Joanna Newsom - "Have One On Me"

    School. School has the ring of routine, the self-regulated purity of forgetting anything except this book, anything except these 5,000 words. It started when it was warm, and the grass had not yet faded. She walked each day back to her room in the three-story building, and the neighbourhood revealed itself with each pass like illuminating brush strokes. After a week she found a place to buy lentils in bulk, and was overcome with that calm feeling, she smiled too widely at the woman behind the cash in her sparkled scarf.
    And the months climbed slowly, persistently past, in that way that one new idea per day clicks a semester by at a steady pace. One day is the allegory of the caves, the next is the Harlem Renaissance, the next is an article by Sontag, photocopied a bazillion times. Over soup, today red, today orange, today brown, she wonders about the utensils of information. And they never talked. Not an email, not a skype call, not a single mix CD. Not a word.
    Megan thought about her often, it was as if she had left her in suspended animation, left frozen at the foyer railing, holding her breath, waiting. She knew in her mind this wasn't true, but the ghost in her heart was always in that frozen position. When she looked in the mirror, Megan wondered if she had noticed these wrinkles, or if they were new, and if she would ever say anything about them. And in the shower she thought about painting her toenails, but every time she got out she forgot about it.
    The first word was on December 8th. An email, one line long: (No subject) are you coming here for the holidays? if yes, when? Of course it was yes, how insulting. She had that way of doing that, asking purposely dumb questions because she wanted to be fawned over. And using "here" instead of "home", how insulting. She was trying to get a rise, back to the paper. Still 3,422 words left to write. Nothing could be decided until the end of 3,422 words. Not even what to eat or where to get smokes, let alone where to go on Christmas or what to get anyone ever who didn't need anything always it's just stuff and stuff is bullshit who cares I can't think about that now.
    School. School has the ring of routine, but also the hypnotic quality of a cult. This could be normal to me if I stayed here long enough, thought Megan. When I finish this paper I'll answer her email. With an insulting email like that, she deserves to wait for a response. She's probably drumming her fingers, sitting by her laptop, she was probably asking because she wants to know when to have my present ready, or maybe she's trying to decide how guilty to feel, I wonder if she's wearing my sweater or she even thinks about me longer than it takes to write one fucking sentence. 3,415 words.

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