102418 Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Thus spake the cursor on the screen in front of my face. There was a reflection of the shelf of books on the of the on the of the shelf on the behind the on the the books well FUCK! Limits of language. I want to say that in front of me (on the screen) there was a reflection of the books that were behind me (on the bookshelf). Well, there you go. Refactoring your code, or whatever. God I don’t know. What I like about mornings, as opposed to these mid day seshs is that i don’t know i feel sull i was just moving fast at the grocery store ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP through the motions of the routine of going out and doing what a peasant in a social environment does. Getting the groceries. *Selecting* them from an array that was prepared in a fashion that was somewhat orderly and somewhat capricious by a bunch of other people, most of whom are peasants like me, just in a different section of the field. Standing there at the pharmacy counter, staring straight ahead in a no-zone; an in between state of not actually living, not actually doing anything except waiting in line for certain anointed other peasants given control over a very specific domain by whoever is in charge of the peasants to give me some medicine. Is it medicine? Is it hormones? Is it drugs? What is it? What happens when you put a pill in your mouth and swallow? Why does so much of who and what we are depend on what we put into our mouths? It’s gross, really, when you think about it. What percent? 80? 90? of our daily thought energy gets focused on matters that directly concern what’s going to be put into our mouths. What is it. How we going to get it. What’s it going to do to us once it’s in there. How we going to shit it out. What we going to do with all that shit. I don’t know, dude. Life seems a little bleak still. I still got the bleakness hangover. Maybe it’s just that winter’s coming. Walking out the grocery, I can already picture the sidewalk in front of the parking lot covered in chunky gray slush. How you get your feet wet, how you get the cuffs of your pants wet when you go to the grocery store. How you track in salt and grit. How the wind follows you in and you hastily close the door and then there’s tendrils of wind that cling to you, love you, beg from you, and follow you into the kitchen, wailing with their open invisible eyes, feed me, love me, come with me, dissipate with me, and then they’re gone; they fade like a killed jedi’s cloak down into the floor. You shiver. Turn the heat up. Put the groceries away. Fuck dude. Aw fuck dude. Didn’t Dorothea say something about not coming back to the same old shit again and again. Isn’t that one of the things we’re given to work on? Does it take a little courage? Does it take a little careful, quiet, honest attention to even see if we’ve been doing that? Yes, that’s part of the thrust of the middle part of the book. Look back at your obsessions. Are you just rehashing the same old boring ones? Have you grown out of your adolescence? Maybe, maybe not, maybe a little bit but I could still-- That’s what I like about mornings. It’s easier to be honest and new in the morning. Whatever you dreamed, that’s not your safe place. Your safe place is your cynicism, your old grudges, your self-loathing, your solipsism. In the mornings, caribou, gazelle, springbok; they all prance through in their underwear. There’s kind of a musky smell. You blink the crust out of your eyes and look around at the sunrise of a new planet. You’re shipwrecked here. Might as well drag your carcass up out of this ditch, reanimate the bones of your old self, and start walking around and see what you can see. Will you be dead before nightfall? Huh. Probably. But who knows. Who knows what that’s even like. Nightfall. On this planet. You don’t know. You assume it’s a big spinning globe like all the planets you’ve been on so far; nightfall is an inevitability you’ve grown used to as a concept, utt- shut up Cel asked me this morning, when you die, do you just--stop? She said some people say you go to heaven, but what would that even mean? She said maybe they just say that because they can’t figure out the real answer and they’re just lazy. She said maybe they say that because that’s what they want to be true for the people they’ve loved. I said I don’t think we can really imagine truly just not existing anymore, and that’s why we think up stuff like heaven, but we don’t know because no one who’s not dead could possibly know; no one has ever come back to tell us. She kinda laughed and said yeah. Went over to wash off her dishes. We were eating bacon and oatmeal. I put cream in the oatmeal. She said it was good. I don’t know what else to say. Libby’s choir concert is tonight. I still got the dull dread hanging off me like a dusty cloak. Where’d that come from? Why did it, why was it not there for so long, and now just last night it came back? Fuckafino. What do you get when you cross a-- I don’t know. I don’t know what else to say. So I’m going to stop right now, and get back to work. I just have to do the work. It’s not that bad. I’d rather eat or sleep or masturbate or do drugs, but I guess I’ll just do the work instead. What the fuck. Why not. It lasts longer. Nightfall is coming, after all.