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backyard

11 May 2005
4:23 pm

i love that this book always takes me outside in the sun. some pages are forever creased to remind me of certain turned phrases, the pages are turning colors, and the text always looks red when the sun sits high in the sky and my eyes stay open. this book has absorbed the perspiration from my clammy girl hands many afternoons over, in this wavering floridian breeze. on the wooden deck behind my old house, next to my mother on an unusually warm january afternoon; at a bench around the corner from my dorm room at ucf until the class i was supposed to be in let out and i would join the public by the reflecting pond, and they would study while i would sit and read; and now, here, on the little concrete slab behind this house in clearwater--i've been living here since january and this is the first time i have really.. been here. like, actively being here, where i spend time in different rooms with the blinds open and the music loud.


"Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down tot he railroad tracks--and there're a lot of them in Des Moines--and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the loomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the lfie of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."
--On The Road


i like the way the sun makes my skin tingle, the way it smells when it is being lightly toasted.