6.29

John Green asked me to go to the quietest place within walking distance as a part of his wife's incredibly pretentious Art Assignment on YouTube. Not that I have anything against his wife, but the idea of asking thousands of people to create the same art as yourself just strikes me as selfish, foolish, or both. I actively failed the assignment, because I know the storm shelter is the quietest place within walking distance and I instead walked the dog outside. I can hear his collar clinking, a hundred bird calls, mower, a handful of frogs and insects, wind through the trees, and cars on the highway. It's noisy. Chaotic. Cluttered. And I'm on my phone, which I think was against the rules. I'm not sure.

But is my "art" less valid because I broke the conventions of its origins? Is my thought somehow incorrect? I don't think the purpose of art is to challenge or uphold the establishment, but to release something built up inside or to communicate some emotion otherwise contained. Art, in my experience, is not prompted as well as exploded.

6.25

Sometimes, feeling the way I do when the mist rolls in off the lake, I walk to the water's edge. There, out of sight of God and Man, I step from my clothes and walk until my head falls through the tension of the surface. Like elastic, it closes around me with a pop.

I stay underwater for as long as I dare and then surge, pushing the gossamer sheen aside to burst forth and breathe. It seems that the fog is always a little thinner, the world a little more colorful, the water a little more chilled after a swim I survive.

6.15

Last night, the moon was bright and the wind ripped through the trees making the sound of a thousand crepe skirts. I don't know the flamenco, so I thought, but I danced anyway.
It would have been such a sight.

6.14

[What's the threshold for artistry—that every thing is art? At what point did we decide that Yoko Ono could stand in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and screech over an instrumental track and say it's meaningful when did Renike Dejkstra earn the ability to take poor-quality footage of young people dancing poorly and call it art?]

^_=

°^-*
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[Have I passed that threshold?]

6.13

That's quite the truth: if you can be seen to use a word more than once, people will assume that your favorite word is "me." Or at the very least, that if left in a room by yourself, you're willing and able to entertain a single human for a limitless amount of time, and if accompanied by anyone, unable to entertain at all.
It's just the honest truth.

6.12

Rheumatiks and Their Remedies: A Two-Part Examinasion. Dr. Heinrich Wurthing. The novelization of a peculiar case takes up the bulk of the second volume; Doctor Wurthing always being a bit more literary in his hopes than he ever told the publisher. The remainder of the second volume is an afterword thanking his daughters for their patience, and an exhaustive index of the two volumes, collectively.

Upon Reaching the North Pole and Travelling Back Therefrom, the Memories I Have Retained. Alexander Milhouse. A travel journal of the forty-first man to lead a successful expedition to the North Pole, written in a fanciful style reminiscent of other famous works of excessive self-aggrandizement from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bound in hand-stitched caribou. All first copies are hand-signed by the author.

how to utter a killing word. Em. L. Foster. The fourth and final volume of short stories from Em. L. Foster. Her style and prose are often compared to men of her acquaintance as if she had stolen her stories from them, which most readers will find unsurprising. Critics are fond of overlooking her autobiography in which she explicitly deconstructs her creation of fourteen male pseudonyms under which to write often incredibly contentious opinions and novels. The longest of these, Though I Dream Upon You, My Fear, has received no fewer than four prestigious industry awards, despite being based closely upon an unpublished essay by Em. L. Foster written fourteen years prior about the most efficient way to torture an ex-lover. Because of Foster's incredible breadth, it is difficult to assign any position to her personally, though the argument can be made that the works published under her own name would more properly be considered as representative. If this is the case, and how to utter a killing word is her own position, she is actually a colonial apologist.

6.10b

The darkness is nearly complete. I can hear the titanic hum of a box fan, two vents, three disc drives, and the air conditioner. I'm already under the covers, nestled safe and warm, ready to fall asleep, when

I crawl my way out. With a thin, waspish hand, I alight on the computer to flip it open. Bleary eyes guide me.

"What is a picaresque?"

Good. Now I can go to sleep.

6.10

Languid, I roll over and fall off the couch. I meant to just get a little room to stretch! But now, the floor rebels against my need for luxury.