no fucking discipline

Last night I went for a late night walk with a joint in my hand. I walked by the East Campus with its creepy old unused beauty and all of the nostalgia I have tied there, then ended up at the all night cafe purchasing a coffee with nickels and dimes at midnight. I felt paranoid and weird so I ran out, back into the streetlight color show that was going on all night.

The trees have just started blooming and there are flowers of all kinds around in multitudes so that a person, properly stoned, can occupy themselves quite nicely walking around with their head lifted to the few stars and the too intense to believe hue of a spring that has sprung.

Strange old black men asked me for cigarettes and chatted me up about why I was out on the streets by myself while they rolled my tobacco and I told them that I liked to walk and smoked my own cigarette.

I went back to the studio, just to look at it one more time. Make sure everything was right. I made sure the back door was locked.

I brought a stack of paper home and I sat on the couch for two hours staring into it trying to coerce it to tell me what it should be but nothing happened. No lights lit. Now the paper is laying on the floor, crumpled underneath my banjo carelessly laid on top of all those beautiful sheets.

The night was a weird night and I laid awake in bed alone and wondered what I was doing. Why do I always feel so strange, as if I couldn’t possibly hold things together for much longer? I was thinking about how I walked into this gas station and I felt like I feel a thousand times a day, this overwhelming feeling that I didn’t understand anything about this place and I felt prickly and like I just wanted to run out of the building. I wanted to be alone.

I always want to be alone.

That’s why I went out looking for studio apartments with The Flower today.

I found one. It is a tiny little room that looks out over a dirt parking lot with a small kitchen that looks like the kind of place a lonely old man would live. Its one room looks to be the old mud room. Its saving grace is a bookshelf nook and neat bathroom lights. I had a hard time imagining the space actually working in any aesthetic manner but its only 350 a month. Right?

The best part is that the place is only a few feet away from the all night cafe so I will be able to widdle away my wild hours in the absurdity of late night talks with methheads. One such methhead blew my mind with a long, beautiful manifesto for “debarrierization.” Simple. Oh meth.

I lived in a house across the street when I got back from my deployment. I spent a summer smoking cigarettes in a slow and meloncholly love affair with a southern belle named Jen. Jen the girl who was like a ghost, who never said a word. Every time I see that place I feel haunted by Jen and those months we spent together. We were so sad then.

Where has my head been?

I came into the shop waving around a cup of coffee that I’d been walking around with for the whole afternoon. One of my bosses was sticking stamps on mailouts. She looked at me with that look like there were uncomfortable things to talk about.

She spent the next hour parading me around my mistakes showing me how terrible the condition of the studio was. She was right. There was pulp all over this beautiful, handmade mould and deckel and pulp all over this weird machine that the man who’d built the studio had made. She showed me all of the places inside of the beater where she’d found pulp.

I was pissed. First at her for looking at this guy who’s been working in her studio for free for the last month for free, painting the floor, organizing the space, utilizing the space, making paper for their projects.

But then I was pissed at me. She was right. She had me. I was irresponsible. I should have done something better and I didn’t. “No Fucking Discipline!” quoth the Sergio.

I told her that I didn’t know what to say. I told her I would fix it. I’d do it better.

I felt this tingling anger/anxiety that I get any time anybody tries to correct me. I’m a very defensive animal. I felt stupid and scolded. But that old military thing that I learned, that thing that happens and I know that there’s no sense being all sensitive, just correct the behavior and move on, that happened.

I can keep the shop clean.

I told her my head has been in a cloud just trying to get the pulp mixtures and sheet formation to turn out right and I hadn’t even really stopped to think about these things.

I felt so gross.

I helped her finish her stamp project and then I cleaned everything up and walked out into the grey humidity of the valley fondling the hope that some day soon I might have a place to call my own for the first time in a long time. Imagining all the things that I could put on the wall. Lamps. Where will I get a good lamp? Where am i going to get a bed?

Rebuilding my nest after two years is a bigger task than I had imagined it to be. Now I see myself sleeping on a cot like some kind of neuvo hobo buddha with whatever food I could buy with my foodstamps but no pots or pans with which to cook it.

All I need is a place to put my body.

I put it in this town. I love this town.