Exhaustion. Dehydration. Phantom hangovers.

Phantom? When you've hardly had anything to drink but the suggestion that the next day should bring illness actually brings on a headache and nausea. This was last night at the Knitting Factory, where I sweated uncomfortably through a Giant Sand set. I do like Howe Gelb, even if he's an easy performer to take for granted -- the way I take David Berman, Mark Kozelek, and Mark Eitzel for granted (and they all sorta sound like Gelb, that slack older-guy, the educated world-weary post-beatnik with a wounded heart).

Today I just feel like I'm wandering through sinewy humidity particles, lost and dazed between the post office and the pizzeria, and down the Promenade. The beams of light at Ground Zero shoot up into an artificial moon, a blurry birthmark splotch on a darkening sky. Winter is over; the way one week melts into the next isn't the easy comfort of a new season, it's that awful clarity of a dream that sputters to a close, not jolting you awake but depositing you in the doorway of the sentient.