running a couple of funny covers, I packed all my shit up and headed out. Well, I chickened out, of course, but I justified it by telling myself that my voice was dying (it may be) and that it wasn’t worth doing for twenty minutes. But, man, when I was walking back down from scoping the scene out, I heard this fantastic music, like Calypso but played on vibes instead of steel drums. As I approached, the first thing I could see was just this little blond girl’s pony tail bobbing up and down as she was whacking away on something—I mean big, wood-chopping strokes—with sticks with bright yellow tennis balls on the ends. As I got closer, I could see that it was a whole family (maybe some crackpot right wing Christian church group, but Christ, just imagine it as a damn family, okay) dressed in assorted tie-dyed bright blue outfits with the guys wearing those little hats that dudes always wear with dashikis, and all of ‘em playing sets of vibes of different sizes, maybe four of five different rigs in all, the smallest being normal sized and the biggest one maybe four feet tall and eight feet long with individual boards cut out of what must have been two by sixes. None of the players appeared to be over sixteen, and many of‘em were well under, maybe as young as nine or ten. As I got closer, I noticed a kid in front playing a hand drum as well, and a young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, standing slightly in front of the whole troupe in bare feet (though I was cold in my jean jacket) shaking huge maracas made out of coconuts and unselfconsciously swaying her hips and taking in the crowd. She was fucking beautiful, and she had us all. But not beautiful in a generic, safe way, not optimized beautiful, but a fragile beauty. Like at that moment, she was the best fucking thing I’d ever seen, but even then, staring at her because I couldn’t help myself, I knew that in only a few short years, she would become dissatisfied, she would feel that her hips were heavy on her and out of proportion to the rest of her body and that far sooner than that her life would be complicated w/ all the appallingly banal convolutions of teenage life, that her face, though it was clear, was probably bound for the ravages of serious acne and that maybe even that night her boyfriend could pull some bullshit “you would if you loved me” and that cloud would settle over her face, never to leave. But for today, she was perfect.
God, I’m a hack.
Posted by Mishka at October 25, 2003 12:27 AM