I’m sitting in the car while it warms up. It’s snowy and I’ll probably be a big chickeny scaredy cat the whole way, so good thing I’m not driving.
Taking care of a body is hard. I’m sometimes angry that it’s hard. I wish I’d learned these skills when I was a kiddo, so that it would feel easier.
But here’s something that isn’t hard: listening to good music. Tonight I heard Langhorne Slim play. I first heard him at the Iota Club in DC in 2006 or so, before I was laid off but around the height of my self-medication phase. My friend Scott was the bartender and I was in town on business. I saw Langhorne again in Phoenix, before my MFA. He’s older now, too, but still doing what he does so well. He talked about his wild energy as a child, and we can still see it in his awkward stance and jittery hopping around, the way his voice sometimes seems to bust out of his chest. People who learned a skill that could channel their wild energy are lucky sons of bitches. But we’re also lucky, because we get to play the records and gaze at the paintings and watch the plays and read the books and live in the buildings they’ve all built.
My upper back and neck hurt when I woke back up this morning. I’d fallen asleep again in an awful position and dreamed an epic and complex dream involving Texas Tech and some kids in dorm rooms and my trying to find the right office where I was to be interviewed, I think? A professor I know and some I don’t were there. Anyway, I woke up with my upper back and base of my neck fucked up. Instead of taking aspirin, I did some yoga, and you know what? It didn’t work as well as a goddamn aspirin. But it made my heart feel good.