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Spring Ivy League Library Ramble The sunlight is an orgasm. Better than multiple orgasms, actually. I've been sitting locked in my office, facing the back wall, working on computers far too much lately. It's definitely taking its toll. Just before deciding that I absolutely must go out and get some food for lunch today, I was listening to the Cowboy Junkies' Miles from Our Home, which I commented to Lady Shiv must be their most desolate, bleak, miserable work ever. It's as though they went out into the woods and had long chats with the Blair Witch about just how bad it could all get, living deep, and not sucking out all the marrow of life, as Thoreau would've intended, but rather, having it sucked out of you. Even the opening number of the disc, "New Dawn Coming," which should read as upbeat, hopeful, sounds more ominous, foreboding, like a hex, as Margo at the last intones repeatedly, hopelessly out of tune with her multi-tracked self, "Are you born yet?" Or maybe it's just my mindset. I've had FAR too much of these dark days, and dear God, I need some light. A lot of it stems from the fact that America is such a fucking miserable place right now. We're told that there's "credible intelligence" that Al Qaeda operatives are in the U.S. and poised to strike, soon, possibly this summer. Yet the Terror Alert Level (a.k.a. "Ass Alert Level"), which due to its use in the past, has largely become meaningless, has not been raised. It all seems very politically expedient for Shrubby and his flock of lemmings. At the same time, one wonders if it isn't simply that we feel any sort of heightened awareness or precaution might just be futile, like raising one's hands to one's face before the firing squad. An insignificant gesture. Why bother? Maybe it's to Canada I ought to move, or back to Europe, rather than to Manhattan. Not that things are really that much better in those places. The world was a fucking mess to begin with, but American foreign policy at present (and indeed for decades) is doing nothing to ameliorate the situation. I have, wandered through the interior of a portion of Yale's main library this afternoon, though, and am sitting in its enchanting interior courtyard, where I've passed countless hours before, both day and night, in every season, green or grey, and maybe today is not, after all, one of those days when I'd like to just check out, call it all off. "Pendu au bout de son fil, depressif, l'artiste, exit, exit," to paraphrase Mylene Farmer. I need a serious vacation. I love the smell of the old books, here. It pervades, even on the first floor in the public areas, where they are few. I pass unnoticed here; I look like I belong. I do, in fact, belong, as an alumnus, though the University in its infinite wisdom only grants library privileges to those alumni willing to pay an exorbitant annual fee for them. One of the guys I fooled around with a few weekends ago expressed his surprise, when the talk turned to college while we lay naked in their jacuzzi tub, that I went to Yale, as I don't come off as quite the arrogant, self-entitled asshole that a lot of Yalies do, though I DO look like someone who should've studied there. Another trick, the hotel boy from Boston, said something similar, that I look like a Yale man, well-educated, sophisticated, vaguely aristocratic. I had to laugh as I fucked him. r
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