092718 I’m so tired. I hafta poop. I’m so tired. I wanna scream cuz of the dishes. If every sentence is a revelation, then trying to make every sentence a revelation results in a false oracle. I’m so tired. I have suckers of tiredness entwined around my throat and heart. Cel’s packing her lunch. Having what you’re typing on the screen is a form of nakedness. It is a form of nakedness you can zap like lightning at any time, sending the fragile crystalline structure of what you imagine are thoughts into never having existed. The kettle starts to simper. I’m three days behind on grading. Cel said, Daddy! There was a dime in the freezer. It’s so cold. Feel it. Everyone already took all the ice packs. My bed gapes; the covers where I pushed them back when I rolled out are still open like a fucked anus. Wow, that’s a real enchanting image there, dude. I gotta close that up. Put the covers up so I’m not being called back to the warm fuck of being back in bed. I woke up at 5:00 because of the alarm, and said to myself I just can’t do it, blamed it on self-medication, and now it’s three and a half hours later and I could still barely get my ass out of bed. Fuck me. Now I’m doing this wrong. It’s full of interruptions as Cel gets ready for school. She keeps saying stuff. But it’s proving something: you can do it even if you don’t always do it right. At least the stuff she says is usually dealable with. Like, this time I’m just going to put my lunch in my backpack right away. Don’t get me wrong. She has real problems too. She says incredibly profound things sometimes, too. But she’s the only one still young enough to talk for a half an hour about nothing. Like the pleasant buzz of summer bugs in the trees and weeds as you lounge on a gently swelling bosom of grass, watching the clouds slip across the sky, watching the heat death of the universe. Teenagers on the other hand take too much energy. Their presence takes up too much psychic space, even when they (especially when they!) go to their rooms as soon as they get home and barely come out for two minutes to eat supper. Teenagers are very expensive in terms of psychic upkeep. They radiate selfish hunger, like all the time. They’re more gluttonous than gape-mouthed baby monsters. And they think they’re so refined. Or at least, they think they have everyone fooled. Or at least, they know they don’t have anyone fooled, least of all themselves, but they feel a heavy oppressive slow-motion panic all the time because of that. Because they know everyone can see the truth except them. Which is of course completely wrong. HA ha. I’m going to make an example out of the tutor who didn’t show up. This is before I’ve read my email, so maybe I’ll feel differently. Maybe there’s a good reason he didn’t show up yesterday. But so far the only response I know I’ve gotten to my request to my AVID site team for someone to fill in today is one “no” and everyone else hasn’t said shit. Thanks, team. I’m nervous about today’s tutorial because we don’t have a tutor and tutors are part of the experience and I don’t want to disappoint anyone. So if it ends up being just me, which it probably will, I’ll try to make it clear that “this is when the tutor would...” etc. And I’ll make an example out of that little fucker that didn’t show up. I’ll say, so you know how in AVID we talk about college and career readiness? Well here’s one thing you can do to be more ready: don’t be the person who says you’ll do something and then you don’t show up. People notice stuff like that, even if it was just a volunteering thing. Some of our tutors actually get paid, like it’s part of an internship or work study or something. Some of them don’t. It just depends on where they are coming from. But either way, if you do a good job, which basically just means show up with a good attitude and try, people notice that stuff. People make offhand comments in emails and stuff, like, oh yeah, so and so was so great, we really enjoyed having her. And the absence of those kinds of comments, even if no one explicitly says anything bad, can be in contrast a tower of fine manure. Don’t be the guy with a trail of manure behind your informal work experience. Ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong dong ding dong ding dong, oh. Every time I say to myself, time to get to work, myself says back, look at me! I’m a gently frondling reed by a lake somewhere! Don’t you just want to wander and get lost and feel the breezes and drift in an open boat all afternoon? Yes. Yes I do, you son of a bitch, you son of a bitch my deepest love. That’s what I want to do, but you know what? I have some other things I would like to do as well, and some of them, even if they hurt, even if they make my stomach twist up like a bunch of octopus hot dogs, are worth doing and can lead to some new streets and new screens and new animations and new alleys and maybe even new loves. Someone to go down by the lake with, someone to see you again with, someone I can introduce you to, and I think you two would get along, gentle lakeside weeds under the slippery clouds, my love, my forever, my forgotten, my large nameless quiet