Cool Like That

I officially met the man who orders the almond lavender steamer with cinnamon. His name begins with the second letter in the alphabet. He looks like a Daniel. He adds a brown powder to his drink to make it taste like coffee and when he went to the Bulls game with nine of his friends last week he didn’t drink any beer because he gave that up four years ago. I think maybe there is more to him than I originally thought but we move on like someone moves their finger through frosting on a cake.

I wish this blog were cool. The kind of cool you feel when you walk out of a show at the Metro in the 90’s and go downstairs to Smartbar where it is smokey and dark. The DJ is in a booth in the back of the bar spinning music you could dance to but don’t. You drink cheap beer until four in the morning near a booth where Billy Corgan sits and smiles at you. That kind of cool.

Place is at my favorite coffee shop where this blog initially began. I am sitting a the counter facing the espresso machine watching the barista make drinks. He has been here five years, half the amount of time I have been coming here. There was a young girl with long dirty blond hair and glasses who had worked here since I started coming but after the pandemic seems to have moved on. I wonder if she would recognize me now. When we first met I was forty and had just moved back from L.A. I was unmarried and living at 5547 N. Lakewood- writing fiction.

40 was sort of cool. I got my first big tattoo on my forearm. It began with my initial E. When living in L.A. my yoga teacher, whose name begins with the fourteenth letter of the alphabet, told me to do something special for myself. I walked down Sunset Boulevard into a tattoo parlor and had my first initial tattooed on my inner right wrist to remind myself of me. Back in Chicago I had a locket designed around my initial. I my neice and nephews’ initials hang from the chain, so does Foo Fighter’s emblem and a hummingbird. I picked the artist from his work online. When I went in for my tattoo we discovered we had hung out together in the 90’s at the coffee shop I went to down the street from where I lived, the same coffee shop where I met Spicy Brown. I can’t remember his real name. When the artist, whose name begin with the third letter of the alphabet, first met he hadn’t any tattoos. I was twenty-six living in the apartment on Division Street in Wicker Park my dad would later have to pack up.

Cool as in lacking warmth, self control; lacking friendliness. In jazz it is marked as restrained emotion. If you were to catalogue me I would be found under Jazz. Classic Rock, Indie maybe.

Cool also refers to body temperature or outside temperature. “Recovering one’s cool.” I’m most interested in the type of cool synonymous with real.

Cool is a Foo Fighters song. Cool would be Dave Grohl writing this entry to sing out loud. It would have Dave’s scream. Screaming come from a deep unresolved place such as lost. I fell in love with Foo Fighters in 1995 sitting on the floor in the apartment my sister and I shared on Hoyne Street. I can be found in a Foo Fighter’s song, particularly Best of You. In this song I am not lost and I am so cool.

We are on the move now. Cool is a backdrop. Place is five days later from when I began this blog. I’m in our apartment at W. Eastwood. Place is uncomfortable. Things flutter under my breastbone and feelings are pushy and aggressive. I move from the sunroom, where I have been writing, to Couch. On Couch place is less lost.

We are out of place and place is uncomfortable. We are in Group Therapy. In this place I lean towards cool. I sit on a green cushy chair right against the back wall. I was in this group with different people at a different location twenty years ago after first being sick with bipolar. C is here from back then and she remembers me- who I was. D is here too, and another C and K, L, P, Dr. F and people with initials from A to Z. who are all watching who I am trying to be. Place will one day not be lost or uncomfortable and when my dad googles my address on Google Maps and says- Liz! I see you, I will believe that to be true.

It is now eight days later and I am back at the coffee shop. Place can move fast. A barista is here who was not here prior to the pandemic. Their name begins with the first letter of the alphabet and when I hear their name I think of outer space. Their hair is shoulder length and dyed black with a thick piece of long bang silver foxy grey. Their eyeliner is winged as I once wore it and their voice is two fingers up from the middle and vibrates as if on a harp string. Sometimes they wear jeans with burgundy fish net tights that peep up above the waist. They look 1990’s and when they play PJ Harvey I know this to be true. A is so so cool.

Back in group therapy where I found out something about me that was not cool, not a part I want. When told this I wanted to run but that would be running away from cool. Maybe it will lead me out of Lost but I’m not sure, sometimes I don’t know if I can do it. If I were not writing quickly in pen I might have erased this line. I have found out some others things, too, that have been suspending me for years, keeping me away from cool, and I wonder if I have been lost longer than I thought, before the storm, maybe at 5547 N. Lakewood or all the way back to N. Volze Dr. West, where I grew up.. This thought makes me feel sad. I would also like to erase this line but I won’t.

I need to lay down a map and push in colored pins where my bipolar started and circle in ink- LOST STARTED HERE.

My bipolar journey is my journey of cool which began at age 24, the first time I was really lost. We are on the second part and the past and now sort of feel the same, like I am rereading the same fucking book. I am fifty now, that’s five decades, and I have been swimming through lost wading in cool. I can see cool through the lost and as I get closer the t changes to an s as when one gets closer to a sign while driving through the fog. Place is uncomfortable again. I sink into a pain that goes deep beneath the ground. I try to remember place is on the move and I will move out of this.

Place is back at my favorite coffee shop where I have been writing for ten years. We are going to stay here. A is at the espresso machine making a coffee drink while pulling up their bra strap. Their eyes dart over the machine at me. I’m writing Blog Post #9 that is surely over a thousand words, more than the length of a piece of flash fiction, closer to a short story, on its way to memoir. There are so many words, I can’t get them all in this post. They are for someplace else. I put the extra words in my notes on my phone, the back of my notebook, on pieces of paper I keep in my pockets. When I sit here and write I am cool. I am coloring in the O of Lost.