I miss being that diabolical rogue. I miss the killer instinct. I miss being a Power Couple. This Brooklyn hangover shit’s gotta end – that’s three years gone now! And I have sulked and moped and let three or four roadblocks in four or five years be the impediment for far too god damn long.

Look out, dummy. We’re coming to getcha. Me and you don’t-know-who.

I hope
It’s the
iPhone
Itself
Giving me the
Painful squints.
I don’t want
To think
I need
Reading
Glasses
Just
Now.

I’m not a cartoon character. I’m not one-sided. I don’t see it in black and white.

There is this song called “Portland, Oregon” by Loretta Lynn and Jack White that really has nothing to do with Portland at all.  But it always makes me tear up, and that’s dumb.  Because it does not have anything to do with me or the life I have “lived” in Portland.  I have a secret cache of songs like this hiding on the iTunes. It’s sick.

My iTunes tells me I have not heard Little Elf by the Out Crown in over two years.  There was a good year where this song was pretty heavy in my life. Not a good year, the BEST year.  Yeah I associate it with a girl. Well, a couple of them.  The beginning and the end.  The beginning of the  end.  This was an “our song” before this was a my song.

But I am listening to it now, and it’s a no-one’s song.  I have put it on repeat, and the absence of nostalgia is acute. The absence of trips to the Oregon coast, to the middle of America, to New York, to London, to Greece, from the dry warm Mojave desert to rain soaked Avenue A, laughs and screams and twinkle eyed optimism and blood boiling rage and sullen resentment. It’s not there.

Good.