that's better

If only I remembered my own advice from one lj-entry to the next. Go to the ocean, I said. And eventually, after mooching about online, and then having yet another stab (sorry) at CSI (it's run almost continually on SPIKE: The MEN's Network, which I now have a legal obligation to watch), I grabbed my camera and walked down to Cook St. Village in time to catch the last fifteen minutes of the midnight coffee houses. They were nasty with beautiful people, but I only stopped to get my cup of ice and residue, and walked on to Dallas Road.

Everything smells so much better at night. The cedar in the chip trails, the saturated air. I took pictures of the moon, which was full and bleary with mist, sometimes smeared down the sky to twice its normal height. My camera doesn't have enough zoom to really do justice to what the eye could compose. Instead I did some faux-arty smears with the long night exposure, as though the moon were zigzagging across the sky in a celestial street race.

If I hadn't been busy whining, I'd've remembered that there's always QV's -- you have to cross downtown to get to it, but it's decent once you're there. The Mac's in the Village is also a half-cafe, with tables inside and out, and the desperate could definitely by a Slurpee (or off-brand equivalent) and sit reading Rousseau for half an hour without being harrassed by the clerk.

I think the Wendy's and the Subway in what I used to call the 24-Hour Village might still be open until 4:00 am. And there's always Denny's.

I miss:

Cafe de la Lune
The Entertainer

The Rousseau Report
Rousseau and I came abreast in terms of age several chapters ago, and now he's in his mid-forties and I'm falling behind, wondering and sorrowful at the path he's treading. I've got about two hundred pages left, but I don't know if I can go all the way with him. As his writing begins to really acheive power, his life and relationships go more and more to pieces.

He has a gift for entering the moment, and his oldest reminiscences are as immediate, or more, as the ones in his more recent memory. From what I understand, he didn't really have time to edit the later books properly because he was so afraid of spies and traitors, and they seem more confusing and less vivid.

As someone with barely sub-clinical paranoia myself, I hurt for him, and all of us, who have both real wrongs and imagined terrors.


{rf}