Bail

Drying out tonight. Getting harder and messier picking up the puddle pieces days after a wet spree, goddamn it.

It has been raining for days, all week rather. Looking out the window seems the days were stuck on repeat-- same ol' mess of wet and yellows.

I went down to the Hotel for singing night-- I bumped into a guy named Ryan in the street.
He has the waist length Metal hair and a waist long Metal beard-- Ryan was supposed to be in Portland, Oregon with his band but his grandmother had died two hours before. We had talked about his grandmother when she was dying, before his tour-- her first husband was killed by fascists in Italy when she was 17. She immigrated alone as soon as the war ended.

There was some sort of autism to the air that night-- a girl was very upset a certain friend wasn't with me, she told me about liking Bob's Burgers and her fetish for feeding skinny looking men, how she had shredded threadbare pajama pants off in a fit of passion the night before, how shitting makes her feel empowered and how people frequently tell her she looks like Alanis Morissette. I honestly didn't see a resemblance.

A dealer with a bowl-cut admired my jacket. It was actually a work shirt from back on the farm, and the mistake confused me. Double so when he kept returning to comment again, nervous that he may have only imagined our earlier exchanges.

An old man named Kenny admired my shoulders and wanted to touch them. He touched them. He had the easy-comfortable bearing of a pedophile, the articulate and delicate aura of a man who'd burned live animals trapped in gas soaked sacs. He wanted us to be friends, and wanted me to know that I should always say hello if I saw him and that I should never avoid his company if we met in public. He wanted to hear me sing, and then touch my shoulders again.

I have taken to singing a sort of repeating repertoire of re-interpretations of good old favorites: Faster Than a Ray of Light by Madonna, Walking on Broken Glass by Annie Lennox, Proud Mary by Tina Turner and Bad Blood by Neil Sedaka. I tend to sing like Tom Jones having a Bruce Springsteen sort of aneurism-- tinged to a Morrissey-nian sense of shame.

 I frequently worry that my reputation as a heterosexual man about town has become a penny stock.

I drank and sung.

Millie has deep mental handicaps, she is a middle aged woman who walks around the bars and sells gimp bracelets. She gets impatient when her marks take too long with their change, but will smile and say "Yeah that's me" if you give her a cigarette. The sort of person who quickly embarrasses her altruistic defenders with fits of aimless violence. Millie and I danced to some song I cannot remember-- we spun each other in circles. Kenny said oh! a regular Clark Kent! American as apple pie!

I left out some back door, and then woke up this morning.