Sinister: lately i'm finding i am the book and you are the binding

[lindsey baker]

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 at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
 +-+  "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000  +-+
 +-+  "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001   +-+
 +-+               Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa                 +-+
 +-+               Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut!                +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+