081718 ok this train has not been cleaned in a while. and/or the guy in front of me smells like old wet shoes. quick review of things i’ve learned from The Exercise: - self-loathing presages urge to give up - get up/get started right away, especially if there’s dreams involved. Snooze kills. - being away from home/routine makes everything more difficult, especially the non-morning stuff - KEEP GOING BEYOND (or before, in the case of getting started) THE MOMENT OF PERFECTION. If you get in the habit of stopping at the perfect stopping place and basking in the moment of perfection, the moment of perfection will become poisonous and choke you up and stop you from developing a fluidity habit. ok, I’ll have more to say at 10:00 (with before then as an option of course), and even if I don’t, I’ll see you then. DID I MENTION IT FUCKING STINKS IN HERE. I’m going to eat my cinnamon raisin biscuit from hardees in anna that my mom got me now. I feel like a sleek sausage. a sagging old man in a boy’s face what if someone saw a dead body out the train window, and shouted it out what if you knew you were going to slam into that giant spring thing in chicago, and just barely had time to get into blast position. the conductor guy was by your seat so you moved over to let him sit down and brace himself too funny how the easiest thing in the world is the hardest thing in the room if you’re not sure why you’re doing it; and yet, obsessing about why you’re doing it doesn’t make it any easier. to add to the above list: - your subconscious doesn’t really care if it’s “writing” or not; a daydream or a conversation is fine. writing is making a commitment to a particular daydream. and commitment as we all know brings turmoil, trouble, tedium, and weird smells. - you have to forget about the micro and let the micro take care of itself. the commitment you need to remember is the macro: one day at a time, each day, you just CARVE OUT THE TIME. Just insist on that one little thing, like taking a pill that you know will help your quality of life. And then once you swallow the pill, you don’t have to follow it down your own throat and interrogate it constantly. You can just let it do its thing. And here’s its thing: **“anything at all that isn’t nonsense”** <-- you really need to remind yourself of that, like, every single fucking time, because if you forget that, you will be caught up in the micro, and you will get frozen again. And it takes a while, sometimes years, to get unfrozen again, and you can’t really count on anyone else to come along and pop your bubble this time. Only you can unfreeze yourself. Well I mean, not to put too dire a point on it; other people can and will help; in fact, if it weren’t for other people, the pointlessness would probably rise up over the level of the cup and just become too too much, and you would just shut the whole thing down and flush your daily pills down the drain, environment and water supply be damned. But other people do still exist, and you do still love and hate them and be fascinated by them, and so that’s why your subconscious, wild pony that it still is, can still be convinced by your loving crotch and legs and heels and lanky elbows and god-damnedest ornery crotchety just fucking hanging on determination, to commit to a particular daydream, even if there’s no daydream police in sight, and no one to enforce it, and it’s used to being a wild pony, cantering around free AF in the wild spinach fields by the sea of graffiti. but if you remember that the micro really is free of all pressure of meaning and allegory and wisdom and significance, you really will be fine if you just take the fucking pill every day. and let it do its thing. and remember that its thing STARTS BEFORE and ENDS AFTER the moment of perfection, if there is one. which, weirdly, there usually is, even if it’s a little one. It’s kinda like clouds. Most skies have clouds, even if they’re little ones. And sometimes they’re-- I got six minutes to go on this thing here and maybe a half hour or so until the Champaign station stop where I have to feign death again to try to psychically repel anyone from sitting next to me, so I’m going to have to acknowledge the existence of the female human creature in the seat one up and to left of mine. And why is the small Laotian woman standing up in her seat? And why did we just slow way the fuck down to go by that train that looked like a bridge? Listening to Eric Johnson with headphones on a train feels mildly rejuvenating, like a tea with cinnamon or ginger in it. Bracing. Joyful without being too doofusy. Anhyway, she’s large and round-rect of build. She has mostly close shaved hair on the sides of her head, and kinf of a fuzzy helm on top. Why are we going so slow? The Laotian woman is talking to someone who is not standing up in the seat next to her. Almost seems to be some sort of marital prcediure or inter-generational negotiation of some sort. The old wide white guy whose name is Brian came back from the lavatory. I hope he doesn’t eat any more snacks, because he crumples the snack sack loudly and eats with an obnoxiously regular rhythm and gives each finger a loud smack when he’s done. He talks in a grumbly tenor but his crennellated old white headed wife produces no audible vowels or in fact any consonants at all except sibilants. They’re a weird pair of instruments, to be sure. But yeah, so my large soft not old but not young black woman is still crocheting. She has her blanket, it must be about 75% done, all on her lap as if she’s taking a nap, but she’s not, she’s crocheting, and she has the little stick that you use for that and its plastic cream colored handle looks like a tampon applicator and the blanket’s wools are atlantic ocean slate and faded teal cyan and two slatey blue shades in between those two. she has thick breasts under a grey tshirt with helvetica thin words on it. when she raises her left arm to scratch her head or adjust the seat back tray table or something, the extra flesh of her upper arm hangs down and moves with the rhythm of the train. and i love her for all of that. she’s going to chicago. well, most of us are. there’s wide gray clouds all over central illinois, and the sun slid under here somehow and is making everything look faraway oh yeah i forgot. she has grey socks with little kissy lip prints all over them. sometimes when she’s listening to music and absorbed in her crocheting, she squnches her toes repeatedly to the beat of the music. it’s like they’re waving at me like goofily recalcitrant little kids across the aisle seeing a simian lipsmacking lackadaisical walrus like brian wipe hamburger crumbs off his seat onto the train floor sure makes you wanna think twice about eating out of boredom. You think you’re special? The clueless guy in front of me went to southern Illinois because his nephew got divorced and needed to talk to someone. He’s on his way back to New York and as we’re slowly approaching Chicago union station he wonders if you can go to the top of the Sears tower. He’s retired. He has said words like love and reassurance in conversation with the old gray guitar player sitting next to him. He’s retired. He also just told a story about a girl “prettier than shit” who punched him so hard in the jaw he took a knee. He says he never took it personally though. “You’d be surprised how distraught people are. In certain situations.” He keeps asking the guitar player in the green shirt all kinds of questions about Amtrak, Metra, the Cubs, etc. Which trains have bunk beds and shit. Guitar tells him about how the Rams left STL for la, and now they got a stadium without a football team. Huh. Backing into the station now. Finally. Gather your stuff. Please don’t block the aisles.