092418 i am truly so fucking exhausted i can barely see. fatigue swims around my jaw like a jelly shark. globules of it drop off my forehead and into my crumpled up eyes why am i doing this? i woke up almost completely blank i need a day or two off the weed--even taking small doses, practically microdoses (well not quite) it still has a lingering effect. i mean, it’s an effect i enjoy, primarily in the direction of calmness and general goodwill--if you do too much, the nostalgia kicks in way too hard--but even the low dose, repeatedly, can start to make you just too thick and slow. gotta take breaks. a silent, still dance: cluster of pens in a jelly jar; one of them is orange; its translucence glows like a firefly in the invisible potential of a distant storm can recall nothing of dreams except moments before the alarm: dancing in a square bare room with one of my children in my arms; swinging her around, singing “king of pain”--at least the parts i can remember from the refrain, while one of the older ones looked on in amusement. remembering my buddies from high school, having their energy transfer to my kids across the gulf of years. i did have some good friends. wow, yeah, i really just don’t have anything today. I’m going to have invoke the jelly-biscuit normalcy of letting this be as useless as it wants to be, I guess. Just the fact of being here at all is all I can count on today, I guess. The lowest common denominator of the morning sesh. I got up. I got out of bed, even though the powerful whirlpool of sleep still pulls on my legs, my lungs, my back--pulls me back towards the comforting egg of oblivion. it reminds me of seattle. Remember Seattle? Trying to open my eyes. waking in a steaming car, dexter in the back seat radiating mammalian warmth. the streaked watercolor sky so wan and neutral. surrounded by strangers stirring around me, stirring their coffee. the gap-toothed sidewalk at once so homely and foreign. so familiar yet faraway. dilapidated houses beckoning almost cruelly with the potential to be a home. rent for a single skyrocketing beyond what i’d paid in the midwest for a whole rambling apartment. the helicopter of the morning circling around my buzzing head. away from the humble houses, on toward work; a spaghetti mess of long, serpentine highways, threaded together in inscrutable knots of hissing sleek traffic, gray noise under a gray sky. the lighted segments of what time it was bobbing like a comet in the dashboard. at least i’m in control of the car. feeling utterly and comletely free, because no one knew or cared who or what i was. zero expectations. i had a car; that was what separated me from the hordes of other invisible people, the ones who caught the bus to their jobs from the temp agency. driving til i found the one warehouse out of dozens of warehouses. going into one of those warehouses that a fully-developed person would drive by, or ride the train by and stare idly at for a moment and then forget. having the inside of that warehouse be a real place. like going in a stage set, going in a background but having the painted generic scenery come to life and tell you what to do. cleaning some gigantic mysterious machine. “Oh, I guess it’s all right, I guess.” Whatever. collecting pay for that day and then never going back to that place. A few contiguous weeks at “light assembly”--standing in a line as the box of Microsoft Word 6.0 came sliding along, shoving some instruction manuals in the box, and then passing it along to the next guy. A few people make halting conversation in an environment like that. It’s not funny, and a few people sort of laugh. It goes on like this forever. After work I need to go down that hill and get me a hamburger and a mocha shake at the Burgermeister. Hey... maybe I could work here instead! It’s barely more dignified, but at least there’s people here. People that come here and look inward and speak to each other and act kind of like they know each other. Yeah. Sure. Lemme ask that guy, who looks exactly like the boss from Joe’s Volcano, if I can work here. And I’ll work here until it’s time to celebrate Dottie’s birthday, and she’ll really cry and be all touched and happy and she’ll look around her and she’ll see family where I saw randomness. And I’ll start to learn something it’ll take me decades to finish learning, and I won’t be finished even then. Even now, I’m still learning it.