Bill Withers - I Don’t Know
Went on campus to return books this morning—one was overdue!—and, while on the bus, one of the poetry books made me feel guilty for having it checked out for ~4-5 months without having cracked it open since the initial day I checked all the books out. So I killed time reading this poetry book at the library until my stomach really began to bother me.
A girl on the bus smelled like men’s cologne and tortilla chips.
When I was leaving the apartment, I found three pink post-it notes in one of the books and foolishly threw them in my bag to read for later, thinking maybe—abstractly somewhere in the back of my mind— the adhesive would stick to one of the books, but a part of me bullied the paranoia with, “Well, you know, just be careful when you drop the books off in the return box” and didn’t want to miss the bus so threw them in my bag anyway.
They ended up sticking to the back of one of the books because I dropped all the books off in a hurry. I got to the sixth floor of the library and reached into my bag to read the notes from ~4-5 months ago and, of course, they weren’t there. I packed everything in my bag and rushed to the elevator in a panic. Calm down. The odds that they already cleared the dropbox of all the returned books in this short period of time are very low.
I went to the front desk and a librarian called me over, but there was a girl ahead of me holding a stack of books and confusion on her furrowed brow. “You returning books?” asked the librarian. The girl gaped and nodded. “Drop them in that white box.” She turned to me and I said, “Is there any way I can get in that white box?” I intoned ‘that white box’ just as she had. “I dropped some post-it notes,” I added sheepishly and for explanation’s sake, of course—Lady, is there any way I can get in that white box? I just want to, y’know, poke around a bit—just for the fuck of it!
She opened the white dropbox, which looks like it’s been there since the ’80s, and there were the three little pink post-it notes, hello! “Thank you SO MUCH,” I told the librarian, because woo boy, how stupid would it have been to know someone who works at the library—maybe even this particular librarian woman?—would have read notes like, “RIGHT NOW FEELS RIGHT” and “DID CAVEPEOPLE THINK THEIR SURROUNDINGS WERE BEAUTIFUL?“
Now the post-its are in my wallet and what if I lose that with my identification in it? Then the person who found my wallet would definitely know the face behind the words. Well, “know,” and, well, what if this hypothetical person didn’t even rummage through everything and just took my cards and whatever money I happen to have in there at the moment of discovery (currently: $10.25)? What if they do that and leave the wallet on the ground and someone else picks it up and then this second hypothetical person reads the post-its? It wouldn’t matter, really, if any stranger found and read the notes, it’s just strange to think of being naked somewhere in a stranger’s palms, fingertips, however you hold a post-it note.
“DID CAVEPEOPLE THINK THEIR SURROUNDINGS WERE BEAUTIFUL?”
I don’t know! Did they even possess a concept of beauty? I can’t remember if the Herzog documentary touched upon that.
There’s a mysterious cut on my right thumb. It appears as though it has just begun healing, but I never felt the initial pain. Can that happen emotionally? Can you ignore the pain of an event as it’s happening, but acknowledge the healing part? For you to realize you are undergoing some sort of convalescence, wouldn’t you need to acknowledge you felt pain at some point? There’s a barrier constructed from the Not Remembering that blocks the Pain from the Healing. It bothers me when I write roundabout, imprecise thoughts.
I’ve never been good at remembering quotes.
There’s still toothpaste on the left thigh part of my jeans.
I am going to need to steal more paper.
I remember when I wasn’t able to write in a straight line across unlined paper. At some point in my life I got better at it and I just realized this now.
I am tempted to reopen this cut on my thumb. The rational part of me is telling me not to because I might end up squeezing a lemon later today (This always seems to happen. I pick at the skin on my lips and I end up eating something sour later in the day), but another part of me wants to just do it and doesn’t really know why.
Lately, I think about your lips and how I want to lick them like they’re a little smear of raspberry jam on a plate.
Night feels like a yawn, a drawl. Also, chickpea is another name for garbanzo bean and I can’t tell which name sounds weirder.
Bill Withers’s voice in this song might be the only one that sounds like it needs to be cleared with a hearty ahem that does not make me want to clear my own throat as if doing so would make that uncleared throat sound go away. Throaty, husky, sensual. He sings out “love you so” and it makes me furrow my brow like I’m channeling his voice on my face. I want to be a receptor. Lonely for it.
Popsicle drip smile.
Have you ever forced yourself to want something you have and, if so, how did/does that make you feel? The something could be anything.
If someone read your poetry would they be able to find themselves in it by skimming the surface of it or would they have to plunge? Is one necessarily better than the other? In what ways? Depends, I guess, on how secretive you want to be.
When my stomach growls, gurgles, mewls, I think of the Eraserhead baby and of you feeding me. You aliment me with acknowledgement; a lot of the time I feel like I can live off of that, like when you know you’re going somewhere exciting and can’t fall asleep the night before and, in the morning, you don’t want breakfast or anything because you’re feeding off the excitement? I was like that about field trips as a kid.
This morning I forced myself to want language. Limbered up the brain by reading 100-something pages before hunkering down to write my own things. Not this, though, no, not this. I have essays to write.
Although, I thought, when I got home I’d be surrounded by reminders of having so much to get rid of. There’s a strong desire to feel unencumbered by stuff. Unburdened. Too much stuff. I’m going to dig a giant hole and bury everything somewhere secret, or maybe not-so-secret. Just bury everything like a bone or many bones. I’ve torn and licked the meat off the things I own. Time to bury it all. Or, well, you know, donate. Here are my bones.
Say, are there apartment listings for the inside of the way Bill Withers sings “love you so” in “I Don’t Know” because it makes me hold my breath and my heart begins to race THUMP THUMP—why does that happen? and why is there warmth at the corners of my eyes and why is my throat clamping?—and it makes the day stand still in my stomach which sort of makes breathing easier? I wish my own voice could have that effect, but I don’t know how to control my voice and don’t know much about it. It’s mine, but sometimes it’s Silly Putty. How would it feel to have so much emotion spilling out of you through your vocal cords? I’m not a singer. I don’t know.
I think that if I really meant the words I was singing, I would cry. I’d be too overcome. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to sing something beautiful without words that would make me cry. Take language out of the picture. But certain nonsense sounds signify emotions and ideas. It would be difficult to divorce the sonic from the emotional/conceptual connotations.
Maybe you need language to juxtapose the content with the tone of your voice— unless you can sing morosely and melancholically with a smile on your face, but then that becomes an issue of performance. To be able to grasp the intention you would need to see the performance or else the juxtaposition might go over your head if you only heard it as an MP3/M4A, whatever format we use today, but, well, maybe you read about the purpose and intent in The New York Times or some other news source that would report about some performance like that, so you didn’t need to see it to “get it.”
Today I read the question: “What cannot be contained?”
Well, you can capture a voice and compress it on a disc and also into intangible files on a computer. You can contain a voice. Strange!
I remember when I used to think “an” was a shorter way of writing “and.” If I couldn’t fit the “-d” in “and” on the same line as the rest of the word, that’s when I’d use “an.” Why did I think that?
I don’t know.
