The Purple Rose of Cairo

I am watching Billy Joe Armstrong sing on Conan right now, looking at his hair, touching my own, and thinking yes, I have hair, and I am not cutting it, and it is going to get bigger and messier just like the effect Billy Joe has gone for with kinking up his hair on this performance. I just drank a bottle of Malbec with Adele and smoked a decent number of Parliaments, while watching Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, which is absolutely amazing.

I mean, I may trim the sides of my hair soon. Not much.

My dad's memorial service is tomorrow.

This movie is so good and not because I went to a liberal arts college and like anything meta just for the sake of it. It says so many amazing things about film and what we get out of it, and how it is distinct from the lives we live, how there aren't happy endings. I think I am going to masturbate and go to bed and then wake up in a few short hours and try not to die.

I lost it on the train ride home and Adele could tell I was an emotional mess when I got home, but now I feel so much better. I was listening to this old Tracy Chapman album and it just devastated me, took the wind out of me, and I could feel my eyes reddening and watering, and I was getting short of breath, and this time in my life now is the only time I have been so easily affected by music. I always have been, in that my body must move to it and I want to dance. But so often lately, my eyes water up listening to songs and this makes me so happy because this is a new feeling that I have never had. And also, this is the album with "Fast Car" on it, and perhaps I should tell you that I got really into this album long after it was released, during my second (?) year of college, followed by the semester I took off from school and lived at home in Virginia and this was during the period of time that I had to drive my dad to chemo appointments on my days off from work, when I was working at an organic grocery store in DC as a checkout boy,

You see my old man's got a problem
He live with the bottle that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
I say his body's too young to look like his
My mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said somebody's got to take care of him
So I quit school and that's what I did
....
And I work in a market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better

And it was during this song that all that started to come back, that and other stuff, that stuff triggering other stuff and me living back in that house and driving my mom's minivan to the Kaiser building with my dad in the passenger seat, unhappy there, wishing he could drive himself, trying to critique my driving. The Whitman bio I was reading at that time while he was in that office and later, him and some friend snorting Oxycontin in the backseat of my mom's minivan in the hospital's parking garage and me trying not to cry in the frontseat, to somehow accept that this was my life and man, the things this album provoked in me, the memories and I think I might even have known that it had that capacity when I put it in my discman, but I ignorned or wanted to bring on those emotions. I am not sure.

I made it five songs into the album. I couldn't take the emotions I was experiencing anymore halfway through "Baby Can I Hold You." Put on that song when you are sad and try not to feel terribly lonely and lose it.