Since getting back from Cologne, I haven't been able to move myself out of an emotional shithouse for any substantial amount of time. Even getting a little high for the first time in four. Fucking. Years. didn't give me more than a few hours, though that won't stop me trying again now that Godzilla is getting less breast-dependent.
Part of it is kindergarten fretting, though I'm slowly getting over that by deciding to control that which can be controlled, and getting used to not being able to control that which can't. Part of it is hangover from spending too much time with family. Part of it is jet lag. Part of it was not wanting to come back here from Cologne, at all. When the plane caught fire in Frankfurt, purgatorial as the whole experience was I couldn't help but wonder if I'd done it with the power of my mind. But back here we are, and we're here for a few reasons, mostly though not only the F-word's, and very valid reasons - and you know, I don't give a shit about all those valid reasons. I'm done. I'm fucking done here. My brain hasn't come back. It doesn't want to. Fuck this place.
Cologne will be fraught with problems in getting our shit set up - I understand that - I'm not wearing rose-tinted glasses about this move, even though I fell for the place like a tonne of bricks. I just want to GET SHIT DONE. Find the kid a school. Find ourselves an apartment, which we can't really do until the kid finds a school. Open some bank accounts. Buy a king-size bed. Use saunas naked. Let Godzilla's bewildering language explosion explode all over German in a way that includes something besides him yelling "Dankeshen, Bitteshen, Morgen, Tschuss!" and then laughing like a madman (even cuter than it sounds).
And Hilts is dead. He hasn't been around here in awhile, and to be honest I don't really know why he started coming around in the first place. I know why I went around his place. He just seemed so decent and so - how to say it? - unapologetically still in the grip of the honest confusion of youth. There was something really refreshing about that because I don't believe most of us ever get over that great confusion of youth so much as learn how to ignore it, either because we can't bear it or we don't have time for it. There's something a little heroic about the men, and usually they're men - women usually find more pressing things to do with their time - who don't ignore that confusion. So Hilts being gone is like a hero being gone.
Part of it is kindergarten fretting, though I'm slowly getting over that by deciding to control that which can be controlled, and getting used to not being able to control that which can't. Part of it is hangover from spending too much time with family. Part of it is jet lag. Part of it was not wanting to come back here from Cologne, at all. When the plane caught fire in Frankfurt, purgatorial as the whole experience was I couldn't help but wonder if I'd done it with the power of my mind. But back here we are, and we're here for a few reasons, mostly though not only the F-word's, and very valid reasons - and you know, I don't give a shit about all those valid reasons. I'm done. I'm fucking done here. My brain hasn't come back. It doesn't want to. Fuck this place.
Cologne will be fraught with problems in getting our shit set up - I understand that - I'm not wearing rose-tinted glasses about this move, even though I fell for the place like a tonne of bricks. I just want to GET SHIT DONE. Find the kid a school. Find ourselves an apartment, which we can't really do until the kid finds a school. Open some bank accounts. Buy a king-size bed. Use saunas naked. Let Godzilla's bewildering language explosion explode all over German in a way that includes something besides him yelling "Dankeshen, Bitteshen, Morgen, Tschuss!" and then laughing like a madman (even cuter than it sounds).
And Hilts is dead. He hasn't been around here in awhile, and to be honest I don't really know why he started coming around in the first place. I know why I went around his place. He just seemed so decent and so - how to say it? - unapologetically still in the grip of the honest confusion of youth. There was something really refreshing about that because I don't believe most of us ever get over that great confusion of youth so much as learn how to ignore it, either because we can't bear it or we don't have time for it. There's something a little heroic about the men, and usually they're men - women usually find more pressing things to do with their time - who don't ignore that confusion. So Hilts being gone is like a hero being gone.
2 commenti:
So well put, Spliffe: "unapologetically still in the grip of the honest confusion of youth" -- thanks. Hilts loved your stuff. He was an omnivore with endless appetite for writing and reading and living. He did more in 48 years than most do in twice that time.
I'm glad that you mentioned that last thing, because I've found myself, like other times friends have died suddenly, worrying about what things were like for him right at the end, and several times I've been about to write you to ask if he was scared, or alone, and if he was okay (what a fucking stupid question but it's the one that, with Hilts and others, keeps coming back to me) - questions that you almost certainly can't answer, and that in any case don't have a fun answer.
So instead I think of him as having a physical heart that just couldn't handle all that living, heaving Hilts, even at just 48, since no matter what happened I guess that's what actually happened. Unless it was a car. Fuck cars, man. I fucking hate them.
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