100122 you have to be able to get simultaneoulsy inside and outside yourself let go of everything and keep moving on and carry everything with you at the same time 100222 lib & cel are downstairs singing, clanging bowls, cljckljcling back and forth making their latest breakfast recipe, while i’m up here fuzzy eyed slomo juggling a combo of words and phrases, PVC, bradycardia, central sleep apnea, deductible, specialist, nobody seems to give a shit, not concerning, underlying heart disease? they’re just going take the first thing off their list and tell me to do it and start adding up the thousands how many times did i wake up last night midstream mid dream sucking in air like an astonished cave hypoxia hypoxemia altered mood daytime fatigue long covid? work performance a dream of the girl down the street straight screaming, hi pitched fervid freakish and me saying no, no, stop, no, this is NOT acceptible, you will STOP now or this will NEVER NEVER happen again— wake, gasp, feel the pressure of my brain inside my fucking skull look around at the day and it’s all there, it’s all familiar but farther away sunlight more distant 93 million miles plus about a thousand yards eventually it’s time to get out of bed regardless of how much sleep or what quality, the checklists are all lined up like good little puppets waiting for their part of the show body involuntarily casts about for phone, ways to start checking all the things that are there to be checked today is apple picking, picking up their little friend that moved when the rent was raised. apple picking. i guess that’s a thing that could be considered redemptive if this were to be the last day. maybe every day has to have that now. one thing. one apple in the basket. maybe it always had to have that. amazing how a sudden shortage of oxygen can make you beg for redemption why does it seem to come and go? why is it only noticeably bad certain nights, weeks? 100522 Waiting for one of the girls to get out of the bathroom seems like a good enough time to contemplate being a poet again. getting my hair cut today made me feel more like being a poet again. You know, that’s a small price to pay: $40 and a drive to MKE. That young woman who cut my hair: all respect. She went to school somewhere, has a husband, doesn’t know what day it is, just knows when it’s time to be at work, is always hungry, is annoyed by her phone making noise but leaves it sitting near us (propped on the sticky-out outlet near the floor) while doing my hair because it’s on like 3%, but also her stomach makes noises that’s even louder than the phone because she’s always hungry. She said if she was a student in an online school she wouldn’t show up for live classes either. Lol. Neither would I, honestly, probably, most of the time. She looked soooo bored when I walked in but as soon as I said I didn’t want “the typical straight guy douchey haircut” everything was chipper and positive between us from then on out, perfect touch in the perfect balance. She fluffed up my hair at the end and seemed genuinely happy—at her own good work and for me and my change. Big changes come, she said, you just have to walk through them. Do you see? Do you see what I mean by wanting to be a poet again? I barely do. It’s like a compulsion. Like a drink. Like a sunny fall walk through my old hood. Looking up at the attic room where I survived the first few months of my marriage. So much has been lost. Being grateful to be still alive, even for a moment. The ringing in my ears. 100922 life just hasn’t been that fun lately i walk thru muskego and there’s bees buzzin and lavender throwin shades of nostalgia across the designated path but i’ve seen what happens when these people here— they’re nice and polite 9 times out of 10, they’ll sometimes even stop to let a bike or ped go by, but i’ve seen what happens when shit gets scary— they’re not my friends, they get real mean real fast, and i don’t feel real here all the sweet pumpkin spice signage and kids in sports suits yelling over pumpkins it’s what’s underneath it all that’s rotten or maybe it’s just me 101122 Cel read Flowers for Algernon at school and she thought it was nonfiction until I told her otherwise, but that aside—she got it, she understood that it was not just weird but sad (tho she gave first mention to the mouse dying, not Charlie, but hey—just like how when you’re a kid Charlotte’s Web is about a pig and when you’re older it’s about a girl?). She gets the thing where your brain can think about stuff that pushes up against the limits of your brain to think about stuff. So awesome. 101222 libby’s sick and i’m worried 101322 for nanowrimo i’m going to write an epic poem, probably based on bullet points that contract into outline sublevels, and it’s going to suck, and it’s not going to be about anything in particular because i’m not a part of any great stories, and the tired ass idea that “the place where nothing much was happening” is somehow capable of self-redeeming into significance, even mystery, as if there were some celestial trout watching all of this who doesn’t have our primate biases, who is fascinated by *any* roll of the dice, not just boxcars and snakeeyes, is just that: tired, ass. But that’s OK. Because I’m here and I don’t have anything else to do. Ha ha, I mean obviously but you know what I mean. I don’t have any other way that I can think of to go into the hole. The deep. The vacuum. The end. The deep end. There’s probably other ways that would be superior in terms of human connection, breaking out of isolation and loneliness, but you know. Those sound really hard. The ladies at the PLC meeting today liked my haircut. One said I should take head shots and go to Hollywood, and one said “Brad Pitt lookalike contest.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha, that’s all very eye rolly but clearly enjoyable. Maybe a Brad Pitt who can’t afford cosmetic dentistry. Or a personal trainer. But I hope I’m not as much of an asshole as apparently he is? Poetry’s kinda just slow motion prose. It’s prose without its adhd meds. Wall-eyed, rambling, noncommittal, discontinuous, confusing, insufferable—except when every now and then, hyperfocus kicks in, and it becomes magnetic Libby’s cough sounds bad and I’m worried. Cel’s extremely tired and droopy every afternoon and sometimes frustrated and angry to boot. and i’m worried 101422 hey, the hra said my cholesterol’s a little high, i’m gonna have to start eating more like you and cel! (proceeds to dine on chips and salsa and bourbon) 101822 i need to stop skipping classes dude, grownups don’t do that shit don’t avoid the awkwardness just cuz you’re afraid there’s only gonna be one student. if there’s one student, show up for that one student. quit being a fucking wimp I’ll give me credit for this, though: sensing I needed something to pull myself out of the abyss (well, sensing that in retrospect anyway; at the time it was desperation to not get fired), i’ve been participating in more group/team shit. It’s fine, just gotta be careful not to be too much of an asssshole about it and think that shucky darn jive talking will save me if I fail to do my actual job. 102522 cel gets upset when she tells libby to stop something like tickling or play biting or whatever, and for some reason libby doesn’t stop right away, and then libby gets sad about the rejection. it’s a weird pattern and i’m sure there’s some reason behind it and i hope they work it out and i wonder if there’s a way for me to help. talk to lib about it? without just making her ashamed or attacked & retreat? 102622 dreamed dad was waving from the window of a building that was completely full of water. but it was supposed to be; that was the nature of the building. he seemed happy enough there. he hammed it up when i tried to get the phone camera to work, to take a picture of him from across the street, where i was involved in a complicated heist at the end of a long slide down an almost endless downhill boardwalk, having just secured some mushrooms from a sketchy pharmacist on the other side of town. certain words or phrases, it gets to where you’re not urbane or worldly enough if you don’t hate them, declare your contempt for them. but i don’t see what’s so horrible about “it is what it is”. it’s not any worse than “a=a” and that’s a longstanding member of the auspicious ranks of formal logic. whatever 102622 your worst student is your favorite student. always. 102622 what’s different now, what has changed is, i want to be visible this time tomorrow in the light of day i want to be gorgeous, i want to look slay i want to be physical, be seen because i know i’m gorgeous, i feel it, i feel it in my skin, that is when i’m not busy feeling like shit or plumb exhausted to the bottom of my soul smiles shyly can i have a light? why don’t you come over here and get it smiles slyly fair enough slides across the tiled floor the planet spins the door opens sunlight streams in as from a great distance across a great ocean relentlessly wavelike beating against the shore i don’t remember whether we were in canada or still on the seattle side of the inky channel, but i do remember scott ordering in an exaggerated voice “the crab *dungenesse*” and shambling down out of the dripping, low-slung olympic boughs after singing and drinking in that secret magical hot springs with those idiotic hippies and miscreants touching each other under the void-black steaming water we were drunk as fuck, stoned as fuck, stupid as fuckity fuck-all fuck, and i don’t regret a second of it at least not right now, tonight while consciousness is memory— my body does whatever it’s going to do, and an instant later i remember it, and start trying to make sense of all the memories 102722 What if being a poet isn’t about being a poet? (cf. “other people matter”) What if the measure of what you do isn’t dependent on how *special* you think you need to seem to be? What if I was right about “inspiration” way back when I exulted in K reading my index cards? If an important distinction for me is “writing” vs “writing to”? That would certainly explain why I can while away an afternoon writing long emails to students, when I “should” have been grading or finishing eval shit or whatever, and come away from the experience thinking it was one of the “things that aren’t bullshit.” The presence of that other, real person on the other end of the line energizes the writing by imposing an organic, authentic deadline—the pace of the conversation you’re having determines the due date. You can’t daydream in hypotheticals forever; at some point you have to shit or get off the pot. The other person gives your inner editor a useful and meaningful focus, so he’s not left to waste away or waste his time in petty bullshit. Focusing on what you need to say to the other person, considering also *their* needs, necessitates timely maintenance and thoughtful operation of your bullshit detectors. It raises the stakes—you’re directly interacting with a person, not just “ideas.” It’s kinda like when you first learned how to make a BASIC program accept hypothetical users’ inputs, and store them in a database—suddenly you could feel how a program might not be confined to its own imaginary bubble dimension forever, but could connect to some kind of “outside world” of literally endless possibility. Writing to, *for,* someone else who is actually likely to read your writing turns the imaginary bubble inside out forever, with a bang, a supernova, the most brilliant event in the night sky. That’s why it’s scary I guess; that’s why it’s worth it. That’s why it remains a genuine motivation long after the pootsy poetry of youth has long since faded like a Polaroid of a grinning dork with a mullet. It’s also related to how I replied to JP about her letter: “I hope you don’t mind if I think it over and respond; I might have some useful input” and what I *meant* was ”Go ahead and turn it in, it’s already good enough for an ‘ADV,’ and completely separate from that I want to reply to you, as a person,” but because of where she is coming from she assumed “input” meant “on the assignment” not “for you personally,” so she said “OK, I’ll wait to turn it in.” This is an example of “know your audience” from Communication and wherever else. What are their priorities? Who or what are you to them? If they care at all about what you have to say, why do they care? What part of their life does what you’re writing about intersect with? And how mutable is that? If you would like a different sort of intersection than that which currently exists, how do you make that request respectfully? How do you encourage those boundaries to soften or shift? It has something to do with love, vulnerability, and being yourself. It’s the difference between sneering at JP because she thinks not having help taking care of Guinea pigs is a real problem, vs creating, whenever and however you have the power to do so, an opportunity for her to feel listened to, heard, and, in whatever way is appropriate for the relationship you have with her (as a student in this case), loved. Love makes things grow. Including writers. Including students. Including me. (at the same time, there’s surely a place for words that aren’t aimed at anyone, or at anyone yet at least, right? Like, say, a journal? Or a napkin, or the sand at the beach) 102922 rochambo (i’m not going to speculate what larger trend it symbolizes) seems so fucking polite now is it because everyone knows they’re constantly being watched now? or because everyone has a phone or computer with them now? because no one smokes in here anymore? but i miss the days when rando kids would wander thru handing out condoms rando conversations would arise over the shared ritual of rolling a smoke all the lines were wobblier then