2005-06-25 || 3:09 p.m.

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because i am twenty-eight, and because i am visiting my san francisco, and because last night i was moderately intoxicated thanks to the lexington club and cassanova, and because matt was chatting up his growing tattooing abilities and a superb rendering of mark twain (R.I.P.), and because i went out to brunch with joanna and she didn't think it was a bad idea at all and nonchalantly produced some flash art drawn expressly for her by matt, i got a tattoo.
it 's a little devil with "li'l devil" written under it.
just kidding. it's a button. because i couldn't go through with mark twain, a rather large-headed fellow. and when it comes down to it i am not that wild about w.c. fields, or armadillos. or bart simpson smoking a bong with "chill out, dude" written over him. no one other than matt and a dude were in the shop, so we seized the opportunity. matt was nervous (note: matt's not a tattoo artist. he's the receptionist.) and shaky and frowned a lot. when i started bleeding a little i asked him if he was okay and ruffled his hair a little, mom-getting-a-tattoo style. but we survived it. it's a little primitive, but prison tattoos seem to be the only kind i get.

in other news, i spent the day with anna livia, joe's 12-year-old niece, yesterday (she's named after the character from finnegan's wake!!!). i adore her. she is loud and hammy and has this loping gait like a colt. and she hasn't succumbed to the plummeting self esteem that chokes girls at that age. she gave me a cassette tape of her and her two 10-year-old cousins singing and doing "comedy skits." we sang at street corners and bought friendship bracelets and ate cheesecake while sitting on the grass at union square. we talked a lot about joe and called brian, and i tried so very hard to get into her thirteen-year-old head. what are you scared of and what do you want to be and do you like school? are kids mean to you? she plays the guitar and she is a great singer and she wants to be a writer, too. standing next to her on a balcony high above union square, i tried to gauge her train of thought and the youth of her body and how she would mesh with me at that age. how i was deathly shy and so sad and hated every aspect of myself. how i would never sing at street corners, not even with a twenty-eight-year-old friend of her uncle's who has good enough handwriting to show to her entire family whenever she receives one of her letters.
i like to think we'll be friends for a very long time, and i'll get to witness her morph into a teenager and a young adult . it is so incredibly fascinating to me, and the idea that i make some sort of impact on her, even if it is simply as this odd grown-up pen pal who shares pictures of joe and miniature ponies and cats, is so unspeakably special. there is a beautiful tie to joe that makes me cry for hours.

and. last night i got to see my brian. i was sitting in his kitchen watching him cook swiss chard when i realized he is one of my best friends, but different. he's my family now. i don't know if it was living with him or having my family being so ridiculously enamored of him, or how he is one of the very few people on this earth whom i feel really understand me, but there is a statue in my heart of him. it hurt to sit in his apartment with my apartment so far away and recognize all of his things that were intertwined with my things when we lived together. like someone cutting up a picture of the both of us and rearranging the pieces to make separate images. after dinner we sat on his back porch with neighbor friend adam and drank wine and watched a police helicopter cut tight circles with its spotlight a block over, and it felt right. he is in a good spot. it's seeing him, though, and missing him so bad that makes me really wonder about how i was able to move so far away.

tonight the vast legions are meeting up, if all goes well, and we'll dance and drink and i'll take pictures and cry a lot. leaving and coming to visit and leaving again seems much more difficult than the initial exit. there's too much to grab onto.

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