Traveled 192 km (or 104 nautical miles, as the useful internet tells me), to be stood up, the first time I’d ever been asked to a dance.
Today I’m awake early, nine o’clock or so, and the apartment still throbs with silence. Later, once Qais and Eliza wake up, we will go after breakfast to the Lighthouse Roasters, (400 North 43rd Street), to hang her show. My plans here are vague this time, and tenuous, (as my lack of cell-phone creates oddly empty spaces around me), though right now they mostly revolve around taking a hot shower and scrubbing the accumulation of Thursday and Friday off of my skin. I still have hot-tub water dried in my hair, and a coating of the warm grease of a thousand exhalations from the gallery last night.
It was packed, by the way, a heavy showing with at least a hundred and fifty variously costumed people drifting in and spilling out back out to chat in the relative cool of the sidewalk, like a black, brassy tide of self examining particles, fresh from the internet, fresh to the scene. ANACHROTECHNOFETISHISM was a success. I don’t think any of the organizers expected it to be so popular. Me, I was suprised at how many faces I knew, and, especially, how many people knew who I was. “I’ve seen your pictures, love them!” or, “I’ve never said, but I adore your writing.” Unexpected, that, in this place, my company being the shiny stars of this newly stilted subculture.
I spent the longest time with Tony, a warm friend, who I met once five years ago when he crashed on my couch after SinCity. Facebook reacquainted us, and I hope to see him more, now that we’re back in touch. We walked through the pieces together, telling stories and reaffirming the mythos of past relationships. It was fun. After he left, I mostly drifted, wandering between my local friends and the people Eliza introduced me to. The show went late, to the point of exhaustion, until we dropped into chairs, wilting against the constant influx of new people, an hour after the gallery was meant to be closed. I don’t think we escaped until midnight.