for emily, wherever i may find her.

you might not want to read this. it's not thoughtful or intentional or any of that jazz.

actually, you want to read the poem. skip down to the poem. the poem is great. hell, the poem is fucking excellent.

(that's fucking as an adjective, not a verb, you dirty-minded bastards.)

((god damn. i swear a lot.))


i feel like talking at you tonight, internet.

there are only two places blog-writers end up; they either acquire readers and then write good shit or else they get tired of trying and then they talk to the internet with no intention of anybody ever reading it, just for the hell of it.

i have arrived.

today, i spent a couple of hours with emily. emily is my forever-friend, you know? that one you've known for so long that after a few months of only rarely talking in that efficient, tasky kind of a way, it's as easy as eating pie to remember how to be friends.

i suspect that modern civilization has the nasty habit of overlooking important details, and i think this is one of them: your brain forms in your adolescence to customize itself to your long-lasting survival. that wasn't it. this is it: you become a person suited to the people you grew up with, and the people you grew up with become the people you expect always to interact with.

and what the hell, i'm seventeen and clueless and probably wrong and definitely more idealistic than any rational adult can stand to maintain, but i'm seventeen, and that's what seventeen is for.

poetry break!

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,

casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.

And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.

So I made him look at the poem.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,

and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed
amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought

bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they’d plot

to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children. Of course later

that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.

“We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
he explained, and the band played on.

also, while we're acknowledging our personal inanity by comparing ourselves to our personal favorite geniuses, mark twain once said, "the man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little." and while we're at it, winston churchill was all like, "any man who is under thirty, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over thirty, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

also, my sorry underqualified ass had to go mess with the HTML to bring you that poem. forgive the formatting-- it's better than before (i promise).

now. having established the scale of my relative perfect and utter insignificance, we resume.

emily and my family are the people i built myself around when my brain was made of plastic.

today we got coffee and went on a bike ride and played cards and i was surprised by the degree to which nothing had changed, and then i got to thinking about friendships and the weight of them and how if they were actual literal ships that represented friendships in a real, actual metaphorical ocean, they would float, and then the wreckage would float, and the ocean would be absolutely chock-full or ships and floating ships and half floating ships and floating half ships and abandoned floating ships and big ships and little ships and literal ships that were actually literally metaphorical (i'm just playing with you now) and i was thinking about the purpose of ships and how bad my metaphor really was and how that metaphorical ocean would have to be made of metaphorical honey to convey how much the brain or society or whatever it is friendships float in wants them to float only honey isn't pretty colored, or anyway, it isn't the color of the ocean.

i don't think that at all, by the way.

that metaphor.

i don't think it's good. it's there to amuse you, and for some of you, confuse you. you know who you are.



with questionable insincerity,
claire.