such earthly delights #2

Am I not your animal? (A list of weekly joy for joy's sake)

This has been a tough week and yet—

shuzo matsuoka

1. A way to start the day.

2. There’s a green-eyed black cat asleep on my feet.

3. Stand on the street corner outside of Rocket with Z and it’s a beautiful night.

4. M. calls on his 26 mile run and tells me about his day for 20 of them. It’s a sweet call, a it-means-nothing call but it’s nice to be woken up with a good morning beautiful. He asks how I am and I can’t say my hair is falling out and everything hurts so I say, I’m tired and he says oh, you poor thing.

5. I’m going to wake up tomorrow and go to a pickle festival.

6. I baked a cake for Ben and then mismanaged my time and I could never drop it off. I give it to my neighbor and this is the most we’ve talked to each other and there’s these small glimpses where I feel like I belong somewhere between this stretch of 295.

7. It’s drizzling and I get on 695 west at the perfect time to witness lilac skies with beautiful, glittering opal clouds. So shimmering and iridescent. I’m listening to the new Beth Gibbon’s album Lives Outgrown and it feels right. I’ve been living based off of someone I knew a decade ago and I am now just a poorly cited footnote. Sometimes looking ahead and into dreamy shimmering clouds after a rain kinda reminds you that in order to grow, you have to change and vice versa.

8. Em and I are cackling as I fold laundry.

9. Order three beverages at Sophomore - an iced oat milk matcha latte, decaf espresso tonic and some canned fizzy drink. This is the third time this week I’ll make the bisexual beverage joke and maybe this is my millennial Dad joke but I can’t get enough. It feels like the sort of place that’s always been in Baltimore because Kris has always been here and if you’ve ever known someone so bright in energy and inspiring and whose dream even in its infancy seemed real beyond imagination— it’s easy to feel like you’ve always known this place.

10. My neighbor and her kids love my Elephant Ears plant that I’ve left on the step. The toddler who is now really a kid pets it for good luck before going to kindergarten and it’s very cute to see.

11. I’m rewatching Sex & The City. The first I watched it was after I had my ovary removed and now I’m watching it in the throes of another cycle of pain and now I’m the exact age as Carrie. She’s a Libra. I’m a Sag. Maybe we’d be friends. Somewhere in the depths of the show is a story of chosen family and I love that. Miranda’s mom dies and she calls Carrie when she can barely relate or talk to her biological sister. Samantha can barely bring herself to digest mortality and Charlotte tries to control it. I think of all the episodes this is the only one I felt seemed very real. I really like the part where Miranda is reminded of her mom in a fitting room with a pushy attendant. When my dad died Sister Mary Catherine took me out and did all these things I liked to do. We drank banana flavored milkshakes (twisted but these were my favorite as a child) and looking back she knew they were things I did with my Dad when it was his weekends. We’d go to the circus or the zoo. She took me to a farm and I touched the horses. It was such a nice day and so when I found out later that day he'd died— it felt like it all made sense.

12. So full from the dinner J made— cod, brussel sprouts and a salad. We curl up and we yap and we yowl and we both yearn, yawn and eventually wilt under the weight of a varying chronic illnesses but it’s nice to commiserate in pain and how it transforms you Jekyll-Hyde from someone capable to someone unable to taste the brightness in the squeeze of life’s lemons and only finding that it’s shockingly and unforgivably bitter. I feel grateful to have someone cook for me and not have to worry tonight about where my energy will come from and for the first time in life I just accept. Geo’s voice telling me that this is the limitations and horrors of invisible illnesses— the trap of ableism haunts all parts of our lives and we reject these eras of our lives as something denigrated and wholly not ourselves. Hello, I am Kelly and this is my era of the grotesque and unbearable and to longtime fans it may seem a long time but this feels different. Can’t explain it.
    

    

    
    
    

13. Don’t know the last time I went to the mall but I drive to Towson Mall listening to Bar Italia’s Tracey Denim. I spend an hour smell perfumes in Nordstrom’s. I buy nothing but give myself a small headache.

14. Feel faint on my way home after poetry club and drive to A’s instead of getting on the beltway and spend time watching episodes of Hoarders half-asleep. I’m in the process of getting iron infusions and I feel the affects in dangerous ways and yet lately I am not landing on concrete like I did last fall, it’s a soft couch with a soft voices and the soft shuffle of empty packages and trash in the Hoarders house. Kate Durbin wrote an excellent book of poems based off the show Hoarders. I am curled up next to Caitlin and I tell her about my hope to get enough energy to go dancing tonight. There’s this show and I haven’t gone out and felt good enough to dance in ages. It’s been a long time. It’s been a long time since I actually, ten toes down, ask for help and I over-relate to this episode of a young Hoarder who laminates that he’s lost his twenties to this disease and he’ll never be normal. I can’t believe I found a soft landing for once and that I asked for help— I often just isolate, I often become something I can’t relate to.

15. Spend the evening dancing cumbia with Caitlin, Martha, and Emma at Le Mondo. We are swirling and twirling around the dance floor. Later that night I curl up next to Caitlin to laugh through a few episodes of silly tv. I drive straight to work in the morning.

16. I mistake John as a taurus and text him happy birthday. He’s proudly a gemini.

17. Monday - I show up just in time to hear poems but not Anna’s. I’m disappointed but also thrilled that somehow I’ve driven more hours today than I have looked at my screen.

18. I’ve been thinking about Peewee Herman a lot. He’s a quirky, singular blimp of my childhood that defied gender and social expectation. Often times he’s quoted by being a loner, a rebel but my favorite part of the quote to Dottie is that he tells her she’s exactly the type he shouldn’t get mixed up with and I’m not sure why that always struck me. The morbidly optimistic whimsy of Peewee continues to delight me as I listen on folding laundry this week and not a few days ago I went on a walk listening to Get Up Kid’s “I’m A Loner, Dottie, a Rebel.”
    
    Perhaps I’m thinking of Paul Reubens a lot and his final farewell and apology for not sharing his mortal lows and that he was sick and that was now his time. I suppose lately I can’t tell if I should take up space or ask for help or do I try to continue on as an island of my own? I suppose I’ve chosen a different route— I’m typing to you— thinking of Paul’s public escapades, career, and persecution.

19. Poetry at Normals. Music at Le Comptoir. Last call standing in front of Royal Blue— Aeon offers to walk me to my car and we get caught up in front of Blue talking to old friends. Sandwiched between Sienna and Alexa, I ping pong between conversations and bounce my way into twilight.

20. Watch The Last Unicorn in the tub. It’s been my favorite animated film since I was ten.

21. I love this poem below by Eduardo Corral— partly or mostly because it’s for Arthur Russell. I like that the night I knew Charles was going to Los Angeles to see a tribute concert Claire texted me to say she just happened to go. I like that two people I love so much and who don’t know each other and I haven’t seen in a while were together and under the dewy sonic aurora of Arthur’s music. I love the line “Am I not your animal?”—
    

To the Angelbeast
For Arthur Russell

All that glitters isn’t music.

Once, hidden in tall grass,
I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:
doe after doe of leaping.

You said it was nothing
but a trick of the light. Gold
curves. Gold scarves.

Am I not your animal?

You’d wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.

You said it was like lifting a cello
out of its black case.

Godspeed,

Kx