The music:
The writing:
I got the url "house.leaflet.pub" for this. "House Notes" is what I will title it, like the notes I would get before selling wine and oysters and specials to customers as a bartender. These house notes are not for selling, they are for expressing the experience and flavors on my tongue and in my fingers as I consume the day.
House notes for today, 2026-09-19:
I have been feeling a little turned inside out and outside in like a twisted pastry with layers of cinnamon and maybe sugar sprinkled on top. I ate a lemon poppy scone today. I drank a lot of instant and also drip coffee--all had lighter brighter and shinier notes.
This is not a bad kind of inside out and outside in--I am happy. I am happy and I'm not even suspicious about being too happy (and neither is my therapist, and I wasn't trying to fool them). I am writing this quickly, I promise that it is not mania, dear shrink. Transsexualism will ease the fear to at least allow me to function [Greer Lankton].
YES!! There really IS gay DNA!!!
It's feeling like the above paragraph is not a great argument against mania. I guess you'll just need to see me to believe it.
I have been thinking about my tremor. Someone lit many cigarettes for me yesterday. Because pretty girls don't light their own cigarettes ;-). When I light someone else's cigarettes it feels like the least hot thing I could ever possibly do--my shaky hands make me appear nervous. and then I feel nervous. and then I shake even more to the point that holding a lighter is difficult and the flame really accentuates the shaking, especially at night.
But here's a poem by Eli Clare, from The Marrow's Telling1:
To the Curious People Who Ask, “What Do Your Tremors Feel Like?”
Tell me: have you ever watched
hands play a piano?
Fingers on the keys, ivory to skin, dance
white to black and back again, run
wild and loose, thump and caress
the universe cradled inside
a baby grand, those hands
I lost at birth. Breath squeezed
to empty gasps, I fell into the world,
brain of my fingers half dead.
Explain to me your hands resting
still as water before they dance.
That I cannot imagine.
after being asked yet again about my tremors 1990
written 1992
brain of my fingers half dead... brain of my fingers. Half dead.
Eli's tremors are significantly worse than mine, his being caused by cerebral palsy and mine being caused by a very high dose of lamotrigine. The brain of my fingers... the fingers from my brain that is not half dead. parts of it do feel that way sometimes--things like my episodic memory, my anomia, my pre- and post-ictal states, my attention span, my...
All half-something, maybe not dead, maybe some other form of missing and loss and grief whose shape I do not fully understand.
My fingers are so shaky now, as I type this. You who are reading this have likely never seen my fingers this shaky--it's a type of tremor that only exists when my hands are perceived by only me. I do not know why that is the case. It is a secret thump and caress.
Someone asked me to share a secret with them recently. So there it is.
When something is secret it remains secret to me until my senses remind me. I cannot actively recall them, like my dreams. Can anyone answer that kind of direct question?
My view as I write.
Google Photos "featured" this to me today. It was taken March 2025, on a South Philadelphia sidewalk.