It's 5am, which is beginning to be the typical wind-down from a day of scampering: class, people, work, expectations, angst, vertigo, and hummus. Too much hummus, really, at the wildly seedy bohemian night job of "hookah barista" (I have taken the liberty of creating a euphemism from the regular expletive included in the title) or "coal ninja" as I have liberally self-dubbed.

Pita Jungle: a place for the Arab community, underaged smokers, college drunkards, male ex-strippers, gyro-lovers, and me, apparently. Today, there was an actual riot outside. I was standing in the restaurant section and three guys push me out of the way, scrambling for the door. They went outside and started throwing patio furniture at each other. About fifteen other Arab men filtered rapidly after them.
It's awful and funny right now. I don't know why, but it shook me up. I couldn't get Ben Lerner's lines "real blood on the stage, fake blood in the snow" out of my head, just shocked at the almost farsical reality of actual violence where I have lived a life exposed to only its holograms and shadows.

Then "Z" read my fortune out of turkish coffee cup. One husband, he said, pointing to a long line of dried grains; one child, he said, pointing at the single branch extending out of it. He told me that when I was younger, I read a lot. In the present, I was moving so quickly that I never slowed down: "I tink itz like you skiing." I blink and reply, "but I don't ski." He sets the cup down. "Itz metaphor." He leaves.

I feel a little ill. I don't know why. Insert emotional honesty here.

Nick Urata guzzles the rest of his merlot on stage and bangs the head of his guitar into the souzaphone.



This is how Devotchka's music makes me feel:



Reduced to that mulled electric, again. A sort of red-colored comatose. (Lovely, lying wasted on the bed, slave-caught, invasively wired, warmed) Cider, pine, tinder, kerosene, hickory, dust: steeped and drafting up, evasive in origin, heady in consequence. (Heard and drunk and wondering)

"Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late,
and no one could sleep
the horses running until they forget they are horses.
It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on the policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed
there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the window pain.
That means it's noon, that means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it."

-Richard Siken