the habit of being

I’ve seen the Alamo, and hopefully will remember it, as well as San Antonio’s pretty riverwalk and the old man who told us we should stay under an oak tree “like an umbrella” with two car seats under it.

We caught a ride from DeSoto with an instrumental rock group called Stinking Lizaveta - two brothers, Yanni and Alexi, on bass and guitar, along with Cheshire, a female drummer, and Debbie, the considerably younger frowning roadie. What we got of their story was that they’re been together seven years and produced three CDs, and were currently on tour, having played 20 shows with 8 to go. With the possible exception of Yanni, whom I didn’t get a very good look at, they were all heavily tattooed. Cheshire had one arm reading “I am fine” and the other reading “I am time.” Debbie was the most decorated, with an artistically rendered metamorphosis of tadpole to frog on one arm, and insects and a large bird on the other. Her face seemed mad, and I never talked to her.

The band proper spent quite a while debating how our species is and the existence of a human “pre-fire” age. Not out usual fare from those giving us a lift. There were many books with them, most about current affairs and political criticism. Also, the mammoth “People’s History of the United States” and a few titles by Joseph Campbell. Debbie was actually reading something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which made me curious how she had met up with and begun traveling with the others. Somehow I got the impression that her family wasn’t pleased, but I never had the guts to ask her. She seemed to want to be left alone, at least by J and me.

There were also two “Philly mutts” aboard, as pit-bull mixes of the city are called, making it, along with all their gear and ours, quite the packed van. The lighter colored dog, Davis, spend much of his time drooling in my lap, while the other, Shu-Shu, wallowed all over J.

At one point, we were stopped by a cop. Apparently Alexi was going too slow. At first Alexi was rather argumentative, but by the end of the encounter Yanni nearly sold the cop a CD.

When we got to the club (Sin 13) where they were playing that night, the band offered is spots on the guest list. Unfortunately, by the time they got onstage, we were already fast asleep in our nearby San Antonio River jungle-ish campsite. We never got to see them perform.

The next morning, we headed downtown, where we saw the Alamo and ate as cheaply as we could at McDonalds. It was extremely hot out, and I felt very dizzy, but we eventually made it out to I-10. The last stretch of our walk, with the sun nearly down, was quite nice, and there was even a cool breeze. We came to a library, where we got online for a little while, and then slept in a field of wildflowers. J spoke of the wrongness of his having sex with me, when he no longer saw a future for us, or at least not a happily ever after. I fell asleep sad, envisioning a time when even my body would be utterly rejected, and woke up with an awful pain in my foot. A blisted had gone crazy somehow, and half my foot throbbed bitterly.

Morning came with decreased foot pain, hoards of rolly-pollies, and, oddly enough, sex, which was most likely viewed by passengers in many a car driving down the freeway. It was good, as sex always is lately, from my perspective at least. J commented last night that the sex was sad, as he was sad. I understand that, but that is not all of it. I still think of love myself, and an element of desperate agony is there, a yearning sort of sadness. Yearning translates well into sex, and of all the things we ever had, only the fucking is better now then it was then, when we were more pure. Physically speaking, I do enjoy it more, if only because it is the last thing that holds us together, unhealthy as that may be.