02/08/04 - and life goes on.....

my beau is doing fine. it's been an excruciating process but bit by bit he started to move his hands, and then his arms, and now he's able to sit up and he is breathing on his own (instead of letting that odd loud machine do it for him) and he should be going into rehab any day. He still cannot talk but there is an odd device that they screw into the hole in his neck(yow) that acts like a voicebox that allows him to talk a little bit at a time. I go in and visit every day i can, when we're not out of town, the hospital has become some weird peaceful second home, the salad bar in the hospital cafeteria is actually not half bad....and sometimes at the cashier counter the cook puts a plate of the leftover ends of loaves of sweet breads for passers-by to sample.....poppyseed bread.....marble chocolate bread.....I try to entertain him by reading some of my favorite short stories (the happy prince by oscar wilde is one of my favorites and i always cry when i get to the part at the end where the sparrow dies). Hospitals are such a foreign real-life world to enter when you are doing things that seem so unsubstantial all day. What is booking a rock show or writing a script to a video compared to the task that is being performed by a man only a little bit older than me, here at my side, deciding whether to take the trachiostomy out or not? what the fuck? what on EARTH am i doing with my life? once again, why did i not learn how to do something practical, something that did not involve getting attention for a living, like...building suspension bridges?

and every day the future is piling up with a scheulde that i don't even really believe in (sort of like the way I don't believe that people REALLY believe in the apocolypse and the rapture).

it's 4 in the morning and i've been up all night coming up wiht clever ideas for the video that pope is going to shoot for "missed me".....it'll be excellent. we shoot at the end of the month between tours and i think we will put out a DVD collection of 4 or 5 videos this coming fall. that seems very far away and also right around the bend. fucking hell, i can't wait for spring.

my two new favorite records:
rufus wainwright "want one": awesome....radiohead meets queen. i think we might cover the first song.
Sufjan Stevens "Greetings from Michigan State": some tracks I can't stand, but the rest I love. Brian loves this one and got it for me.