3.5.07

i'm good at missing people. friends, former-lovers, family members, and people i've never even met. does that mean i'm good at loving people? i don't know.

last night i was feeling kind of down. i'm not really sure why, but i guess it's because i hadn't left my house at all. jesse insisted upon bringing me coffee and coming to hang out with me and cheer me up. when he showed up, i was sitting in my back yard watching neil young videos on youtube. i started talking to him about music, and about how much i love it, and about how it's what i most dearly want to be doing right now, and about the pressures in my life and the uncertainty in my life and the social intimidation that all of us experience and things of that nature. i sort of teared up while talking to him. i hadn't put my finger on what it was that had been bothering me, but as soon as he got there, it was music that i wanted to talk about, and it was music that made me almost begin to cry. the amazing thing is that it was also something that made me happy, once i started talking. within minutes of discussing it, i was excited and optimistic instead of afraid and bummed out. mostly because of the way jesse responded to the things that i said. jesse has this ability to make me feel 100% better in a matter of minutes. i think it's because he and i are fueled by the same forces. love for human beings and love of music and love of conversation and humor and creativity/ creative people. i've been finding that i have an abundance of people in my life who understand what it means to be charged by such forces, and i'm infinitely thankful for their respective existences. but conversely, i'm thankful for those who are nothing like myself, because i can learn from them too.

long story somewhat shortened: jesse and i decided that we wanted to drive out to the coast to try to find tom waits' house. we found out on the internet that it was in the town of valley ford. we fetched steph from her house and drove there, stopping on the way for energy drinks and food and gas and public bathrooms. i hadn't driven out near the coast in over a year. it was a weird breed of deja vu, but the drive was gorgeous, as was the entire experience. it was exactly what i needed; worth every dollar of gas money that i coughed up. and it put things into perspective, both with regard to geography and with regard to my own emotions and thoughts. we listened to music, talked, exchanged stories, and looked around ourselves at the fields rushing by. old fences posts in long rows where they had fallen. fence posts, unable to fall alone because they are bound to one another. kind of like human beings, maybe.

we looked at all the houses in valley ford, and the three of us agreed that a very certain house had to be his house. it had one lone light shining down from it, the light yellow in hue, and the building stood atop a hill with nothing around it for acres except for sloping fields. it seemed nice enough to be worth a bit of money, yet rustic enough to inspire songs about bourbon and porches and to bring back brooding memories of old loves and old friends and old happiness and old heartache. we drove around and couldn't figure out for the life of us which road led up to the house, because whichever road might go up there was hidden, and presumably snaked around the back of the hill up to the house. we found a few long driveways with locked gates, and assumed that one of them probably led up to it, in a rather meandering manner. whether it was his house or not isn't really the point. the point is that we spent the hours between 1 am and 6 am driving around the coast together, near the water, through old fields untouched by the tread of man for perhaps decades in some places; looking for tom waits' house, thinking in the back of our minds how nice it would be to be able to leave him some cigarettes and a handle of bourbon... maybe a note.

tom,
thank you.
love,
katie

or maybe:

tom,
i love your soul.
love,
katie

what poetry can be written to a poet? i have a feeling that anything i might wish to write to him would be something that he could probably put much more eloquently, and could probably present with far more grace and beauty than i might ever dare.

we didn't really have anything that we could leave on his porch, and it turned out that his porch was impossible to get to and impossible to, with full confidence, discern from the other porches of those others with similar living aesthetics to mr. waits himself. which makes me glad, in a way, because i don't like the idea of random hooligans (like ourselves) paying mr. waits random visits and disturbing his peace. i wish i could say that i would have a problem with the idea if said hooligans were ourselves and only our selves. but i would be pretty okay with that. of course, no one would be happy to have visitors at 3:30 in the morning, even your favorite local night owl, especially if the visitors were strangers. no one with kids would be very keen on such a thing. but there are some things i'd like to talk to tom waits about, mostly things concerning the passage of time and and the meaning of love and the stomaching of alcohol. all of which seem pretty symbiotic to one another, by his modes of thinking.

we drove back, and our energy drinks did little for us. exhaustion silenced us to only laughter. i went to sleep more quickly than any other time in recent history once i was home in my own bed, and then i awoke to a day of songwriting and wine/dessert parties and walks downtown to get coffee while talking to my dad on the phone.