hello sinister. i've had an odd weekend. looking at the words there next to each other, it occurs to me that the sentence is unoriginal. for me to have an odd weekend is not singular, and in and of itself, not all that interesting, either. but still, i will write on and on and on of oddities and commonalities and hope that somewhere in the act of writing and reading and forgetting, i will remember the feeling of friday night, and the subsequent minutes to come and pass away. is that indie? is that emo? is that rawk? is that apathetic? is that categorical? is that worth caring about? is that me? is it? is it? is it? maybe we do need a pretty song, and so i recommend ben kweller to the list and skip a line to commence something. *** i was supposed to see cursive friday night. i was actually more than a bit jazzed about the show, not only to see the band (which i only really listen to when i get really pissed off thanks to the nature of 'the lament of pretty baby') but also to see the people i knew would be there. ex-boyfriends and indie folk galore, i guess, and i was decked out and ready to roll by the band merchandise table (where i would have undoubtedly purchased a button for the masterpiece bag) and chain smoke my way to a smoke-hazed oblivion of actualized mistakes. i never made it. i chose, unfortunately, to go with some people who will soon be 'smug-marrieds,' who decided that, upon coasting off i-80 into omaha, they needed to go shopping for a loveseat. for an hour and a half we rounded the floor of couches and sofas and chairs at nebraska furniture mart, going back and forth between two identical loveseats save for the different color-schemes in their plaid upholstry fabrics. finally they chose a rather countrified gem in pale blues and reds, with an abnormally high back for what they deemed was 'good back support.' after the shopping reached its heady end, food was next on the to-do list. they wanted sushi. i said all right, even though i'm not a big sushi fan, but i was willing to do whatever it took to get to tim kasher. the wait was too long at sushi ichiban, so i took them to a vietnamese place i quite fancy. at least i had a good dinner, i thought, as i sucked down a parliament in front of the 'sold out' sign on the door to sokol underground an hour later. they wanted to go to a used bookstore downtown called the antiquarium, a heralded hippie hangout of musty books and music and a black and white cat. i said fine, sure, go. it's ok that i'm missing out on the only reason i came home. and so. we went. and there, among the stacks and stacks of dusty boks, came the beginning of the oddness. the antiquarium is one of those places you go to either because you're a hard-core used book reader, you need something sort of hard to find on vinyl or you're trying to be cool. i went out with the lead singer of the band the movies (back when he was solo hit matt whipkey) in high school, and he told me he always took girls to the antiquarium on a first date because it made him look 'intellectual.' in the front corner of the store hangs a white piece of cardboard with the words 'designated smoking area' written in red marker and outlined in black. underneath is a grouping of chairs and tall ashtrays, a coffee table strewn with books and magazines. friday night, people occupied the chairs, smoking and stroking the cat, talking about anthropolgy and anatomy and the subtle differences between being a masseuse and a masseur. i finally found the poetry section, having left the happy couple perusing the religion and cookbook areas, and set to work scouring the shelves for something. and there, fifteen or so feet away from the heavy conversation and suspended layer of smoke, the cat rubbing against and around my ankles, i discovered a section of poetry volumes by my poetry professor. greg kuzma. i picked them off the shelf one by one, and flipped through the pages. 1978. 1988. 1995. greg read us one of his poems last semester, a long ditty called 'getting the dead out.' the title turned out to be the best line of the piece, and i sort of stopped listening halfway through his reading. the poems in the first book i looked at were shorter, older. a hell of a lot better. it was weird, seeing his name on the cover and seeing the differing lengths of each book and poem. trying to, as he always likes to say, feel the words in my mouth. get my teeth and gums around the lines, maybe with the luck of biting into something quite worthy of mulling, chewing. one of the books, a little one containing a single poem titled 'grandmother,' had an autograph. it said: 'to the person i always loved the most -- greg kuzma.' and i was sad, thinking that there, written above the signature i had seen so many times before written on my poetry papers, someone he had loved hadn't treasured the written or the printed words enough to keep them. the penciled price for the book was $4.50, and i didn't buy it. it wasn't mine, and i didn't think i could ever try to imagine myself to be the one greg always loved the most. or. rather. maybe i wondered if i could ever be the one anyone always loved the most. i slipped the book back between the other yellowed copies, and stood there, looking sideways at the spines of all the books together, all the names of people who do what i do. who sit down in a room somewhere and watch everything fall away save for a pen and paper. i was filled with an overwhelming sense of longing, for someone and something i could only half-define. i don't know now if i would have been happier with the ex-boyfriends and pseudo-indie friends and grinding bitterness of cursive. i don't know if i was happy with greg's cursive signature and the obligation of riding back with a happily/overly christian couple. i wanted something. i wanted a name. i wanted a boy. i wanted the passing of time to accelerate for a while. i wanted to sit with the graying hippies and smoke for a bit, petting the cat and saying i, too, knew much about the nervous system. i wanted the person greg loved the most to have that book back, on their shelf, to have a story worth talking about. *** matthew said this: Same goes for love, which you indie sentimental folk love to talk about. It's all sort of worthless too. How often do relationships really work out? How giving can one person be for so long? You know that someone is going to get tired, and things will fuck up, and there will be bad patches. And eventually, it will end. Marriages that last awhile seem to be rare, and when they do happen, it's usually at the expense of true happiness or dignity on someone's part or something like that. I know that's vague, but whatever. i have two songs to reference for this, first, before i throw out my indie-tastic two cents. 1. "we've been waiting all year for someone to just say, 'everyone fucks up, it's going to be ok.'" -- rilo kiley 2. "son, love is a punch in the eye. it's a sudden and swift surprise. it's not a candle, not waiting to burn. so baby, just wait your turn. and when it hits you, you'll see, through rose-colored apathy, through the blues that bruise can leave...was it really worth the wait?" -- the good life (tim kasher rears his head again! why? why did i miss him?) goodness, apathy seems to be winning out these days on matters of love and life and everything else. i would like to think that love, in its purest and truest form, will only further qualify my sense of self and dignity and happiness. not because someone else supplies me with false senses of inner-worth, but because i will finally realize that, when i love, the time spent believing love to be elusive and short-lived at best has really been a grand self-delusion. how will we ever be able to love if we don't believe it's worth the while it lasts? and if love is worthless why the hell am i wasting time on things i love? maybe i am one of the century of fakers, and i really love nothing but myself, or the image of myself i create at night when i'm lying in my bed, trying desperately to not be afraid, to breathe. but if i love me, and love is worthless, maybe that means i am worthless, too. ahhhhh. indie sentiments. i "love" them. songs rise and fall, just as people do. let the movement of air through your lungs match the pacing of chords, then, i guess, but question the depth of your lyrical understanding if you have never known or believed in love. we fall in love with songs because of the personal history we bring to the music, not because the music supplies us with artificial emotion. danny said this: "I like to believe that everything matters and that everything we do can make a difference and that everything is precious but sometimes i just get hit by a huge bout of apathy that lasts for a few days or sometimes longer. The bouts of apathy scare me,but i guess they're all part and parcel of being someone non-linear. Someone who can be very twee and all RAWK at the same time. Someone who loves to watch amelie but can just easily make do with some trashy horror like scream. Someone who enjoys reading 'classic' novels,teenage-dramas and poirot detective novels. Part and parcel of being me." this is why people fall in love with danny, and why it's worth it and, whether he believes it or not, why it lasts. see songs referenced above. we all long for something. something vague and specific and neatly categorized into such evil slots as 'love' or 'acceptance' or 'truth' or 'companionship.' i will take all of the above, please, even if they're all as worthless as greg kuzma's autograph, a trip to a sold-out show, a difference in plaids. even if they're all as worthless as me. xxx love, lou _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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