Barns I burned and pillars of light I genuflected in for the fifth Sunday, February 3rd, of the year of our mighty defeat and exultation 2008.

I fell asleep at 2am on Saturday night after a fun but exhausting show and a final weary game of Godstorm with Mike and Amber. I woke up today at 10:30am but didn’t scrape up from beneath the ground until well after one. I watched the cold afternoon burn the walls in the increasingly classic home fashion: long hours drawing uncomfortable CX on the kitchen stool, black coffee, granola with milk and crushed trader joe oreos in there, Garrison Keyler like an old bell clanging in my 4th grade stomach. One night my parents came into my room while I was reading and my dad said, “Here,” and it was a clock radio. He plugged it in and tuned it to WVIA, and I listened to All That Jazz and then Echoes where I heard Nana Simopoulos “White Bird” and Mark Isham “The Woman in Gray.” Hearing even ten seconds of these goofy songs still makes me crumble into the adolescent night. While my parents and grandparents have grown younger and younger Garrison Keylor remains ancient and permanently distant.

My dad brought me the old couch on Saturday. It appears in our old family tapes and I haven’t seen it in about nine years. Fittingly, we ripped the top a little bringing it into the house, but it’s here and it’s fine. Bonsky and I rearranged the downstairs this afternoon to accommodate it, opting out of what I call “Random house classical” (tv bottom of steps, couch opposite) for a new approach, with couch where the communal computer desk was, TV where the barbi stacks were and dining room table + chairs where the old coffee table was, and bikes where the TV and beer refrigerator were. We found a punk patch dating from the Mike Straight era stapled to the wall behind the tape shelf that read “No War Between Nations / No Peace Between Classes,” featuring a dove carrying a molotov cocktail. I sprayed the walls with bleach water and wiped them with a sponge. I live here. When I say I am going home this is where I mean. My dad said to my mom, “You can never visit, you can never see it. He lives in total filth.” I look out over the back on Sunday afternoons here – behind me, out the window behind the stool – and I feel the same warmth from dead yards and bare trees that I feel at my grandparents’ house. As if my house is our old campsite in the gone woods that filled their backyard as recently as a year ago. As if when they were plowed under those tangled trees and the strange sand pits around them went underground and swam to me beneath the mud and the leaden soil, to sprout their vines beyond my window, to wind up over the fences and into the neighbors’ yards. My grampa snores with the TV and the fire turned on and my little cousins screaming and laughing. He has a dream that says, The naked indian moved to Thomas’s back yard.

My dad also brought me a lamp that he had in his and my mom’s room while I was growing up. He famously had a nightmare one night, got out of bed and, to my mother’s horror, punched it off of his night table while whimpering with wide sleeping eyes. I would convince myself every night when going to sleep that I would surely hear a burglar or kidnapper entering the house, and could wake in time to get my dad if I needed to. I slept through this and many other night episodes, but woke up once: one night with wide eyes I watched a single thin black hand part the curtains of my room from the outside enough for a head out in the dark on the roof to look in. I was paralyzed with fear and pulled the covers up above my head. In the morning I couldn’t tell if it had actually happened.

For dinner tonight I had black and white beans in olive oil with four mushrooms, an onion, four garlic cloves and a pepper all chopped in and all fried up into a delicious gray bean slop. Cook it up with cumin chili powder black pepper. Add rice and cheese when it’s done. I crushed some crackers on there and then added some hot sauce, also two pieces of toast. I cooked chicken again earlier this week with the same recipe as before but did a better job, mostly re: cooking longer on lower heat and adding stock gradually rather than all at once like a god damn idiot.

On Tuesday I start going to Amber’s school to read to two of her kids. On Friday or so I’m going to Boston. Tomorrow me, Mike and Sienna are completing the unbeatable proposal we’re working on.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under boring blog, food, home, memory, night, philadelphia, sunday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.