Futile Horn

06.12.2003 - 4:12 am (as boring as an ode to Fortune)

They changed the wrapper on the Hershey bar. It used to be that paper and foil combo, but now it's like some kind of plastic shrink wrap. The change must have been made in the last week. To some degree it bothers me, and to some degree it makes no difference at all.

As optimistic I was about the future a few days ago is how lost I feel today. Some days I think I can try to use the lows to my advantage. Some days I don't know how.

I tried to run away today, but it started pouring as soon I as opened the door. I waited in the doorway for a few minutes, as if it would stop as quickly as it started. The rain wasn't cold for once, but I didn't have the energy to get wet tonight. The sky was a strange pale red. I thought I might be dreaming.

I suppose I could have driven to the diner, but I was feeling broke after the gift for the engagement party. It is almost four now, maybe I'll go anyway. I feel like being around people, even if it is only ditsy waitresses that don't want to have to talk to me for a moment longer than they have to.

I have tickets to the Yankee game tomorrow afternoon and no one to go with. I wasn't going to do it, but I might just go by myself to have somewhere to be in the afternoon. If there is anything lonelier than being by yourself, it's being by yourself with 30,000 people. But hey, maybe I am a masochist. Besides, they got no-hit last game, maybe no one will show up. Maybe I'll take my backpack with me and hang out in the city after the Yankees lose.

In high school I used to run the track just across the street front Yankee Stadium. Not a day goes by where don't forget to miss that neighborhood. If I am going to be heckled for being white, at least I could be in Philadelphia where I know a few decent places to get coffee and some hummus and listen to mediocre taped jazz.

I miss Philadelphia. I was miserable most of the time I was there, or lonely, or heartbroken, or in love with someone who didn't love me back, but it was a better kind of miserable than this. At least I could move about. I had places to sulk. At two in the morning, I would freeze my ass on the steps outside the student union and write poems, or watch the homeless people shuffle past the hospital, or visit all the statues of Ben Franklin, or walk on the fake metal lily pads floating in the pond behind the business school, or go to the diner on the other side of the river where they didn't have anything good at all.

During the week, only couples walk around campus at 1 a.m. At 3 a.m., only lone weirdos. An hour after that, you might get some damn fool trying to get you to sponsor him for an AIDS walk. I took about nine walks a day, and I had all the demographics down.

Jesus Christ, I can't even figure out if I want to get eggs right now. How am I ever supposed to decide what to do with myself long term?

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn