062419 On the other hand, Anne is good with and for the kids, and feels like family. I don’t have to be like I used to be and not be able to remain myself if I let someone else into my life yknow. I feel bad for being responsible for us not staying the third day. Megan I know will be fine going back. Millie could probably go either way. Pretty sure the littles would love to stay, but I said some dumb excuse about a meeting to say i had to get back tomorrow. I’m kind of dumb. Also remind me to tell you how bad ass it was to pop my finger back into joint, notwithstanding how fucking lame it was that I slipped and fell on a boulder in the first place. Lucky i didn’t concuss my dang self. And I have a nice little bloody hole in my elbow too. 062319 Megan feels unloved by her sisters. And doesn’t even want to come down here with us anymore. Wants to retreat to the comfort of her friends. That breaks my fucking heart and makes me feel bereft and like an illusion is being murdered, killed like an innocent dog. Going to Anne’s family bbq was awkward and weird except for the littles’ swimming and maybe a little bit the others talking. Anne didn’t introduce us and I made no effort to talk to any of them. Carol said “that’s mat and his family” to someone while I was getting food, and I turned around and said hi, and they basically just stared at me for a second. Not eating a shit ton at supper does no good if you’re just going to go home and eat a FUCKING SHIT ton of snacks before bed. Heartburn and heartache at 3 am, dreading going to this hotel with Anne and boys for two nights. Going to be close awkward quarters for my failure to tie my family together harmoniously; my inadequacy as ersatz matriarch. I miss my people that I never quite found. My queer family. Reading Isherwood went from inspiring to depressing. I’m too god damned old to just go along and do whatever a woman says. I’m not getting fucking married, because i don’t want to. Yes, I’m terrified of getting old and not having anyone to take care of me. And yet. Megan said her internet friend said she had to start being authoritative because “obviously no one else in that house is.” Fuck that and fuck them. Snotty little know it alls. What the fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck you up the fucking ass ass ass ass let’s see you have a perfect family and a perfect life you entitled little judgmental shits. Apple’s implementation of swipe typing absolutely REFUSES to swear AT ALL, and that fills me with righteous rage. Fuck fuck fuck fuck you Apple. It won’t even say “you” after you force it to say “fuck.” It can’t even say ass at all. What a bunch of manually pecked out SHIT. and I (obviously) can't write. So then what are you supposed to do? Something else, I guess. Like the rest of the fucking fucked up world. Hearing carol talk I can hear where anne gets it from: always having an answer, always an assertion, always the moral compass and everyone else's too. It's not arrogance or machismo, just strongly held belief. I find it so tiresome. It's like herbicide for the weeds of mystery. But then again, Megan just got a call from one of the snotty little internet friends saying the doctors think her mom’s MS is so bad they don’t think she’ll wake up from the coma she’s in. So I mean. Spouting off some specious advice about someone else’s family drama is forgiveable I guess. Megan texted me at 3:49 am to tell me that, maybe not expecting me to answer? But I did and that was the end of that converesation between me and her for now. 061719 Steaming Cup, waiting for Lincoln to get the brakes and stuff done. Mostly i look around and see examples of people i don’t want to become: “some old guy next to me” with a hawaiian print shirt and a macbook pro a thickset man with a weathered face and “I ❤️ metallica” tshirt, sitting on the couch by the window, taking a deliberate drink of his coffee once every 10 seconds, until it’s gone, then he gets up and leaves. It’s in his blood now, doing the thing that the chemicals in coffee do to people; another person going around with those chemicals having been sucked in a yellow pencil of a young woman with straight hair straight face nodding acquiescence disguised as listening; receiving a one-way flow of wisdom from a buzz-cutted tasteful-facial-hair-having white guy on the approaching side of middle age any number of “dowdy frumpy women” like isherwood said any number of men with ridiculously huge bellies. how the fuck do you end up with a belly like that? wtf? and no, having a big thick beard doesn’t make it any better; it makes it worse myself the only human in here i’m really enamored of is literally a baby, chilling in a stroller, working very hard but not anxiously to learn all about pushing buttons on a remote control. her big deer eyes look up and around, taking everything in, while she waits for her mom to pick up the remote again and give it back to her again. she gets fussy and squeals a bit and mom says for the benefit of anyone who happens to be listening (and you can tell she knows someone probably is) “You do not need to behave that way. You are not hurt.” but all those people are real people; how can i write or teach if i can’t see that? get inside and look out from their little eyeball windows? if i’m too repulsed and afraid of my own humanity to relax in someone else’s shitty apartment or haunted grand hotel? until you’ve *been* everybody, you can’t make a legitimate judgment about *becoming* anybody. 061619 well ok lib & cel came down and said “we want to spend time with you” — took them for a chilly walk in mke, went to george webb and we were waited on by a plump libghtskinned black gril in a dirty apron who was (she said) “fresh out of training.” It was sketchy and grimy and kind of good. Still feeling a bit self-pitying and anxious and empty and regretful. Feel like I never give millie enough credit or attention and there’s something pathetic about that. 061619 Fathers day. Millie’s the only one of the lot who didn’t basically completely ignore me all day. I have basically lost Megan. She’s gotten what information she needed out of me about life and sex and drugs and regret, has latched onto her older pot smoking friends, and is on her way into unfettered narcissistic pleasure seeking. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted. I’m never wrong about these things, so I won’t even bother having the argument with myself about whether I’m being hysterical. I’m not. In the place of the wild optimism her four and a half pound aura of infinite wonder gave birth to is a turbid, grieving ache. The first of four to come, I presume? God why can I not be honest without being so fucking sappy. 061219 You don’t have to BE an asshole to be ACTING like an asshole. 061119 Unemotional fact: if there’s chips, Megan will eat them. What I do with that information is up to me. 061119 1. What experiences, however mundane, gave you pleasure? Mowing the lawn. 2. What praise and feedback did you receive? Rick sent me two more “shout outs” from the parent/student survey (and I’m pretty sure one of them was from Mya’s mom) 3. What were the moments of pure good fortune? It didn’t rain (long enough to get the lawn mowed) but it did cool off and the bathroom curtain got huge with breezes 4. What were your achievements, however small? Met with AJ to plan next steps for learner profile summer project 5. What made you feel grateful? I’m still able to take a decent walk 6. How did you express kindness? I listened to AJ instead of just talking to myself, and brought mildog to the Y, and agreed to take Lacey home so she could come over and hang out with libdog 061019 Best quote from final faculty meeting of 2019: > Giving birth to someone who can solve the rubic’s cube... was how I solved it! Lisa Diamantopoulos 060819 Even though ai and neural nets exist now, invented and developed by somebody besides me obviously, I still want to have my teh-dsa and i still don’t know how to make it or what it is. i mean i know it when i see it but i rarely see it anymore. 060819 I don’t know why I dislike Millie’s boyfriend so much, but I can barely even muster the motivation to be polite to him, to even acknowledge his presence. He reminds me of what I like least about myself around his age. 060819 Starflight has limited resolution—big chunks were the elements of its fractal generator, and it opened the imagination wide. Text has limited entropy—boring like chess pieces on a grid—and yet it opens wide the imagination. It’s like the piano player in that movie—88 keys is the definition of the universe, and he was comfortable within that. Physical infinitude disintegrated his logical infinitude. Yet somehow this analogy is unsatisfying. 060719 dan savage said to someone, I don’t think you need a support group. you’ve had experience, you know who you are, you’ve fiugured out what you want, you don’t need to debate with yourself endlessly or justify it to anyone; just go out and get it now! and i was like, yah, you’re right, i shouldn‘t marry her. unless she reveals some pretty big fucking secrets that somehow over the course of half a lifetime i completely missed 060619 You sit on the toilet and wonder About certain things, And you notice yourself wondering about them, And you wonder whether wondering about them indicates that you are kind of smart, And you think it kind of does (Probably just because of the sensation of wondering), But then it occurs to you that maybe the things you were wondering about are completely Mundane and pointless, Fascinating only to you (And not because you’re a super genius but because they’re obvious and boring), And the fact that you’re wondering about the implications of wondering about them Could simply mean that you’re a fucking simpleton, But then you latch onto the hope that maybe thinking *that* means you’re kind of smart, And so on. Somewhere among the loops of this particular infinite spiral, you hope you can find an exit ramp So you can get off the goddamn toilet and go do something else. 060219 It’s pretty much impossible to slam a curtain. 060219 On my last day as an ARC, stop at Dottie’s and there’s an ad on the fucking gas station TV thing for Amazon hiring delivery drivers. Fuck off Amazon. 060119 Lib & Cel are giving the neighbor girls (from both sides) a tour of the house. “Our kitchens are back to back!” [Lib] proclaims, and for some reason that makes me incredibly happy. Like campground-at-night happy. Anne has this vision of us being old and poring over seed catalogs and living in the travel trailer while renting out our property to hunters in the summer or whatever, and that all makes sense, but I can’t quite see myself in it. And I’ve had shall we say some bad experiences with forcing myself to see myself in something before. With warping myself to fit the curves of someone else’s story—if it even is their story—maybe it’s just a parody, a caricature of a story hastily assembled out of the fear of loneliness mixed with habitual obedience, crafted with as much skill as a house made out of a ball-point square with a triangle on top and a scribble of smoke coming out. Thunder and lightning. Megan races out the front door to go to half price books and rochambo with her friends. One of the girls in the basement screams. One of them says, “I love the smell of basements. Oh my god, it smells so good right here!” Millie made fried rice. She had little piles of square-hewn carrots and potatoes, and sugar snap peas all lined up while the rice was cooking. I mean she has the whole house planned out. “You can have the upper right room for writing.” But what am I supposed to write about? Seeds? I’ve never been able to write properly with a proper woman in the house. I don’t see why I would think it would work this time. I’m not saying I’m content. I guess I’m not ok with being entirely post-sexual after all. But the changes I want to make—I’m not sure I can bullshit them into being *her* changes, even if financially it could be a huge boon to me. Take advantage of her loneliness to save my ass from never being able to retire and relax? I mean it makes a kind of sense, but I don’t know if I could live with myself. I already made a desperate compromise once, and it literally almost killed me. And even if I didn’t die, I had nightmares for years. And my kids got fucked up because of it. So yeah, with whatever vigor and life-force I have left in however many decades of dilapidation I have left before I’m so brittle and disintegrated it doesn’t matter any more, I’d really like to at least have the *chance* to finish writing my *own* story. Even if I have to do it in some shitty apartment, and not in the upper right room of a perfect, quaint farmhouse near Sam A Baker or whatever. I still haven’t found the rest of *my* people, and I’m still not dead yet, so I still have some work (and fucking play, by God) to do. How many times do I have to revisit “what I want” vs “what I think I should want” for fucks sake. Will I get that down before I’m 92? Well, gotta keep trying. And the corrolary or inverse or converse (I never could get those straight), “if someone else doesn’t like it, that doesn’t mean I can’t.” Can you believe she had the sheer obtuseness to ask me in a text, “When did you get so darn suspicious and cynical?” Uh, gee. I don’t know. WHEN THE FUCK DO YOU THINK? ---- You say you want to live someplace new, someplace old, someplace special. Well guess what? You could start a little closer to home. Instead of scouring MKE and UES and XMD for the perfect hole, juggling thoughts of neighbors and smoke and kids and costs and rooms and walls, you could start with the one big wet floppy wall around you everywhere you go. Remodel your skin bag, my friend. It’s free—no money, just takes some work.