14th Street

So I just finished reading 'Special Topics in Calamity Physics', by Marisha Pessl, which makes you feel like you've just finished reading the whole bloody English canon, and then a whole other canon that doesn't even exist GOD DAMN POSTMODERNISM. You should go and read it too.

I've been juggling work this week with uni, rehearsals for this comedy I'm in, a mess of a home life, rufus wainwright's Want 1 & 2, Dylan my muddy guitar, Calamity physics and trying to get fit. I bought a punching bag.

"Take five, Geoff, that was excellent!"
He wiped the creases of his face with the leather of his arm. Looking around, Geoff sat down on the long wooden bench up against the gym's left wall. He wanted a long and cold beer and a beautiful child to abuse. Sadly, the break in training was just that, and the locomotive rolls on, regardless of the shine on the tracks.
On of the things his mother had written to him - in the lengthy and fragmented 8x10 foot poster that she left stapled to her hanging body like some satanic proclamatory scroll - was that if you had to be a mindless slave to emotion, to 'love' or to 'anger' or to 'grief', then at the very least you should balance these tendancies by reciting poetry as you spiralled.
Returning to the gym floor, renewed by two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen and one part Yeats, Geoff tried to to dredge up what drove him to such ambition.

And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.

Long days, hot nights, good people, warm dregs, soft shoes and hard fucking. This is the existence of the athlete, the man whose endless search in the world ended in himself, in the fruitless pursuit of confirmation in the eyes of man. Confirmation by the games and challenges man invented himself. To ignore the pull and pall of the problems, and to train the given corpus into an elite unit of the useless. Hunters and Collecters is just a band, now.
But Geoff was alive, and that's what matters. No amount of Sarah Kane or Lou Reed could take that away from him, just like no amount of anablic steroids could cure the knowledge he was climbing a hill that lead like an Escher, to the bottom of a hill. But he was climbing it! A mountain climber, oh gorgeous human pursuit.
Now I've made you feel bad. But why? I said Geoff was happy! Is it because you say you're happy, when in fact you're drugging yourself out of the hills? I'm happy, I'm better than happy, I'm fine.