092118 I skipped my morning sesh today. I failed to do it. I failed. Well, Megan hadda goda jazz band which meant getting up even earlier than usual, and man, my head was just so swirling with fatigue, I just, man, I just couldn’t get up and over the sweet sweet gravity. But I’m a do it now, because of two things: 1. I remembered while in the shower that it’s not about creating a collection of essays. It’s not about producing fine products. It’s not about expectations. The only expectation is just to type words for fifteen minutes. For real. That’s *it.* As long, that is, as it’s not *complete* nonsense. It’s fish food, it’s not a finished art project to sell at a gallery of fish-themed art. 2. It’s so quiet in here. So peaceful in here. The wind last night blew away the big lump of hot hazy air that had settled on top of us. Everyone is at school and seems basically OK. Millie has that thing with her lungs, Megan has that heartache because of another goddamned wimpy boy being “confused,” Cel is still getting over strep and said her throat feels tickly again, dammit, and Libby, actually Libby hasn’t complained about a single thing since going back to her Muskego school after the experiment with that shabby so-called STEM academy. And so now everyone’s got their backpacks and packed off to where they’re supposed to go, and hopefully I’ve gotten the hell out of their way enough to where they’ll be able to resist the programming enough to get something like a real education. Now the playful fat fingers of the breeze are billowing out the bathroom curtain, like invisible mischeivous kids running up under the skirts of the Nurse and saying “A sail! A sail!” Down by the viaducts of my dream, Van is singing and my speakers sound good, even with my old Yamaha receiver with its modest amber lights harking back to another time, another age, when I had money and time to blow and friends to blow it on and with. And I got two cats in here, one that looks like she kinda wants to kill me but in a more or less friendly way. She meowed at me thru the basement window when I was putting my laundry in. And the other one that looks like a bored meatloaf. Now she’s watching cat TV: staring out through the screen door at the long hair of the unmowed commons. And on the other side of the commons, the trees, a clump of trees that Muskego hasn’t managed to chop down yet, are waving at us. They’re saying hi, hey, ho, what’s up, yo, we’re trees and the breeze is fucking with us, and we’re kinda digging it, what’s up with you? And so that’s why I’m here. Halfway through getting started on grading. Doing my work, doing my homework. Not young and meaty like the last time I wrote that. But not frail yet either. Close enough to know that there will be a time when I can’t do any of this. I guess that’s OK. OR MAYBE IT ISN’T! Fuck knows. I don’t have to pretend to be enlightened, even though I’m listening to *Enlightenment.* See me through one day at a time. Maybe I won’t go gently, I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to see. Megan’s whole thing with being sad about that boy. What does it remind me of? That is, what does it remind me of that I feel like typing about right now? I don’t think it’s quite a Jennifer Cain analog. At the time, sitting in the little red bathroom with the unburned little red fire plug candle, I kinda felt like I knew I was crying not about Jennifer, bless her grown-up heart, but about the lost opportunity. Like my Dad said about having had contact lenses for a while but it didn’t work out, referring to some book or play I don’t remember, “like I knew something different for a moment, and then I lost it again.” And how when he said that, Ruth was like half-ironic “awwwww” but you could see it wasn’t really ironic. Like she got that, she felt that, and it hurts in a low slow way when you can get and feel that feeling. Being human is so weird. It’s not a Sheri Grable thing either. I knew what was up with that. I wasn’t old enough, worldly enough, dirty enough, adult enough, or tough enough for her. I got that right away. There was no illusion there. I was like a little boy in a secret garden, playing the piano and trying to get up the nerve to go outside, and she was like, you’re cute. See you later. Good luck with the piano, you’re really good. And she wasn’t lying. That’s what I didn’t understand at the time. What I didn’t understand at the time was that all those girls were so smart and honest and real and wise. I was still stuck in narcissistic boyhood, but I had a penis and curiosity and a sense of drama, and so I was out there in the same, or at least overlapping with the same nightlit neon pot-sneaking broadway-cruising world as them, but I didn’t have any goddamned idea what I was doing out there. It was a story to me. I was Nemo in his pajamas out there. They were kind to me. They made sure I got back to my room to get tucked in on time. I made up stories to tell myself to make it seem like I was as growed up as them, but I just wasn’t. And that’s the part that Megan’s stuff reminds me of. These stupid boys. I was so just like them. Thinking I was so smart. Thinking I was so important. Thinking the girls were the extras in my movie star story. Thinking I even had the slightest idea of what the world was all about, what it involved. Thinking it was somebody else’s job to keep me entertained, make my ego big, make me think I was a real man—I expected them to play all those roles, without even realizing I was demanding it, and failing to have a wide enough field of view to even conceive of the necessity of trying to understand why it was an absurd demand. Thinking I was owed love and respect and fawning support and awe, even though I hadn’t done SHIT to earn any of that. Thinking just because I was cute and got 99 percentile on those stupid tests that I should be allowed to just pick a girlfriend like a grape. Turtle breath. Ferret face. I learned the wrong lesson from her. Maybe we’ll start with that next time. Said the therapist who is so kind to me. The insurance pays her for it though, so I don’t have to feel bad. There’s no confusion here now, anyway.