peeny wally

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October 24, 2002

St. Louis Blues

I love my man like a schoolboy loves his pie,
Like a Kentucky colonel loves his rocker and rye
I’ll love my man until the day I die, Lord, Lord.

I got the St. Louis blues, just as blue as I can be, Lord, Lord!
That man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea,
Or else he wouldn’t have gone so far from me.

***

I’m in St. Louis and nothing interesting has happened yet.

My brother lives on Chippewa Ave. in South City. It’s a main thoroughfare through the city. I had forgotten what it’s like to have non-stop traffic rolling by all day. I got used to it when I lived here and when I moved away, I kind of missed it and then got used to it not being there. I think I heard the new Nelly song booming from somebody’s Jeep at the light outside earlier. I’ve heard lots of thumpy songs, and it’s been nice rather than annoying. A little reminder that I’m in a totally different place. It’s constant and soothing, sort of like listening to the ocean.

I’ve never been to this apartment before. It’s in a neighborhood full of memories for me. My old leasing company is down the street. My friend Julia used to rent a house off of Chippewa, near the Hill (the Italian district, where I aim to go get some coffee and bread and shoot some film en la manana.) Josh says she lives even closer to him now. My friend Cary had her second apartment with some jerk named Scott near here, on Oleatha, where I drank lots of underage beers. My old roommates Jenny and Jeff live in a house just a little ways over on Tholozan, which is a street with a highly disputed pronuciation in this city. Of course, every city has shameful ways of mangling place and street names (go down to Man-chack via Guadaloop if you don’t believe me.) St. Louis is the worse though, since it’s an old French city. Gravois becomes Grav-oise. And so on.

So this is where I am, in a new-old, strange-familiar place, badly in need of a cup of coffee and waiting for my brother’s roommate to come home with Tony Hawk 4. I’m spending tomorrow afternoon with my Dad, most likely at the art museum, and then we will eat Vietnamese food in my old neighborhood off of South Grand. Then tomorrow night is reserved for running around with my two best girlfriends, the aforementioned Cary and her sister Liz. We’ll go to bars I’ve long forgotten, hear songs from long ago on jukeboxes that never stopped playing them here, and maybe even run into a few old friends. We will laugh and play catch up in a comfortable way and remember lots and lots and lots from long ago. We will communicate with a familiarity that I’m lucky to know. We will most assuredly have too much to drink. We will tumble out of bars, hitting the chilly city streets, illuminated by a million tinkling lights and see our breath in the night air and walk home arm in arm, a definite force to be reckoned with. These are all good things.

Then it’s up bright and early and off to Kentucky the next day.

Posted by pogo at October 24, 2002 4:09 PM