111918 better late than never? what if we just skip the boring parts? i eman not the yeah those parts you can write the stupid and the boring; just skip the tedious and the oh my god if i have to type that i swear to god i’d rather just not type anything at all. skip those parts. after all nobody cares, least of all you, my dear invisible fish. tera just leapt up onto the desk. the desk is made of a plank of deskwood that i attached legs to. the legs came from an old table that i don’t use anymore because it’s too small and too big. the tabletop is in the garage i think. tera walks around and around up here. her tail makes a fossil on the balck of the screen. it looks like some artsy fartsy oh my god aint i a genius at photography type of photograph. you know the kind i mean. the kind that is so sharp it makes your eyes bleed. the kind that is a keen glimpse of our vulnerable world. that reveals the astonishingly minute fine detail of our fractal landscape the kind that’s so cooooool and vivid and makes you be all like whatever that’s cool i guess i could use that for my wallpaper. aren’t we all a little jaded? Didn’t the advent of ubiquitous imagery kind of kill the significance of images? whatever. who the fuck cares. i went to see the doctor today. he said i’m basically fine except he still doesn’t have definitive answers about y inability to pee full force and my inability to pinch a loaf without considering my life choices in the bathroom for about a half hour a day. but he listed off some options. One i don’t want to do because i don’t want to get bitch tits. Two i don’t want to do because surgery is scary and it doesn’t seem that bad yet. three he said was kind of expensive (but i mean like, isn’t that what insurance is for? Oh i guess i’m still pretty naive about stuff like that) and four is just take more of the pills i been taking, that aren’t working so well at the old dose. so we’re doing that for now. whatever. mdedifdnvdindfindicndicn fuck me fuck me fuck fuck fuck i am finding this weirdly difficult right now, not because it is hard but because it is pointless. it’s like eating cardboard. it’s like pet fish. sure, they’re pretty. so what. this isn’t even pretty. it’s like flying a plane when nothing goes wrong, only without all the cool status and controls and there’s nobody’s life at stake. it’s a dumb game. i really don’t get how this is helping me become a writer. i really don’t see how this is helping me become a writer. is it that it’s up to the point where i really need to be doing something else with it but I don’t want to yet beceause that seems like work? But here’s the rub: i’m lazy and i don’t want to bother explaining what the rub is. hey, maybe that’s part of the essence of poetry: just like henry ford (we were told) was such a genius to make the assembly line *because he wanted to do less work,* maybe poets create poetry, say so much in such a short space of words, making every word work, because they *can’t be bothered to explain everything in a whole bunch of words!* They’re like, yeah, i kind of have to say this, but how can i cut out *everything that isn’t absolutely necessary* so that I can get it out and over with and then go back to thinking or daydreaming or reading or fucking or inventing something or playing with my kids or doing drugs or being a doctor or whatever else it is that poets do. I guess if nothing else, i could practice typing with more of my fingers. That would probably help my left hand especially, which is the one that gets the weird ache in between its fingers every now and then, when I type too much in that cramped crabbed clawlike position that i tend to default to as a result of needing to type fast but being unable to move my leftmost fingers over and being unable to move my whole hand (or unwilling anyway) and so the result is that my palm stays put on my cushy palm rest (which maybe that’s part of the problem--when you typed on a typewriter, your hands by god *floated in the air* and you *liked* it, by god) while my two fingers that actually do all the fucking work around here contort themselves over to such environs as the w, the s, the a, the q, the x and the z. It hurts, and, like my prostate, it’s just another sick reminder that I’m fucking old. I’m not fucking old, though, that’s the cruelty of it. Is there no age at which we stop ingenuously thinking we’re old when we’re not? When do we really get to say we’re old? When we can compare ourselves to a glacier and come out the wiser for experience? i don’t know, but i still don’t feel much closer to being able to be a writer. Maybe “be” is the wrong word. Maybe this has just become work because I’ve forgotten the fun part of how to do it, and I’ve just been focusing on doing it period, and the fact that it’s so easy has once again perversely turned into the very thing that makes it difficut. But at least my laundry is done. I can finish this shit up and get to bed. I hope everything goes ok tomorrow. I hope i can drive long enough and take enough breaks and hopefully not have to get a room and waste almost all of my trip in driving time. I hope we don’t fly off the road into a ditch. I hope i can stay awake and lucky enough not to have that happen. If that happens, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault; it’s mine. I should have known better. Or else I just got unlucky and then it’s no one’s fault. Is anything ever anyone’s fault? I feel like this is a question that is more frequently answered by rage and righteousness than by any sort of reason or even ethos. Good lord, we have a long way to go.