In quintessential triviality for years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

i know a guy in massage school and a friend whose sincere desire is to be a female professional wrestler.

others i know who believe they are jack fucking kerouac. 

what is with these blind dreams?  i take a moment and realize, it is this constant bickering i have with myself that is the important question for many writers, this thinking, then stepping back and thinking, bullshit.  Then, asking: What is truly bold aspiration? And what is nonsense and bravado?  It is important to be constantly humbled, to remind oneself that ideas are nothing if not worked at, but sometimes i believe my habit of snide, quick-to-condemn doubts stifle any and all ideas i might have, rather than curbing only the stupid ones.  and becoming stagnant is no better than being too sure.  maybe it is because i became so inundated with and sickened by the cult of intellectualism, the faux genius and the art faggery that i reject all steps toward the romantic and the precarious.  but i realize that though dreams may sometimes be blind, without forethought of execution, without any adherence to anything remotely realizable, so, too, is cynicism blind, when it turns its gaze from any stirring thought and sits, smug, satisifed, fruitless.

perhaps this is my defense mechanism of the moment, to shut down, to un-think all that i have thought and felt about this grueling year.  i am tired and alone, constantly, but i think it is my head that needs restarting.

i think i need to look over my old poetry.  reading more is a start.  but i realized, scanning the verse in the new yorker or in any of the books i seem to be amassing from bookstores, this is for me, this droll and limber verse, these margins, this small space.  it isn't fiction, driving at a long protracted tale of a person i don't and never will know; i have always been about getting at the quick glimpse, the first moment everything leapt into your mind from one single sight of skyline, leaf, mudprint, cig smell, passerby.  Poetry is about condensed moments, and I like that, and I wrote to keep those moments, and I want to keep writing, albeit with no small amount of reticence and self-admonition.   This is not impossible.

the other day i was sitting, eating a sandwich, next to a young woman with two children.  i watched a black man go by. the woman used this moment to explain to her children that black people's pants sag because they are too poor to afford belts.

we sure have made progress.

i should make an effort to record daily notes.

i saw an interesting comment made today:

"It seems to me people think that humans are more important than the things that sustain human life. To have such a thought process is not only irrational but also ignorant."

this written by someone named sarah "the slasher".

i have to say i agree profoundly.  profundity. oh yes.

Kelsey has lurid dreams about Keith Olbermann.

PS I just read that he his girlfriend is only 24.  Oh em gee, I have a chance!

it's too late to repent
you got the hound on your scent
and it's driving you down
through the hell that i went

I fucking hate mindsay. It always deletes my entries when I accidentally press esc. I was well at work writing and then nothing.

Fuck you mindsay.  I should move to blogspot or wordpress.

"My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I've decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there...Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality?  Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic?  Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?"

Yes, I can agree with you on this, David Foster Wallace.

I recoil at romanticized notions; I do so, now, in knee-jerk reaction, to prevent my falling to their vulnerability. 

It has the tendency to make one vulgar, and alone. 

I am different now, to say the least.  No musing poet.  One who'd shudder at the word.

WOW, I'm so impressed that you drink tea and imported coffee! 

Just an update: when I grow up I still want to be a mule.

I'm really starting to dislike people who write like a thesaurus.

(I know I've done this but I routinely reject myself.)

I'm going to go doing something frivolous like work for a dog showing organization. okay thanks.

Hey there, local misfits.  I am consulting you from the desk of... my bed, where I am searching for some job where I can hug animals.  I have lots of relevant experience in this field, just sitting and hugging animals.  I have some animals nearby me who support this approach to life.  They are south american rodents (unfortunately not capybaras) and they are a-chatter and clothed in the plush of royalty.  If my only goal in life were to be an animal hoarder surrounded by creatures who are beautiful, but cannot talk back to me, would that be wrong?  I could have ornaments from every side of the globe; I've got my chinchillas from the Incan Andes, I could add some placid oriental feline pretentiously named after a literary figure, and some very intimidating German attack dogs, mein schutzhund.  Or perhaps Argentinian boar hunting attack dogs from the pampas.  It is very difficult to decide.

I figure it has been a while since I tried to write everyday, but now I find even that notion laughable.  I haven't come up with an original thought in half a year. What, me worry?  I'm an idiot and even the books I try to read I find distasteful, like the words are put there just to broadcast some zealous superiority on behalf of the author. Look at me! Look at me!  Now I know why people I've met previously have detested mannerism and confessionals.  I feel there is no getting beyond this 'injection' of meaning into words rather then presenting them as is, assembling them upon a table (or in my case, a bed) to simply lie. (A poem is a naked person.)   Which is why I turn away and do not write. I feel like a parapalegic if I even attempt it. 

Hell, I've even lost interest in this.  I feel like I can't even begin to touch my thought so I let it distort itself, fade. Float off, divested of me.  Sometimes let another person's thought push mine aside. It's wrong to say "I think"; one should say, "I am thought." I is someone else... It's easy to turn away when it is incomprehensible.  When it is too much.  I've seen people lose interest in me and even I'm losing interest in me.  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.  I'm so tired, and I have so little belief in anything anymore that it is absurd. At its worst, my hopeless neuroses are electric; they bolt through my nerves at one touch too close; I feel totally abandoned and afraid; panic strikes through my body like a tuning fork, and I suddenly remember everything and I sink, as if I am going down to meet it but it never bottoms out.  Then, even with someone right beside me, I am--irretrievably--alone.  I've bound myself all up in my own shorted wires, tied all my own knots.

I end up lying there, breathing fast and unable to speak, like the quiet after a lightning storm, literally wordless, with my mouth slackened and open.  It is because being touched like this now brings forth a tumult of panic, a thought I stare into and can't penetrate.  I am present at the birth of my thought.  I watch, and I listen.  I draw a stroke of the bow, a symphony stirs in the depths or comes with a leap to the stage.  It's too much.  And I hate myself for not having the capacity to say why or even what it is.  And I hate myself, knowing I'm just like anyone who can't tell why and who seizes up when she feels it all.  And I hate that I know whatever I write about it, that I will fail and is inevitably what I hate, words grasping at meaning instead of meanings grasped in words.    It began with waves of disgust, and it ends, as we can't immediately seize this eternity.  It ends with a riot of perfumes. I am gross and sweaty, the musk is hanging heavy around us.  And it passes.

The wordless motions of the mind, those I cannot tell.  I hate all the people who brag about it, say they are poets and writers.  I don't think they've felt or touched this obscure notion.   It is something to say but another thing to be able. Dylan told me recently I was a poet. Although I was impressed by what he said, I couldn't help feeling it was like being told you're an archer. Well, they may think you're an archer, but you know you don't own a bow. (Tom Petty)

If I were able to say what I felt then, siezed up with fear, looking inside myself yet at something apart from myself, something terrible, something separated and gone, then I might say I were a poet.  Because in that instance, I could present that something as solid, as its own entity, on a page. One single true word: it is, COME BACK. I want to be with you, I love you. (Arthur Rimbaud) But I cannot even hold it in my head much less my hand.  It is too much, and I stop.

When I stop I have no thought and no hopes.  I don't care. I hate my own pride in its insistence to not believe anything better, that nothing may change.  It's a hard callus on one's mind, though, toughened by loss...can't very well push past it.  It's funny that way, the way one's mind holds on to non-existent things, builds a defense around them... funny. Maybe that's why I can't write.  What I write doesn't even reach the feeling anymore, as it is an ache that stretches onward trying to reach something that no longer exists.  When I am pushed to the edge to feel, at worst, I short circuit, at best, I laugh.  I am alone.

In all honesty, I am stopping myself.

I mean, I know very well that it is absurd. I laugh because there is nothing else for me but laughter. I gibe because I'm grasping at straws; there's nothing for me to do.  It is not a happy smile but a knowing grin.

    There are times--and finding Zora's grave was one of them--when normal responses to grief, horror, and so on, do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of the emotion one feels. It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is.  Partly this is because I have come to know Zora...and she was not a teary sort of person herself; but partly, too, it is because there is a point at which grief feels absurd.  And at this point laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity. (Alice Walker)

Here, it seems, there is nothing special about beauty or the vanity of art or of telling but there is only remembrance.  I don't retain the zeal of poetic flourishings on fields (I see but a field with a stone, or a hole). I don't don't have the wiles of the hip new slam poet raving in soliloquy.

...dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix;
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. (Allen Ginsberg)

I'm not interested in looking for the lexicon with which to dazzle my fellow jerks to pave way for my mystic aspirations.  I have no aspirations.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes.  I am the happiest man alive. (Henry Miller)

I have only nothing.  Not the negative absence that the word 'nothing' connotes, just a space, holding its own.  Myself, divested of thought, sitting and biding the time to make sense of the smoke and mirrors, what appears behind the glass that I can't make sense of. Fear will always be there just as there will always be rocks, obscuring what's beneath. There isn't anything but concrete.  Things we can't make sense of.  Abstract facades. Nothing but block housing, grid parking, brick foundations, strip shopping centers, gas stations. Why paint them? We shouldn't design complex ideas about things.  We should pick things up, hold them in our hands, and move them onto paper, if we are even going to do that.  Not design them as we think they are.  I don't care if you ever write a word if you recognize it.  You don't have to write anything down to be a poet.  Some work in gas stations, some shine shoes. ... I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet. (Bob Dylan)

It's easy to think we've got something to say, to wipe it all over the walls and show everyone.  I don't think so. Like we have a higher calling.  Maybe this is just the calling we have, walking down the streets. 

It's like the story I read about a man who thought he was called to preach:
[He decided he wanted to preach so he went way down in the swamp behind a big plantation to the place they call the prayin' ground, and got down on his knees.
    'O Lawd, Ah wants to preach.  Ah feel like Ah got a message.  If you done call me to preach, gimme a sign.'
    Just about that time he heard a voice, 'Wanh uh, wanh uh! Go preach, go preach, go preach!'
    He went and told everybody, but look like he could never could get no big charge.  All he ever got called was on some sawmill, half-pint church or some turpentine still.  He knocked around like that for ten years and then he saw his brother.
    His brother said to him, 'Brother, you don't look like you gettin' aholt of much.'
    'You tellin' it right, brother.  Groceries is scarce.  Ah ain't dirtied a plate today.'
    'What's the matter? Don't you get no support from your church?'
    'Ah don't have a church.  Ah don't git called to nothin' but sawmill camps and turpentine stills.'
    His brother reared back and thought a while, then he asked him, 'Is you sure you was called to preach?  Maybe you ain't cut out for no preacher.'
    'Oh, yeah,' the man told him. 'Ah know Ah been called to the ministry.  A voice spoke and told me so.'
    'Well, seem like if God called you He is mightly slow in puttin your foot on the ladder.  If Ah was you Ah'd go back and ast him again.'
    The man went back to the praying ground again and got down on his knees. He prayed and said, 'Oh Lawd, right here on this spot ten years ago Ah ast you if Ah was called to preach and a voice tole me to go preach.  Since that time Ah been strugglin' in your moral vineyard, but Ah ain't gathered no grapes.  Now, if you really called me to preach, please gimme another sign.'
    Sure enough, just as soon as he said that, the voice said 'Wanh-uh! Go preach, go preach, go preach!'
    The man jumped and said, 'I know Ah been called. That's the same voice!'
    By that time the voice came again and he looked way off and saw a mule in the plantation lot with his head all struck out ready to bray. 'Uh huh, you's the very son of a gun that called me to preach before,' the man said.
    So he went off and got a job plowing.  That's what he was called to do in the first place.] (Zora Neale Hurston)

Maybe that's why I prefer the company of animals to people lately.  They're mute and keep everything to themselves.  Maybe we're just supposed to live it, dig in it, breathe it in.  Rubbin' it all in the pores of my skin, the wind between my eyes, knockin' honey in my comb. Maybe we're not supposed to say anything at all.  Maybe there's not anything else we're supposed to do.  To know it for ourselves, not for anyone else. Carry something too heavy for us to say. Go on, and by living, become it.

A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist.  I no longer think about it, I am. (Henry Miller)