09/19/2017 sweatin and achin in bed after they done it his junk was like a pile of messed up breakfast dishes he kind of went off to sleep her fingertips kind of touched his thigh thinking, *the shreds of whats left of us; blowin like a rag over whats left of the finish line* But it counts! *bla-da-bloink!* On to the next level! Morning is a forest you gotta wake up to explore you gotta wake up to explore to explore to explore 09/19/2017 Ok so, legos. Legos are what you find in the attic and the basement. The ones in the attic are soft-edged, round-cornered, etched with dust from apartments with threadbare rugs and alligators in the living room. The ones in the basement are gleaming, sharp, and bristling with clicks and energy. They are both outposts of the same life force, though. Tribes lost to each other—one in lush tropical farm land, protected from tsunamis and starvation, free to develop technology at will. The other, a straggling pack of wolves, hanging on, roving, laying low, surviving. Eventually, they find each other. Of course by then the course of history has passed on. Eventually, all plastic returns to the sun, melted into hot oblivion. The sun can play with legos now. Then there’s the new ones. Everyone criticizes them for being too specific. “Specialization is for cells” as the old man said. Pieces that look like little girls. Hair. Lights. Electronics. Turrets. Window hardware, I don’t know, what the-- It’s like a shopping trip, not imagination land. Well maybe that’s just us old folks. We’re afraid of the realistic. It has betrayed us too many times. Trust issues. Yeah, sure, I got trust issues. I don’t trust my kids not to keep the legos off the floor. Losing a lego, now that’s a cardinal sin. Breaking a lego too. There was, of course, that dark time--the lego wars--giant tanks of red and green careening on plug-in tires across black and white and black and white and black and white, till *SMASH*--broken-off bits of 09/21/2017 I don’t want to be rude, but fuck the Omtermet. David Foster Wallace said going on a cruise was a kind of pleasure torture, because it was all so meticulously perfect that any tiny imperfection started to seem like great opprobrium. The same thing has happened to me with this iMac, the second new one I’ve had in my home in the last few weeks. I bought a refurb one, and there was the usual blotchy dark curtaining of the screen, but it really didn’t bother me. I got a bug up my ass that said I’d rather have a MacBook Pro, because that’s how I was used to typing and because I figured because it was smaller it would be more likely to have a more uniform screen. Well it turns out the entry-level Macbook Pro is startlingly underpowered, the trackpad feels kind of cheap, and the screen was even more noticeably blotchy. Oh, and the keyboard is a pain. So I took it back to exchange it for another iMac, but this time I opted for a non-refurb (aka, a brand fucking new one) because I didn’t want to have to wait because I am like a little baby when it comes to waiting for the shiny. So I paid more, but less than the Macbook Pro, and got some pink Beats headphones to give to Megan who is pissed off at me right now anyway even though I also bought her tacos from a fucking truck on the street in Milwaukee last night. So I figured hey, it’s not even a refurb, maybe it’ll have a better screen because maybe that’s why that first one was returned in the first place, because probably someone as spastically picayune as me was the one who had bought it and returned it, and—but no. This one’s screen is worse. It’s dark and orange on the left, and bright and green-blue on the right. A lot? No. Would normal people notice it? I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. But I do. And that’s the mind virus I have. You tell me there’s continents across the sea, wondrous lands of coral and blazing white sand, with whirling terns and amazing songs, and all I can see is the suburban garage in front of me. You tell me there’s people being polished clean off the face of the earth by one, two, three, four, five fucking hurricanes in a row, and all I can see is the threat that as all this shit gets worse, eventually more and more people are going to want to move to Wisconsin, and let me guess whether they’re going to displace rich people or poor people who’ve spent all their paltry savings on one ultimately unsatisfying Apple product after another. Fuck you, Tim Cook. You’re so enlightened and gay and heartfelt and you care about the gays and the immigrants, and I’m addicted to your stupid shiny shit and I never have any leftover money to spare because it all goes to you. Unless it goes to Olympus, but I think I’m kind of over that. I don’t look good but I don’t look bad. I’m not old but I’m not young. I’m not poor, but I’m not not poor. I got this mind virus, though. We might have to try to survive a nuclear war soon, and all I can think about is whether I would get something the same, worse, or better, if I go to the Apple store and tell them I want a new computer because this one’s defective and it’s got a warranty, ain’t it? And those kids that work there, I don’t know... There’s something wrong with them. They’re all, what did that one guy that Megan likes say? They’re all smiling like they got fish hooks in the corners of their mouths. Why do I feel like I have to know all about the latest Apple products anyway? Remember the LC-475? It was a hunk of raptraddly shit compared to these slender blades they got now, and I wouldn’t ever have dreamed of expecting the monitor to look good, let alone perfect. And I’m not any happier now than I was then. I mean yeah, I got a better job, but I still spend all my god damned money. I thought this might help. It didn’t really help. I still got THE QUESTION looming over my head, way more huge and pervasive and menacing than anything that could possibly ever matter. I got a mind virus but maybe it’s like a mind cancer at this point. It’s like a cloud of diffuse and stealthy pain. Something deadly that I’ve gotten used to. O how it scrapes me out like a gnat-circled oyster shell