091718 ok well i’m not grading tonight. my thing where i get caught up on grading lasted literally ONE DAY. But here’s the thing: I really needed to take a walk. I really needed to make my kids supper. I really needed to tuck the littles into bed and listen to them for a few minutes. I really need to sit here and do this. I’m not sure why, but I do. Is that a lie? OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that I DO know why I need to do this. First, I can vacuum clean all the other junk I mentioned out of my head rather rapidly, because it all but goes without saying: walk - mental and physical health supper - development of healthy kids and family bed & listen - all of the above SO that leaves sit here and do this. Why? Why is it important? Well. Hm. Let’s see. Because I need to stay in touch with the words. Why? They’re an obsolete technology. All the new kids are being haughty and smart and superior and patronizing and pedantic and self-righteous because they do CODING or PROGRAMMING, not just dumb old writing. You’re like, oooh, I finally learned how to rub a piece of coal on concrete to make a mark! and meanwhile they’re all like, yeah, we’re launching a spaceship to go to Mars and communicate with gravitrons and shit. I mean, whatever. Why do I need to do this? Is it because I refuse to give up on a fantasy? Some kind of fantasy of being some kind of celebrated tortured artist hidden genius? I honestly don’t think that’s fully it anymore. I mean, there will always be a little part of it that is that, and you know what? I’m not torturing myself over it anymore. It’s like there will always be a little bit of my human relationships that are driven by jealousy, but as I get older that part gets a) less maddeningly intense, and b) less of a problem even if it does still exist. I think you call that “acceptance.” Like I used to spend so much heat and passion just trying to beat it into submission, to fight it, to deny it, to destroy it, and I punched so hard at that membrane I broke right through and went all the way to the other side where I promptly began to (or continued to, actually) eroticize it—like I always eroticized it pretty much, pretty much always anyway, as long as I can retrospectively remember, but there came a point where all my pathetic writhing squirming resistance just went BLIP into the negative space, and it became a thing in itself, for itself, and I went into it hungrily because I was so utterly unmanned by it and it seemed like some kind of salvation. No it didn’t SEEM like anything; it WAS the salvation because it was the only thing that worked. Going deep into the jealousy was the only way I could get hard and get excited and feel connected and vital and alive in the shambles of a leftover outhouse of a piece of shit dumpster in the middle of a shitty clearing covered with plastic buckets and scrap lumber and rusty nails and shit that my marriage had become. And now? It’s more of a funny thing. Like I could (OH MY GOD THIS KEYBOARD AND THIS GROTESQUELY ENORMOUS TRACKPAD ARE SO UTTERLY FUCKING RETARDED FUCK YOU APPLE) see still playing around with the jealousy, but I know I will never go as far with it as I did before. Not because I can’t, although maybe I can’t (there’s more of that wry acceptance for ya). More because there’s no reason to. It’s like, I went too far and now I learned what too far is, and there’s no reason for me to repeat that. I’m not the sort of person who has to keep putting his hand on the stove burner, I guess. At least not for that. Not for something as horrible and pathetic and wormy and feverish and stressful and mud-caked and depressing and cloaked and veiled and turgid and fervent and furtive as that. I might do all kinds of stupid shit again, but not that. That’s one thing I can thank her for, I guess. Is I actually learned something. I haven’t had one of those dreams for a while. I wonder why it is that I kind of don’t want to ever completely stop having them. Is it because it’s always a reminder of how comparatively sweet my life has become since she was removed from it? You know, I still can’t fully wrap my head around how awful my life had become. It’s kind of scary, actually. I was in a really shit place. I barely even felt like myself. I look back and it’s like I hardly even recognize that person seven or eight years ago as me. He was some kind of swollen baby in a sad white pale ghost body. A rapidly aging ghost with a rapidly expanding gut and sagging tits. At least now I can wear my tits out in public and they’re MINE, by god. I don’t know. What was the question? Oh yeah. Why do I feel a need to do this? I mean, does there have to be a reason? Maybe I just want to. Maybe I always kind of wanted to, but I for some reason took away my own permission to, and now I’m giving it back. I’m taking back my permission, and I’m giving it back to me, and nobody can take it away again. Nobody. And Alexa the stink-ass cat just came up here, bonked her face into my arm a few times, drank some of my water, and flopped her fat sausage-tube of a body down on the table, half over my left wrist, and her big racoon-hat tail is swishing over my hand, over the keyboard, and she’s sprawled out not giving a fuck about anything. And that’s OK with me.