Letter to K, Fall 2008

Hey! It's been almost a week since I posted, so I thought I'd input this unsent letter I wrote you - geeze, almost a year ago now. Specific date unclear, but it looks to have been right after Thanksgiving last year. Funny how much has changed since then!


Keiko,

I'm sitting here in my armchair in my room (we've moved the old TV back upstairs for the winter. It's weird, writing you in pen...it's so permanent - I can't just go back and erase. Well, maybe this will be a draft. If I fuck it up I'll just have to start again...

Your letter may have been the best thing to happen to me all year. Primarily because, as years go, 2008 is a real stinker. It started off all right - with the experiment and, even after you left I had some good times with Zayne, stoner road trips, drinking champagne and tanning on the roof...when she left it really sunk in how many friends I'd lost track of in the course of the last couple years. It blows.

Anyway, it was really great to get your letter. RE: writing emails in your head: maybe we're both a little bit crazy! It was so great to read that line. Nothing helps a feeling of disconnect like hearing that my bro feels the same way I do even half a world away.

It was also great to hear that you miss my poems - maybe that sounds conceited, but that's not my intention. I've been writing pretty sparsely, still. If you thought I was becoming a shriveled-up hack when I was unemployed and stoned all the time, you should see what I've become now that I have this job. I work 40+ hours a week but I have no benefits. Lots of overnight shifts. On one hand, it's great that I basically get paid to surf the net for 8 hours at a time; on the other hand, more often than not I'm ready to stab myself in the face out of boredom, and it's damn hard to find "job satisfaction" when you're doing a job that quite frankly ANYTHING WITH OPPOSABLE THUMBS could do. Heck, if you took the mouse and keyboard out of the equation a prawn could probably do it.

So between that and my dearth of friends, not to mention a dearth of free time in which to see the others who work 9-5 jobs (Kim and Jessye), it has been a tad difficult to feel inspired lately. For more on my particular feelings of stagnation and desperation, if you haven't been you can check out my Myspace blog. I've been fiddling around with that again.

Angst aside, it isn't as if 2008 didn't have its salvagable moments. We went to the beach with Rich for a couple of days, but got so fucked up sunburnt that we were too tire to get fucked up drunk and go on the rides. And we made a separate, more mellow beach trip with Brian the Boy at the end of the summer.

So there's that. Missed you at Thanksgiving. Me, Ste, my brother and his friend were smoking a spliff out back and my Aunt Lisa came outside. I offered her a hit and she just said "Oh, you don't know how long it's been!" And started smoking with us. LOL! And telling us this story about her college friend who was a fisherman and how he found BALES of mota floating in the bay, and she got 4 of them and spread them out all over her room to dry.

You should have been there, it was HILArious.

I guess I'd better wrap up this letter, huh? It's getting to be an epic. I guess,in closing, thanks for reminding me that I should be dreaming big things for the future. It's really hard when I live without joy 5 days a week and am still struggling to pay all my bills. Kim said all of us were going to do great things with our lives; I replied, "Yeah, right. How?"

She just said, "You want to be a writer, right? So write things."

So my new project is trying to believe in the optimism you guys possess. It would be so much easier if we were all still close by. Missing you always, and looking forward to our epic fucking reunion,

-Allyn

(PS - I don't know about "poetry," but I'm enclosing some scribblings I composed to you and all my absent friends. Hope you approve.)

And the following was LITERALLY some scribblings I had done one morning when I woke up, so don't expect greatness, here. LOL.

i miss this.

waking up with words on my lips and friends in my room.

i miss mornings and sunsets and bob marley spliffs.

i miss grass and i miss rock and i miss rock and roll.

i miss fresh water and fair-weather friends, i miss wood and incense and blown glass

i miss cats and light in the dark and warmth in the cold.

i miss pressure and release.

i miss them, and i want them back. days back.

fall back, i miss lockstep and winter and summer and spring and i miss doing bad things at good times.

i miss knowing everyone and being seen.

and being scene. LOL.

for that matter, i miss when "laugh out loud" meant something and i miss dappled shade.

i fucking miss you.

i miss the stone works and the rock garden and the commune and the road and i fucking miss missing things and i miss parties and planning parties but not as much as i miss parties that are totally unplanned.

i miss that night. you know the one.

i miss us then, and i miss you now.

i miss unemployment even though i don't miss being poor. i miss playing hookey. i miss sour mix and i miss bourbon and i miss shiraz.

i miss ashtrays and rummy and rum.

say hello to my riesling life (and vodka nights).