Thursday 24 January 2008

coming together in relative ways

It's the first sunny morning in over a month. I'm in my pajamas catching up on the day's internet, listening to one of my favorite albums of all time. The day is completely free of scheduled events, but I have things I can get done, and will. Tuesday I was walking downtown in the rain when Thom from Framework Social caught up with me. . . "Graham. . . the poet, right?" So I've got a gig in February. Tommorrow I'm going to Cardiff and the oldest independent record store in the world. Last night Courtney and I talked about God. Wood and I talked about Julian Cope. Yesterday I made up a CV. I'm awake, refreshed and anticipatory. Not a lot of days start like this and I think it's worth noting.

Here's to looking ahead, unironically.

Sunday 6 January 2008

In lieu of staking out the pub with a sketchpad

I am sitting at my laptop with a fresh hot cup of (instant) coffee, not because I need coffee to be awake at 5pm, but because the image of the writer at his computer with a cup of coffee is about as ingrained and romanticized for me as the image of the writer in the corner of a wood-paneled bar drinking whisky and staring grimly at a notebook. All those times I went to Caps with my journal and a pen and sat at the counter or in the corner? Yeah, the night might have ended with me at table with two to several others of various acquaintance and myself a few more drinks in and dollars out than I intended at the start. But I really only did go to write, and maybe just as important, feel like I was writing. The rest started out bonus and ended up an expected (sometimes regrettable) part of the routine.

A week into 2008 and I'm working on working on setting new routines. I'm a creature of habit but I get restless quickly. Kat told me I shouldn't worry about in October living in a not-my-home country without a job or place to live and a still fairly useless degree, pointing out that I crave the instability. Also, that it's only January and I always seem to skate right under the razor's edge in these sorts of situations.

The three weeks before courses resumes I have an extensive list of accomplishments to enact, ranging from general cleanup of my room to looking for work to getting some financial stuff sorted out with loan companies to sending off submissions of poetry and criticism to various publications. It's not a list of entirely crucial things, but it is entirely crucial I get at least some of it done.

I put too much sugar in my coffee. I think part of the romantic image has the coffee black. I can see why.

It'll be another week or so until everyone not-from-Swansea is in town again post-break. I'm not sure there's enough regular routine leftover from Sep-Dec to fall into, but there's the possibility of resuming friendships that were just starting come break. Re-orient myself to be a little more here-focused, a little less letters-from-home focused.

Most of the time I've got that Tom Petty feeling (the future is wiiiiide open) but there are days when I feel like October can't come fast enough so I can skate back into something familiar, wish I was doing so much more, and not have to deal with the pressures of actually doing it.