long gone day

Melancholia cured by tea and time, of sitting on the porch in the old almost-hood and wandering the streets of the city, routine can cure so many ills, as do the joys of conversation with those whose company I like, the purring of the cat next to me on the pillow, good books and some incomprehensible divine grace.

There are straunge folk afoot with the changing of seasons and such, scowling at the creep doing the eye-rape because there's no other way to combat lecherous gaze and pass-making without getting written up especially since the race card will inevitably get played, wondering how the hell all these people who are supposed to be helping the down and out seem to be in need of mental help themselves, if not for being crazy, then for having no heart whatsoever. Such eternal questions of existence may remain unanswered until the end of time like the ones that I constantly scream to God on the days when nothing makes sense and only the logic of some updated queen-free great chain of being seems to hold my view of the universe together.


And Layne Staley would have been 45 today, so of course an Alice posting is mandatory. All of you except Randal are probably rolling your collective eyes but dayum those harmonies were swank, and they've yet to be co-opted into any voice-of-a-generation hipster thing. Mad Season's one-off and Dirt are desert island discs, Jar of Flies too. I love it all.

One of my britpop loving friends referred to them as 'Camaro Rock' and she's not entirely wrong. But yeah, no apologies, no guilty pleasures here, sheer enjoyment maybe.

 I was too young to remember when grunge was cool, never did the flowered dresses or the floppy hats, being too young and hand-me-down dweeby as it was, and the unfortunately gigantic baggy jeans and t-shirts gave way to skinnier jeans and longer skirts still mostly black, but more bibliotheque gothique than displaced Portlandia.

 I get leery at burgeoning cultural zeitgeist nostalgia for things I love without apology, like grunge and rusty smokestacks and overgrown teenage angst and slackitude that befits this region I call home. I can't wait til everyone moves on from rust belt chic, because I love this stuff out of familiarity and comfort with my low station in life and its attendant trappings rather than a kitschy aesthetic of ironic quaintness.

I can't get condescending about the taste of other folks anymore, because of what I like, and because I know that most of my fellow rust belt denizens are wearing Affliction instead of vintage bowling shirts, and that they like Bon Jovi unironically and watch a lot of sports and drink non-artisan beer and while none of these are my thing, there's nothing really wrong with that. It's stupid to be a snob when you're the butt of everyone else's jokes and you just look more insecure. What we're all respectively into might not do it for others, but that was never the point as it was.