Lunching Alone in the Snow

In the Comfort Diner. The first time I'm out for lunch for pleasure, alone, since B. I feel good about that. With Elvis' "I've Never Been to Spain" to celebrate. Today... on a day when the snowflakes are so fat that they stick in my eyes and the gray pea-coat doesn't fit but the blue one is in the cleaner. (One thing at a time).

I hope my voice lesson today is as good as it was last week. I didn't even want to write to OperaBoy to tell him that I still sing. It seems weird because he's just going so far with it. He is so amazingly talented... and I knew him when he was 16!

The green tiled specks in the counter look like miniature turtle shells, crawling along the surface, their faces suffocated in cement.

Food here. Must go.

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Okay. Just finished. I think I know why I used to write in my journals so much and then stopped. I just had no one to talk to. It's just one big fat solipsistic exercise in which I become the listener as well as the speaker-- the participant and the observer. My own confessor. I think it warps things... Whatever.... It is what it is.

And Elvis is still singing... That book (the Penguin lives) makes such an interesting point about Elvis rebelling against poverty but inspiring a rebellion against the very middle class conformist affluence he attempted to become a part of. Is that the difference between Schoenberg and Wagner? Was Wagner safe on the inside while Schoenberg became "degenerate" (like Elvis-the-pelvis)? Then, once Elvis "got it," he couldn't join the '60's rebellion of people trying to get out. It's just so fucking sad... but easy to see how he made all the "best" decisions for himself but still became irrelevant.

That Michael Jackson documentary on 20/20 last night was so creepy. It's scary how life can be so distorting. Meryl Streep in Adaptation-- "I want to be new." Isn't that what we all want? To be born again? Not necessarily to do it differently, but to be no longer living with what has already been done... Like when Elvis was new... When I was still "brilliant" for my age and not just "without direction." Prodigy into mediocrity in a flash.

I didn't realize how good that music I wrote was back then. I always think I'm being on the clock. One day I will be...

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Ok. On the M104 now and heading across 42nd Street, stopped at the light on Lex. The snow is falling so fiercely now that it seems like the flakes are all feeling something in the skies. They are frantically running parallel to the bus in horizontal grooves until we slow and they continue, stuck together in clusters, to rain down towards obliteration on the pavement.

I keep seeing pink in the windows for spring. I like pink. But God, do I need to lose some weight. I need to stock the fridge, eat all my meals at home and not think about it. If only it would stop snowing so I could go for the groceries.

(Elvis just finished his "American Trilogy"). We're at Madison. I think I'll close for now.