pre-lupercalian

On the days when my curmudgeonly colleague is enjoying his time away from the slab, I get less scowling and occasional pithy discourse on existentialism and heshery and more, well, chick stuff that's not quite as generally interesting. I know I'm in the minority on this business of matters of love, which I'm more and more okay with, but it's amusing to see how other people view this stuff and more than a little disconcerting.

You've got to look like you want it more
You've got to join the activities where there's lots of men
You've got to stop acting like you're so independent,
How do you get all that attention? I wish I had some...
I've got one guy taking me out to dinner and another one sending me a bottle of wine and another getting me flowers. 

 I think of that line from a Morphine song, about you get what you pay for with free advice and it makes a world of sense listening to such absurdity. I guess it boils down to what you want, and what your wants have been influenced by, or something, I don't know.

And I have no plans for that day. I never do. Not even the platonic let's be single together kind of plans.Which is fine because usually that's weird anyway. It's ceased to be a point of frustration long ago except for that one time I wanted to go see Henry Rollins and then those plans fell through, but that had to do more with Henry Rollins than a superimposed-over-pagan-apocryphal-saint's-day.  

There is Movie Night tomorrow, there are friends coming over for dinner tonight, for our monthly pondering and planning and talking til late in the night bringing out the upstairs neighbor's atheist rage, because evidently it's ok for me to have people over and be listening to Opeth and Tom Waits late into the evening (they're my age and from what I hear through the ceiling watch a lot of movies), but it's totally not okay if it's 8:30 and we're embroiled in theological matters. That's when I get the banging on the ceiling and the complaints that I'll try to avoid this time, knowing that the whole thing is ridiculous, but hey what can you do?

Oh, and this in honor of the festivities.

the chill

Last night the rain felt so cold as we walked back to his car after watching RJD2 conjure beatacular magic with keyboards and drum machines and turntables that remind me I don't know what I'm doing with those 1200s at the station.  There was hail this weekend, heated discussions of election issues which make me look forward to the day after election day when the kinder gentler machine gun hands return to business as usual, a couple of friends had babies, got to know some acquaintances better,  and some of the plants on the porch have died.

Sitting on the porch leads to chills now, the windows left open all summer are shut, the sore throat needs tea, and the grunge layers have resurfaced, as have the long skirts and clunky boots, melancholic dirge chord music and trip-hop being operative tuneage right now. I want to carve pumpkins and hibernate, sit by fires and get existential, see where all these new tendrils of acquaintanceships go. 

savoring

A summer night in Clevelandia, everyone outside on their balconies listening to music and being friendly, three of us in the hot kitchen, barely enough room, all the pots and pans and knives in use, the CD player rotating between sundry heavy tuneage, flour on our hands and dusting our clothes (black attire compensates for a multitude of stains and spills but not baking ingredients).

He's making noodles, she's slicing carrots and keeping the cat diverted, I'm plucking fresh mint from the yard and basil from the porch, trying to remember what temperature to cook sweet potato falafel at and finding where everything is. Everything works out except the mussels, but since one of us was vegetarian anyway, it's moot, and we feast, laugh, talk about cats and metal and art and bands we used to like, and reminisce and ponder, skating close to politics and pulling back to other territory.

The last time I remember the three of us being together was a night at the end of the semester when we converged on campus, about six or seven of us ended up converging at a picnic table for dinner,went to watch the Black Keys play (they were starting to get big then, but nowhere near what they are now), and then hung out at the playground on the swings as night fell. 

Nine years later, I'm not in touch with half those people anymore, or we don't see much of each other or have much to say when we do. I'm not who I was then in some ways, neither is anyone else, and I'm wary of any kind of attempt to capture the magic of the hazily remembered good old days, but it seems we've gotten older and wiser, and we've got new things happening, new interests besides graduating and finding bands to listen to, and I'm thankful that our worlds still overlap and that there's still something there besides nostalgia, that we can still share meals and thoughts and continue to age gracefully and see how far we've come.

Also, sweet potato falafel is the good stuff...

Baked Sweet Potato Falafel

Makes about 18 falafel, more or less
2 medium sweet potatoes (yams), around 700g or 1 1/2 pounds in total
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
3 small cloves of garlic, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 handful of fresh cilantro, chopped (optional)
Juice of half a lemon
1 cup (120g) chickpea flour
a few tablespoons sesame seeds, for sprinkling
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees and place whole sweet potatoes directly on oven rack for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until just tender. Once removed from the oven, let them cool until manageable. Peel and discard skins–they should come off easily.

Mash together the cooled and peeled sweet potatoes, cumin, garlic, coriander, cilantro (if using), lemon juice and chickpea flour into a large bowl. Season for salt and pepper. Once well mashed with no large chunks remaining, stick in the fridge to firm up for an hour, or the freezer for 20-30 minutes. At this point, your mix should be sticky-smooth rather than wet. If necessary, add a tablespoon or more of chickpea flour (this varies depending on the water content of the sweet potatoes).

While chilling, preheat the oven to 400 degrees and oil a baking sheet (I used parchment paper but would go without it next time in order to develop a golden crust on the bottom). Using a couple of large spoons, scoop up a mound of the falafel mixture and shape it back and forth between the concave sides of the spoons to form a football-like shape. Press sesame seeds along the outside of the falafel and place on prepared baking sheet. Bake in the oven for around 17 minutes, until the bases are golden brown.

sapped

My landlady and I ripped out more crawling vines and weeds from the back yard, freeing up the berry bushes, restoring some order, it felt cathartic to do that, and vaguely metaphorical given all the other thoughts bouncing around, because so many things ultimately weary me, the sheer not knowing what to do at any given time of wanting to say things that would ultimately be pointless or rock the inertia with which we've grown comfortable.

Is the lack of being social sometimes a reflex to the sense of rejection? The cruel ironies of social networking showing off everyone's business is when you plan something, and everyone but one says they can't make it or doesn't respond at all and then you find out that a few of them hung out together without you and you feel like you're in high school again, because there's too much connection and why upset that balance that could topple the relationships between us that are honest? I'd rather not bother with trying to think too much about it, because sometimes things cycle back around, and sometimes they exist in this ambiguity which I guess is better than open hostility.

And so I end up reading books, watching a movie, playing guitar and painting, which isn't bad, but the sting is still there a tiny bit, the feeling of f--k this already, and it makes me less inclined to bother with others where there isn't even a modicum of trust yet.

So yeah, back to the daily grind, and the two weeks of housesitting which will afford much in the way of canine companionship and also the creature comforts of window unit air conditioning. I'll try not to think about the rest and drown it with song instead.

pardon my rudeness

One of my near and dears from the Kent days has a brother who stopped up unexpectedly to visit me as he's doing research on Fair Clevelandia these days for a thesis so we hung out in the courtyard by the cathedral and talked such things as relate to cities.

And then I'm walking home and I hear my name called from an apartment window. It's a friend of my previous roommate, someone I barely knew as an acquaintance and haven't seen in a couple years, given that he's graduated and me and her no longer hang out. After the initial "hey we're neighbors" and how've you beens, it suddenly turns to can-I-make-you-dinner, let's drink some wine, my roommate's not home, and I'm caught completely off guard but I want to get to art class so I say later at first thinking well of course who wants to eat dinner alone, but as I'm dusting green enamel on the copper plates, I realize that the whole exchange of half an hour ago is completely weird, that the reason of his sudden moving to this side of town may or may not have to do with a relationship that ended, and that showing up after class later on in the night is probably a very bad idea and for lack of other options, I'm just going to pretend the whole interaction didn't happen.

So I kill time in Lakewood, walking around the park, sitting by the glassy lake watching the geese and the swallows, work in the garden til sunset, come home to let the phone ring, because I don't want to talk, I don't want to deal with this. We live three houses away, so I'll have to eventually, but there are other things to do, so I let it be, because this is not how I do things, this is not what I want. I don't want token gestures of chivalry and romance, from someone who barely knows me, if I want anything, it's camaraderie and naturalness and some kind of foundation other than hormones and loneliness. I don't know why this and other things kind of make me mad but they do.

golden dystopian

Friday night commiserations with sundry friends, philosophical meandering keeping us up til 2am before I drove back to the east side and wondered if the mix CD I made for him made any sense, considering most of it wasn't in English and the sequencing was somewhat idiosyncratic.

I've been walking so much the past couple days, the carnivalesque festivities of Parade the Circle with good people, wandering through the art museum seeing things anew yet also missing the Asian and Islamic art that's been AWOL for years now with the renovations, was mercifully bailed out from waiting for the trolley back to the west side by my old college roommate who worked the event. This is one of my favorite festivals in Clevelandia because I always like seeing what different ideas everyone comes up with every year.

 photos courtesy of the daily rag since I haven't gotten my shots off my camera yet.

A friend of mine calls me as I'm out walking on Sunday afternoon and we kill some time together before he goes to work, driving in his rusty car that makes him look like a "person of interest" despite his legal blank slate, listening to hip-hop, devouring Turkish food and he tells me tales of valet parking (Bruce Springsteen fans treat him the best, Young Jeezy fans were the worst) and of what he's reading in 1970s textbooks found in his grandma's basement.

I don't see much of him anymore and I miss the ease of the conversation and the laughter and the shared love of strange beauty, nature, and good tuneage and the mutual skepticism about the way the world is that comes from growing up around adults who harbored a distrust of the state in all its forms, though those in my world sometimes had memberships in the NRA and those in his were involved in the Black Panthers. He's a car guy and fascinated by machines at the air show but disconcerted by the blase attitude toward blowing things up. I remember us standing on top of an abandoned factory as warplanes roared overhead on Labor Day Weekend and the spooky feelings we got in that urban wasteland.

I head up to the garden to pull weeds and hang out, and I come home with a huge bag of strawberries and me and the lady across the street are picking mulberries off the tree in the back yard and I pick up more at the abandoned church around the corner to make some weird amalgam of granola and fruit cobbler like a good hippie. Some kids walk by and ask if they're edible, I hope the cop watching me isn't going to bust me for trespassing, and there's more berries than I know what to do with. It might be time to learn how to make wine.

I wake up at 1am this morning to the smell of burning and wander through the house looking for the source and realize that if there was an actual fire in there I'd be dead or aflame by now, and also that there's no smoke detectors in my apartment. Fun times. Someone on the bus tells me there was a fire a few blocks over, and when I get downtown there's helicopters in the square and while the press release talks about how it's "occupied" I feel a bit creeped out, like someday this kind of invasion for the week will be normal. Because nothing says Fighting The Man like glorifying the military industrial complex, you know...

unsurety

I don't drive out to the outer suburbs much, and navigate the lanes around the mall with some trepidation. I get lost in subdivisions and cul-de-sacs where the names run together, usually conjuring up images of nature scenes and old estates in the British isles but instead bare lawns and generic architecture of new money. I call her when I realize I don't have directions and it takes a couple turns through this development to get there.

My landlady's friend's friend answers the door and she's very nice, welcomes me in, and shows me where the cat is hiding behind the couch. The little one was spayed yesterday so she's sore and cranky and while she sits on my lap, she's skittish and growling and muttering. I guess I'd probably be the same way if someone removed my uterus so it doesn't bother me. She's tiny, with black fur tinged slightly auburn, five pounds of scaredness, yellow eyes avoiding my gaze.

I bring her home and she's somewhat chill in the car, making the occasional sad noises that break my heart. I hope that Mike Patton's voice isn't driving her crazy, and when I bring her up the stairs and let her out, it takes me a half hour to find her again, huddled behind the couch. I can understand being freaked out, so I set up a corner for her with ample hiding spots, food and litter in a side room behind the curtain and bring her over there. From behind one of the paintings unhung, she purrs, and I think she'll be okay in a few days, and I hope she gets along well with the other one.

connections and dissections

I sat across a table last night with a cup of yerba mate tea and a growling stomach because it's more datelike when someone else pays and I'm not one to take advantage of gender dynamics like that, and it's a coffeeshop so I don't want want bakery when mine is better or an overpriced salad and as we talk I'm noticing a tendency to zone out into smile/nods, because we've covered all this ground before and I want to talk about something else, but I'm not sure what or if I'm just being moody and unreasonable or if I'm just spoiled by my morning coffee and snark partners in peonage and have become too accustomed to a certain level of most-encompassing discourse. And I'm not sure where he's at either, because we're not kids anymore, and usually the lines are laid out more firmly: platonic or not so much.


I drive home, coming up the stairs I realize I'm so glad to be alone now, wondering how this happened as I scoop some leftovers out of the fridge to nuke in the microwave and make myself some tea and wait for the neighbors to stop by with house keys and cat-watching details. There are other things I'm thinking about, spinstery things like my garden plot and the cats that will be taking up residence this weekend and what I want to make next on the pottery wheel and how I need to start taking these little scattered bits and get my guitar out and see if I can write something I'd want to listen to. It might be that this is easier and safer. 

It's not that I'm antisocial at all, I hosted dinner on Monday night and when the Queen of the Bondo and her husband came over, we hung out for a bit in the living room talking about books and cities and such, but then I cherish this space of solitude that's my own domain and wonder if that makes me selfish or self-preserving or a little bit of both.

watching the clothes go round

Half a glass of wine on the day of adopted patron saints, strangely antisocial and relieved to come home away from people and junk food. Partying is for other people and there's tea to drink and Bulgakov to read. A Friday night previous of living room music, the rawness of voice and guitar that was infinitely more intimate, walking through my old almost-hood, talking about music and theology over diner food. Somehow the jitters resolve themselves once all is made clear and there's nothing to panic about.

So I'm at the laundromat across the street with the other folk who rent, Mellencamp and other sap on the radio, trying to figure out how to use these last few hours of weekend sun before the chill comes again. It smells chemical fresh and the thoughts don't come out so easily. Maybe they will next time around.