april 2012

this cover is only ok (just sort of a low quality recording, clipping everywhere) but i wanted to post it because of my memory of the day i recorded the video. it’s the tiniest thing, just a little flash of a moment in the hospital cafe: i went to visit my best friend & he said something complimentary about my tits in this outfit & i scream-laughed. maybe it wouldn’t be so significant if he hadn’t died a couple of months later. maybe it’s a moment that would have completely disappeared if i hadn’t happened to also record this video, adding an extra hook to the image in my brain. i have a truly awful memory, so the tidbits that do stick around are fascinating for me. why this one? when did it become solidified? what day did i even record it? it might have been this one:

because in the elevator up to his floor in the hospital i’d always think about how it was a huge elevator (one of the ones that can fit beds for patient transfer & stuff), but still much smaller than a dinosaur, which is a spatial concept i was really obsessed with for a brief amount of time– or this one:

because there was a construction site between me & the hospital & i’d often pee in the portapotties there if i was visiting while drunk or something like that. i think it was the dinosaur one, because in my memory, it’s daytime. oh, sure– if we were in the cafe, it would have to have been daytime. it was only open in the day. i worked there for a while, after he died. i mentioned all the time i spent there in my cover letter. it might be a little intense to mention hanging out with your dead best friend in an application for essentially a cook & cashier position, but you do what you gotta do to get a leg up. i don’t remember if i said in the cover letter that he’d died. it wouldn’t have been out of character. whatever it was i said, i got the job.

i somehow remember walking through the park on my way there or back, the day i recorded the video. as i wrote that sentence, i had the vague feeling that i wrote a poem on or about that walk. i looked at my old deviantart & found this & had that strange “aha, confirmed” feeling in my stomach 

& on another website, a poetry blog i had, i also posted this instagram picture from the day of recording the white stripes cover (same outfit! park confirmed!)

& i don’t have a point to any of this. just a lot of amorphous thoughts about the memories that get encoded & the triangulation of them through online documentation. if my old tumblr were still up, i’m sure i’d find detailed posts about that day. it was much closer to when he was first hospitalised than i remembered it being. like, within days. i would have said weeks. i guess i remembered wrong.