3RD / MY MIND IS RAMBLIN' We check out the locals, grab a few beers at a small joint downtown. Everything’s green glass and dark wood inside. Ambience: well-used. The patrons have decades on us and it’s early as hell. The kids haven’t come out to play yet. Anyways, I’m driving around tonight so I’m careful. I’m always fucking careful these days. I don’t go overboard. I ask about his old lady and he cuts me a look like it’s alright, ya fuck, we’re okay. It feels good to know it without having to say it. I know he got a lot of flak for it. I tell him I regret pulling out of the last project we’d lined up together and he cuts me another one like it happens, ya fuck, you’re okay. I leave earlier than I used to. Later on in a classier joint downtown, I’m glad I kept it together. Everything’s red lights and dark wood. Ambience: discreet. It’s hard to see anything but a curtain of dark hair but if I can’t see her, they can’t see us. So we’re okay. Under the table, I touch her legs to keep her warm. 4TH / STELLA WAS A DIVER AND SHE WAS ALWAYS DOWN I used to know a girl who compared her virginity to pie. I want to give my Real Guy my Whole Pie, she’d say. I told her that was the stupidest fucking thing I’d ever heard. She wound up falling for an amateur boxer anyway and they split after two violently intense years. She hated watching his fights. She’d cry. There was none of that wishful thinking by the time we fucked. It was a throwaway. I always knew what she meant though, back when we were kids. I just wanted to deconstruct her argument and watch her struggle with it. These days, I’m lying around with someone new. I tell her sometimes I think I’ve given too much away. What if there's nothing big enough left for anybody else? She eats her pizza and watches me struggle. 5TH / STEADY, AS SHE GOES This is the real world, and I see so little of it. The curtains are down. The light’s coming in. The whole room’s mellow yellow. I already know it’s too late. The cars are grinding up outside as people wake up to Sunday, bloody Sunday. I listen to a dog barking somewhere and everything’s muffled but the sound of us breathing now. Everything is perfect. Of course the phone goes off again. It’s such an ugly goddamn sound. That other world’s always interrupting me when I need it to fuck off the most. Tomorrow I’ll wake up at four and the room’ll be dark again. The temperature’s dropping like a bitch. The Atlantic’s frigid. The shoot schedule’s a grueling twelve hours on top of all the training, and this is my life for the next x weeks. All of that though, I can handle, you know. That I can do every day like a champ. It's the going to bed alone part that I really fucking hate.  |