I’VE BEEN LOW – PART 3

DIARY

Every year I have a ritual of going out at the end of January or beginning of

February and buying the music I’ve neglected to buy during the rest of the year.

I went overboard this year, and it was wonderful.

I bought the first two singles released by the band Lush, Radiohead’s Hail to

the Thief, Peruvian folk music, Taraf de Haidouks, Snivilisation by Oribtal,

Everything is Wrong by Moby, Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction, Paul’s

Boutique by the Beastie Boys, the first EP of Jurassic 5, Spice by the Spice

Girls, Steal This Album by the Coup, and too many Techno compilations to

count. Don’t ask me how much I spent. It was decadent; absolutely decadent.

When I said that the Nocturnal was the one thing that kept me going, I lied.

There was one other thing, and deeper, even, possibly. No, definitely. My

novel, Urbàntasm, which I have been working on for eight years now. It’s slow

going. A long, hard slog. But the longer it takes, the more passionate I feel

that it must, must, must be completed, with or without its consent.

The night that I bought the music, I went home and went to sleep.

The night after that, I came home, and listened to a Lush song, Etheriel, as I

tried and tried and tried to bang out the end of a chapter that has preoccupied

me for six months now. At the end of the night, I had only written a

paragraph. Eight or nine lines for eight or nine hours. I went to bed with my

heart sinking through the mattress and into the floor.

The next morning I put on the song “Jane Says,” by Jane’s Addiction. Mistake.

The words are slightly sad. Jane says Have you seen my wig around? I feel

naked without it. The tune is slightly happy and hopeful. Beyond that, I

don’t know how to describe it. I mean, it’s got a guitar and steel drums.

What more?

I had to stop and sit on the radiator and cry for about ten minutes. It just

broke. (By the way, I don’t really keep many secrets anymore. I don’t know if

anyone’s reading this blog, with its sentiment and too-long entries, and if

not, then it’s certainly a moot point anyway. If you are, I don’t care, I am

proud of the person I’ve become, and I don’t have to keep any secrets, like,

say, crying while I sat on the radiator.) And of course, as the sound wound

down, I looked crappy, so I had to put on my shades, which are violent, and

make everything appear much sunnier and alive than they are, and that was a

jolt as well. I took the train to work. I went through the day in a haze.

And that night, when I was staying with friends in Hyde Park (the South Side by

the Lake), I wrote an appeal to seven friends and colleagues urging them to

form a new group with me, the Occlusion Group, not a theater group, a group

that would just be, a group that would just be together and enjoy being

together, and drive itself to be happy in the world, and most of all, heard.

This is the new new group I have started, and we are going to come together

this summer.

Leave a Comment