II. Say Anything
I’ve never seen Say Anything, released in 1989 when I was 13, fell into the gap of people who were too young to see it in real time, and not interested enough to see it as the cultural imperative it kind of became for the coming of age romantic allegory. Sometimes I feel like I should just see the movie and get it over with, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t love it as much as I do now, like the idea of what you think is inside something is better, more inviolate, than the actual thing. You know how actors ruin the characters in a book made into a movie? Or how the movie ruins the book? Or how the book’s execution ruins its conception? Art, really, is a bag of failure.
So I have not seen the scene where John Cusack holds the boom box for the girl, perhaps to play a song? I know it’s about a guy who likes a girl, and he plays a song for her because maybe he can’t play guitar and sing, or maybe the song was playing during an intimate moment. Yah that’s probably it. I know these things because I have lived in this world the same way you have, and together we understand these things — the kissing, the songs, the I love and hate yous, which brings us to dawn, after the 2:00 am text, having been up all night, somewhere in the middle of this world, a broken google map URL, a night gripped by tendrils of want, which felt, this middle, like the edge.
I always wished there was a stairwell in my bedroom and I never had one, you see those movies with the rooms that have the stairwells that spiral up into somewhere else, like that room in the second half of Geronimo Rex that ends the book and the weird passage of bodies through it. I spread out on the grass beside Barry Hannah’s grave last week, I rolled my back against the ground until I could see the sky behind me and the buildings there upside down, there was this yellow-lighted building where there was a party that was hanging out of the earth toward that and it was like being pressed against something in reverse gravity and I wanted to stick there but people were talking and it scrambled something like the bass in here. I always wished I could play drums but I am not a drummer-person, drummers are made out of different kind of human scrap, all drummers seem to me like they aren’t going to age at all and one day they’ll just die. This song’s ok but it really just makes me want to listen to Bitches Brew. The key tone in here is pretty nice, reminds me of crystals
More keys in here, it’s like the keys in the other shut the fuck up and became the keys in this song. I wonder if you had all the songs ever written you could put them in a logical order that would just be another thing, I wonder if the length of all the songs ever written is longer than the amount of time people have been playing music, seems like yes but maybe not, when do people go to sleep, how many songs are being written right now. I don’t like this song at all really, well I guess sort of but it doesn’t song like what I remember Codeine sounding like though it’s been a long time since I pulled them up, I like those songs on albums that you skip when you are originally listening to the album a lot because you like that one song less and then later that song suddenly reappears and seems so new in the context of the others, and you can listen to it in a different way than the whole album, I’m thinking mainly of the “The Good Thing” by Talking Heads because I always hated that song until one day I didn’t. This piano part now is really getting irritating. I’ll take a sip of this drink. There’s some limeade in it which I discovered this week having in my fridge improves my life by a good 8-11%. I wish I could look up right now and see someone I didn’t expect to be here sitting in my house, it could be anybody, as long as they were supposed to be elsewhere. Will the internet let you do that one day, I hope not. Fuck a stairwell I want rope.
