otoh, maybe you suspect yr dreaming but you dont quite WANT to wake up yet 100325 i need to stop bein afraid of ppl i need to get some energy back and i need to stop spendin all me money that’s basically it right at the moment i’m afraid of ppl bc it’s easier i don’t have energy because i don’t sleep well and i spend my money to feel in control and grown up and to cope — with boredom, fear, etc 100525 What if I didn’t drink. What if I didn’t smoke weed. What if I didn’t eat extra sugar. What if I pretended I didn’t have a TV, what if i stopped using Apple products, *what if I stopped spending all my money …* these are all legit, but if you just keep going down the list, never getting to the source of whatever it is you were trying to avoid by going to all those things, you might feel virtuous for a while, you’ll get that hit of storebought revolution, but eventually there’s gonna come a day or night where you just feel joyless and pointlessly anhedonic again, even with the furniture rearranged. On the other hand, going down the list *might* be a way to help focus in on whatever the alleged source actually is … ? But it’s still no guarantee you’re going to do anything about it. karen asked me to take turns babysitting when she goes for her back surgery and i said yes even though i don’t really want to but i do but i don’t and everything i do that isn’t exactly what it is has something to do with avoidance and which came first, the loneliness or that? hearing other people talk about how much they love their jobs or how good their kids are at their jobs — it makes me feel like i’m dreaming — fake or unreal — when I’m like, oh yeah, i have a job, I guess I’m supposed to do something — there’s parts of it I “love” in the sense that I’m annoyed (like mastrioanni said) into not being able to not do them, and then there’s parts that i’m like, ugh, what? i don’t even — you want me to what? like i literally do not even know what you are talking about — so most of my work energy goes into trying to quit feeling like i have to convince myself to love the parts i truly don’t give a shit about or am truly the complete opposite of interested in. but then how do you accidentally on purpose fool yourself into letting the parts you are interested in teach you new things you didn’t know you would be interested in if you found yourself there? i have been neglecting the fake pigeons (for reasons) and today the real pigeons appeared to remind me that — i need them, whether real or fake or neither or both — they swooped around and burst across the street and alit on nearby buildings, combining, recombining, drawing crazy elegance in the air, and that’s exactly what my memories do, how our thoughts work i miss them so bad, as always when in self-imposed exile, i need them — why? what good is this need for anyone or anything else? What is the value of hunger? “Hunger keeps the individual alive” answers the overconfident smug suburban easy-mode student in the chat. OK, but —  100625 your avoidance habits create the emptiness that you feel a need to fill with your avoidance habits *wait, you’ve been alive for 1747296112 seconds, and you just now figured that out??* 100725 the agitation continues right on into the next morning what is the purpose of gnawing, chafing obsession, when channeled into something seemingly useless, arbitrary, or ... what’s the word for “you *feel* as though getting this one thing perfect is going to bring you ultimate satisfaction or a feeling of completeness or frictionless pleasure or contentment or having *arrived* somehow, even though you *know* that it won’t, really, and there’s no end to the one-more-thing of the pursuit anyway? mixed with shame that it’s focused on something pointless or selfish or orthogonal to art and creativity (though even a plausibly creative pastime can turn into a smokescreen) and always, always, *always* involves spending money?” more to the point, how do you break out of it? to quit being a slave to alcohol, it seemed obvious: quit drinking. but how do i quit being a slave to the machinations of my own mind? maybe: your brain has to burn off the excess energy. it’s easier to let it do it on something of no real consequence, so you can’t fail yourself — or anyone else? or: you’re not doing drugs so you gotta do something *else* to stave off idleness, loneliness... to bring back someone’s memory... tweaking and shopping: constant fiddling sigils to keep the inner rage in abeyance ---- Certain albumes you just want to have on CD. Mozart Symphonies 41 and 38. René Jacobs and the Freiburger Barockorchester (2007). Tashi Plays Mozart. GI Joe and the Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. You know, all the classics. ---- Sudden sadness, bereftness, despair — you do this on purpose though you don’t necessarily realize you’re doing it — it’s another defense against — *whatever* — displeasure, basically (?) 101625 i am dying of loneliness somebody stop me tom (the other one, the whitehaired one with the droopy eye, the one who used to be a principal) clasped my hand three different times tonight while talking about intention and sending out love and finding your center. it was nice also he said i have a strong heart and he said he thinks of me as ‘the wild man’ (lol) 101725 Everyone in here was a baby once. Everyone out there was a baby once. Everyone on this bus, everyone on the street, everyone on the internet — every single one of them was a baby once. Try to picture that when you see people. Everyone was a baby once. Some people still are. Keep that in mind when answering the question: “Given my role here, how should I behave right now?” 102519 i can’t go back to drinking and smoking and eating as much as i want, because that’s what kills the essential loneliness of writing 102325 stinks like nasty ass chicken up in here. stinks like the inside of a stale cracker box wtf 102425 We went to visit Libby at Aurora and she said, “I’m laughing but I’m cooked. I’m serious. There’s no coming back from this.” She thinks she’s done it too many times and it’s just going to happen again. She thinks school is fucked, everything is fucked. You can’t argue with how someone feels. You can’t counter their worldview in one whirlwind conversation sitting on the edge of a hard slab of a bed in Unit 3. You can be there? What can you do. You can believe in them. For as long as they want to keep trying, you can be there for them. That seems so inadequate. One might say, for example, after not convincing persuading or even explicitly reassuring, after sitting with her the way a cat might, breathing, “You feel you can’t come back from this. I believe you can, and I will be here for you — we will be here for you when you do.” ---- if this is old enough to be a pigeon next time you look at this, add it to the pigeons: the engaged but exhausted look on j9’s face when LK was regaling her at graduation—doing emotional labor not because it’s easy, but because it’s important October 26, 2025 *life:* loci of significantly low entropy; precarity linklater’s *Blue Moon* — good, sympathetic, theatrical, claustrophobic, tragic. the unavailability of redemption is itself redemptive. a bit too pugnaciously egocentric: moments where the “extras” exist only to talk to each other about “him” — i wonder about the filmmaker’s need for that kind of lens October 28, 2025 evry morning my bed gives birth to a slightly uglier baby just cuz your ankle monitor has a high-tech tv in it and you stick it in your pocket instead of wearing it on your ankle — doesn’t mean it’s any less onerous 102925 “How do I feel? What did I do? How was the weather?” Scheduled: Oct 29, 2025 at 19:45 to 20:00, CDT Abject. Distant. Mentally constipated. Physically constipated, tbh. Went to LGBT center for free Wednesday evening yoga, but instead of having that they had a bunch of people dressed in cheap black costumery with smudged black eye makeup and someone said “Are you here for Hallowqueen?” and I, in my flannel shirt looking like a fucking square lamentably passable for straight said, “I thought there was a yoga class.” Well it was canceled for whatever this thing was, which, whatever it was, featured (I could see in the next room) a youngish softish black girl or boy doing some kind of vogue thing, while around the perimeter of the room more people sat and watched and listened. On my dejected drive home (second time in a week I’ve tried to go there to take one small step towards diminishing the chronic loneliness; second time I’ve been foiled either by my own expectations or by careless reading of the schedule (I guess, although it did say “EVERY WEDNESDAY” on the general part of the website and you woulda had to’ve dug deep into the ACTUAL CALENDAR app part of it to see yoga was off for this week)), Gil said that because of how important belonging is to us, “even the mildest form of social rejection can feel like a threat” and “your brain doesn’t differentiate between mental pain and physical pain; it just knows there’s something wrong and tries to get you to do something about it.” Of course the “something” for the drinker is alcohol, but since that’s not me anymore, I turn to feeling angry, or resentful, or uptight, or generally misanthropic. I sigh a lot and wish someone would swoop in through the window and say “What’s wrong, little buddy? You have every right to feel bad, now let’s affirm your hurt and pay attention to you and start to make it better!” and when nobody does, I have to keep composing more and more scurrilous crimes against myself as perpetrated by phantom villains posing as other people’s shadows, to make myself feel justified in feeling like abject, distant, constipated shit. Cel’s friends and Lib & Aidan decorated the pumpkin cupcakes that Lib made, though. That was nice and didn’t seem to go horribly wrong in any sneaky devious way despite there being teenagers involved. Maybe they just snuck their offenses by me, but if so, I guess they win, what the fuck, at least there was no drama or loud noise or late bullshit shenanigans. Now as long as Lib and Cel make it back OK from Lib driving the friends home. Lib — I don’t know what she’s going to do — she doesn’t either — she said “I think I have to” when I asked if she’s gonna still try to finish the semester despite everything, the inpatient timeout and everything. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just want her to be all right. She brought Aidan back and sideloaded her way into asking if he can stay over again which ok fine whatever he’s not bad but sometimes if he’s around too much i just get really sick of his energy being present, like how at a certain point you HAVE to spit your gum out. part of it is that he always has to talk. that drives me to enervation. part of its just an energy thing, i truly dk exactly why. The weather was nice I guess? A little chilly, a little damp. Bright, slashing sunlight insinuating in through the crumpling boughs of the apple tree. I feel like I can’t relax, even if I could, because then I’ll never be able to get back to work. I feel miles and miles away from work, except at certain times like when I’m doing the “teacher feedback” for Creative Writing. Then I feel like I’m maybe possibly at least for a few people for a little while actually doing something. Other than those kinds of moments though, I don’t want to do it, I resent everyone, and I’m scared of people. > *In a primitive sense, work is picking something up and putting it down somewhere else because you have to.* > – httwyt, theriault, p. 16 103025 “How do I feel? What did I do? How was the weather?” Scheduled: Oct 30, 2025 at 20:45 to 21:00, CDT I feel like stiff cardboard garbage. I sat here eating a huge fucking pickle while waiting for Lib & Cel & Aidan to get back from Woodmans with the groceries because the van won’t start and two people failed to jump it so they’re waiting on AAA — good thing I never got around to taking Lib off my account I guess. Hope they didn’t buy any ice cream. Every update of this enervating series of events resulted in me wanting to eat something even though I was fine with being done eating for the day *before* they started texting updates about how everything was going wrong. Interesting, huh? Yeah sure I guess. Ugh. Fucking cars. Fuck cars. I fucking hate cars. I fucking hate how you have to have a fucking car to do SHIT in this ugly fucking country and city. The weather’s fucking great, I don’t fucking know. How’s the fucking weather where you’re at? Fuck me. Fuck all of this. Libby’s probly gonna feel bad because going to get the groceries was supposed to be the helpful thing she could do while helping herself feel better by driving and focusing and getting out and doing something, and now it’s all this. Or maybe she’ll be fine, and that’s not what’s gonna make her feel bad next at all. I never fucking know. Sometimes I have a pretty good idea though. And Cel’s stuck staying up way the fuck late the night before her presentation at school. That’s the risk you take, I guess, when you say “I’ll go along.” Like Theriault said about people getting crushed by heavy objects on job sites, it’s just a part of the package deal. The old timers know this. Being stuck somewhere with a couple of tons of stinking rusting immobile steel and grease is just a part of “driving.” It’s fucking stupid. But that’s where we are. 103125 “How do I feel? What did I do? How was the weather?” Scheduled: Oct 31, 2025 at 20:45 to 21:00, CDT I feel gross and distended because I ate ALL my General Tso’s chicken plus ONE BITE of libby’s sesame chicken plus THREE LITTLE BAGS of candy some random NICE family in Tosa gave me because trickortreating was almost over and they had so much left and then when we got home I ate SEVERAL of libby’s dark chocolate oreos. What I did was fuck around with the van and wonder why it keeps failing to start; some very slow, halting grading; pop into a IEP meeting late (after the van stuff), which looks better than not showing up at all after sending the depraved “I GOTTA GO HELP MY DAUGHTER SHE’S STRANDED AT THE GAS STATION” email which in a PROFESSIONAL world is just about equivalent to “DO YOU GOT FITTY CENTS FOR THE BUS”; and then because I was exhausted but restless, and Cel and Amb are both at their haunted house gig, I asked Lib (who I guess did a little bit of the stuff she feels a need to do today instead of sleeping all day or just flopping around with Aidan) if she wanted to go get chinese food and we went to CHINA EAST in Tosa and there are two little bitty tables there because it’s all takeout and no one eats in, but we did, and it was good. Then we walked and bussed home and she told me a little more about Aidan’s drama and why his mom (now ALSO living with the grandmothers) doesn’t seem to want Lib to come over very much because apparently she (his mom) got pretty freaked out by the whole overdose thing. But when we were still sitting at CHINA EAST, Lib was on the phone with Aidan, needing to know (because the bus was coming in three minutes) if was OK for her to come over (it wasn’t), and one of the things I overheard her say to him was, “No, I gotta lock in, I’m going back to school.” And there in the flat white led light of the restaurant, with the darkened window to the parking lot framing her, and the bustle of frying and order-taking and sharp chinese call and response in the kitchen behind us, when she said that, with her pink and dark magenta hair (split down the middle) and her nite-lite flat white worldly girl makeup, when she said that I saw bus stations and decades and wide open streets and her lost, wise smile, and the ozone-tinged smell of fear, the fierce flame of life, the spirit of urban flourishing reflected in mirror sunglasses on a stand in a shop window somewhere, people streaming by, lost people, hopeful people, looking for work, looking for life, blessed with uncertainty, feeling a future stretching out ahead of them, elusive, forever, serpentine, glowing, slow burning, ever receding, echoing like the strains of a radio thru the open windows of an old squared-off american sedan rocketing past you on some nearby faraway highway. And I loved — and I love her so much, love all of them so much — skittish, free, ready to bolt, wild ponies in the salt-sprayed wind. The weather was cold enough to wear two shirts, a jacket, and a hat, but not cold enough to curse the world — yet.