Femmes: Sylvia's Library

It's quiet-ish. I've been here before. I forget it's summer now, not the lonesome cold of late fall that I remember, and so I'm not alone, no, far from it.  It's not just Sylvia and me set alone with her books today with the windows closed against the biting cold.  I see none of her webs, I hear none of her whispers in the silence.  It's hot outside.  Tourists hush about taking pictures in front of the "Please Do Not Take Pictures" sign.  I'm not depressed like I was, which makes things different and the only free seat is by, you've probably guessed it dear reader, a fucking writer type; or maybe it's just a sneaky mirror.

There's a furrow in his brow.  I know it, I don't even have to look up.  I can feel his messy corduroy pants angst on the humid French from the whispering tour guide, and the Paris air and he's had enough, he's gone.  Good riddance fucking tortoise-rimmed glasses and knapsack bag.  Good riddance to the iPad too, that's what all the writers are using these days, the real ones with their tortured souls and their "poetry"

Perhaps I spoke too soon.  Have you got a grasp on my thoughts now? Have you? Do my feelings pervade?  Good, because we must part ways now, there's a beautiful girl sitting in the corner and we keep making eyes at each other.  Take a picture of her dear reader, lest we forget, the Irishman from the cafe is a photographer after all.

Femmes: Corners (or Sauce de Piment)

Ah ha! And to think that I'd almost forgotten about my dear shitty Chinois! The microwave heat, the sitting still water oh, the memories.  This was real Paris to me those years back when a floor was suited just fine for sleeping on.  The city's been flooding back all day, walking past Bastille, past the metro at Filles du Calvaire and the corner at Rue Bretagne, the one with the ATMs, where I'd waited for Olivia that cold, cold November night ago.  I'll say it's much different in the summer sun.  No chill in the bone, it's a sweat on the brow instead, and nostalgia, and Cafe Charlot.  It must be the company that a memory clings to; her long fur coat, her deep rouge lips.

I have to smile.  I had been writing in a shitty Chinois that night too.  I was so, so young, pacing in circles in the tangerine light, freezing from fingers to toes right down to the core of me, wishing for her to be there, and suddenly she was, I remember.

It's these muses that cross our path, like glue that keeps the sand from sieving through, they're the heavy anchor in turbulent seas, I remember.  Beige jacket, red pants; of course I remember Rachel when I see the galleries.  They may be different now (JR's long moved on to bigger and grander iterations), but really it's the corners, life's intersections where the streets meet that are most clear and familiar.  Walking with Rachel I remember right where the broken toilet was on the corner across the street from American Apparel.  That memory might well outlast the facing storefront. After all, it's been six years nearly.  A lot can happen for a fashion brand in six years.  A lot of mistakes can be made, but it's still here.  For now.

Femmes: Cafe Shakespeare

I have a knack for meeting people, I suppose.  Maybe it's only when I'm traveling. Yes, for a second while this beautiful girl beside me twirls her hair.  Yes, it's my favorite thing, serendipity.  It's the way a woman in proximity, knowing not, has her hand on the faucet of my words, my word.  Is that a bit too garish?

Twirl, twirl, twirl.  She's a beautiful young thing, young brown hair, young legs, deep blue denim jacket, yes.  She's busy with a highlighter.  That's right, a student no doubt.  I can't imagine highlighting passages just for the fuck of it.  Her face is easily forgivable though, and when she looks up, I look back down of course, to stop from staring.  I've come to the curious revelation that my hand may write -- impressively straight I might add -- for some time without the consult of my eyes.  It can be a subconscious thing, and then I become the weird guy staring.  It can't be a strong look, but in my periphery I can see that she's smiling; shaking her head, but still she's smiling.

Ah! The line between muse and distraction is razor-thin sometimes.  Serendipity though, yes.  Not only fun to say, serendipity is a wonderful scheme.  There's no pretense, there's nothing really, it's free.  All it takes is a little perception and attention to detail.  That costs nothing, like singing Soundgarden songs to the babies waiting in line.

A recreational smoking habit helps as well.  I met the guy behind the counter two hours ago on a not busy street in the Marais.  After all, it's a Marais day.  An empty street I remember because of the clarity of the only few voices in the air, a whisper English in my ear as I walked by and the name Haim as he and a friend lit cigarettes.

It was Haim and the cigarette smoke that drew me to a decided about-face down the block to bum one.  If you smoke cigarettes at all, I swear, you need to come to Paris and walk the streets.  It's one of the simple pleasures in life; walking through Paris with a lit cigarette to drag on.

Anyways, they were Irishmen.  God I love the Irish.  They gave me three cigarettes when I told them I hated the Lumineers; real DB music, the Lumineers.  And we'll all race to marry the Haim girls. "On bended knee as soon as I see 'em!" I'd said.  I'm turning a corner with this Shakespeare place.  I'd left six years ago in the winter with such a sour taste for writer types.  Now it's iced chai on my tongue and familiar English in the air.  Maybe I'm thawing in the summer heat, maybe I just enjoy the company at the cafe better.  I'll poke into the bookstore shortly for a bit, see how Sylvia's doing, weaving her webs in the quiet parlor upstairs.

Femmes: Place D'Aligre

Against all odds and varying degrees of je ne sais quoi, let's call it scatter-brained indifference, I've woken up in Paris once again, and for only the second time alone.  It's new to me this Paris, not the 14th, my familiar stomp, nor the 7th that's familiar from Lili.  No, I'm holed up in the 12th now, not far from the Marais and Sacha's flat and still, entirely different. No, the 12th is a much more generic, wholesome humble Paris.

I arrived at Gare de Lyon late last night, near midnight, and walked myself north to the tiny square of Place d'Aligre. Only by good grace did I make it into the building without the code. A kind woman let me in, an older blonde, but ah, it's always a woman with me.

Still no wifi, but that's not important. I tried at the cafe but the password didn't work. I don't really care. Fewer and fewer things faze me now I'm beginning to realize. Perhaps it's a Paris thing.  From a space beyond interconnectivity it takes on the specter of a master and hostage reality. We have a sort of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to our technology. We've been enslaved so long now that the thought of being free is frightening.

But free I am now, at least for the moment. The mind is open to more important and more beautiful things to be thankful for; like this market right outside my door, and the smile it brings to me, and more discreetly so, the dawn of thought that has come to me as I walked up and down the stalls of old antiquities and fruit.  I was searching for something more to buy her, but I found nothing, and perhaps that's because I need nothing else to give up to her; not a trinket, no jewelry or a shiny stone, not my love, and certainly not my life.

It's exhausted, finally, this merry-go-around of holding on and letting go and so the comfort, I should say, is only natural.  Its the little things; an old pencil and bound paper, a borrowed cigarette, a table to myself outside on the corner, and an espresso in Paris.  Paris is a power like that.  I can only find this here.  I might walk all day around the city I think, and let my feelings fly again through the streets like they haven't in such a long time.

The soul is whole again; anything is possible.

Femmes: Sunflowers at Sunset

I'm beginning to notice with more increasing regularity on this train all the people together: the couples, the families, the friends travelling together.

My eyes glaze over those alone--the commuters, the weekenders--and they focus on the relationships of those that know one another and illicit emotions.  Perhaps because solitude is silence, my ears pricks at conversation and my eyes follow.  It's usually the sound of love or joy or happiness, being carefree.  I wonder if eyes glaze over me.

Maybe people see the way I see, or maybe I'm one in a million, and no one understands the constant fireworks in between my ears like Bastille Day, Sacha's birthday, on the fourteenth of July.  It's curious that my oldest friends, both of them, were born on days of independence in July.  There's probably a story in there somewhere, and I wish I just had a mountain of speed with which to write it down.  With that, it wold only take days, smashing through the excavation.  What would Steinbeck do with that motivation?

I like reading his journal, or I should say his collection of letters to his editor.  Today he balked at Roger & Hammerstein's The King And I, calling it a thin show that covers it's thinness in luxury.

He said:

"I believe you can only be unafraid if you find what it is that you fear and you conquer it."

Not about The King And I, mind you, but about a more general kind of living.


*****

Whatever be the problem,
sunflowers at sunset
in South France
is the cure.

They have a powerful magic
at this time as they suck
on the last sunshine
of the day,

sunlight in the sky.

I hope when I die I wake up in these fields
to wander through forever.

Femmes: Love Sex Dreams

Only when I check my phone do I realize what train I'm on.  It's the 4:20 train to Paris.  Right on time, and away we go.  I know small details always fall by the wayside which is why I write them down.  Some things I don't want to forget, especially when I'm back home, back in Venice by the beach in the California sun and the weed haze, trying to remember everything.  The feeling of craziness tickles the peripherals of my mind yet again on this leg, Barcelona Sants to Gare de Lyon; French, Spanish, English, German all flying around the car.  I'm glad I'm on the second level, to be closer to the heavens, higher off the ground than before.

I smile at the thought of having wanted to throw myself off a bridge when I first got here.  I was desperate, which drove me, as it often does into the serendipitous.  An older English angel guided my hand in Barcelona and Andalusia, kept me company, kept me busy and away from the darker thoughts, French angels in France also, friends and young lovers, they always seem to be my saviors. I'm nowhere near suicide now, but still, I'm rocketing away I'm afraid.  Oh well.  Sanity's for the mundane and the overrated.

I'll think back on Seville and the curious Alberta (Elysia) I... well, that's just it.  It's curious isn't it?  What was that?  It was a laugh, a gas.  I wouldn't call it a riot, but it sure as hell was something new.  She doesn't drink, she doesn't smoke, she doesn't eat cheese, she doesn't drink tea or coffee, she doesn't eat meat on the principle of animal endearment, but everything else is attributed to having the pallet of a fifteen year old girl.  We didn't have sex.  She talked about her ex constantly and how she'd ran away from the only guy she ever felt anything for.  Her parents hated him because he was a dreamer.

Suffice to say, I could relate.  He grew up surfing in South Africa, I grew up surfing in LA.  Alberta (Elysia) showed me the other side.  She pushed me over an edge I needed to get over.  Maybe it's frowned upon, but I have to laugh at the fact, thinking back, that if it'd been me and myself in Seville, it might've been me having to do the pushing, and the edge maybe much more physical.  It's insanely hilarious.

I feel better now, much better, like I accomplished what I came over here to do with her.  Sure my balls feel like boules from the not cumming for three weeks, but I'll sort that out in Paris.

Fuckin' life is grand, isn't it.

Femmes: What's In My Head

The Fuzz song makes me think of Savanna; Ty Segall and Savanna blaring in my ears.  I'm writing to the music again like I used to do.  It feels good.  There was a feeling of the glow only a few minutes ago, that full body insanity when my fingers itch for a pencil, gripping and tapping and stretching and popping.

I wrote once after a long hiatus that I needed to write again or I was going to explode; that kind of glow, my hair stood on end.  They're all at attention now on my arm, I can see them listening on my leg because it's hot outside in summer Spain.

I just left Madrid.  I was in Andalusia in the morning, I woke up in Seville.  Tonight I'll rest my head in Paris again.



*****

The shadows of the
lines running beside
the train flick back
and forth across my
pages like windshield-
wipers as gold fields
and patches of purple
fly by outside.

It's because they're 
not totally taught.

I wonder what they're
wiping away.

I hope it's thee
anxiety.