Monday, March 13, 2006

3/13/06

Maybe it's because it's been such a warm, sultry day for this time of year, as the temperature cracked the low 70s, but I have felt like a celluloid image of myself floating through a three-dimensional world, of-yet-not-of this physical sphere.

Or maybe it's the combination of driving a nearly continuous 8 hours yesterday after a bout of insomnia left me with three hours of sleep. Or the aftermath thereof (I slept from 11:30 pm to 11:30 am). And perhaps my mind hasn't yet acclimated to the serotonin plunge that follows Sam's departure, the emotional cliff dive. I don't know. I am in-but-out, in a pleasant enough, but low energy frame of mind.

I walked half way to Trader Joe's grocery on Market Street tonight. As I headed east on Spruce Street to the 37th Street stop (where someone had vandalized the SEPTA logo to read "SHLEPTA"), the full moon was rising above Liberty Place in Center City, a buttery yellow spot in the cerulean sky. I was brought back in an instant to Newport in 1991, in the few months before I moved with my family to New Haven. My friend Paul and I had been drinking beer somewhere and riding around town on our mountain bikes, and had ended up as usual at Forty Steps, where we spent all summer swimming and cliff jumping.

"In the moonlight the crests look like someone's laying out massive lines of coke," Paul remarked, pointing at the waves crashing on the reef. Newport in summer is a cocaine party, especially in the hospitality industries, and while I had been off the stuff for a year, it was everywhere.

I don't know why that came to mind tonight.

As I write this, "There Stands the Glass" as performed by Van Morrison is on the radio. It sounds really good. Just sayin'. I'm gonna take a piss and stretch.

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