'these are my intentions...'

It's another Friday night and Evan's on the road following his beloved Phish, leaving me to my own devices. I got home a couple hours ago from a lovely dinner at New Leaf Cafe with friends Jessica & Andrew, who had decided this perfect near-summer day was a good time to take me out for my birthday.

That would be my 35th birthday, which is still almost three weeks away on the actual first day of summer.  Not that I'm counting or anything.

I put itunes on shuffle and after awhile Bruce Lee came up, and I was sitting Indian-style (can you still say Indian-style? Sherman Alexie would say yes, so I'm just going to stick with it) on the couch knitting away and smiling (this song unfailingly makes me smile) and getting into this wonderful Bruce Lee groove (aided, no doubt, by the mojito and the glass of wine at dinner) and was so momentarily devastated when the song came to its inevitable end that I had to go surfing for a bit more Underworld.

It's left me feeling horrifically old.

Of course there was Born Slippy, soundtrack to the mid '90s Trainspotting moment*, crooning to my twenty year old self so sadly its almost but not quite upbeat anthemic lyrics ('you had chemicals boy i've grown so close to you...').

Then there was Dirty Epic, listened to over and over (and over and over and over) while riding trains and walking through Prospect Park on crisp autumn afternoons and through Lincoln Center late at night hoping to run into a girl I'd been pining for, and who had not been pining for me (' freeze dried with a new religion and my teeth stuffed back in my head...').



And during that same time there was Push Downstairs, not to be mistaken for the more driven, more annoying Push Upstairs), so intrinsically connected to the aforementioned girl and all the embarrassing writing** that ensued ('her voice so intentionally smiling and a cloud's between us, these are my intentions...').

I think it's not a bad thing, this turning 35, this being a decade past all of that, this closing in on middle age.

*I remember going to see Trainspotting at Lincoln Plaza Cinema, that funny underground movie theater, with Charlie and Aaron and Maria.  We were all in love with one another , or someone else all together, or both.  We went back to Charlie's afterward and spent the night smoking pot, drinking tequila, and numbing our tongues on salt & vinegar potato chips and strawberry clove cigarettes, each of us longing after someone in the room and none of us doing a damned thing about it, at least not then.  Oh the trials and tribulations of college life.

**the japanese maples are aflame again--
it's that time of year, and a few weeks ago we
talked about garter snakes and that's about it.
i love you. i guess that's it too.
these are my intentions when we speak of faith--
not poisoned apples or mute forked tongues
staring down the fire.
(11/13/99)