when at night the nurses left
Today I meet another agent. I don't think the last one thought so much of me. This one has already read my manuscript, theoretically, so ugh. I keep buying these irises and they keep dying without opening. What am I doing wrong?
I had another rant about this place going, but at the moment I have neither the time nor the energy to post it. So I will content myself with wishing a happy 21st birthday to my little sister, who will now discover the sudden lack of interest and mystique in legal alcohol consumption. But it's still a boon, since she lives in Reno and there is absolutely nothing to do in Reno if you're underage.
Marlowe was talking about personal theme songs last night. He was convinced that his is "Vehicle," by the Ides of March, while Josh McCullough's song is U2's "Bad." (Josh was upset to discover that it's about heroin.) I would probably have to pick a Leonard Cohen song, mainly because of this Leonard Cohen documentary I saw at Nik's place in Tucson a few visits back. The documentary was not so good, but the disturbing thing was to see Cohen in his twenties, when he was just making the career move from poet/novelist to musician. He was small and scrawny and dark-haired and looked very Jewish and... rather like me, basically. He also seemed to have all of my geeky mannerisms and laughed too loud at everything and got drunk off his ass and played guitar and led a sing-along in his hotel room. It was uncanny. As far as a particular song I'd have to pick "Teachers," though it doesn't really make sense unless you hear the frantic/creepy fingerpicking line underneath, especially if you're listening at five in the morning after coming down from [reference to youthful indiscretion removed]. Back when I was going to write a story collection about the mental hospital I was thinking of using "When At Night the Nurses Left" for the title, but that idea has been scrapped.
Another piece of music that expresses how I feel a lot of the time, though it's not really a theme song, is the "Montagues and Capulets" section from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet suite (RealAudio excerpt here: track 5, though they don't play the best part, which starts around a minute-thirty). It summons up the darkness of love—or more precisely, the dark contingencies that love forces upon you: the jackbooted march of the damned.
