heartbeats

feeling: ballet-full, new friends, vanilla-chai. is it february already?

about to eat: home-made hamburgers in the 16eme!

today i washed george whitman's pajamas. when i was folding the silk-lined cotton tweeds, more carefully than i do for my own washing, i found a wrapped iced chesnut (un marron glace) at the bottom of the dryer.

i sat in the corner between the art section & the comic books, on the red velveteen cinema seats. with a stack of short story books to my left & poetry in my lap, i tucked myself up & slipped into a world of other people. an old man unknowingly, gently, pulled me out of my daydreams & into another as he played chopin on the almost-in-tune piano in the back of the bookshop.

after work, once the shop had shut & all the tumbleweeds (the people who are staying in the bookshop for free in return for a few hours work) had pulled in the books from outside, a british biography writer called shiv, the two haligonians & i went to a small cafe called "le fourmis ailee" which was long mistaken for "the garlicky ant" - another case of mistranslation made clear by the small ant with wings hanging from the window: the winged ant. after that, we drank some more red wine in the writer's studio on the second floor of shakespeare & company. hilary played joni's "a case of you" & a californian called daniel joined us, contributing some blues riffs about kung fu. they asked me if i could sing; i said no, i could not sing for people. we started talking about jose gonzalez & before we knew it, i was hand-writing the lyrics to "heartbeats" so that the four of us, plus the swede tumbleweed who wandered in ensnared by the gee-tar, could sit around & sing along. we harmonized, practiced, experimented, & recorded. i sang the melody. we plan on going semi-professional & playing on the streets to fund our fiendish book habits.
i got back at 4 o'clock in the morning on a mild february night, brimming with contentedness.