letter_i_never_sent jane Hi.  It's late and I'm thinking about you.  Funny how we've shifted from hand-written letters to hardly a chat every now and then. I hope there is a time in our future that has room for us to see more of each other...even if it means coming full circle and me waking up hours before work to spend a spell with you in your car.  I worry about you - invariably more than I should, but part of that is feeling so distant and helpless. I know you don't feel well but it would be nice to help you. I worry something will happen to you and I'll be last to know.  I just....really miss you.  And I can't help but shake this feeling that time is running out, if it hasn't already.  111003 ... raze it's thursday turning into friday, and i just came out of the dead kind of sleep that follows being awake for twenty-four or thirty hours before crashing and shocking the circuit board back to something like normalcy, because i need to be ready for sunday. really it's friday already, but i refuse to recognize the changing of the guard until the sun comes up and the new avian friend i've never seen starts singing that two-note song i've heard so many times before. sunday i'm supposed to record the hood's first album. they're a three-piece alt-folk group led by dave from better weather. i've never met him. but i've heard good things about him. there's also zara, who calls herself zarasutra, who i got to sing on one of my songs before i recorded an album of hers. she's hard to read. she didn't give me any real positive feedback. i couldn't tell if she was happy with any of the work i did. her wanting to come back here to record again seems to tell me i didn't fuck things up too badly. i've heard she has nothing but good things to say about me to anyone who will listen. she just ... hasn't said any of those things to me. and then there's naomi, who calls herself little fox, who i sent a facebook message a few months ago asking if she'd be interested in singing on something, though i'd never heard her voice. she read it and didn't respond. i expect her to act like that never happened when i meet her, because that's what people usually do. that shit pisses me off. i mean, if you're not interested, or you don't like my music, or you're just too busy to get involved, i can take it. at least have enough respect for me to take ten seconds and type a dozen words so i'll know where i stand. i guess that's asking too much. of the forty-seven people i've reached out to so far about contributing to this "solo album with guests", nine said they were interested and then stopped talking to me or blew me off when it really mattered, eleven never bothered responding at all, six were interested but things didn't work out (we'll call it "amicable fizzling out"), seventeen have come through for me, and four are still pending. i made a pie chart breaking it all down. it's pretty funny. it's colourful. even if no one else shows up to play or sing on anything, i'm batting .362 right now. which is pretty respectable, all things considered. shoeless joe jackson's career average was .356. that's the third-best batting average of all time. if you can out-hustle shoeless joe, i think you're doing okay. i just look at all those people who either flaked on me or ignored me altogether, and i think it's funny and sad in ways it didn't mean to be. like a movie that doesn't dream of turning into a steaming pile of celluloid shit at night but kind of comes out smelling like one anyway. you asked me what kind of movie my life would be. that's a tough one. i'm going to say it would be a sixteen-hour documentary narrated by mickey rourke, if only to hear his gravelly voice saying things like, "he didn't know what the fuck he was doing, but he was gonna do it anyway." but really, i think it would be more like one of my dreams. one of those strange, epic brain_movies that doesn't make complete literal sense after the fact but makes perfect emotional sense in the act of becoming. sometimes i wish i could live in one of those dreams for a while during waking hours. even the nightmares usually have something interesting swimming around inside of them. you were in one of those dreams last night. first you were someone else with dreadlocks. then you were yourself and you had your own hair. you told me about a live-in relationship that went south, and i remembered a few quiet moments with the person most of the songs on "gift for a spider" are about. moments that felt kind of domestic and nice, before that whole thing went to hell. like i was seeing a little picture of what might have been if we were different people and it wasn't doomed from the start. and i said, "well, i haven't washed my face or anything. and i forgot my glasses inside. but if you ever need someone with shitty skin to confide in, i'm your man." i did some ethnic-sounding singing in the key of e in a barren music store, or what i think was supposed to be a barren music store. and then we were walking in the rain. your umbrella was just big enough for both of us. you seemed reluctant to share. you told me the melodic arc of my singing was too predictable. too easy. to soften the criticism, you ended by saying, "hey adam!" as if the words were meant for some other person, and this immaculate black classic car stopped beside us, and i realized we'd been walking in the middle of the road the whole time. the car was something straight out of this old james cagney movie i watched last night. i'm not sure what make it was. i just know it was black and it looked like sex. "maybe that guy's named adam and he thought you were talking about him," i said. we swerved left to meet the long thin lip of sidewalk there, and the driver of the sex car started following us on foot. he left his sex car parked right there in the street. he kind of looked like a young, bald james ellroy without the glasses. he had one of those faces that looked like it didn't know what a smile was. when he caught up with us, i saw he was carrying a pair of headphones. he didn't say anything. i grabbed onto the cord, and he let himself fall behind. the black cable seemed to stretch out forever. you told me this was the man you'd lived with, and i knew the headphone cord represented all the cheating he'd done and all the people he'd done the cheating with. i knew without needing to be told. so who knows what that was about. but i thought it was interesting. anyway. i hope i have my shit together when sunday comes. 220817 what's it to you? who go blather from