Blog Six.

i/ve had an open sore on my foot for over a week. it scabs when i sleep, and i think it/s finally finished and then i put my shoes on and the scab reopens and coagulates to my sock, so i wind up reopening the sore, again, when i take off my socks and then it scabs over while i sleep. and there/s a bar in the countryside where i go alone and old people in cowboys hats sway slowly to glittering steel guitar and kids play outdated arcade games, and an old woman take my order at the bar and her husband shuffles over to my table with fish, chips and beer that looks like black coffee. there/s a man here that looks like he was in a fire and all of him was badly burned except his upper lip because he has blotchy pink skin that sags down his face like melted wax, and a closely trimmed moustache, but it/s only because he/s real old. he still has a nose, too, and a cowboy hat. a stranger asks me how i/m doing. much better, as it were. (what does it matter anymore that all my friends are dying and have abandoned me to the same?) i drive home hitting 100 clicks on snowdrift dirtroads listening to ryan adams, and appear without warning over a hill into fastfood bigbox suburban outskirts guelph. i drink another beer walking alone towards downtown, watch a garage-punk band open for a garage-pop band. james arrives with andrew. andrew leaves. another james arrives gropes me mutters something latently threatening to the first james then leaves. they/re roommates. the garage-pop band stops playing. me and james wait in a long cold lineup outside a bar, i piss in the alley. james runs up the fire escape, i walk in the back door, fuck the lineup, but still don/t have the two dollars necessary to go upstairs where james and andrew and everyone else is. i call andrew and he comes down and he pays for me. james and me run into kate/s sister and dance with her. a girl from my writing class recognizes me and talks to me on the dancefloor, james and meg make eyes to suggest i try to fuck her. i/m happy for once and couldn/t care less, i dance with my eyes closed. i apologize to a friend of a friend that last time i/d gotten down and drunk, had ranted at and probably insulted some too. she seems cool about it, says she thought i was depressed because we used to have a lab together and i was always nice then, so i invite her to our kegger. i spend the rest of the night wondering if she/ll actually come, and wake up still happy. cooper is happy for me to finally be over my funk. i pray it lasts until the kegger. i pray also the open sore closes by then too.