12.29

What fortunate circumstance drew me outside to see the carriage crash I cannot recall. Perhaps it was the abominable barking of my neighbor's small dog, Bartlett, whose body shakes miserably with each violent sound until he has expelled all his own misery into the street for other people to have. While I am usually the main recipient of the unfortunate fusillade, on this occasion, Bartlett made sure to include others, I am certain. What else but the excreta of this deplorable fiend could have so quickly and soundlessly turned the carriage, jamming it permanently into the tightest part of the lane, necessitating my swift extrication of the unfortunate occupants? That, sir, is my report to you, and though I know you cannot charge canines with civil crimes, I hope you can find in the law an exception for the fiend Bartlett. Good day, sir. 

12.27

Metallurgy had always been one of his prime pursuits. Pouring the molten metal, watching the microscopic crystals form, so small and so quick that he couldn't catch their making, even though he knew it was happening, he had a chance to feel like some ancient scientist alchemizing from basic elements. The unknown was happening right in front of him. He was destroying the raw elemental heat with water or air, leaving only the earth, pristine and smoking. Looking at the castings he had made, he could almost believe he was making primal alchemical constructions. He tried to ignore this fact when working with chromium and molybdenum in his steel, at least for as long as it took to choose the precise proportions to improve the working product. He tried to forget the scientist when pouring, to become the alchemist again. 

Sometimes, the effort was too much, and a strange first-and-twenty-first century laugh could be heard ringing out across the courtyard from his shop. 

11.24

Doris ran her hand through hair still crunchy with hairspray from a morning that felt like days ago. She couldn't communicate the deep tired she felt, two fingers pinched against the bridge of her nose, skin wrinkled and aging as her body ached from lack of sleep. She looked into her sister's eyes and thought cold and friendless thoughts. Why here? Why now? Though, arguably, there is no proper place to suffer a breakdown. She looked at the Malibu, then at Miranda, then at the Malibu. She felt like running her hand through her hair again, but it wouldn't do any good. 

"Cheer up, Doris!" Miranda quipped in that asinine perk of hers. "It could be worse!"

Doris hadn't thought that could be true just thirty seconds ago, but Miranda had to open her obnoxious mouth. Now she knew that things could always be worse. 

"If you speak again, I shall be forced to end you," Doris said, her bones growing colder in the weight of her conviction. 

"D'awwwww," crooned her addled sister. "You really do love me. You never threaten me unless you're in a particularly fine mood." Miranda thrust herself upon Doris, wrapping her arms around Doris's neck, a heavy weight of unwanted affection. Doris, unexcited about this new development, made efforts to get away and then abruptly stopped, her manner not unlike that of a cat that has been pinned in a lap for petting. Doris's eyes gleamed murder. Her fists clenched and unclenched. She would never admit she was having a fine adventure.

11.19

Whichever one of you moves first is likely to get a mouthful at a speed you're unlikely to enjoy, and it'll be a meal from a top-rate chef deluxe au pain you'll need an infinite dirt nap to sleep off, no bread involved, but it will certainly cut your mustard and no mistake. Don't even think about trying to squawk on one of your bird-brained compatriots to get on my food side, cause you crackers won't do me or my ruffled feathers any good anyhow: I don't have a good side; there's a devil on both shoulders, which doesn't leave much room for parrots even though my inner demons do tend to parrot each other. I'm saying that if you try to cross me, you'll wish my name was Goldilocks because I'm likely to make you too hot quite suddenly and too cold for too long and I'm afraid you'll never be all right again.

11.12b

Trashfiction
It was the great Holly Hayton who sighed as she pushed back her chair and, standing indecisively, said “I guess I’ll go eat a trash cookie.” You know them: like pressed flour topped with violently-colored sugar paste. They’re always seasonal, somehow, at any time of year, and never perfectly round. I find that it is impossible to buy, let alone eat, a single trash cookie. They are somehow more American than apple pie. They are ubiquitous. Honestly, I’m not even sure this belabored definition was even necessary. As soon as you saw the words, you pictured a trash cookie without trying to, and I bet you felt at least a little hungry and disgusted.
So, what, you ask, is American trashfiction? Well, my friends, I have read too many Harlequin romances and Slocum westerns (something like two dozen that I’ll admit to) so that I could bring to you a comprehensive definition of trashfiction.
First, trashfiction has a unique language. Oh, certainly: it is written in words that are recognizable as English, but it’s exhausted. As I read trashfiction, I get the distinct impression that no sentence is really in any kind of context. The whole book starts over again after each period, as though the author took a long nap from the effort of ending the sentence and woke up again fresh to write the next sentence without bothering to read the last one. I don’t mean that the content is somehow bouncing wildly from science fiction to western to murder mystery or anything so egregious. I merely mean that each sentence is like an older woman sitting at the salon while her arch-nemesis from the church women’s organizing committee is getting her hair done at the next chair over. Very alike, they are, but not connected. One might even argue that the sentences are somehow in the right order, or that the author chose this choppy style on purpose, or that it was a good idea for Brenda to get color and a perm only a week before the Christmas fellowship program, but that person would be wrong. Dead wrong. Brenda can eat my shorts, which are better than hers and which I got half price at Macy’s.
Imagining a world in which the only language sin of a trashfiction novel were to dangle its sentences gives me a warm feeling. I am broken instead by the complete inability of trashficton authors to use dangerous words well. This is a famous problem for sex scenes. No penis will ever grace the pages of such works; no vaginas seem to exist. Every body part is obfuscated behind a thin layer of poorly-chosen innuendo. His manhood always seems to find her intimate folds. Her cleft weeps at the thought of his member. Somebody’s nub is all about some other body’s love canal. It’s a well-documented phenomenon, and it’s sad every time. I’m not sure if it’s a joke or not, but one author’s “Sexy Thesaurus,” a list of innuendo, has alternate words for “lady bits” and “man parts,” meaning it’s possible that the author of this self-aware document still couldn’t use “vagina” and “penis,” which would just be the pits.
I wish this propensity were restricted to sex (which should be referred to as “the carnal act”), but once the author gets into the habit, it seems to be difficult to break. Nothing is simply what it is, but everything is poorly designed metaphor. The office is a bleary jail cell. The beer is a nectar. The two men threatening to remove the narrator’s testicles (please, it’s scrotum; don’t make the author blush) are a salt-and-pepper set because apparently the only thing important to know about them is their races.
And the most dangerous words of all, the “four-letter” variety, are a frequent visitor to the realms of trashfiction, and always an unwelcome guest. Either they’re covered over by artless indirection or they’re used entirely too enthusiastically, and I know my preference is for the first. A word of advice for the authors: if the word “shit” does not easily come into your mind, try to keep your shitty writing out of mine. There is a certain ease of use that comes with long familiarity, and if it is your goal to show such in your characters, it’s difficult to fake. “‘Shit,’ the character exclaimed,” reads in my head like a ten-year-old trying the word out in front of best friends for the first time, and they all nod approvingly. Cursing doesn’t have to be awkward or painful, friends. My sister once turned to me after returning from an alt-rock concert, and she said “The frontman is just . . . he curses so elegantly.” This is not a problem that a trashfiction novelist has ever had to struggle with, and it shows.
Second to the ubiquity of language, trashfiction has a unique content. A work of trashfiction is roughly three fourths internal monologue, as though the author heard an audiobook of Catcher in the Rye being played in their upstairs neighbor’s apartment while the downstairs neighbor blended fifty pounds of ice in a magic bullet and they thought “Yeah, that’s awesome. I could do that.” Somehow, trashfiction narrators never stop telling you what they think and, as impossible as it may seem, never think anything worthwhile. You can tell the narrators of trashfiction by saying something near them that is tangentially relevant to the plot. After that, all you have to do is wait for them to explain why you said what you did with their trademark style: an equal mix of “fun” or “quirk”  with a near-godly level of omniscience. In fact, the narrators of such books are rarely limited by what might hamper a mere mortal. Their total comprehension is bounded by the exigencies of plot alone. For all other things they peer keenly through the veil of reality, perhaps, if we are charitable, because the authors have forgotten that not everyone has the whole story in their head and so such things come across as uncanny. But I am not so charitable. I think the author just doesn’t know how to give the audience information in any other way.
As we tumble further through this explanation, we find smaller and smaller elements of trashfiction that, troublingly, have a greater and greater impact. Now that we’ve wormed our way into the mind of our narrator (or been dragged there forcibly), we see every person and every action through their eyes. Perhaps only an eighth of any page is description, but every ounce of it is upsetting. I like to think that a well-meaning middle school teacher taught a classroom of bright young minds how to use rich and varied description and then just . . . forgot to mention why. The trashfiction authors, sitting in the second row with their wide eyes and Jansports just never thought to ask. Because the words don’t matter and they’re included to fill some imaginary quota, there’s somehow far less description of places, people, and events than I need, and yet every bit of description is far more than I want.
For a gut-twisting start, every character is described in terms of their sexual or aesthetic interest to the narrator. Corky is fat, and we’ll hear about it every time he moves, speaks, or breathes. Randi is old, and we won’t be allowed to forget. But Skylar—ah, Skylar is a sexual fantasy who I gave a purposefully gender-ambivalent name, whose toned arms and thin neck and rich head of hair we will be forced to imagine whenever the mood strikes. Talking to Skylar? Sure. Also when imagining kissing in Skylar’s downtown office. Also when walking past a place Skylar’s mother’s best friend runs for the mob. Also when being stabbed by someone whose existence is completely disconnected from Skylar. What will Skylar think of my new scar? Oh, Skylar’s strong, sensitive mouth will pinch into a paroxysm of concern, and Skylar’s capable hands will fly to my side. Skylar as sexual object. At least the audience is assured of the importance of Skylar’s minutiae by the obligatory sex scene; Corky’s corpulence or Randi’s decrepitude is only supposedly important to the plot or the characterization. Supposed, that is until the end of the book suddenly marches up and the author shouts “that’s all, folks!” and the reader is left wondering when, exactly, such facts will become relevant.
Sadly, it’s the relevant facts that bother me worse. It’s unfair to us, the audience, but the narrators of these sorts of books are either author-insert characters, audience wish-fulfillment foils, or both. Usually both. And as such, whatever qualities we are supposed to think of as positive are cranked straight to eleven. Female narrators become hyperfeminine fainting machines who somehow simultaneously maintain just enough autonomy that it’s suitably romantic when they “choose” to let their lover choose for them forever, an act that allows her to be sexual without all that nasty “libido” she’s heard so much about. “Libido? That’s for low-class women” she sighs. On the other hand, Male narrators are always justifiably violent, poorly-controlled boner machines whose sex drive only infrequently gets in the way of saving every one and every thing except for the characters who have been mean to him, who he punches. Lots. In this sort of trashfiction, even character flaws are charming, and are duly cranked past the breaking point. “Oops, am I cwumsy? Sowwy. I didn’t mean to be an irredeemable alcoholic. My bad.” The audience is meant to accept it.
Exhausted? Too bad. We have finally arrived at the lowest circle of trashfiction hell. Follow me, friends and gadabouts, into the realm of cloying dialogue. For trashfiction authors, dialogue serves one purpose: to give their narrators somebody else to prompt more incessant internal monologue. No one is allowed to simply speak, to have their words stand for the reader to interpret. We are seeing things from the narrators’ perspective, after all, and why are we reading the book if not to be told what to think by our favorite narrator? Watch: Chastity accidentally said something. It’s time for our friend, the only person whose thoughts matter, to explain both what she said and why she said it, and it is vital that this explanation be delivered with the confidence of intimate insight and ancient acquaintance, no matter what the facts of the two characters’ interactions are. Of course, Chastity is a new character, and the internal monologue will continue to explain everything that the narrator thinks is relevant about the character before she can speak again, when her thoughts will be dissected and explained yet again. I like to picture this as happening in real time, with the narrator turning to camera and forcing Chastity to wait for the minute and a half it takes to essentialize her. Something like this:
“Carmen, wait!”
Carmen turns and sees Chastity clutching a handbag and shivering in the street. Turning sixty degrees, our hero stares off into the middle distance and says to the open air: “Chastity always spoke with a thinness to her voice that didn’t match her hips.”
“What? Carmen . . .”
Carmen’s eyes glazed over as she continued her narration into the December night. “Chastity worked downtown at the bank, where she could hide behind a teller’s counter and flirt with the men who came in on Fridays to cash their paychecks.”
“Carmen, what does that have to do with anything? I’m dripping wet; I need your help.”
“If she was lucky, she could convince one of them to wait until the end of her shift so she’d have a fat john to barhop with until his pay was dissolved in the cheap beer of a two-am dive.” The wind tickled Carmen’s hair, but her face and body stood utterly still as if paused on a cosmic scale. Chastity walked over, her broken heel clack-slapping with the other, and she waved a hand in front of Carmen’s blank stare. Nothing changed.
“Are you . . . okay?”
“Now the fat cow had probably been roughed up by a man she’d met and dropped, and she needed my help to save her. What she didn’t know is that I had been watching while she flirted with Skylar, eyeing Skylar’s perfect skin and dreaming of trapping my love in her wicked claws.”
Chastity was caught by this. She blinked. Her face flashed a series of conflicting emotions, confusion and anger rolling across like the wind down from the mountains, blasting the little plains town with a solstice chill. As soon as it had come, the emotions resolved, hardening into detest. Her body still shutting down, Chastity dragged her broken shoes past Carmen and towards the car beyond. Carmen didn’t shift her gaze or acknowledge Chastity’s existence.
“If she wanted help from me, she had another thing coming. I looked at the water dripping in a wide circle around her feet—”
“I weigh 170 pounds; what is your deal!?” Chastity screamed as she flopped her freezing ass into the driver’s seat.
“—and deduced what she needed. Well, she wouldn’t get it from me, the scarlet whore. I had waited too long for love to come to me, and I didn’t need someone else hoovering up what I wanted. I turned to Chastity, slowly, with malice, and I said ‘I would give you a cold shoulder, but it seems you’ll turn to ice before I do,’ which was a pun she was too stupid to understand.” All at once, as she said she would speak, Carmen turned to where Chastity had been nearly a minute before and addressed her as though no time had passed. Her face was animated with disgust, her hands vibrating with repressed rage. No sooner had she delivered her final epithet than Chastity, shaking her head, floored her savior’s Camry and flashed away into the slush and the quiet Wyoming night. She was still fat, though.
I am not through with trashfiction, critically nor personally. You remember that I said I had read well over two dozen examples? That was by choice, my friends. With the same exhausted resignation thin-spread over a mountain of shaking eagerness with which I buy a box of two dozen compressed flour circles and sugar paste (thank you, Holly), I read trashfiction, and proudly, too. I have unjustifiably subjected myself to more than twenty painful experiences. I eagerly await the next thin and sexually inexperienced woman falling into the arms of a muscular gunslinger. I will regret every moment and yet read another. Why, you ask?
It may be trashfiction—but it isn’t garbage.

[last line courtesy A. Gregory, 2019]

11.12

My mother sits in the next room, our family cracked and split over a half dozen rooms as cousins we've never yet met chatter in a foreign language. I'm trying to ignore her, but she keeps calling my phone, trying to get something out of me so she doesn't have to walk over and reveal to her unknown relations that she still needs her child to run small, meaningless errands to the store for small, meaningless groceries. My phone is vibrating again. I lean through the open doorway and yell "Ma, you could stretch and I'd hear it, you're so close. What do you need? Stop calling me!" I can see her thrust her phone away like "who, me?" like now she's the center of attention. But nobody turns to look at either of us; nobody cares as she flushes a hot pink.

It was a dream, I guess, and I'm not fond of my alarm posing as my mother. It's too bad she's not here, so close I can hear her stretch. I should call my mother. 

11.3b

I'm finding I like music that feels like summer with the windows down, driving not because anybody knows where to go but just to be driving, and the car is full of people I have accidentally come to love, and the sun is going down, and I'm aching to make it stay, and, of course, acting like it will.

Thank you, Stephen. https://youtu.be/JrvMNLJJpWU

11.3

There is a small, tub-like cactus in front of me. I am very much taller than it. By the time I die, I will still be taller than it, but this round, yellow-spined cactus will still be here, and I will not. I don't know what that says.

10.29

I pause my theremin playing for a moment and the machine shrieks as I drop my hands. I'm in shock, of course; I never expected you to walk through that door again, and certainly not while I was learning how to play Billy Joel, and with this half-grown mustache, too. Damnit. You'd have a lot of convincing to do if you wanted me to believe that life isn't run by cruel pixies bent on my destruction. 

10.22b

I told Philip that I wished to summit Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, but it is perhaps the worst dream I've ever had. He mourned with me for the disgusting irreverence required to be ported up a mountain as quickly as possible by a team of well-meaning but ultimately exploited mountaineers carrying half again or more than their comfortable, soft, undeserving patrons. 

The lesson of this was always meant to be about how neither he nor I (and in fact, you) realized that Kilimanjaro is not in Tanzania, but I looked it up, and I was right. Not right about being wrong, but right, which I was wrong about being wrong about. Yikes.

10.22

He flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette—or did he? I'm not sure. I haven't actually seen someone smoking, in person, in years. I didn't observe those who did because I was so uncomfortable that I left. So maybe he tapped the ash away on the window of the car? This is hopeless. He could just as likely have held the cigarette up to his mouth the wrong way round and blown the ash away like the smoking barrel of a pistol and it would have killed the same way. Regardless, he was disdainful of what Samuel Quilty had just said, and if you don't believe me, the thing he did after Samuel implored him to take up his case with the President was that he took a long drag on his cigarette and cut the ash off with a small pair of silver scissors from his breast pocket.

10.19b (or 10.21, if you like)

As one of dust she came to curse me

while I held her bones and skin,

'till I felt her knotted anger,

and she told me to begin.

The loose youth was hanging off her;

in its slack I found her hard.

All her summer self had wasted

soft and lazy in the yard. 

What great sin had been her driver

in the all-consuming plan

to have done with eating substance

and to only eat a man?

"Let us eat," she breathed through flaky lips
locked tightly to her grin,
"It's awfully nice to have you," here,
she paused, "for dinner, friend."

I can't hope for mute forgiveness,
not with memories this crass,
as I pay for all my wanting

and I take a bite at last.

"You're delectable," I mumble,

picking anger from my teeth,

"Like a brief bouquet of passion,"

though my tongue detected grief.

And it was quite the sudden feeling:

to have met death at the end

as a really complex person

with my entrails on her chin.

10.19

As one of dust she came to curse me

while I held her bones and skin,

'till I felt her knotted anger,

and she told me to begin.

The loose youth was hanging off her;

in its slack I found her hard.

All her summer self had wasted

soft and lazy in the yard. 

What great sin had been her driver

in the all-consuming plan

to have done with eating substance

and to only eat a man?

It's the fingernails, I tell you,

that will cut like sharpened glass

as I pay for all my wanting

and I take a bite at last.

"You're delectable," I mumble,

picking anger from my teeth,

"Like a brief bouquet of passion,"

though my tongue detected grief.

And it was quite the sudden feeling:

to have met death at the end

as a really complex person

with my entrails on her chin.

10.14

[I can't come up with anything beautiful or terrible to write about. I am out of practice. I need to go to bed and I haven't even brushed my teeth. I didn't eat a cookie tonight, though they were sitting on the counter calling to me. This is adulthood. I would trade it for anything.]

Do you remember the days when we didn't know where we would wake up? One or the other of us would drive until the sun was on the other side of the world and the lights in our heads had gone bleary and grey and neither of us could see the other one for what they were, and then we would stop and muscle the car into some exotic parking lot space between a tweaker's rig and a college student's Prius and there we would sleep until something ephemeral about the other reached out to tell us that the lights were grown sharp and dim again, fit for illuminating nothing but the other person's face, and we would stretch and ignore the view. I don't think I looked at the mountains or at you in all that time, but I know that I saw. I don't know if we could go back there—any going back is a death—but I would like to have been there, again, now, if you know what I mean. But you can't. The lights are gone colorless and the world is dark. Sleep, and we'll see what we don't look at in the morning.

9.30

[Airbnb is sponsoring five volunteers (practically randos, they assure us) to go on a trip to the Antarctic plateau to look for evidence of microplastics. I saw the advertisement and nearly fell down. I have already submitted my application. It reads thusly:]

I am under no illusions that the proposed research trip is easy. I anticipate that it would be the most difficult thing I have ever done. I have read a half dozen books about polar explorers and research expeditions, watched documentaries, and perhaps overwhelmed with questions an Antarctic research pilot I happened to meet. Apsley Cherry-Garrard is a hero of mine. Some of my best anecdotes are about Shackleton. I know that our southern continent is inhospitable and terrifying, and yet not thirty seconds passed after I learned of this opportunity before I started writing this application.
There’s a reason why I felt I had to fill this out. I work with kids. I’m a teacher during the school year and a summer camp worker during the summer (I can’t get away from it; I’ve been at camp for ten years now). And every time I tell a student or camper that they’re capable of more than they could dream, I have to believe it. But to say a thing is very different from living it. I want to be able to tell my students that, when the opportunity showed itself, I ran full-bore at the most unachievable dream I had. If I can do that, I can implore them to do the same, to believe in themselves, to believe that other people will see their worth, that with a dash of luck even the stars are within reach (metaphorically).
Three years ago, I did something I believed to be similarly inconceivable. I piled everything I had onto a bicycle and set off from Massachusetts to get to California in three months. I was alone, with no direction and less cycling knowledge. Every day was a battle with fate, a desperate flailing for control of my life in an unfeeling world. It’s cliché, I know, but the sudden end to my marriage and a barely-constrained self-loathing had manifested in a four thousand mile journey to, I suppose, “find myself.” I didn’t. There’s nothing mystical in doing something grand and difficult. There is no secret to such a thing, only luck, privilege, and sacrifice. My battle with fate, giving in to luck and giving up comforts and company and money more and more every day in the pursuit of a wild dream—these things do not get easier. Certainly, they are difficult, but they merely are.
In short, the science is fascinating, the ideas are aspirational, the results likely to be troubling. The trip is worthwhile in itself. But as much as I would explain my scientific bona fides, as much as I would explain my outdoor acumen, it would simply eclipse the larger truth. It has long been my unspoken dream to travel on the Antarctic plateau. I scarcely dared breathe of such a thing for fear that even the possibility of it was too fragile, that my saying such a thing out loud may destroy the reality of it. I breathe it now.

[Hey, you should apply too. Why not? What could you possibly lose but time, and you stand to gain a dream. That's a trade I would take every day.]

9.26

I wrote a poem about a poison fish, as a pun in French. It was only slightly clever, but it was mine, and my phone deleted it. I saw it on the screen as I reopened this app and then—
Into the ether. Gone.
I will be the only human who ever reads that poem, which was a unique combination of words and sound shapes. I am treated to an endless string of beautiful moments that are useless and worthless, and I think it is better far to enjoy them than to throw my phone in rage.

9.25

Fortune favors, he told. Four coons savor the bold.

Poltroons quaver and fold.

9.23b

[I just watched Arctic with Mads Mikkelssen. It joins All is Lost with Robert Redford in a list of grueling survival procedurals that hold a very special place in my heart (not least because I love polar exploration stories and thinking about sailing).]

But I want a grueling survival procedural about a woman, please, and don't feed me any of that Hunger Games trash, please. And I've already heard Adrift isn't up to snuff, The Shallows misses on all my favorite silent procedural nonsense, and Wild . . . I don't know, friend. I may give it a shot.

I'll tell you what I want.

A frontier family. The last wagon out of the high mountain valley before the fall snows close up the pass, and the visitor says "I'll be back come June." Maybe she sends them away with a big jar of peaches from the orchard that has shown its first fruit this summer.

Fire.

I picture that she spends the first night maybe hunched over in the burned up husk of their house, curled up with her head on her knees. I imagine that she claws through the ash for the shovel and has to make a crude handle just to bury whoever was taken by the fire. I imagine that she takes the horse up to the ridge where she can see the pass, maybe she even tries to ride through, and she has to turn back. She has a month, maybe, before the snows will kill her.

I imagine that she slowly reassembles a life, buoyed by little bits of her old life that she finds in the charcoal, and sometimes she'll pull out something simple and inexplicable like a big jar of peaches and she'll just weep. I picture her meticulously setting snares in the woods and felling trees and learning how to build a fire with nothing.

I see her losing the horse.

I want a story that drives her just exactly to the brink and then tips her over it again and again, just like these stories should, and she reacts in exactly the way she would—not masculine, exactly, but a sort of feminine strength that usually plays badly in films because the person writing has no idea what they're doing, or perhaps they think that being strong also means being an asshole, or maybe because they don't let the actor have space to actually be strong. I want the actress in the situation with the solution and to let the actress play how she would play it. Not strident and soricine. Not standoffish and mean. Not an asshole. Who would she be these things to? There is only her. Hollywood can't ruin her by making her an uncomfortable send-up of herself. But we would see something distinctly feminine, perhaps, in actions that are taken for necessity because they are the only actions to take, even though they are the actions that anybody would take to survive, whatever their gender presentation or identity, in such a situation. I want to see it because I wonder what the actress would do. I want to see, isolated, idealized and impossible, strength on a feminine palette.

I see her giving up, starving to death, laying down to die, and seeing that jar of peaches again where it rolled back into the corner of her rough shelter, and she eats them, the whole jar, with her hands, the juice running down her elbows and freezing on the floor, and she's shaking and her eyes are deep in her gaunt cheeks.

The peaches are the turning point she needed.

I believe that when the spring roars back to her valley, she hears three gunshots from up in the pass shouting welcome back, and she just sprints. She drops the adze she fashioned from a piece of the old sink or whatever and she just runs pell-mell up the trail towards the returning visitors. She rounds a bend and just collapses in the road, and she says something courageous and expansive and overwhelmed as their wagon rolls around the corner ahead of her. Something breathed, something from an unfamiliar voice that hasn't heard human speech in seven months, something like

I lived.

And maybe, if we're very unlucky, the visitors will bundle her up into their wagon and place her again firmly in her role as the feminine, and we will be left with a scene of her being laced into a borrowed dress in the house she built with her own hands while the male visitor takes all the credit for emptying her snares and the female visitor degrades what she's accomplished with her stark disbelief. And our hero will cry, and the female visitor will grasp her hand and say "I know, dear, I know." And she won't, not at all, but we will, and we will cry, and nothing we can do will fix it because catharsis belongs to the author and he has withheld it from us and he is a vicious beast who wants to make us suffer even in the heart of salvation. He wants us to taste the bitter ash of living.

That's all I want. Is it too much to ask?

9.23

There was, somewhere in Nathan's bag, a solution to the current problem. He just knew it. Maybe the pencil sharpener in the front most utility pocket, or the metal straw in the water bottle, or the small pocketknife on a lanyard at the bottom of the bag. All these were useless to him now that he had thrust the bag into the lair's front entrance, not counting on there being a back entrance.
"Oh, bother," he said, and he felt it was a very keen understatement indeed.

9.22

Dream, 22 of Sept, 1884
It seems to me, now, that the divorce was ever among my chiefest sorrows. Even at my blackest moments, I found I could rely on her to bring on a deeper darkness still. And she was game for it! I could not escape her all-too-familiar silken cloutch.
Imagine my surprise, then, when on the night of the twenty second of November of last year I was harried from my bed by a frenzy of banging on my door. Even as I stepped to the threshold, the clatter increased to fever pitch, and throwing the latch and door together, I espied there upon the manor grounds and well into the carriage path besides nothing; save for this single porcelain feather laid in great haste and still spinning slowly upon my step in the gloom. I closed and relocked the door, gripping my key with ghostly knuckles and pallid face, and, returning to my bed, was greeted by her sudden reappearance in my life as a corpse. Of course, I called upon the police immediately, and they have called upon Scotland Yard, and Lieutenant Cuthings has called upon you. The remainder of the case should be familiar to you if you have maintained a familiarity in the past four months with any of the major newspapers, save these scant details: first and chieftest, that as a bachelor, of course I maintain some household, but the cook has always slept in some outbuilding built by Spanish immigrants in the last century, the maid takes her leave until well into the midmorning and changed her schedule none that day, but, as the papers could never have gotten wind of it excepting to his shame, my valet had taken to occupancy of some mean hovel just down the carriageway while he and I worked out a petty labour dispute. It was, in fact, his place that I called second, and that is why he arrived, just as sergeant Andrews did, to find the front gate barred and the porcelain feather still spinning softly in the icy blast of ill wind that curled around my front door in the fell autumn wind. We have managed to keep little else out of the papers, but I have hope that seeing the body and the estate will bring you further clues than even those insatiable newspapermen were able to unearth, and to do so without ruining the reputation of my servants, such as they are, or of my recently deceased ex-wife. For myself, the damage is done, come what may.

Yours,
Sir Carlton Weigton of Lambraith Manor

9.16b

Whether I write here or not is just fine. Whether you read it or not is just fine. Any outcome is meet and good, and all have either been preordained or completely unseen, and either way is indistinguishable, and both would come to an equivalent end. This is what is meant by zero.

I have not been sharing my deep self with you. That takes time, and time is valuable and valueless, and I also don't currently feel a burning need to share my deep self with anybody, to be honest. But of course I want to share my deep self with somebody. I just don't want to share it with anybody, partially because that involves the onerous act of sharing it, and also because I don't feel a need for anybody I know right now to have my deep self. And finally, I'm not sure I have a deep self currently, as I interact as authentically as I can with each person as I'm with them and then I don't feel the need to reach back to them when they're not with me. At the end, though I dislike this course of action, it, too, is zero. At some point, everyone I know will no longer count me among their friends, or they'll be dead and won't count anything. This is zero, and also zeroes out the value that may have been, positive or negative.

I hope you understand that I don't want to feel guilt about having not written you long letters and I don't want to feel guilt about having written or writing any in the future. I hope you understand that I don't need to feel satisfied about doing so or not doing so either. It merely is, and the value of either action is zero.

The value of pointing out that something is zero might be negative. I hope you don't dislike that I have pointed it out. But I suppose it is actually zero.

You understand, I think. The two of us are at least Buddhist enough to communicate that much to each other in the overlap of our vocabularies.

Why are yous o concernet with speling everything right <"right" is not an adverp but in that space an adverp need and thus i cock up the senentce

Why do commas , need t,o go an,y whyemr,e,e?

I am concernet that if I told you a word was speled differently than how you had spelet it, you would take my word for it, even if I lied.

I would not lie. By spelling this sentence "correctly," I have told a small lie. Or perhaps not.

Both my concern and the value of your taking or not taking my word for it are zero. You are free to feel whatever you wish and that is meet and just. Whether I lie or not is zero. I will not, and that is nothing. It changes naught.

You asked what question I would ask god, or God, or deity, or numos? I would not need to, unless It existed as an entity to be asked. It does not, and thus I do not. What exists is all that exists, and that is just and meet. But if It existed as an entity to be asked, for the asking, and that was Its purpose and mine was to ask, I would want to know if I should reduce or increase entropy, though I would understand that any answer I received would be unknowable and both correct and incorrect. I suspect I should reduce entropy. I suspect it is the end of religious thought. I suspect it [It] is the most succinct way to explain my own religious thought.

All things will become zero. All things are zero. I will behave as though they are not so that perhaps, for that moment, in that place, they can be, and not zero. And the less zero there is, the more I am, and the more I am, the more there is space for God in it, and the more chances I have to see God. Maybe this is too esoteric and ephemeral, but I want to love others not because it is the right thing to do but because it affirms and repairs their existence as long as I do so, and in that is God. Destroying love or denying existence creates zero, and in that there is no space for God, at least, not the God that I have seen. But perhaps the absence of God and the presence of entropy are both one as meaningless as the other and the entire question is moot and the value proposition between the two is zero, but I have not nor will behave in such a way. I will reduce entropy and deny zero just as I will not lie. Why?

I do not know. It merely is, and this, too, is zero.

9.16

Sam slipped her fingers through the feathers of the ferns, raking the tiny bits of leaves to clear the old, dried detritus from the new, green growth. She sighed as they drifted slowly to the floor of her small apartment. It was nice to have green things about, but now she had to sweep. Tradeoff.

9.12

I squish ants. I comprehend that it is unintentional. I understand that it is meaningless. I function as though it doesn't matter.
But destroying a life feels wrong. But life is merely a complex amalgam of chance events no more meaningful than a series of interconnected switching networks. But life is rare, and rare is precious.

I want to reduce entropy.
I want also to unsquish that ant.

9.10

Quincy

I have often been described as oppressively normal. I describe myself that way, and that's how I know it's true. I read books, but not as often, I guess, as other people do, and my friends tell me that the characters in those books are so often kooky and intelligent that they have become memetic. Ooh, another introspective teen. I haven't read enough of these books to confirm that, but Franky Fish Fingers tells me its true, and she never steers me wrong. Franky is interesting. You would be better off reading her journal to find out why she is named Franky because her father ran away from the military and the Argentinians put out a warrant for his arrest so that he can never go back to South America. But you are not reading that journal. For your sake, I hope that you can at least read this and not think to yourself "another one of those obnoxious smart kids who are so quirky and can't let well enough alone and have to tell you that they're intelligent rather than just being obviously intelligent (Knute tells me this is the main problem with such books and films. A narrator is forever popping up and gushing over how well that ten-year-old can spell or how many equations this tweenager has memorized, as though that's intelligence, somehow, a thing the author can look up and report, and not, as it occurs in the real world, the terrible speed with which the person deduces, connects, indicates, processes you down to a fine powder and then devastates you with one sentence or two. Anyway, that's the kind of intelligence Knute favors and the reason why he's friends with me. I do not threaten him with this. Anyway.) I've double-sided the page and I have room for one more sentence. Miss Turnbill, I would like an A on the [editor's note: here the text becomes very small and turns on itself like an Ouroboros on the last line of the ruled paper] recent test, but I am oppressively normal.

8.28

11:11pm

I received a message from a friend telling me about a Visa gift card I could get if only I clicked a shady link. Of course, some program had coopted his account, and he had not sent the message of his own volition. But was it any less his message from my point of view? At what point will the hackers be able to coopt my mouth in the same way? Soon we will have to perceive the friends we know to be true beneath a layer of unfortunate clever social engineering used by a malicious computer program to gain access to our central cortex so a breakfast cereal company can make more money.

Of course, this is ignoring the fact that we already say things against our volition and we interpret as reality a skewed sense of our friends' words without any intervening cinnamon toast crunch.

8.26

Somewhere in the vast someplace, you can stand still and look hard enough that you see the whole of it, and it's just then, with your eyes strained just so, that you see that you haven't been seeing, not really, all along.

8.21

The darkness has crept up and wrapped itself in the corners of the room. Its fingers are stretching out as the sunlight fades in the west. I see it as a quiet friend, here to watch over me as I cram four more cookies in my mouth. Go away, mom. Nothing to see here.

8.19

How many times have I heard this one clock tick and I never thought to count it before? A lifetime spent in this house with this clock, a lifetime of watching my father turn the small key, a lifetime of reliable rolling out hours, and I never thought it was important.
How many ticks went unheard because the walls of the house intervened? How many did I hear and not parse? How many have I listened to while trying to fall asleep on the couch? How many more are allotted to me?
I wonder what tick is waiting for your first and my last, and just how dispassionately the clock counts out our mortality. It will rumble onward after we are gone.

Its grinding indicates a tone is coming. It rings out one. Another day encroaches. All I can hear is the incessant tick tock of time.

8.13

you've pulled your knees up under your chin
it is innocent, quiet, and clean
eyes elsewhere
you're invisible, it seems, and nobody needs to look at you

so i look away, fear
eating through my confidence
that's one thing i will not do
stare
but if i could, i hope you know i would not

why is the grass so bright today
who dictated the color of the sky
and when did this breeze pick up
to move the trees in a quiet dance
was it You, or did i only notice when i looked up from you

8.12

I have that peculiar taste in my mouth, the iron-red tang of waking up after a bad dream, almost bloodied by the fear and paranoia of social anxiety induced so strongly in the dream that I carry it into the waking world, and I suck my teeth of it. I wonder what she dreams about. I can quickly realize that I do not know a particular she to wonder over, but rather every she for whom I have wondered and wonder invades my thoughts in sequence, a flood, a rising tide, a slapslapslap of crashing waves bowling me over and driving ideas up my nose until I can taste the salty grit of teary oceanwater thoughts mixed with the red-iron.

She dreams about finding the right connecting flight to paradise and being ushered through security. She dreams about opening the door to find a new cat. She dreams about piecing together the map fragments to an ancient mystery in the basement. She dreams about a friend she hasn't seen in years. She doesn't dream about me; she dreams about whatever she wants, and always invariably something pure and enviable because she doesn't exist except as a construct of my own dreams, but waking, no nightmare of mine but daydream.
And she is so good at dreaming that she will never dream back. Why would she? The red-iron has soured in my mouth with the salt to make an acrid and alkaline bite, cutting away at my tooth enamel, darkening my day. She doesn't need that. She doesn't need me.

[this went a sad place, but you always knew it would]

8.11

Which taste is sweetest, the first, or the last? The first is layered with anticipation, its subtle zippered tang hanging in the air long before you make your way from plate to mouth with treacherous fork, but the last--ah, the last taste. You and your friends have talked so long that the food has gone cold, and the last bite sits off-center to the plate. Your fork makes its pleasant scraping sound as it bulldozes all remnants into a final pile and you lift it, confident now, to your mouth. You would regret a drink of water or a toothbrush because they would do away with the lingering feeling of satisfaction in your mouth. There is too much said of anticipation and so little of contentment. Perhaps it is because contentment does not scream, does not lift its voice, does not advertise. Contentment merely lasts, ignominiously, for as long as it takes.

8.8

Three conversations about the numos, the Love of the universe, the God of all. Urijah and I sat facing the fading light, basking in the otherworldliness of the topic and delicate purple sunset. Three conversations, and not one of them situated in anything like the faith tradition of the others, and not one of them significantly contradictory. River leaned over the handlebars of his monstrous mountain bike, his helmet protecting his brain from bumps but not thoughts. Three conversations, zero conclusions. I stared deep in the distance at the trees on the other side of the lake as they faded away into fog and I faded away into irrelevance to my own self.

8.4

My sundial dance is prompt at two pm. I spin in the shallowing sun; the shadow marks time for me. My cadence is cyclical, my sun dance solar. I'm swift. I cease. Two pm passes apace.

8.3

If your sail flaps

fast

There's no wind in it, but there is wind.

If your sail flaps, it means you're bad at sailing.

8.2

Today, I bought an odd cap made of the wrong fabric with a brim that can be flipped up or down but doesn't do much, really, to obscure anything but direct sun and rain in either orientation. It is my most recent concession to cycling. First, darts in my pant legs, then waking up at small hours of the morning, then quietly admitting that every day is leg day and I may never do another pull-up as long as I live. Soon, though, you'll see me in an odd little cap, if I like it, and you'll say "There goes a fool who doesn't know that you're only supposed to wear those when you're on the bike." Alas, your cultural rules mean nothing to me. I just think I'll prefer a cycling cap over a ball cap on warmish days, and I want a hat. What's wrong with that?

7.28

I lean over the table, staring out across the lake, eyes squinted against the glare and the potential shame about to roil across the table to me. I have only been asking questions, but I have been asking questions with hard edges, words what cut their way through too much and reveal the underneath. I'm not sure my companion was ready to be revealed. I think that at any moment it's just as likely as not that the careful façade of confidence between us, this edifice of rank or title or whatever else you or we might care to call it may become more cumbersome than it's possible to believe, and we will be forced to rebuild its foundations, as we are incapable of shedding its weight. I shift in my seat, not to get a better angle of protection from the glint of the sun on the lake before us nor because I am uncomfortable, exactly, but just to have something to do. My companion hasn't spoken in an uncomfortable long time—two seconds of dreary silence. For the two of us, in this place, with this relationship, and under the burden of this compassing pall of confidence, two seconds is forever to go without saying the next witticism. I am shifting in my seat to brace against the answer, if it comes. I know that my question carries with it an imposition and an implication, of power lost and wrong done, and I just want to know what happens thirty seconds from now so I can prepare what I can say ten seconds from now so I can feel confident again two seconds ago.
My companion clears his throat.  I realize I have been holding my breath.

7.27

I have three days to write a proposal for a big paper I want to write for my master's program. I have nothing planned and no time to do such a thing. I have ruined myself utterly and I feel guilty and afraid. They turned down the project I actually wanted to write and now I am left flapping freely in the breeze.
I want to feel persecuted, as though no one understands me. I fear that everyone understands me, however, and no one cares.

7.22

I have seen people so beautiful that they take my breath away. They deserve to have their whole selves hung in a museum where the wrinkles around their eyes and the long stretch of their fingers and the waft of their hair can be preserved in oil paint or pastel or watercolor or silver in emulsion forever, until tomorrow, when they are a masterpiece again.
I want these artworks, but I cannot myself make such things. The world is far too cruel for that.

7.22

Which shoe did we lose today? Left or right doesn't really seem to matter when all you have is one. It's curious how such petty distinctions fade away. Even your most unthought-of patterns fall apart. What foot do you shoe first? Do you tie your shoelaces so the knot falls left, or right? Which foot, new-shod, takes the first step?

These things are now immaterial. All that matters is my first and most pressing question: which shoe did you lose today?

7.18

Clark leaned over, well into Emma's space, pushing that infernal camera right up against the plexiglass. She had woken him, not the camera, to see the sunrise over the ocean, a thin band of orange fire that faded so quickly to ultramarine that she wasn't even sure how that pallate could mix so quickly and yet remain so distinct. Looking out across the vast ocean of hot, orange cloudtops past Clark's excited fist, Emma saw shapes of nothing drifting by, spinning and disintegrating, and the shape of her future, too excited by sharing the moment to actually look, slowly solidifying.
The ring still felt heavy and new as she spun it on her finger. She said her head against the arm he had snaked behind her head, ruining the stability of his shot momentarily. She kissed the inside of his elbow and went back to wondering how orange becomes blue.

7.16

I never have discovered exactly why it is you said that to me. All I know is that it didn't really but a second to turn around and shoot me down. Four words were the bullets, and the holes they left just won't heal.
There's some small part of me wishes you'd come on back to finish the job, just so I could get a look at your face one last time while I was dying. But that ain't like you. Only time you ever turned around was just that once, to shoot me down.

Sometimes, when the wind is fit to tear grass out the ground, you can hear it singing though my open heart. Don't mind it much. It reminds me of you.

7.14b

Sometimes, I fantasize about someone finding my diary and devouring the pages, savaging their buttery tone, drinking my years like claret, nourished by my secretive self. What if you were to find and read me, my unwalled self? You would find it too full of gristle, too poorly seasoned, too dishonest. I fantasize about it, so I am not willing to reveal too much of myself in it. I am curiously more open in my personal conversations than I am with myself. Alas, I am no five-course dinner, but a pie in a diner window, glossy, fake, and rotating.

7.14

I am not crying. I feel hollowed out. I should be asleep. She's not all I can think about. I wish I could stop thinking about her.

[I wish I could have met Catullus. Maybe we could have been friends.]

7.11

I can feel all my muscles. I decided to ride my bike, and I went out for an hour. A simple hour, surely, wouldn't kill me, right? And yet, here I am. Aching my way to bed so I can feel like I'm dying until I have to go to work.

7.10

I caught you looking at me, today. Once.
I had to glance at you a hundred times, and I did it willingly, daring myself to not stare. Added together, I studied your lips, your ears, your fingernails, your toes. I studied the way your skin comes together at the corners of your eyes and the open glow of life in the warp and weft of your hair. I added it all up and wished I could paint.
I would paint you looking at me.

7.4

I tell people it is important to have positive self-image, but mine wavers between alright and awful.

I advise others to work their hardest and take naps in the middle of the day.

I have strong feelings on kindness and love, but I struggle with both.

6.30

Today, I let all the air out of my lungs and sank to the lakebed, five feet down. I had my eyes closed, and couldn't see anything beautiful. My ears were full of the rushing of blood and nothing else came through. My senses were numbed by the cold water and the weightlessness, and I sat there just long enough for panic to grip me. It didn't take long.
I rushed to the surface for air, heedless of how strange I must look to the fish and the birds and the trees, who never exchange one gasp for another. Only the newts looked on, understanding.

6.21b

Have you ever had enough time to depersonalize a person's face? Sometimes, with some people, it can take hours. How much of a person are they? How often do they use their face? Do you know them well? Is there not much material to work with?
With other people, at other times, the effect is immediate. I see the hard edge of her lip, where frenum meets vermilion, as though the two angles met and have never quite agreed after that. I see the roundness of glasses not as a style choice but only as geometry. I see, but of course, I don't.
I'm not looking at her; she's not there yet. I have to put her back together from my face-blindness so I have a friend again to meet.

6.21

IiiiiiiiIIiiiIIIiiiiii
lllllLlLLllLlllllLll
IiIIIIiiIiiiiIiiIiiIIi

6.17

The twisted tightrope that we walk between idiocy and suavity is wound with bundled wires no thicker than a mistake made while trying to compliment your hair or feet or breasts. You say the right thing to me and then I confuse myself two ways backwards and inside out just trying to consider whether or not you're interested in a compliment of your compliment or a compliment of yourself. I should come with an instruction manual, but I guess I still wouldn't read it.

6.16

[For the next time you trounce someone at chess:]

A knight hops around in an ell,
A bishop moves diagonell.
For straight lines and things,
You can try pawns and kings,
But that's checkmate as you know full well.

6.15

MAGG13 was named with numbers because Androids shouldn't have human names. Her mesh fiber skin wasn't the pale blood-through-collagen color of a white human, but the smooth, perfect white of a toilet. Sometimes, MAGG13 wondered about what her human friends must think of her. Sometimes, she turned off her subroutines and and didn't wonder at all.

6.12

Terrance liked the taste of grass after it had been aerosolized by cleated feet. He liked the sound of a crowd muffled into incoherence by a helmet. He liked football, just not, exactly, playing it. 

6.10

[As I face day four of the ten-day sprint of sustained creative effort between now and the start of summer camp, I am forced to ask myself why I find solace from creativity on this blog. Why do I keep running here to avoid my responsibilities?]

Cats wreck thatch.
Claws rasp 'till they're
    cut, rough tools.

[I like thinking about where we make sounds in our mouths. I like thinking about the sounds in this poem move forward in the mouth like they're being pushed from behind. I like thinking about how this poem would be ruined for non-rhotic extremists. It would be ruined for Jonathan Ross.]

6.9

6.8

I remember when I introduced you to my soul. So casual, "Say, have you met . . . ?" The bits of my bones were rattling around as you shook hands. I sat on the lid of myself, afraid I would jump out too much too fast. Soul and self are not so different, but meeting one, then meeting two: this is a new thing much too dangerous. Perhaps I'll keep him locked away. Yes, actually, I think so. Lock him up in bigger boxes so he has some room to move. Yes, yes, this is the right idea, I think.
Where has he gone? Where have you gone?
Ah, shit. My soul has run away with you.

6.7

Think about the tremendous number of things that have to be just so for an evening with this light, airy breeze. Think about the staggering coincidence of two people meeting in just this way. Think about the enormous unlikelihood of the cascading chemical reaction falling, inevitably, through both our brains. Just think: all this could be manufactured, for only $699 a month, or a yearly cost of only $6,999. Our neural self-authorship programs are available to anyone with a cybernetic implant of model 3 or newer. All this could be yours! Just think.

Offer is available for a limited time. Individual results may vary; use all implants with caution. Self-authorship is not guaranteed to have no real-world effects. Use all self-authorship devices with caution. Just think.

6.4

I read some Seamus Heaney Beowulf tonight. His translation feels somehow ancient new, a kind of word accident that could only have been carefully planned.
I feel that way about my favorite translation of Catulus 85, which isn't one of the famous ones, and I can never remember who translated it.

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris. Nesciō, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior.

I hate her and I love her. Don't ask me why. It's how I feel, that's all, and it hurts.

Maybe that's how Grendal felt about his mother, too. But there's no way to find out for sure.

6.2

She was no taller than a martini shaker.
She had a face like a Bentley's grille.
Her silver legs were a money-maker;
I'll tell you when I've had my fill.

I am made of piss and lightning.
More disappointment here than thrill.
When she's around, I feel the tightening
of my fear; too tight to kill.

The muse I mean is a gilded fever.
Her skin feels like a dollar bill.
I tell her I can love whenever (
A promise that I won't fulfill.
)

5.28

Sometimes I wonder if I'll be remembered after I die. I watch the memorial services and biopics and television specials and historical reenactors and I despair that anyone will ever do the same for me. And then, I remember, and laugh.
Who cares?

Bury me in a cardboard box. Burn my papers. Give my car to a kid who needs it. Delete my photos and throw my keepsakes in the compost heap. And if, accidentally, some cold summer day, you look up through the trees at the incoming rain, and think of me, don't let it be a melancholy thought. You know I wouldn't want to ruin your afternoon.

5.25

She and I are surrounded by police at this point, and I'm so fully fed up that I finally shout at her.
"I'm sick of this! This sucks, and I hate it, and I hate that you've hurt me like this!" I don't curse, and it feels more honest that way, and it feels like it might sting more that way. She's the one who drove off the road and battered the car against the police officer and parked in a handicapped space and ran from the cops. She deserves to feel bad.
Why am I so unlikely to stand up to any woman I like, to ask for what I want, to stop something I know is stupid? Why am I like this? Why am I awake, writing down a dream that happened a half hour ago?

I lay here, wishing to go back to hear the princess one more time, her voice sardonic and small, her comedic timing excellent, her heart laced with hated for everything, her sarcasm boundless.

Dream 25 May 2019

5.24

What if we tattooed pigs? Our impulse for art meets our impulse for destruction and becomes this confluence where two continents' watersheds crash into each other, piling water upon water as rivers of [quiet humming, small doodles in the margins of books, a sweet note in a bite of pizza, the feel of old leather jackets] art meet rivers of [tearing the knees out of jeans, snapping a new book spine, topping a tree, cutting a cuticle] violence. [Noun] meets [verb].

Maybe if we tattooed pigs we would get [it] out of our system as we ate more and more of [it].

5.22

A found poem of machine language and God-language.

5.21

As I lay here, awake, I wonder what it would be like to love falling asleep. My thoughts revolve around that liminal space between worlds, and my mind rejects it. Why would I want to waste my time there? Hung like a wet shirt between space and soil, between waking and sleeping, between thought and silence—what great torture that must be! I prefer my long, agonizing hiccup of wakefulness and the agonized, last-minute plunge into sleep at last, two hours after I intended to go, exhausted beyond words, immediate. As I lay here, awake, my mind flitters on to a new idea and I wrench it back to the thought I prefer having: what if I could just flip a switch? What if I could think whatever I wanted? What if I could choose how long it took? What if I could guarantee it would be pleasant? What if I loved falling asleep?

4.10

Poor Mary. Your fingernail bent back on the doorjamb as you went to grab the handle. Such an innocent mistake, of course, but it's how your soul felt, too, when you went to grab onto me. Like a fingernail, bent back on an obtrusive edge that was so innocuous you had thought it was invisible.
Maybe it's too bad I'm not rounded and smooth, but at the same time: everyone has doorjambs. It's the getting inside a person's head that's supposed to be treacherous. I guess it's just too bad you didn't use the doorbell.
- Theodore

4.9

Cori slipped her hand deftly into her bag. There wasn't anything in there. All the care she had put into packing her bag was undone. Luckily, the door was unlocked and all her things were still on the table in the entryway. She picked them up and placed them carefully into her bag again: toothpaste, moist towlettes, lipstick, credit cards, cash, two small figures of the buddha, phone, key. She walked out the door and onto the street. There he was again, looking at her. She slipped her hand deftly into her bag. There wasn't anything there. She thought about waking up, but luckily, the door was unlocked and all her things were still on the table in the entryway.

4.8

Professionally, Jay was an artist. Privately, he was a failure. There were images he saw in his brain that he wanted, desperately, to make. He scraped and crafted and ground and wiped and slid hot dry rough young cracking ugly portraits around his workshop to find the right light so he could see the layers of old paint flake off when he [turned] them to ribbons with a box cutter.
And at the end of every month, Jay would lay, splayed out quietly on the floor as seven or eight rich idiots would roll by with his agent to purchase the long strips of heavy canvas tacked to creaking stretchers. His agent would leave a check, and he would use the bulk of it to buy more paint.

4.4

[It's Watson's birthday today]

He was already sweating, and the sweat bit at the corners of his eyes. His hands, sunk up to the elbow in the membranes above him, were too grease-grimed to be of any help. The delicate operations he was trying to enact (beyond the power of sight) in the complex guts of the machine (well-designed to be inaccessible and incomprehensible by people long-lost to time itself) put more than just physical strain on the bones and sinews of his aching fingers. His mind began to pirouette, turn backflips, fade from control. That shape octagonal, this one cylindrical, a thread here, a sprocket there, and over all a repulsive gelatinous lining of icy lubricant.
He turned to the young idiot standing next to him, insensible to the fear of failure, confident in his skill and the inevitability of success, and said "Wrench, please."
He got the wrench and drove it up into the layers of sheeting under the hulk. Averting his eyes (it's almost impossible to lie with one's eyes), he tapped the wrench four times against the cleanest section of dull-tympanic crust he could manage.
"Wow, it's really up in there, isn't it?"
"Yeah. I've almost got it, though." He thought about throwing the part very far away, preferably over a cliff into a dark bay somewhere. He drew the wrench back out and closed his eyes as the lie washed over him once more. "Wrong size."
"Smaller or–?"
"Sure."

3.21

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/20/pedestrian-killed-stony-point-road-deadly-stretch-santa-rosa/

“Yeah we joke like we're playing Frogger. We joked, but it's not funny anymore,” said Lippencott ruefully.
I have a Google alert set up for Like Lippincott. It has never been pinged. Other people and coincidences ping it all the time. Please make sure to think about this person's family today, just this once, very quickly, and then go on with your day. We live in a weird place on a strange planet and today is very short, but it's yours.

2.27

Solomon pulled his shoes on and lay back down on the ground.
In his pockets he had three pieces of hard candy and a piece of paper with his father's name.
There wasn't any reason to leave the door but he still tried to reach his shoes to tie them.

2.25

Have you ever felt like you bent back the fingernails of your emotional self? God knows I've reached out too fast for everything and my stubby child-like hands just smash up against things. Have you ever felt your soul-cuffs scraping the pavement with every step because life keeps buying your pants too large? Sometimes I feel like I'll never grow into myself. Have you ever been like this? I feel like I'm alone.

There are a hundred million people who have been in my position. There are a hundred million more living it right now, with me, and I could write it down exactly and throw it into the ocean, safe-corked in its own bottle, for the outgoing tide to tear away from me, and I know that whatever shore it found there would be someone there feeling the same accursed thing, waiting in the surf for the bottle to knock them in the shin. Even so, I still feel as though there's nobody out there who feels this same thing I do.

Have you ever felt like pushing your self out the door into the late summer night to smell the dying flowers in the hazy heat of our infant planet? Have you ever felt like asking who lives in the mud you've squished between your crusted toes? Have you ever cried for no reason when you're trying to fall asleep, too tired to succumb and too sad to admit that you know exactly why you're crying? Have you ever tried to hide a smile?

I think we all have.
I feel like I'm alone.


Maybe we are.


[This is autobiographical, of course. Almost everything is (to say otherwise would be to pretend you're stupider than you look). I'm exhausted, but I'm not depressed. I'm sad, but I'm not overwhelmed.]

2.13

There's a tree outside that's covered with fruit, and often the ripest will fall to the ground. Sometimes, these will split, spraying the grass with a thin mist of citric acid and sugar water. The ants have learned. Now days, if I go to pick up the fallen fruit, there are round holes and an empty rind. I wonder how many ants I keep alive by looking the other way when the wind blows?

2.10

This isn't poetry or prose art. It's not even interesting.

Reading about Siegfried Sassoon, I realize the unbelievable sequence of lucky coincidences that have to all work together in order to end with some writer being published, becoming influential and famous, and having biographies (five, by last count) written by other people about his or her life. I also realize how utterly banal it is that it should happen at all. The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon is not the best poetry I have ever read, but it was published, collected, and anthologized. He is recognized as important.
What is the separation between his work and mine? Skill? Chance? Powerful contacts? Rich family? His participation in the most horrifying warfare yet experienced by mankind? It might be all of them or none of them, since they're all true in varying degrees. I don't know why he should be published at all. Literature makes no sense anymore.

2.6

I am an amiable malcontent:
running my mouth off,
principal fooled,
stealing my youth for my own damn needs,
skipping school.

I am a fabulous mystery:
lying too smoothly,
friends confused,
making Chicago my carnival wonderland,
nothing left true.

I am a sad story:
lives destroyed,
nothing learned,
riding off into my fabulous
sunset unearned.

- Ferris Bueller

2.5

Today was the first time in a month I saw something beautiful. I was walking along Ambs drive in the cold after-rain, wearing one jacket and carrying another. My shoes made a consistent wet rubber noise on the new concrete with every step. And I looked up. There, in front of me, across two neighborhoods, a highway and a train track, the sun shot sideways across hills of rippled green. No houses, no trees, just grass and the dirt underneath, but the old golden light of a near-ended day carved crowns of the lonely ridge above me. Beauty is always so far away here, just at the edge of sight or further, always curtailed by buildings and con-trails. I miss my moonlit nights of high fervor.

2.4

I'm crouching in the reed bed,
drooling mouth a blood red,
staring at a new prey,
hoping fate will obey,
willing muscles wound taut,
burning just a single thought--

Tiger.

I'm munching in the dry heat,
a living taste of fresh meat,
poem drawing to an end,
hoping one last day to spend--

Goat.

2.2

Which direction is unhappiness? Explain the road map. Blue lines, or black? Bold, or? Are the highways that direction big, multi-lane monstrosities with dozens of motorists all around you, jostling around for space in the faster lanes, everybody rushing to get somewhere they haven't paid attention to? And then they get there, and shake the sleep from their eyes, and realize their foot is still jammed down against the pedal, and their engine screaming, the car shaking itself to pieces, as they hang in midair, falling through the realm of unhappiness.

1.24

I woke up with a burning ache to use a new word at some point today. I just can't seem to work it into normal speech, you know? I've been trying to bend each conversation that way, but I end up so stilted and unexpected, slowly rolling the boulder of my mind closer to my goal. None of my discussions seems to last quite long enough. Maybe towards bedtime I'll just call a 511 number and blurt it out, hang up, and turn out the lights to sit in darkness.
It's okay. I'm used to it. It happened yesterday with "polyamory" and the day before with "interregnum." I get a new word every day. Now I've got a new one: I guess it's "quotidian."

1.20

The swindle of Jason Dorrigan was almost complete. Twenty thousand dollars lay, crisp and clean, stacked and sorted on the countertop of the closed-for-business nouveau riche café. Jason looked, kindly, into his precious con artist's eyes, so ravenous and strong. Now that the money was within Billy's grasp, the whole escapade was nearing an erstwhile attitude, and nostalgia for the time he was currently living threatened to choke Jason. He pushed the satchel across the counter, as though indicating that it was, finally, okay for Billy to hungrily shovel the short stacks of greenbacks safely away. Jason knew he would never see the fake children who were supposedly getting a new playground with this cash. He made a mental note to donate a concomitant sum to the Catholic daycare down the street, as though that would somehow absolve him of this six-week sin he had engaged in. You know, at the end, it was rather good, and well worth the money. His mother wouldn't understand, but then, she thought a cruise was a good investment. She hadn't had an exciting day since the sixties.
Jason nearly broke down when, satchel on his shoulder, Billy paused at the door. But the dashing criminal only pushed out into the wind-whipped streets of Jason's suddenly unfamiliar city without a backward glance.
"Goodbye," Jason croaked, and pulled out his telephone to tell his banker to stop investing in breakfast joints.

1.10

This small mind can't stretch too thin or it might snap. This small mind might stretch itself to encompass what it may. This small mind is pulling on its edges, stretching badly, hoping to thin and spread, hoping to swallow you.

1.9b

I was born to carry my father’s armor and to protect a village across the shining sea. My helmet is burnished and engraved with my ancestor’s names. A foreign place waits for me to protect it.

But you have need of my protection, too. You, my son, have need of light. You needn’t be afraid while I am with you, but someday, when you take up my father’s father’s helmet and strike out with intent across the shining sea, you will yourself stave off the fears of a hundred generations. Find this village of ours, wrap it in your will, and become as I am.

They will need armor; not for beasts and ghouls, but for the indecision and darkness in their souls. They will need to know that (though youth can sting) life is bright and safe. Someone will need to draw them out of their winding canyon to stand in the sunrise on the low dale and to say to them “Cry not, for I am here.”

1.9

Has it been a month, Madeline, since the last frost? Has it been a year since I broke my leg? Has it been a decade since we met? Has it been an hour since I laid down in the new-tilled field to watch the clouds go by, bugs crawling through the collar of my shirt, open eyes drying in the breeze, unwilling or unable to close?

[sorry I've been gone]