Stella at stelladellasera sent me a postcard from northern Virginia--- always a lovely thing. I do love Stella's handwriting. I love the idea of northern Virginia--- NoVa ---too. The linkages there are arcane enough: Wm. S. Burroughs' "Nova Express", Samuel R. Delany's sci-fi novel "Nova", a girl called Erika Bari who worked for a Nova University, a long-forgotten band called Ars Nova.

Selena at Atwowaydream lives in NoVa as well... I do imagine Selena tonight, standing out in the night by the James River, looking up at the harbingers of the Perseid showers and letting the smoke rise from her cigarette...

I will ask for playlists again. Now that I have the iPod and have at least some idea about how to load CDs onto it via iTunes, playlists will matter. All lovely wicked clever readers and correspondents are invited to offer up suggested playlists. Ambient, electronica, '80s synthpop, darkwave, ethereal, trip-hop, industrial-dance, Japanese jazz... I need music for late nights, music for autumn afternoons... Lists matter, of course--- City Lists, Hotel Lists, and now playlists...

There's still a set of the David Palladini "Aquarian" Tarot deck in my nightstand drawer. I've always loved Tarot decks--- the Palladini deck especially. And, yes--- I still need to get KdG at k_navit to read the cards for me again. Tarot cards offer a chance to construct stories, to build up worlds out of the cards. I sat in hotel rooms with the Evil Dana Lynn and Elizabeth-Claire and in dorm room beds with Brooke and Joan and laid out cards and told them stories late late into the night. I did lay out cards on taut bare flesh and stark starved hipbones and think of the architecture of memory palaces...

I do hope that Lissy at emigree will do a new "Revolver, Dauphin" 'zine soon... I want to read her own Stories, want to walk through the memory palaces she builds.

Melissa at kraftig_bewegt is seeing clients in NYC tonight--- offering herself up as the doomed, cachexical girl men can ravage for a thousand dollars a session. She called from a subway stop earlier, there on her way to be part of some married hedge fund manager's fantasy of alternately violating and saving a doomed young whore. Melissa masturbates in tanning booths--- what beautiful wicked girl doesn't? ---but also cuts herself there naked under UV lamps. Blood flowing down from the inside of her hipbones across smooth waxed flesh to mix with her wetness--- she loves the idea of the flavours mixing, loves thinking of clients frozen between horror and offering her more money just to watch. Melissa's laugh is all fragile crystal there late at night.

David Sylvian's "Brilliant Trees" CD is playing. I'd had Goldfrapp on, but at midnight David Sylvian is more a voice for empty rooms on a solitary night. I can let Estonian vodka lie cold against my tongue and listen to David Sylvian and imagine dancing with a lithe ghostgirl
there in a half-empty club in a distant city. I can hear his voice doing "Red Guitar" and feel sharp hipbones pressed into me, feel a ghostgirl's lips brush over my face, feel her almost weightless in my arms.

Stella at stelladellasera wrote to say that phonesex reminds her of loneliness, of being separated from her Lucia and having a phone rather than her Lover/Owner's body next to her. Voices and seductions on the aether are the one way I know to escape loneliness, to escape place and time and knowledge of loss and just be voices, just be dreams of passion.

I think of photographs that Permeation and Longitude post at D-Land and try to imagine what Ginny at ginny_mccoo would say about them: photos of distance and places along the highway, photos of open water and girls with lost loves across continents and seas.

I'm thinking of Norfolk and Petersburg, of hidden houses somewhere in the Tidewater... I'm thinking of a girl like Libet or Ms. cataplexis or BaneBerry diving naked from a sailboat into the night waters of the James... I wonder if PondLife is standing somewhere on a wrought-iron balcony, looking out past cigarette smoke to the Battery and Charleston Harbour, tasting salt air and single-malt Scotch and thinking of faded cities with too much history.

No words, though. I can feel the ghostgirl in my arms, see lithe and pale bodies diving into dark water, see a silhouette there on a balcony. But no words. Ghosts, only. Never words.