Good Morning Revival

Today I woke up at 5 am. I have had exactly 4 hours sleep.

But I’m not pissed off. Really. The days of late have been very very hot by about 10 or 11 and don’t cool down until about 7 in the evening. So since I was up anyway, I thought, fuck it. I will get up. And so I did. My housemate has to get to work at 7 this morning and she usually just bids me goodbye and tells me not to break anything while she is away while I grunt dismissively from my already too warm bed. But today was different. I got up and dressed without pain and spent a good deal of the morning actually helping. I made her lunch for the day and had breakfast and everything. There is something very fulfilling about doing something like that at that time. I had coffee while the sun rose and it was only 22 degrees outside and that gorgeous morning light came in the kitchen. I mean, there was golden mist for chrissakes. Oh and (if you needed further evidence of how ideal and destined my morning really was) when I got up the radio station that I usually really don’t even like was playing “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John. For some reason it was perfect. I will always remember that song from being in “Almost Famous”. In that scene where its all kinda bleak and boring and they’re all on the tour bus and then that song comes on and they all start singing it, even though they’ve fought recently and they don’t feel the best, they start singing it. In perfect non-harmony, and together. A song pairing that is a magical and real moment in a movie like that is so rare. Oh that and that INXS song that I can’t remember of the title of (shame) from the Directors Cut (and only the directors cut unfortunately) of “Donnie Darko”. Another brilliant moment. Donnie carrying Gretchen’s limp body in his arms down his street at dawn, at least that where I think it goes, it could be the opening credits when he’s riding his bike down the road… oh well, brilliant nonetheless.

Gosh, I feel like I’ve just come down with a nasty bout of hayfever. Yelch. That’s what that mist was, no moisture to be had around here. It was a big yellow cloud of pollen. *sneezes*

I always used to consider myself a totally not a morning person. Morning people were feared or loathed, and this was mainly because they were just people posing as morning people. They didn’t enjoy the morning, it made them grumpy and gave them the compulsion to clean things. But I think, if I could be bothered getting up for it (at least while its hot) then the morning and I could have a good relationship. I might actually do something productive in summer. Even in my most productive times I never write during the summer. Its just plain too hot for my poor little brain to function, little own crank out something creative.

And I probably will end up going back to bed when it gets hot. But who cares?

My name is Anika, and I was up at 5 am. (I feel like some sort of reformed sinner).

---------------------------

Later

---------------------------

Alright alright, so I was asleep in the middle of the day like I speculated… and I had this amazingly weird dream.

I was in this hotel, this huge maze of a hotel with multiple stories. And I was in the basement showing a girl (who I knew from years ago and was not quite my friend when I knew her anyway) around the place. I knew that ages ago the basement of this hotel was used as a jail, and some really famous criminals had been kept here and had left their graffiti around. So we were walking around this place with its strange stuccoed turquoise walls with their bleeding black graffiti and I was having trouble finding my way out and the with the locking system on the doors (I accidentally opened the door to the laundry once). But finally we found our way out through this huge carpeted room that was having all its furniture removed. There was this very gay and haughty interior decorator standing in the middle of the room ordering about the removalist guys. And maybe we weren’t supposed to walk through there or maybe even be in the whole hotel because he looked at us with a look of utter disgust, and my not-quite-friend was a little nervous, and I told her that all you had to do was smile and look sophisticated and it’d all be cool. And it was. And through this room we were able to make our way to a part of the hotel that we hadn’t been able to explore before, it had a lounge and dining area and a dance floor and a bar and things like that. But we kept walking until somehow, somewhere, for some reason my not-quite-friend went away and I met up with my mother. Then it somehow crept into my mind that Amanda Palmer had just finished giving a concert in this hotel. Why I didn’t have tickets I’ll never know, but rumour had it that she came down to the bar at around 2am and did a little show on the stage there for the very late night crowd. So my mother and I had to make our way though this big, now almost completely empty room, with the snooty gay interior decorator (who gave us even dirtier looks) to get to the bar.

The place was well lit and tasteful with huge long dining tables and black leather and steel chairs. Amanda was sitting behind her keyboard at the stage in the south-west corner next to the bar which ran along the west wall. The barman passed her a drink which she put on top of her keyboard along with a bunch of flowers. And then she began, but I was sitting on the side of the table that was closest and craning my neck to see. So my mother suggested we move and so we moved to the other side of the table which faced the stage instead, but the tables were so wide we ended up sitting a long way away from the stage and I had trouble seeing her. She started with “Sing” and I of course sung along, nobody else seemed to be paying much attention apart from me and my mother (of the about eight people left in the bar at 2 am). But I knew all the words and I unashamedly sung along in my terrible voice. Then she played… something, I know it was off “Yes, Virginia…” and I was singing along to that one too and I think she seemed to notice me because she was looking in my direction and gave me a smile. So this song was one of those songs which ends with a crescendo where the non-percussion instruments pound and then stop abruptly and then the drums go bang and then that repeats and then the non-percussion instruments do a decrescendo. So when she ended this song she wasn’t with Brian of course so there were no drums, so she pounded the piano and in that space where the drums would be, my mother sneezed, and a few people laughed, as did Amanda, so she went for it again, but this time my mother sneezed out of time. We laughed at that too as I offered her a tissue.

Once the song was finished Amanda was chatting away about something to do with DD (Dresden Dolls) fans and she brought up a girl and her sister who had done something brilliant and academic. And the girl was the one who had been sitting in front of me during the show, the one Amanda was really smiling at during that song. So this girl (who was about my age) and her sister (who was about 8) got up on the stage. It turned out they had both recently treated to a few days touring with Amanda. They got flown out by plane and went to some nice tropical destination (like Hawaii) with Amanda where they just got to hang out with her. Someone had been filming this whole thing and they had a highlights tape playing on the television in the bar. I was secretly glad when the younger girl untied her sister’s ugly peach bikini top in front of the cameraman and they showed the result it in all its unpixellated glory, which made me quite surprised, as I commented to my mother “Wow. They didn’t even blur it.” (much to the embarrassment and shame of the girl herself, and then much to my shame when I thought about my evil jealous thoughts and the fact that the girls tits were twice the size of mine).

The next thing I remember was Amanda was taking a walk with some people down this road sometime after and my mother and I were following. We got to the top of the road where it became a T before I said that this was really stupid to be following her like this, and if she knew she wouldn’t talk to me anyway. On the left side of the T there was a little building resembling a beach shack and Amanda was standing on the veranda, passionately kissing some guy. So we began to walk back before Amanda came down the road again, but we only got a third of the way there before I stepped in some glass. I stood there thinking, hang on, didn’t I have some shoes? I definitely had some shoes on the way up the road, where the hell are my shoes? And I looked around and they were up at the top of the road at the T intersection sign. So I hobbled up there and put on my shoes and then walked dejectedly back to the hotel. But because of having to double back and get my shoes the returning Amanda was a lot closer on our heels. Pretty soon she was right behind us talking to her friends and my mother. (I must compliment myself on my ability to recreate her voice, which was almost right on.) Then she turned her attention to me, putting her arm around me and giving me a kiss on the cheek.

“Hi.” she said.

“Hello.” I struggled, not displeased, but shocked about having my personal space invaded like that.

“Weekend?” she asked inquiringly.

“Uh it was alright most of the time, I spent most of the time alone.” I said nervously, before cursing myself about saying “most of the time” twice like that. My mother on the other hand thought it was very funny and tried to conceal her laugh with a cough, I responded quickly over my shoulder with a “Shut up Mum.”

But something wasn’t right about this scene. And that wasn’t because I was embarrassed, but Amanda’s face (which was still very close to mine as her arm was still around me too) was rough. Like she had stubble, or bad skin, and when we reached the end of the road at the hotel I remember looking at her and she was old. She didn’t look like her anymore, she looked about sixty and with a tinge of my old replacement English teacher. It was obvious that we were going to be parting ways, and so I tried to ignore this and suggested that she should email me so we should catch up again if we were ever in the same place like this again. She said that she didn’t much care for email, and so I offered her this crumpled bunch of scribbly blog drafts (of which there are none, so that was weird) and she took the corner of one of the pages with a particularly scribbly example on it and said “Frankly I can’t even read your writing, I couldn’t read it in the first thing you gave me.”

“Oh, OK.” I said, trying hard not to let get to me. “Then I’ll write down the web address for it, its all typed up and you won’t have any trouble with it then, some of its changed anyway.” But she was grimacing and then told me that she didn’t like computers and had trouble figuring it all out.

“Oh, oh OK.” I said, knowing that she meant for me to drop the subject. I wasn’t sure if she really meant that she had trouble with computers (which she doesn’t at all in reality) or she was just trying to brush me off. And then she was gone. I turned to my mother as we walked back up the steps to the hotel, “I can’t believe she was old like that, I mean I didn’t want to be prejudice, and I tried to ignore it, but she just wasn’t right. That wasn’t the Amanda that we saw in the bar.” My mother nodded.

☆Anika☆