It feels like another lifetime, reading this stuff the second time around. What a ride.
I couldn’t fall asleep last night. A vanishing rarity for me. I’d stayed up until a bit past 4 a.m. as it was, first setting up a Hercules guitar rack I scored for $35 off Facebook Marketplace, then setting up, as best I could, an old Framus parlor guitar with a pass-thru tailpiece and floating bridge (I think it’s a 5/1, perhaps the “Junior” model, made in the 60s or maybe even the 50s, but the model number is sloppily written and the stamp that would give me the date faded beyond any real legibility). That, I scored for free. It had been the house guitar, and then became a neglected dust-collector, at the anarcho-communist hippie-punk compound where my friend Jimmy lives. Jimmy’s good people. A queer activist poet, fellow New College alum in mourning, and as I learned on my most recent visit to the farm, a mighty fine singer, too. (Mighty fine in general. If he didn’t have a partner … )
Anyway, the farm doesn’t have air conditioning, in north-central Florida, so suffice to say this old guitar has not been kept at ideal humidity. It’s certainly not worth anything, but I’m hoping with some TLC it might be worth playing.
While setting up the rack and then the guitar, I’d also done open-parts surgery on my vacuum’s floor attachment to unclog it (and having done that, vacuumed a bit, if only to suck back up all the shit that confetti’d the floor while I was operating on it), made a minor dent in my bookkeeping by figuring out what a mystery transaction was (a ticket to see Jane Goodall speak this Saturday) and probably half started another thing or two that I won’t remember I half started until I notice or return to them.
Anyway, staying up a bit past 4 isn’t especially beyond the norm for me. I don’t have to work until 4 today — debate hours, scheduled until 1 a.m. — so it seemed all the more innocuous to stay up late and see if I could find viability in an old inexpensive guitar.
Staying up late is normal, but insomnia? That is *weird* for me. After a long while, maybe 90 minutes or so, I decided I should do something other than just lie here.
Trying to avoid the default timekiller that is my phone — because I had set it shortly after 3:30 a.m. for a “sleep well” night that I get points for completing even if I sleep shittily or nary a wink, so long as I *do not use the phone* for 8 hours — I went to the bookshelf. I stared, sans-glasses, in semi-darkness, and saw your poetry books there.
I grabbed them. I turned my bedside light on low. “Devotion” seemed ill-advised; I can only take love and lust in small doses right now. They’ve become alien concepts, I a xenophobe. About halfway through “You’ve Changed,” I thought I’d try again. I turned the lights back off.
Reading usually puts me to sleep. But reading poetry, well, I should have known better. What *that* does is get my internal monologue going in writerly fashion. I should do more of it, but perhaps not when I am faced with the fickle side of sleep. “Before the light coming in through my windows turns day,” I thought, or something close to that, anyway, about how I wanted to get to sleep. I thought I should write it down, whatever the wording was, so I turned the light back on, grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper, and heard, as I was about to start scribbling, my housemate ask if I was OK. I could barely hear him over the white noise of my bedside fan, but said “yeah,” and wrote down what I wanted to write, and stuck it in “You’ve Changed” as a bookmark, and turned the light off again. If he was home, that meant it had to be 6:30 or so.
Good thing I don’t have to work until 4. I finally slept until a bit after 12.
Looks like I can’t post pictures in the comments, but I’ll find a place for the picture I took to send to Jimmy after I got the guitar set back up. I think I might oughta put Silk and Steels on it, though. Less tension on the ol’ thing.
I have to remind myself to check the " date" of your sub stack posts, like this one from 2012. Thinking it was from your recent trip to Shrewsbury FF. Part current part long ago! I kept saying " What" ???
It feels like another lifetime, reading this stuff the second time around. What a ride.
I couldn’t fall asleep last night. A vanishing rarity for me. I’d stayed up until a bit past 4 a.m. as it was, first setting up a Hercules guitar rack I scored for $35 off Facebook Marketplace, then setting up, as best I could, an old Framus parlor guitar with a pass-thru tailpiece and floating bridge (I think it’s a 5/1, perhaps the “Junior” model, made in the 60s or maybe even the 50s, but the model number is sloppily written and the stamp that would give me the date faded beyond any real legibility). That, I scored for free. It had been the house guitar, and then became a neglected dust-collector, at the anarcho-communist hippie-punk compound where my friend Jimmy lives. Jimmy’s good people. A queer activist poet, fellow New College alum in mourning, and as I learned on my most recent visit to the farm, a mighty fine singer, too. (Mighty fine in general. If he didn’t have a partner … )
Anyway, the farm doesn’t have air conditioning, in north-central Florida, so suffice to say this old guitar has not been kept at ideal humidity. It’s certainly not worth anything, but I’m hoping with some TLC it might be worth playing.
While setting up the rack and then the guitar, I’d also done open-parts surgery on my vacuum’s floor attachment to unclog it (and having done that, vacuumed a bit, if only to suck back up all the shit that confetti’d the floor while I was operating on it), made a minor dent in my bookkeeping by figuring out what a mystery transaction was (a ticket to see Jane Goodall speak this Saturday) and probably half started another thing or two that I won’t remember I half started until I notice or return to them.
Anyway, staying up a bit past 4 isn’t especially beyond the norm for me. I don’t have to work until 4 today — debate hours, scheduled until 1 a.m. — so it seemed all the more innocuous to stay up late and see if I could find viability in an old inexpensive guitar.
Staying up late is normal, but insomnia? That is *weird* for me. After a long while, maybe 90 minutes or so, I decided I should do something other than just lie here.
Trying to avoid the default timekiller that is my phone — because I had set it shortly after 3:30 a.m. for a “sleep well” night that I get points for completing even if I sleep shittily or nary a wink, so long as I *do not use the phone* for 8 hours — I went to the bookshelf. I stared, sans-glasses, in semi-darkness, and saw your poetry books there.
I grabbed them. I turned my bedside light on low. “Devotion” seemed ill-advised; I can only take love and lust in small doses right now. They’ve become alien concepts, I a xenophobe. About halfway through “You’ve Changed,” I thought I’d try again. I turned the lights back off.
Reading usually puts me to sleep. But reading poetry, well, I should have known better. What *that* does is get my internal monologue going in writerly fashion. I should do more of it, but perhaps not when I am faced with the fickle side of sleep. “Before the light coming in through my windows turns day,” I thought, or something close to that, anyway, about how I wanted to get to sleep. I thought I should write it down, whatever the wording was, so I turned the light back on, grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper, and heard, as I was about to start scribbling, my housemate ask if I was OK. I could barely hear him over the white noise of my bedside fan, but said “yeah,” and wrote down what I wanted to write, and stuck it in “You’ve Changed” as a bookmark, and turned the light off again. If he was home, that meant it had to be 6:30 or so.
Good thing I don’t have to work until 4. I finally slept until a bit after 12.
Looks like I can’t post pictures in the comments, but I’ll find a place for the picture I took to send to Jimmy after I got the guitar set back up. I think I might oughta put Silk and Steels on it, though. Less tension on the ol’ thing.
I got my own story this time. Thank you, Kat. I have to be careful about staying up because I’m very very good at it.
Here’s the guitar.
https://substack.com/@naufragouskat/note/c-68493897?r=2pg9so&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
The words I wrote down were better than my waking recollection six hours later. It’s the “undeniably” that makes it.
before the light
outside my window
was undeniably day
I have to remind myself to check the " date" of your sub stack posts, like this one from 2012. Thinking it was from your recent trip to Shrewsbury FF. Part current part long ago! I kept saying " What" ???
I loved revisiting this trip! Good memories.