It feels like my Mind is Wiped Clean about once a year. What was I doing again..?

I was going through some of my notebooks and I found this. It’s clearly from a few years ago and while I remember it, I don’t remember writing it. Very appropriate as the whole thing is about how I don’t have a very good memory so I have to write down what happened over the past year. I like how I sprinkled the Poe throughout…

It feels like my Mind is Wiped Clean about once a year. What was I doing again..?

Thank Heaven! the crisis- The Danger is past.

We were in Savannah.

No, really. I remember it. We were sitting in a pirate’s house and the alcohol was affecting my Better Judgment. We had a fight that resulted in what was probably the worst feeling my mind has dealt with in…

I can’t remember anymore. We let the girl wave to us. Was it goodbye? Hello? I’m here? There was a giant kid who killed a little kid and the town killed him. You lay beneath the tree, looking towards his swinging body. “Skylark” was on the radio.

A young woman waits in a hotel room for a sailor. Or maybe it was in a bar. A bar-bar. I am not that sailor, trust me. We’ll have breakfast at Clary’s and forget about her. You shall press, ah, nevermore!

I remember seeing you in the late 50s. Maybe it was the early 60s but they’re both so interchangeable sometimes. You were on a beach and the sky was dark. You see a ship and wave. The hotels are pastel colored.

We were in Atlanta.

Right? Atlanta?

We were wandering. We were walking through a garden of Venus Fly-Traps. I was visiting an old friend. You were not happy about that. We were in a club full of vampires. They were going to lock the doors, I know it. The Battle of Atlanta had raged around us and we talked about past events that don’t matter anymore. Did I kiss her before we parted ways? My memory deteriorates like nitrate and I could not tell you. Coca-Cola rots the brain and we’ve had so many kinds. I don’t even want to talk about the Italian ones. At the end of our path a liquescent and nebulous lustre was born.

The French Quarter is too full of ghosts for us not to become possessed. A chalice bursts into flaming streams. A woman chops up her servants in an upstairs room and we can’t see a thing. Do we drink absinthe where Faulkner wrote? Yes, I think so but you’ll have to help me with the details. I know it’s raining when the voodoo queen is found and I’m not sure if what she did was a blessing. By God, will somebody shut off that Fucking Music?! And the life of the Ebony Clock went out with that.

A gypsy drive-in can’t get us in tonight so we’ll have to go to a college town, which is a poor substitute. The Lord has forgiven me for that Piggly-Wiggly I knocked over. What kind of abandoned town is this, anyway? They’ll shut the lights off if you pump gas too long, no matter how cheap it is.

How long did you sit by the campfire before you realized you might love me? I don’t want an answer. I just want you to think about it.  How long before the tabloids would pick up on our story?

I think I was in Tombstone. A hearse carries a child’s casket to Boot Hill. Little Egypt is on her way to Chicago. I went downstairs at The Birdcage but didn’t go in the rooms. You weren’t there. Hey, pretty. So much has changed.

Can you remember like I do? Can you erase like I can? I have had to lock in the last year or it would flake away like silver. These memories cannot just walk into the Mississippi anymore, they have to be pushed. And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side but only to look at you, laughing, as a tear falls. It was surely October on this very night of last year that I journeyed…

I journeyed down here.

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