080818 let's just stay in bed all day no but seriously. let’s slow down today. let’s really not try today, this morning, for a change no word count. no time buzz no chasing the thoughts let go every time i say let go, a million awesome images already whizzed past the creation of a universe is a fast and slow thing can you mix writing and meditation or are they two opposing magnets? can writing be the brain massage? does asking a question somehow negate or ameliorate or neutralize the sawtooth malign of the deadly equals sign of “to be”? it’s shockingly difficult not to try to be clever. it’s shockingly difficult not to be in love with the instrument, and therefore to hate the instrument when “it” doesn’t work properly. arrange the cards like this: place of the way roc city room full of a thousand voices they make a nice totem pole of psycho-intellectual weirdness. a nice tall picture. the top of rock city (in the square edition) looks as though it blends right into the place: the cut off star almost lines up with the “k.” swimming pool blue under sun gold yellow sadness of swimming pool past echoes of screams and laughter fading into tufts of grass, dirt, heat, humidity, bugs, slowness, age, impending death. when am i going to actually start reducing this big bubble gut i’ve been developing? who cares? going to missouri is so different now. it has a hospital pall over it. clumps and dirt and bugs and heat where the pool used to be. the pool used to be the focal point of virility, jubilance, and plenty. now it’s a hot abandoned airstrip where nobody goes. a blank green rectangle open to the cruelty of the sky. don’s as old as a cicada shell. mom’s still mom but those lines around her mouth have deepened and hardened into a little volcano of accepting the inevitable. dad’s penultimate drinking and swearing irreverence has softened into a kind of sad mirth; he seems to have traded some originality for a manageable form of inherited cynicism. ruth’s old and in pain and alternates between maudlin and just damn near mean. she gets her feelings hurt as easily as when we were little kids, again. she doesn’t get the jokes as much anymore, or at least is less enthusiastic about pretending to. the cursor blinks the same speed no matter what state you’re in slow down today just for fun, let a bunch of thoughts and images go. let them go. like softshell crabs you’re not gonna eat today for a change. my mind is really cantankerous with itself this morning. maybe that means i can actually get some schoolwork done. frustration with this other so-called work could-- oh yeah, i just remembered. That was what I wanted to focus on for a little bit this morning. Yesterday, I said why I did and/or continue to do (where “do” means spend time and attention on I guess) various *other* jobs, but I didn’t get as far as why I have been doing, or want to have been doing, or plan to continue doing “this” one (where “this” means “writing,” whatever that ends up meaning—well, for now, it means waking up early and sitting here typing, and then planning out a solid fifteen minute chunk during the day to do the same, no matter what. And that’s been kind of rewarding, for the most part, and I’m kind of “proud” of myself for having been able to maintain it for longer than usual, this time, mostly because of that thing Dorothea said about “succeed or quit.” And later today I plan to read more of what she said to get some guidance about what to do next. Why am I putting so much weight and faith in Dorothea? Why not, I guess). So... why? slow down get a new form of sensual that ≠ drunk take a walk with your shirt unbuttoned slow down i think you can accomplish well over half of what getting drunk accomplishes just by slowing down it’s a little harder (and easier) than it sounds like writing, it’s sometimes hard *because* it’s so easy. why do i want to do either of them? write? and slow down and be sensual and be aware and feel things and see images and relate to the buzz of bugs around me and touch and be touched by other people? why do i need to play legos with someone else? why did me & my brother need to do that back then, and why do lib & cel do that now? why do i care if anyone else knows that one time i caught a glimpse of a place that was bigger on the inside than on the outside? why do i want to somehow “share” that with someone? i want to prove that i was here, but not in the sense of just defacing the dripping cave walls with “So and so was here”— in the sense of what, then? what else is there, really? what can you “say” about the cave that the cave isn’t already doing by itself? slow down this morning just for fun it’s ok that you don’t feel perfect there’s still some hesitation, rough bark of frustration it’s ok you’re still alive and can still take a walk and you do have work to do the world is a scary place these days. was it always? it seems worse now. reading anything relating to “news” (and that’s such a different word than it used to be; it could mean practically anything now, depending on your browser history) just saps the energy, makes you think your kids are going to be gap-toothed diabetic peasants because there’s no more EPA and no more health care and no more anything that doesn’t feed mister trump’s gigantic frothing maw of pure evil greed. This internet thing, this thing that people built but feels like it was always just there, like an asphalt forest, an endless parking lot, it has so much vast wide endless noise—a room full of a trillion voices—that it kinda makes you feel like there’s nothing to be said or heard. like Isherwood said about the European mind just kind of blanking out when confronted with the unreal huge scale of America— the eye refuses to see and the ear to listen (look up the exact quote). How exactly do you slow down in the bath of all that fizzing borderless energy? How do you build a little house where you get to choose whom to open the door to, or not? How do you do that without just completely disappearing into illusion? Was everything before this internet world just a bunch of peasants living in illusion? Is the only difference that we can now see how horrible everything is, see clear evidence of how we’re constantly being raped and manipulated by the sinister few rich and powerful? Or is that just another layer of— dear god, i don’t know. that’s why I need to slow down for a minute. That’s (maybe, I’m going to say provisionally) why I still feel the need to “practice” this “writing” thing...? someone’s awake and flushing the toilet guess i’ll go, all disheveled and still with lots of work to do, for a walk. preferably a slow walk, with my shirt partly unbuttoned. but we’ll see. you’re not going to get the answer just by pounding on it, right now, necessarily. But sometimes later it bubbles up, when you’re not looking so directly at it. the pounding, if you get good at it, and do it with love but also a kind of grunting mammalian musky hardness, can be like a massage that lets you loosen up enough so that other... things... can happen....