Ten minutes ago, I turned off the lights with the earnest intentions of trying to get some sleep at what is - at least in poet time - a decent hour.
Now the lights are on again. I'm sitting cross-legged on a bed. This is something I never do.
My mind is restless. I tried listening to Neurosis to calm it down, and that was a failure of a plan. I've been home from St. Paul for 3 days, 4 if you count today which is only a couple hours old. After 15 days of living out of a suitcase, having no solid place to call "home," exceedingly limited finances, and an abundance of exhaustion, I though that being stationary for a while would be something I enjoyed - instead, I feel as restless as ever.
I'm often prone to maudlin fits of late-night, insomnia driven melancholy. It happens.
I made more friends at Nationals this year than I had expected to. I've got this romanticized ideal of the 'transient life' where I'm too much of a drifter to really make a connection with people for more than a night, but generally that turns out to be a falsehood. Due to a perfect storm of frustrations, setbacks, and complications, my first couple nights at NPS were a showcase of me at my most negative, so much that I caught myself muttering around inside my head that I should just "fuck all this slam bullshit." Somewhere along the way - several solid hours of sleep obviously helping - I reconnected with some friends that I made at NorthBEAST last year, who did an outstanding job of reminding me that this whole poetry thing really is one fucked up dysfunctional family, but it's still a family. So here I am several nights later, and like Johnny Cash, I still miss someone. Several someone's to be honest.
The few trace fragments of typical machismo-masculinity that I haven't yet driven out of my body are all screaming at me that this is a pathetic display of unnecessary sadness. I'm not sure I disagree. I've always prided myself for my ability to stay self-contained, so this whole stage of wishing it was still Aug. 3-7, that I was still in St. Paul, that I was still in the safety and comfort of a hotel full of poets instead of the middle-of-nowhere dead cell that I inevitably return to as "home," it's all kinds of fucking foreign to me. I sometimes wish that I wasn't so comfortable revealing shit like this to anyone, let alone the entire internet at large.
I haven't seen my closest friends in weeks.
The people I miss more are ones I hardly know.
I miss one person in particular more than the rest, and I don't know how acceptable that really is.
Maybe I shouldn't...maybe it's not appropriate mental behavior.
I worry that I'm always fucking things up.
I didn't intend to write any of this. I had initially picked up my laptop with the intention of looking at porn.
Somehow, all of this happened...it seems far more scandalous and shameful to be caught with than dirty pictures on the internet.
It's 2:30 in the morning,
I'm at home,
and that phrase hasn't felt this
lonely and wrong
in a long time.
W.James
1982-XXXX
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