boring old nostalgia

Sometimes I have a Friday alone in our apartment to do work and chores.

Sometimes I get a strange craving for the Dar Williams' song "Are You Out There."

I saw her in a little 90s concert in my little bubble-liberal-arts-college. A large reception room with intimate sound. 

Back then I wanted my life to be some impossible combination of Mariah Carey and Carl Sandburg, and I desperately wanted to be cool. I did find space, in that embarrassing and wonderful time, for my mom's 70s suede jacket and my awkward sparkly fuchsia lip gloss, my knotted hair left as is. I would sleep in old bone-colored lace slips that I'd found in my mom's boxes. I got a cool boyfriend (and stuck with him). I absolutely loved smoking cigarettes and blasting music and inexpertly talking about poems and playing cards and cracking wise. 

Our daughter is thirteen years old. This morning I stacked black clothes for her on her bed because she's the stage manager of her school play and will spend her weekend in black, running around behind a stage. This is its own delicious romance.

One of the shirts is from when della watson gave me a pile of things as she moved away from Chicago. It's from Limited (lol/rip) and is essentially of the same moment as my 90s Williams time. I think I even once listened to that album in a drunken (grad school) night in della's apartment. I guess I saved that plain black shirt for this very purpose.

One of my longest friends is about to begin chemo. 

I deliciously think of our time in that little bubble college campus: she wore outrageous black high heeled boots and 70s polyester old lady skirts. We thought it was hilarious to call our parties "decadent" as we blithely stumbled around campus with our cigarettes. 

We lived with each other in other places, too. We were in some other kind of time.

I think one of the other black shirts on our daughter's bed is hers. She's always been outrageously generous and luxurious with her giveaways.

Who can keep track of all these clothes and songs and selves.

When I was little, my mom would cry at every single chemo scene in a movie or a tv show, remembering her own dad's experiences. My brother and I would instantly run to the bathroom to gather for her an inappropriately large wad of toilet paper as kleenex.

The huge handful of toilet paper seems so much like the sort of cheesy and sort of wonderful Dar Williams songs, now.

There are zombies on their cellphones every room I go to, every bus I board.

The internet is dead. US democracy on its way. 

Even though I can feel how big and open and good so many people are, I'm just too nervous for the never-ending end of things. The irritations of rubbing up against doom.

I can't believe how excessively people are expected to just suffer. 

This can't possibly be allowed.

Who's in charge around here?

"I gotta real complaint."

I'm re-reading Chelsey Minnis for class:

"Look, it's been very hard to puppeteer myself

all these years!"