What A Muse Is For

Here, I will tell you some things.
I am living for two weeks in my aunt’s apartment while she and my cousin are on a cruise. The apartment has two bedrooms and a big sitting room kitchen area. Every room has good light and the kitchen cabinets above the stove open upwards like the doors of the Dalorian time machine car in back to the future.
The front of the cabinets and the tiles in the shower are a light sea green. Everything feels very clean until I cook and then I leave buttery stains and grains of hardened rice around the stove top- that is not why there are flies though.
There are flies because the cat likes to go in and out from the balcony and I have to ‘leave to door open for her or she panics.’

The cat is beautiful and gray with light blue eyes. She follows me from room to room and when I sit down she curls up in my lap which is intimate and comforting until she starts flexing her cat palms like she’s nervous and sticking me with her needle claws in the process.
At first she wasn’t eating her food. I have a few observations about this but not yet any solid theories. I noticed that she will usually eat while I am out or while I am not paying attention to her. Also I spilled some dry food on the floor by her bowl and though she had not touched the food already in the bowl, she readily lapped up the fallen nuggets. Interested, I put some more food on the floor and she ate it right up. Like I said, I’m not sure what the problem is. But I can hear her eating now, she’s crunching out of site on the other side of the counter.
When I sit here at the kitchen counter the tops of my thighs brush the underside of the counter and they get covered in white dust. Maybe the dust is left over from the construction of the counter and no one usually sits here so it never got worn away. This feels like a new building. I know it is a new building. It is the light stucco walled building with wide glass windows on the block of matching red brick townhouses.
Sometimes I feel like the only white girl on the street walking up to the only white building on the street. “You are that.” says Sam when I relay this feeling.
The dust under the counter makes me think of plot possibilities. Some dangerous white drug dust gathers on the undersides of surfaces and is discovered only because the character who will later solve the mystery sits down and collects some dust on her pants and so becomes an accidental detective.

From three windows on the side of the house you can look down three stories and see the Brooklyn shuttle passing in its subway track canal. Looking down on that canyon from the windows I feel like this building is perched on a cliff. Its not that far below but it looks like another world, a more natural, jungle-like green world that is meant to be a secret between two shelves of city.

I read Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins which is a lovely spewing ramble of a book. I read it on the express train going back and forth from the city. Express trains are a new thing for me. I have never lived so far away before. I try to sit on the edge of a bench so that I can link one elbow through the metal side bars and anchor myself there while I read while I bump along. I hold the book with two hands and my elbow keeps me steady. I look up from the wordplay sentences to catch my breath and my focus only to watch the panicked blinking of tunnel lights flash past past past the windows then suddenly past past past the columns of a local station platform where we do not stop because we are an eeeeeexxppreeeesssssss train.
What I mean is, the pacing of the movie in my mind- the editing of the words in the book- the images in the book and the reading it on the train and the flick flick flick of my thoughts and my grins- the tunnel light tunnel light stranger stranger stranger eye contact smile blush- The pacing is good.

I feel like the whole world discovered Tom Robbins long ago. When I asked a bookseller today if they had any used copes of Jitterbug Perfume he smiled in a 'ah your life is changing isn't it?' sort of a way and informed me that the book is sold out because everyone is always already reading it.

There are many things I am meant to be editing. My senior film I know about and am working towards but the others- a music video for jake, five montages for a summer camp- they quite literally slip my mind. I looked up in the middle of my lunch today and remembered for the first time in three weeks that I will receive $900 as soon as I finish those montages. My brain feels slippery.
And my face feels dangerous.

I walk around feeling like my dangerous face is pulled forward on the end of my neck which I feel is too long and I have visions of dropping my face onto the sidewalk where my teeth shatter like ice.
My hair is a woman and my face is a woman and they announce their femme ness and blow in the wind above and ahead of me like a kite and the kite is a banner which announces my importance and imminent arrival so that you can all be ready with your ‘pretty eyes’ comments by the time I pass.

And my eyes feel like water and my face is a bright glowing kite with my thoughts written in legible font across it.
So I bury my kite-face deep in a ramble book written by one Thomas Red Breasts and let my brain get heavy and my string neck bends into a kite-less posture and anchored by one elbow to the side of the bench, I ride the express train far far out to here.

When I finished the ramble book this morning I typed the last and poignant paragraph into a text message and tried to send it to one of you and then to another but I didnt send it to any of you. I kept thinking of reasons why you would misinterpret or dislike or be damaged by it.
I also worried briefly that, because in the book these final thoughts are printed onto the page in the author's handwriting, there might be something sacrilegious about typing it up in legible computer font. But, I realized that outlaws have no rules so I laughed at myself for making up a rule about the book about the outlaw.
In any case, I will post it here in case you want it.

'It isnt love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection is merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery and we long for love to last so that the ecstasy of being near the mystery will last.'

Rush Hour

At 7:54 in the morning a tired eyed girl wearing a long green skirt exits the franklin avenue subway stop carrying two coffee cups balanced one on top of the other.
The NE corner exit expects the commuter to step down two steps near the metro card machines, walk approximately four paces before stepping up again, this time about five steps. After walking around the curved tiled tunnel, the person wishing to exit to the NE Corner then walks up the usual ten steps to the street, rising between the two green painted iron railings and, in the case of the NE corner exit, under a wooden scaffold.
There is another exiting option which produces you a few feet away in the middle of Eastern Parkway on the 'island.'
The sign advertising this exit option reads 'NE corner Island' which sounds to me like a beach town with tourist shops and sandy children.

Why would someone exit the subway early in the morning carrying two coffees?

Perhaps she loves some coffee shop so much that she rides the train a few stops down and then a few stops back every morning in order to drink that particular cup. She's not on her way to work, she does not pass this loved shoppe on her commute she has no commute but she wakes up with the rush hourers and rushes out a few stops down and buys the two coffees and brings them back to bed. One for her, one for her lover who hasn't even awoken yet.

When he does wake up, at the sound of the lock turning, he will not sit up started and disoriented, expecting a burglar. He will roll over tiredly appreciative. He thinks there is something decidedly tender about the girl's devotion to this particular cup of rich nutty coffee.
Were he to wake up a morning without her, he thinks, taking a tentative sip- the coffee is always the perfect temperature by the time it reaches him- Were he to wake up a morning without her he is sure he would go himself a few stops down to this coffee shop and buy this cup of coffee. It will keep the idea of passion and choice alive in his life. He has learned that he can always, and is in fact entitled to, get what he wants.

The girl sits on the edge of the bed and sips her own cup, smiling at her lover like she is a sneaky thief who has gotten away with something.
What she has gotten away with is being extreme and being understood in her extremity.
After a few weeks she will no longer feel like feeling this way is a sort of theft from the ordinary world. She will, like her lover, begin to feel entitled to this feeling and the word entitlement will, along with other such extreme and powerful words, loose its negative association and become as tasty as the coffee.

Or perhaps...
...the girl exiting at the NE corner of Franklin Ave with two undrunk white paper cups of coffee- down the steps, up the steps, up the steps, under the scaffold, in the morning- perhaps her friend bought her two cups of coffee before he went to work. They split a cab but not the price of the cab the night before and so he has paid her back with double coffee for her day.
She walked into the subway tunnel with him for no reason other than because she was awake, too early, as early as rush hour but without a job. She walked down into the tunnel and swiped him through with her unlimited metro card. He went to work, she walked out of the tunnel, and you presumed the rest of the tale.
The carrying of undrunk cups of coffee at 8 in the morning does not necessarily imply the possession of a lover who understands your extremity- though it is a good clue, and were I Sherlock Holmes and solving the mystery of the girl with the coffee cups, I would not hesitate to presume as much from the evidence.

Things That Tower & Cats

The thing about someone else's cat is that it will become your cat too quickly for you to spend much time at all thinking about how it is really someone else's.
The thing about someone else's apartment is similar to the thing about someone else's cat.
The moment you are alone in the apartment, the moment you stare into the cat's eyes with no other human around, these things become the things that you do in your most pure form. These are the things that 'unwatched you' does. This becomes the space where you vanish.
The silent inside of your head where you live where you dont name the thoughts that float by.

Do you remember the first time your saw a film with a voice over?
You were a child and ‘Is that what thoughts sound like?’ You wondered as the perfectly phrased sentences spoke themselves over the image of a badly directed actor who put a finger to his lip and glanced up to the left pointedly as though the voice was coming from there.
The voice is not coming from there, the voice is coming from the place where you vanish.
"Harold, a tree doesnt think its a tree. it is a tree."
"why was harold talking to this man. this man was an idiot. This man used words like wibbly wobbly and explained that trees were trees. of course trees were trees. harold knew that trees were trees."
...I memorize movies.
I wrote that from my mind. There are words in my mind.
I have an audiographic memory. Is that a real term? Spell check doesnt think so.

Dates are for dresses. Wear a dress.
I cannot!
I am un-normable.
we all are arent we and so then whats the purpose?
Un-normable.

The iranian director of photography said that he also has trouble dressing in any label-able way.
We talked about movies on the long car ride up to the hamptons. We had never met before but we talked about movies which led to talking about politics which led to talking about stories again which led to emotions and then movies again and so we talked about everything including our fear of dressing in a label-able way.
"Are you a hippie?" He asked and that was how it began. Later he apologized for the question.

Labels are a relief sometimes.
Labels, give-ins, objective norms. They hold the weight of their own shoulders so you dont have to hold their shoulders.
“I dont want to put that on her shoulders.” said the girl's sad brother when I asked him why didnt tell his happy sister that he was sad.
“what about your shoulders?” I said and he shrugged them.

The thing
About someone else's cat
Is that it is always possible that they think you are their someone.
They think that you are her but acting differently than she usually acts.
I know about animal's sense of smell and I know that it tells them many things but does it convey to them the information of 'different human' or only of 'human behaving and smelling differently.'
Does she think I am her human?

She has blue eyes and grey fur and she follows me from room to room as though I am going to leave again. Again because I think she thinks I am the one who left. The one who is still gone. She smells that her human is not here but because I also feed her the way her human did and I pet her and walk and breathe the way her human did she thinks I am the same person but understands that that person has left and doesn’t want that person to leave again so she follows me from room to room afraid that I will leave again.

The brooklyn shuttle passes by below the apartment windows.
Theres a canal down there of green trees and rock walls way down there three stories and an underpass lower than the windows.
And the top of the silver shuttle goes by like a disney world ride through a jungle set.

I’ve been listening to Wild Child and Bright Eyes and Tom Robbins and they all have different things to say about love.

Miso, the magical cat, is good at being in love. I like her for her shameless devotion. I champion the good kinds of insanity and so I let her into my bed and am not allergic to her anymore.

And it’s remarkable how many things look like the figure head of a ship. Lamp posts on highways, flag poles jutting out of buildings, trees with branches that reach long, long necks on people. Construction sites are also ship like with their towering crane-masts and netting that catches the breeze.
A ship with sails is a thing I will never have. My values will get tangled in their attempt to love a ship. I do not like contrivance and a ship today would be pure contrivance because we no longer need sails. I like function and purpose and a ship with sails today would be pure spectacle. But I love things that tower. I love construction cranes, they terrify me because when things are tall I think they will fall or maybe that is not true. Maybe that is me attempting to justify the mystery of my love of things that tower. I do not think they will fall I just think they are so high. Awe is a word for them.
Let’s sit under bridges and feel that below-a-towering-thing-vertigo.