January 1, 2001 I am addicted to toys, and so I bought this thousanddollar busy box, the iBook. And because it doesn’t have a floppy drive nor the old-style ports, I can’t connect my Zip drive, my printer, my mouse, or ANYTHING. Until I get different cables, adaptors, etc. Fucking pain in the ass and I eat it up, just like they want me to, as I immerse my nude body further into the molasses pit of debt. And let it lick and suck all over me. It’s just hyperflies of electronic credit-noise. It’s not really money. It’s not really who I am. It’s not really how they have a set of wires and strings attached to my balls so they can make me bend over and suck . . . . Now that I’ve spent all day fucking with it, determining that I’m going to have to spend considerable time and money just to be able to save a file to an external disk, after already having spent 20 extra dollars to connect to the printer that doesn’t fucking work because i ripped the little piece of plastic off the fucking ink cartridge and will have to BUY another one of those skimpy ass little pieces of shit that cost 20 fucking dollars and run out of ink after you’ve printed an anemic little handful of poems, and determining that it’s really rather hard to type on this stupid little keyboard, and determining that most of the Internet, which at the moment is all this expensive brainsucking pacifier is really good at, is garbage, I’m too fucking tired to type anything. So how do you like that. 30 years old and STILL I rush out to buy something on credit because it’s going to make me content enough to get over that threshhold of lo-tech dullness into a life of confidence and adventure, and then it fails to do so after the pornographic waves wash over me and the purchase is done, the product set up and fucked with, and now I just wish it would leave, get out of my house and not call me back either, and take your goddamn smelly clothes and piles of horseshit in the bathroom with you thank you very much god i suck. Is it really going to help me change anything? Any little thing at all? And here’s the most twisted part: I could take it back. I have 14 days to return it. I kept all the parts. I could just realize it’s not really what I wanted or needed and take it back, shave off the five years I just added to my economical and spiritual slavery by succumbing to the medicine doctor’s quacking demands that i buy this shit, the medicine doctor in my own pathetic, pimply little head, but the reality is I probably won’t. Just because it is such a good god damn toy and it keeps me busy. And now I have 2 things to add: 1) what about the little parts that are good? 2) Maybe it is Oh, whatever. Time for bed. After a good piss. January 3, 2001 Now I have a Zip drive on here, some noodles cooking in the pot, an empty soprano recorder bag under this to prop it up so it feels pretty good to type on, and my favorite OLD Microsoft Word at last (again) to type in. Okay, I’m not so mad after all. And I’m ready, ready for . . . ? I’m ready for bed. January 4, 2001 i cant beleev i sent her that email. was it all true? am i still in love with her? do i just want to fuck her? is there a difference? or does everybody just say that without really knowing. January 5, 2001 The power struggle over the Internet is about access. They can either censor it or charge an arm and a leg for it or both, as long as they control the lines of communication. How do we keep some of it for ourselves? January 5, 2001 Can’t sleep. Smoke pot, light candle, fuck around with computer instead. The neocortex is eating itself, right Bly? You think there’s a world behind the screen? Wrong. It’s always just the same 480,000 points of light, just flashing on and off in various sequences, like next year’s or the next year’s hottest selling christmas lights. Weird how I can go to a site, click a button and waggle my finger, and it (they--who?), without direct human supervision, sends digital signals I can’t even detect directly into this little busy box so the little bits get arranged in such a way that I get a hard on and start stroking myself. Weird. Nam-shubs, indeed. Well, let’s do it. I’m not ready to talk about Ann’s kidney failure (?) and peptic ulcer yet, nor how I’m ever going to feel not tired again, living with her (or probably anybody for that matter). to wound the autumnal city . . . . January 8, 2001 So I’m eating bon bons and playing with the computer, so fucking rape me. January 9, 2001 I actually heard glockenspiel playing her glockenspiel. sounded gongy watery tubular churchy January 10, 2001 So why did I get the electric jolt of jealousy when ann’s message said she was going out with billy? because i don’t even want to have sex with her, why should i care if she’s with someone whom i know she finds incredibly attractive? is it just the potential of losing my hold on her, so i wouldn’t have anyone any more to do dishes, drive me around, etc? or keep boosting my ego . . . . or is it just that she’s getting some and i’m not (theoretically)? in any case, i want a boyfriend i think. Maybe i don’t really, but i’m so fed up with the question of whether or not i’m a legitimate homo, i’m ready to just do whatever i want. and right now, i want to fuck a man. big time. i could go into what else i May want, why i think i have to respond correctly when shown photographic sexual stimuli, other reasons i’m on edge about ann & billy, how i just don’t know about ol’ katy, but--i don’t want to right now. I am working on something here. i am working on my own salvation. i am exploring the curve of the question mark. katy said, and i agreed, that were she and i just to play out our true roles, we would be just fine together. but how do you know which is the one true role? i have to conclude it is the one you actually end up playing out; therefore, katy and i are fine together--apart. then why do you have to say so all the time? to help remember. but i thought you were just doing whatever you want, now! i am. oh. good night? good night, good night. i smoke a bunch of dope & wake up feeling like a beat marshmallow. i am a dumb ass. good morning. and good evening. do you think sometimes you tell yourself it’s because you don’t have those feelings any more, when actually it’s because you are afraid to let in the impossible now? you can go wherever you want, my friend. you don’t have to pass a king arthur or a jedi or a nazi test of fate in order to get a passport. it’s your god damned boat. you make the rules. tell ’m to fuck off for me, willya jake? time to call claire, my tit-friend. i keep thinking eventually i’ll find this one mega-desire formula, this magical net of circumstances and subscriptions that will reduce me to a quivering, virile beast of titanium love. so Maybe it ain’t gonna happen. that doesn’t mean i have to quit looking. this is my boat. i make the rules. regarding men: what if you could really love one, reciprocally, in addition to just fucking him? i mean, what am i saying. you can. i have -- i mean, not in addition to but instead of. now i would like in addition to, please. eleven: and the running lights are on, the one a lost, blue cafe, the other a crimson dirge. What if in fact you could be kissing him on the neck, and you could actually be there and taste it and see it and feel it and drink it, (outside the space of someone else’s fantasy) and what about this: Is your determination not to conclude too hastily that you’re gay merely a determination not to conclude that you’re gay at all, disguised as scientific rigor? I mean shit, mat, every time you think about a boy or see a naked picture, you (almost) instantly switch over to woman mode: does this excite me more or less? you ask, scanning every nook of your digitally vibrating corpse for bits of evidence that you are really straight --or really gay--look, isn’t that kind of switching over exactly what you were doing when you were eleven and you wanted to train yourself to like women better than men? when you masturbated up to the coming point and then at the last instant switched out the images of the men or boys, replacing them with images of women? Remember that? What was that all about? What is this all about? Have you learned anything? your fantasies were stronger then--and reading was juicier--because you let more of them in, you had the door wide open, baby, open wide, and you took it all in. can you do this now? let’s see you, treehouse boy. and then fantasies give you time to build up a charge, till your hair is about standing on end with need and mirth. openeyed you blink into the sunlight of the present; golden boy stands before you in kissing warmth, he opens his arms to you and you “and then you get quiet, and then I get quiet, and then . . . .” as if it were my fault that chain reaction happened. am i supposed to be not quiet just to keep you from being quiet? fuck that. you can be as quiet or not quiet as you like, i’ll do the same. does wanting friendship, adoration, giddyness, playfulness, freedom, girlishness, love and sex from men equal being gay? no? then what’s the missing part of the equation? which part doesn’t add up to make the whole? oh yeah. it’s the rainbows. the ceremonies, the gala, the clubs, the acquired sense of being persecuted and therefore superior by default, or at least very, very special. it’s acting like the magazines. you claim not to tolerate that in your “straight” life, why should you tolerate it in your “gay” life? January 14, 2001 In Julian Mitchell’s afterword to the screen play of Wilde, it says: . . . if we had a message, it was simply that love is love wherever you find it, and whoever with. We didn’t need introductions or explanations. We simply had to show how a bisexual genius came to discover his homosexual side, and where that led him. That fills me with fascinated joy. Because while many times today I have felt these starbursts of I am gay! I also have felt a few times, I am not! Basically, I don’t want to be just swapping out one straitjacket for another. I get to play at bisexual genius, too, if I want. I can do whatever I want. And I will. I am uneasy now. Why? Because I’ve spent so much time the last couple of weeks trying to make this lawyery case about how I’m gay and I’ve just been in the dark all these years. Well Maybe instead I’m just coming into more light. Remember the airplane on the way back from London--London where I had roamed around seeing and tasting Anne in almost everything--Anne Regina on a mailbox of rain-defying red turned into Anne’s vagina in a perfect purring mound inside my head--when suddenly I realized I still wanted boys, and this distressed me, and then my other voice sifted in thru a crack in the ceiling and said, in that hollow, chuckling, out-of-context, from-the-future way it has, “ . . . ah yes, that was back when I still hung around with women--that was when I still cared! [which sex it was]” and I felt pretty much okay for the rest of the trip. Even after the stewardess came down the aisle and summarily snapped all the window shades shut, because “people wanted to sleep.” I guess she had seen the sun rise from the middle of the fucking sky a million fucking times. . . . how a bisexual genius came to discover his homosexual side . . . . January 14, 2001 Yes, I like that. Not so much I was a prisoner and lying to myself and o how tragic, just, that’s where i was then, and this is where i’m going now. i’m coming home, and i don’t know altogether where that is yet, but i’m getting some clues and they are called the hint of joy; they are “why am i dancing around in the street when for months i’ve felt like a goddamn zombie?” January 15, 2001 Despite the risk of conjuring an incomplete psychological profile, I’m going to tell U about just one part of my dream. Brian Coon (from satyr) was with me over at my dad’s house. We were upstairs. We had been downstairs talking about music or some shit. Now we were in the old angle-ceilinged storeroom that was where the weaving room is now. We were still talking, but I was also looking through a bunch of books that were on a shelf right above the old toy box. There were several Spider Robinsons. I took them. And some others. And I left some because they were dumb. Then he and I were lying on the bed, talking about something else and our heads were very close together. I pushed the pillow over to give him more, and also hoped he would get a little closer. It felt nice. I was afraid he was going to realize what was happening and stop it. But then we were downstairs. Dad and Ruth were trying to hang up something by the front Door. He went directly over and helped them do it. I made some comment about his being tall. Then I introduced him. I did it a little too slowly and Ruth interrupted by naming herself before I was done naming her. (Reminded me of Christmas when she introduced Ann to everybody as my girlfriend before I even had a chance to stammer out anything at all. Not that she wasn’t my girlfriend, and not that I wasn’t at least somewhat relieved at her assuming that social burden I’ve always had trouble with, but still . . . .) So anyway then Brian’s on the phone presumably with his wife. “ . . . but I called you twice . . . .” Apparently she was harrassing him for not being home or available or something. Then this guy, this lean, handsome black guy, comes in through the front door (which for some reason is on the west wall) without knocking, without looking at any of the rest of us (there were more people there now too, I don’t even know who all. He goes right over to Brian and starts counseling him, apparently about how he should be home. Like Brian’s wife sent this guy or something. And it took me just a second but I got up and said, hey you don’t just walk right into somebody’s house. And he ignored me so I put my right hand on his left shoulder, and my left hand flat on his chest and repeated myself. He drew back, looked at me with an amused and slightly umbrageous expression and mocked the way I had touched him, indicating that I looked faggy. That took me back about another second, but then I said, “You like that? [in the tone of voice of the Faggit That’ll Kick Your Ass] Come on. You can’t just barge in here,” and I grabbed his arm and started dragging him toward the door. Then everybody in the room helped me and we made this human wall and manhandled him out onto the porch. Then outside it was just me and Brian and we kind of accidently hooshed him face down into this thicket of bushes that was right to the left of the concrete steps. I said back to the door “Hey, everybody come out here right now, I’m gonna need some help,” and this time my voice sounded a little more high than I would have liked. I’m not sure if anyone came out, But we got rid of the guy, he left or else just disappeared. January 15, 2001 I just want to be washed away by lakesummer rowboat dragonweed passion. Is that too much to ask? The old man in Magnolia said, don’t ever let anyone tell you not to regret anything. Regret whatever the fuck you want. Use that regret. Use it. And then later it started raining frogs. And Ann is sighing the voices in her head sigh. And I like to make a little extra noise when she gets like this. As if Maybe it would January 16, 2001 It didn’t. Long story. Anyway, I still haven’t done laundry and I have no clean clothes except a bright blue Austin Powers Disguise shirt with frilly lacy cuffs and some old-man pants that I don’t even know where I got or why I have. I have to come up with at least $150 before lunch tomorrow or else face a jet-fueled spindown of returned checks, and even if I manage that I will have approximately $0 with which to pay this month’s bills. BUT AT LEAST I HAVE THIS BITCHIN COMPUTER WHICH IS COOL BUT ALSO MAKING ME A LITTLE CONSPICUOUS- FEELING IN FUEL CAFE RIGHT NOW. Why is it that every time I try to type Fuel Caf, I end up typing Fuel Cage? Weeerd, main. Sometimes if it’s too much hard work to try and be honest all the time, it might be more honest just to lie. I hope I don’t end up one of those fags addicted to straight boys. Or do I? Tired. Tired. Deanna’s folks threatened to call the cops on me, insinuating that I might have been molesting her or something. This cute punky boy with armadillo studs on his shoulders keeps bashing into the backside of the bench. But I forgive him because he’s a cute boy. It’s a little like the cute girl tax Glenn & I referred to: you have to tip cute girl bartenders more. Here they have sullen boy counter person and I didn’t tip him at all. Sullen doesn’t particularly turn me on. I almost want to smoke. There’s a little amber ashtray over there on my table with three white butts in it. And you KNOW how I get around white butts. January 18, 2001 So here’s why I suck: For $500 more I could have gotten a mac with usb AND firewire. for probably at least $500 less I could have gotten one with neither, and been able to use all my old shit with it. Instead, I spent $500 more than I had, and got just usb which for me, practically, offers no benefits. Sure, I got a good price on this thing, but it’s basically an obsolete system that is tons better than I actually need. Oh well. It’s cute and fast, anyway. Make a web site. Make a book. Pay for it spiritually. Quit your bitching. And anyway, if you did have firewire, it’s not like you can afford or need to go buying firewire add-ons any more than you can afford or need to go buying usb add-ons. Really, it should have been an old one or nothing, and since you went with impulsiveness and instant gratification, it’s probably just as well that you spent 1000 instead of 1500. It’s not really any worse than firewire for my purposes; if I want a new printer or whatever i’ll be able to find plenty of options in usb for several years. So it’s like an extra expensive, extra fast old one with even more expense involved to add other hardware. okay i’ll shut up now. January 18, 2001 Fuck it. It’s time to give up. After masturbating twice tonight, I’ve concluded that a man’s not going to make me any happier than a woman. It’s time to just give up, quit forcing the issue, and quit faking it. I wanted out of the relationship with Ann, I got (almost all the way) out. Now it’s just a matter of getting my god damn bed back, getting my space back, and hopefully next time I’ll think thrice before asking someone to move in and help ruin what I’d spent the last two years building up. Not that she hasn’t helped me a lot too, but blah blah blah. And as for Katy, well fuck her if that’s how she wants to be. Or not if not. People will come into and go out of my life how they’re meant to, and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway except be there and ready, and so that’s all I’m going to do from now on. And in the meantime, there’s music and words and blah blah blah. Even if you’re not as sexy as you are supposed to be, you just shouldn’t kiss anyone you don’t want to kiss, and you should kiss who you want to. PERIOD. So why do I feel so ragged and empty (again)? January 19, 2001 Wow, my journal has a cute ass. Ann flushed all her pills. All of them. In her notebook, she quoted to some guy in her head named Santos the exact same quote from the old guy from Magnolia as I did a few ¦’s up. Word for word, I mean. Weird huh. Things are going to get weirder. I can just feel it. Maybe I hope so. I also hope I get through it all right, and secondarily that she does. I never was a very good martyr. January 24, 2001 I don’t really need a cuticle trimmer. I dreamed my MATC class ring had a gold finish that was wearing thru to the silvery colour beneath. I think I want to have the out of solitude guy make something else out of it but I don’t know what yet. Mom emails me every day. It’s kind of nice, kind of pathetic, kind of annoying and kind of nice. How can I ignore all the stupid shit I’ve bought, all the mistakes I’ve yelled into dogs’ faces, all the lazy turns I’ve taken down mediocre roads, and just get on with doing something fun or good or something? Answer: it’s obvious. You just said it, now just do it. But, but, but --and today’s card is the Mistress, and she says, JUST SHUT UP AND DO IT, COCKSUCKER. My life is my first float trip, down something like the Merimac R (Glenn knew it), and now I’m in the part just beyond that one sand bar, but just before that part where it gets all sluicy like a juicy neck muscle and tips over every canoe, one by one, as they try to go through. I laugh. It is summer and my leaves are WET. January 26, 2001 I ate a lot of fish, drank a lot of coffee, read a little of Delany’s ’88 autobiography. And then I was electrified. I was convinced I was going to go home, never sleep again, give in to my addiction to caffeine, and type all through the night until the very words parsed their way through the veil of unimportance and not- extraordinariness that has unjustly crippled me these years these years my life was going to change in one evening, like so many one evenings before when the lights swirled and my mind popped and i was suave and sang on the street as i walked along behind the polllution trail of the bus and walked my own self across the milwaukee river on my own two pegs and when I got home, i sat down and fucked with the computer and typed not a god damned thing except this. Then I lay back, looked at the dogs looking at me sleepily expectant, and I wondered, why don’t I just cash it all in? What good am I? What do I make or produce that makes even a surface ripple of difference in this vast engine we call a world but is really all just elaborate variations on TV? Infinite, nebulous, hyperdetailed, fractally self-similar, all- encompassing, beginning and ending TV. I am a bit. Without me, you will not notice a difference. My absence will not crash a program. I spend my life pretending to try to learn to tell the truth, and then I die. So what? I am a nonessential file. Throw me out. Delete me. Trash me. It won’t matter. The only reason not to is you won’t save an appreciable amount of disk space by doing so. Really, all I am is an aesthetic annoyance, a blip of clutter in one of your folders you never access and probably don’t even remember creating or installing. Probably the folder I sit unused in was stuck there by some other installer for a long-obsolete piece of incidental software you weren’t even aware was getting installed. A side-effect. A detritus. A flotsam. A crumb. Eat me. Or don’t. If you don’t, some cockroach will. Or Maybe a crow. Like one of the seven that were eating the bread scraps in front of the house this morning. In the snow. The wretched, crusty snow. Tire-gray and listlessly worried by the sun, the shot snow sits as pathetically self-referent as I. We both hide railroad tracks. We both melt a little when salted. We both we both we both fell from the sky and are never going back . . . . Or are we? In another form, on another day, in another recombination, when we are evaporated and we go to join the rest of the pollution up there. It’s ten seventeen. Time for a nap or more coffee? January 28, 2001 I’m not gay, I just never had the balls to do whatever I want. Now I’m getting that way. I am bi. I guess. Whatever that means. I wake up and I want to fuck. So we fuck. I don’t have to act any certain way; if anything that’s what gay means to me. But we’ve already gone over this all, haven’t we. I guess once again, the smouldering question has transformed itself into my mind. Now it’s, “Am I condemned to women, like the guy in Another Country discovered he was, while fucking the other guy, his friend?” I guess if at some moment that seems true, then it’ll seem true, and if not, then not. Frankly, I hope not. Because I still want to try having a boyfriend. It always goes back to, Am I just afraid of women, though, I guess that’s a corollary to the smouldering question. Am I condemned to women? Am I afraid of women? Will I be happier with a man? Is happiness independent of all this? We’ll see, we’ll see . . . . Yeah that’s what you always say blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah my mouth feels all mushy now. coffee January 29, 2001 my confession is two lines long: i am gay / i am a writer January 30, 2001 I just watched a NOVA on tv about this plane, Stardust, that vanished under a glacier in the Andes like 40 some years ago, and then got pooped back out again (partially, so far) at a spot further down the mountain. i said further on purpose, so fuckin get off me. and then tonight, as i started to feel i was really working on the book for real now, i am really working on the book for real now, i started to cry and it felt good. after a warm bath. and i learned what my knife means: “I used to ponder what I would do if Taelin died and left me alone. I considered running off to hike the Appalachian Trail. Don’t know if I still would or not. But now I know what I’m going to do about Glenn’s dying. I am coming the rest of the way out.” To some extent, “discovering your identity” really means selling yourself to yourself. why I consider “i am gay / i am a writer” a confession is: well, let’s treat the latter element first. I am a writer is a confession because I’m afraid I’m not a particularly good writer, yet I can no more deny that I’m trying to be one than I can deny that I’m trying to be a fag. Even if I’m pretty sure I’m not god’s gift to writing, I am still going to do it. This is in line with something my dad said years ago, and it hurts to let myself not tower above him in some way but to shrink my image of myself (as a fast shrinks a stomach) down to the farmer, peasant level of him and our ancestors. I simply wasn’t born genius or weird enough to be a truly remarkable writer, but I wasn’t born indifferent enough not to be a writer at all. And so I take up my place in the middle, once again, which is merely the edge of the edge. ROY: I’m trying to do my homework and smoke weed at the same time. Mulus in silvam est. Or is it es? See, it’s not working too well. I’m pretty sure my dad knows I’m smoking weed. He kind of looks the other way, because he smokes it himself. At least he’s not a hypocrite, right? So I don’t know what’s up with this Zee chick. She’s like this really cool girl--I mean too young for me, like, in that sense, but that’s not what I mean. I mean she’s just this really smart, energetic, awesome kid but she hides out in a dark, deserted, scary place because she doesn’t get along with her family. Or, part of her family. This Santos guy, particularly. I don’t know if he’s like her dad, or just some kind of weird mystical commando freak, but he apparently doesn’t really want her around. Or that’s what she thinks, anyway. He took her room away from her. But then there’s the matter of Ann, who is the human body that Zee and all the rest --from the perspective of other humans, anyway, it seems--actually live inside. Ann needs Zee to be happy or else she’s not happy. And can’t sleep. And has a hard time getting to this place called the Sanctuary (no, not the bar in Milwaukee), which is where Zee wants her to go--Ann, that is--to meet her, and Maybe work things out. The problem is, Ann and Zee both feel powerless. Now what does all this have to do with me or my homework? Well, indirectly, or Maybe more like directly, now that I think about it, quite a bit. Because that’s part of the reason I’m smoking weed instead of doing my homework. Is because, see, well, like, Zee thinks I exist. And Maybe I do, Maybe I do. But, well, more to the point, I went to visit Zee in the dark place. Well, I mean, to me it was more like this: I sent messages to Matt, who was able to recieve about a micropercent of them, and using that little bit of data, he spoke for me. Now this is how we usually do it. It works pretty well, except for the times when it doesn’t. But that’s neither here nor there nor somewhere in between. Or Maybe it is. Fucking I don’t know. Just let me finish, okay? Okay. Now where was I. Oh yeah. So Matt’s doing a pretty halfassed job translating my shit, but eventually the point gets across that I want to be friends with Zee. She’s hip to that, and she gives me some messages to give to Ann. Cool. I tell her I’ll e-mail her. She says (and I imagine I hear Ann’s voice coming out--oh yeah, I forgot to mention--shit! Maybe this is confusing!--that I’m talking to Matt, Matt’s talking to the sleeping form of Ann, and Zee appears to be using Ann’s voice. Ya with me? Okay--for just a moment --for just as long as it took the words “I think I can do that” to come out, I fancied I heard Ann talking instead of Zee) she thinks she can do that. E-mail that is, using Ann’s computer, Ann’s keyboard, and yes, Ann’s fingers. To send e-mail messages to me, Roy, which will be intercepted by Mat at his computer (which, incidentally, is only two rooms away from Ann’s) and then passed on to me through the long, misty, twisty passageways of the null space between him and the rest of us in here, in my world, assuming my world even exists. Fuck. I love being a teenager. But wait. To get to the point, Zee said don’t tell anyone you were here with me (or did she say are here with me? I’m not sure), and I said okay, okay? Okay. So then the next day Matt spilled-- or rather, I admit (conditionally, provisionally only you understand), I spilled it all to Ann. Because she said she blanked out for a while because she looked at her Out box and there was an e- mail letter from Zee to Roy that she didn’t remember typing. So assuming she’s telling the truth, and you can never assume that, Zee somehow managed to use her without her knowing it. Which was not what I intended to encourage at all. Cuz that shit’s creepy, man, that’s all there is to it. And Zee hasn’t answered my e-mails. Or hasn’t yet. I haven’t checked yet tonight. I May not until tomorrow morning. And I wonder if she’s mad at me for telling. But if she’s mad at me for telling that means Ann somehow, intentionally or not, managed to tell her that I had told her. And if she did that, that means they can communicate. And if they can communicate, why do they need me to act as go-between? Or Maybe that’s not what Zee even wanted me to be. But I feel responsible. She’s just a little kid, for Christs sake. And Ann is so addleheaded without her. I feel like the god damn dog trying to get the family back together. Why? Why am I doing this? Time to smoke some more weed. Ever the vigilant teenager. I wish I knew if I was real. The floor is speaking and it’s time to go home.so let me see if I’ve got this straight. Or bifurcated endlessly, whichever the case May be. You start with a point attractor, like stillness in the case of a pendulum slowing down, or flowing basically straight to the sea in the case of a slow river. The next level of attractor is the circular, or limit-cycle attractor, as in the case of a pendulum’s cycle between zero speed/max displacement (ends), and max speed/zero displacement (middle), or a bathtub-style vortex in the river when it’s moving faster. Then you get torus-shaped attractors, such as vortices within vortices, as the river goes crashing on downstream. Then, you get (I’m not sure how the shape is described) vortices within vortices within vortices. But then--the attractor after that stage is called strange. And it’s not just another zoom-level after the pattern thus far described. Somehow, the level of complexity becomes infinite, the shape of the strange attractor is fractal. How this happens, I do not understand. I am so accustomed to thinking in reductionist, atomistic terms, that it is quite beyond me to visualize how it could not end in the smallest fork, the smallest level of detail. But then again, I can’t imagine how you could have a smallest level, either. Cuz couldn’t you always be just a little bit smaller? Or fork off just one more time? It’s that beautiful paradox of infinity that has so often passed the time like quiet music, while staring out a car window on a long, strange drive. What would I do without friction points like that in the brain? I’ll be checking back to see if I can understand the quantum level any more, and get any more of a grip, or release any more of the opposite of a grip if that’s what’s required, on how a coastline could be infinitely long, or how the universe could be made, not of waves made of waves made of waves etcetera, in some very wriggly but ultimately static pattern, but waves made of waves made of waves made of something else entirely that keeps reproducing itself forever. Shadow Walkers, Zee calls them. Shadow Walkers are they who make you not open up and sing. Try to make you not, that is. They try to make you not, but some days, some nights in the motherfucking FALL of the year, they can’t, can’t NOBODY stop you. Love. As they migrate towards our world, they help us. They become animals and come to us in our dreams. They teach us about faith and magic, or whatever it is we need help with. Be aware: they also ask for help from us. Thanks. Good night.I got an “A” on my homework from yesterday. I mean, I gave me an “A,” cuz they don’t generally give grades. They’re all like, did you do it or not? If not, do it now, and so on. Yesterday I had class with Crow for a change, instead of the three, or SchIT as I like to call them sometimes. I’m always a little nervous about sessions with Crow, but unless something Blackie or someone did has pissed him off, he’s actually pretty cool. He said I had to say what I thought to someone I didn’t know, preferably, and also someone whose reaction I couldn’t assume would be innocuous. He’s had me do that before: witness the letter to the editor I sent to the Shepherd. This time it was an e- mail to Dave Berkman, who, it turns out, answered me, and appreciated the respectful tone of my message. Because at first I had it all typed out in this bitchy, self-righteous, sophomoric, holier-than-thou tone, but then I was like, well, hey. That’s really not my place to be disrespectful. I can say what I need to say, ask the question I need to ask, without going off on trying to teach him a lesson, for Chrissake. That’s assuming I know way more about him than I do. I think that’s one of the main bits Crow wanted me to get that day. Or anyway, he seemed pretty happy that I did get it. January 31, 2001 So here I am, about to learn all about AppleWorks so I can use it in conjunction with AppleScript to play with this goddamned hyperexpensive Lego set. I think it will work to keep me busy enough, but not so busy that I won’t ever write any more little poems and shit. HyperCard never quite worked for me, and now my version is obsolete, so fuck that. RealBasic is depressing and odious for some reason, so fuck that. CodeWarrior is too damned expensive to take the risk that I might actually groove with it, so fuck that. Basically, what with scripts, links, macros and the like, I should be able to build pretty much any spaceship I need with just the shit that came with Busy Box, here. I still want an iMic adaptor from Griffin Technologies, though. Okay, whatever. I should add (please see the journal Jan 01) a third line to my confession. Note that I am not erasing either of the other two lines, simply appending this: I AM BISEXUAL. February 1, 2001 I am bisexual, dammit, and no-one can make me not be. I am free to be that. And I am free not to get married, and I am free not to use being gay as an excuse to get out of marrying women. If I don’t want a certain kind of relationship with someone, I by god can just say so. I don’t have to justify it with a supposedly involuntary genetic restriction on my behavior; I can just say no I don’t want that thank you very much. And then I can go and do whatever I fucking well please. February 3, 2001 I get jealous of these women whom, when I so-called have them at my so-called disposal, I don’t actually want. Why is this? Is this because I am a so-called homosexual? Or is it something more sinister and paltry? Like I am just a so-called worthless weakling, or a perhaps socalled failure, etc. And this line of questioning goes on ad nauseum, that is to say until you get nauseous and decide to just get enraged, get engaged, get unengaged, get depressed, get enraged again, and finally find yourself in a familiar but completely different place where you can so-called write again, even though to be perfectly honest every time you’ve called what you do writing, that word has seemed a little insecure about being just quite the right word for the job. And all the jealousy you’ve garnered is a galvanizing force; or rather it is the fluid you are getting galvanized in. It is electric, liquid, hateful, and feels real good. Now I’m going to stare at Katy’s picture for a while. Oh. Okay. I know why it is I get jealous. It’s because I can see it all crumbling. Because I have a moderately long history of using sex, sometimes only the idea of sex, to control women, to keep them around, to keep them in my employ as devoted worshippers. Is that so wrong? Does everybody do that? Do they just do it differently, own up to it Maybe, instead of categorically, habitually, subconsciously denying it? Well, in any case, it’s taking a nerve o’steel right now for me not to ask Ann leading sex questions about the conversation with Jordan I just got done hearing her sickeningly sweet half of. You see, I hate listening to her talk to him because I am on the outside now. I used to be on the inside, the one with her reins, and now I am not. Now she is just another person again. Now we are equals again. What I would do if this were the old me talking is start up the old engines and slowly or quickly, subtly or overtly win her back. And I could do it, too, which is more a commentary on the sort of person she is and the state she is in than on my prowess as a super stud. But since this is the new me, who wants to work on some other things, such as my own, oh, you know, stuff, instead of focusing on some woman’s every want (in order to get her to focus on mine), I’ll focus on mine, and she’ll focus on hers. And soon we will live in a house where I don’t always have to hear her cum-gargling, lollipop-choking-on, god-damned sotto-voce conversations with that greasy, two-bit dunderhead she denies she still craves. or rib her thusly: “have fun,” with a leer, as she goes into the shower, because from what i gleaned from her half of the conversation, she’s going to masturbate in there. shit, Maybe i can’t help it, Maybe i’ll ask her, “feel better?” with the same smug leer, when she gets out. Maybe i just wish i could watch--again, not so much because I am dying to have sex with or about her, but because this way, i’m left out. out of the magic. out of the magic sex circle. out of the inside. just the way i like it. so i have something to fuckin drive me nuts. and for some reason i feel a slight betrayal that i know she’s in there doing that in secret. Even though I do it too! That’s the other thing about my jealousy; it’s always such a blatant double standard. Like when I discovered Katy had been online looking for love before we were all the way broken up. Did I mention in my indignant reports to my friends and family that I had done the same thing??? Maybe I’m jealous of women’s passion, too. They always, at least the ones I seem to end up hanging out with or living with or fucking with, seem capable of such more profound lust and satiation than I. When I was with Pam, I concluded that that’s just how the whole sex thing was set up: men were just these platforms, these launch pads that play the vital yet not starring role of departure point for the women spaceships. the women were the ones that really got to see the stars. And we men participated in this little riot of inequal hilarity because it fulfilled us in a--different way. A manly way. A quiet way. A calm way. A--do you see what I’m getting at here? Anyway, Maybe I was kidding myself. Maybe it’s either a) just me, or else b) I just haven’t found where to take off in my own stellar cloud of nebulous passion. Maybe someday I, too, will get to see the Seven Sisters. Maybe not. Who knows except the hedgehog, and he ain’t saying. February 6, 2001 So here I am. Who would’ve thought. And other such incantations of inanity. A single letter off insanity. Here I sit, in my mighty little bothy, high above Riverwest, looking back over the neighborhood I have come to actually sometimes live in. And I’m thinking about the wrinkly-faced old lady below me, Marcy, and all her stuff in this attic I kind of want to snoop through, and there is also a vague sense of isolation, weirdness, loneliness, restlessness, boredom--all of which is perfect, beautiful, right on schedule. Typos are still omens and letters are still flowers, the blossoming of which leads to deeper and deeper levels of fractal inside-outness; the inside is bigger than the outside; you keep going on in and on down and eventually you get to a level just one level deeper than you’ve ever been before, and there is a warning voice, friendly, warm, black, that says, “This is the most dangerous level known to man,” and you say, yes. Let me in. Let me sleep here. Let me sit here. Let me break my fast here. Let me study this rock face, this backbone, this delectable muscle of manhood and let me ripple my tongue over its sharpsmooth facets, and let me purr in milky delight and let me go weak and give in and i can see the street from here. I can see in other people’s houses. I can see when Ann pulls up unless she goes to the back alley first and I can see one star and a rub of cloudy material and some white lights in flat lines over yonder that could be the freeway but aren’t. They are on the other side. And I can hear, as ever, Marcy’s TV. Now that I’ve masturbated, made an abortive attempt to start a new playfile, listened to the huskies bitching down below, and sat here with an unsettled feeling in my stomach--like there’s something more I should be accomplishing--I’m going to go down and listen to a CD for a while. Or something. I’m going to have to train myself to be an astronaut. February 7, 2001 Or a publisher. Or even a writer. I think I could be a competent writer if I ever decided that was a good enough thing to be. I mean, if I ever accepted a gray area in between godlike, celebrated genius, and absolutely illiterate joe. but whatever. it ultimately doesnt matter, i guess. i mean, if i want to sit and play with words and letters, i will, and if i make money off it i will. Or not. But right now, I think Oddletters is my best bet. Best balance of reasonable goal and appreciable challenge, connection to “real” world and connexion to place of the way. and i guess i really do need both. February 8, 2001 A little queasy again tonight. Typing in the (new, unbroken) kitchen. I have the attic but I don’t really want to go up there much yet. I suppose when I start getting sick of Ann and huskies--or of anybody but Dexter I guess--I’ll have it to go to and that’s the main thing. I’ve got to stop--why? but nonetheless, the thought occurred, so I’ll go on and type it--letting Ann mother me so much. I can for chrissake do my own laundry and haul my own ass out of bed and go to work. In Ice Storm, towards the end, the narrator says it’s finally time to do something besides smoke marijuana and masturbate. Right. It’s time to smoke marijuana, type, look at pictures, Maybe call someone but probably not, and then masturbate. February 8, 2001 I told my mom. I’m so ecstatic. ann’s a good friend cuz i don’t hav to hide being high from her.but i dont hav to unhide it, either. have i said all this before? suddenly this seems like the third time i’ve typed this. i wonder if i’ve gotten dumber since getting all those high scores on all those standardized tests in elementary school. i wonder if it matters. i wonder how it possibly could, and then for a flash i am in the current, in the merrimac, the jack’s fork, the missouri, gann’s creek turkey creek the swimming hole the tadpole run, the sweetly sloping rocks where you fuck your best friends. in the youth of a thousand summers. February 13, 2001 Now if I could get to a place where i could be making love (or just making out) with a real man (or boy), instead of a surficially masculized version of a fake fantasy woman, i could really see some stars MEDITATION! Zero level equals no tv, radio, phone, book, computer, pad, recorder, food, drink, smoke, etc. dogs and other such creatures can be present, and are, since after all i’m making up the rules, invited. level one then is when you go get something to write or type with. i suppose minus levels would involve doing something specific or further within your mind, but i’m not particularly worried about enforcing those right now. You May wish, as I wish tonight, to float back and forth between levels one and zero. and anyway, it’s all relative--how ever many stimuli you’re used to, that’s how many to compare to the state you’re going to call “meditation.” Level, schmevel. February 14, 2001 it’s valentine’s day, surprise surprise. i still have plural girlfriends, imaginary boyfriends, a disgruntled sense of nothing. I am feeling the killing wind of ordinary again. I’m just not amazing, I’m just not extraordinary, I’m just not extrememely talented, and sometimes (now) this just makes life seem heavy, listless, all but pointless. If only Glenn were still alive, I tell myself in less direct terms than these, I would at least still have someone to sit and drink with. Talk about the bullshit that makes up this little hot-glowing world thingy we supposedly live in. I mean what the fuck IS this living thing for, if not to make beautiful things> to make a cup for your brother to drink from. to make a cup for your brother to drink from. to make a cup for your brother to drink from. It’s just so hard for me because I WANNA BE THE BEST, DAMMIT! And If I can’tbe the best I at least want to be the weirdest. But I’m neither, anymore. I got out of the microscopic pond that was my family’s houses, and out here I’m just another rat-fuck scurrying around taking up air. Maybe the solution is to give in to all those things you know aren’t solutions--just enjoy them for their own fervent, meaningless selves, instead of stopping every impulse you have just because you’re wise enough now to know it’s not going to be the miracle cure. So indulge in miracle cures knowing full well they are but snake oil. Drink it down, feel it slither down your throat, swallow the snake juice in silvery gobbets, friend. Why, after all (since [as we learned on the acid trip before motherfucker had the disappearing audacity to die--of all the ridiculous twists he could have come up with] the stuck on and stacked up this you see around you like so many fistfuls of fake gems and tidy shelves of motley liquor bottles is all there is, all you get), the fuck not? Dude, you just need to have a job you really dig. I mean, more. I know, I know, you can’t love your job all the time. But I just want one in which I can: Work at home Work my own schedule Go out and meet people sometimes Travel occasionally Make enough to get by Feel like I’m paying for the space I take up. Is that so wr-wawng-uh? Right now I’m scoring about ONE out of SIX. And that’s not quite good enough for a sustained life. Well, okay, let’s make it TWO out of SEVEN: Learn something And anyway, if you had a job as, say, for instance, just, you know, hypothetically and all, as a writer, and it turned out that you were right, you’re not amazing, not a superhero, just plain old Matt, and then you decided that doing your job anyway (sadness of an old computer?) was still preferable to--not doing it, I guess, then Maybe you would discover that you could laugh at your own habitual grandiosity. Maybe you could come down off the hypersuperultra tower of filmy fleecities and be a horse, be dirty, be in a tavern, make a little love with a cute boy--what I’m trying to say is, when I feel like I’m writing, it is good enough. And what more sign do I need than that to FUCKING PROCEED????? In the final end he won the war, after losing every battle. I hope that if (when) I am reunited with (or secretly never separated from) my clan, my tribe, my core group, my, my, I don’t fucking know my clump for fuck’s sake, that I will keep getting to play, that I can take this fragile quest, already by the shrill standards of this flatulent, vociferous world aged beyond utility or beauty, on to the next level, where I can play some more with my friends. On the off chance that this is how it works, I will keep going, keep working on it, keep playing like it. And then, in this living arrangement, we become each able to do our separate things, to read our books on separate couches, to glimmer languidly in the unassuming presence of one another’s love, without having at all times to make love--and then, looking back, we wonder why we wondered why, or what is the purpose of this living, when simply to do it, to inhale and exhale, is, after all, the peak experience, enlightenment attained but usually ignored, hurried past, run through as heedlessly and clumsily as this sentence runs on through the blissful purity of a snow-white page. February 15, 2001 Kind of lonely at home before Ann and without the Internet, Aina? A-what are you gonna do about it? Bunny. eat choc. drink cof. mstrbt. smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke some pot! appreciate the fact that putting this computer on 640x480 res. mode makes it look more furry, homey, crayon coloured. ’s’cool. I dig. You? why would you want to be famous? the more worshipped you are, the less you can trust the worshippers. February 16, 2001 I’m sad and horny, I miss Glenn, sometimes I miss Katy, mostly I miss my Lover. He needs to wake up. I need to wake him up. Enough of this stalking around trying to pick a magazine to emulate, I am I, dammit, and I have such a lot of love to give. Words rust. Under the dust of the crumbling Dodge in the reedy field: he is sitting there tasting the impossible brilliance of south dakota mountain sun. February 17, 2001 I think Glenn was the only one who didn’t get upset or weirded out by my frequent, capricious changes of mind. He was just kind of like, “Okay, man....” February 19, 2001 I am now typing to keep warm. and get less shiverin’ miserable from the weird combination of drugs I’ve had today. February 20, 2001 This radio station is on the air. From approximately 6:30 pm to whenever, before Ann gets home, we bring you news of the melting of the snow, weird music to masturbate by, and a host of other linguistic intricacies too nonsensical to be ignored. Welcome, and thanks for tuning in to If you there and ready . . . . Now I apologize for the dead air space, But I’m going to go listen to nothing for a while. foodstuff nub calzone. turkish you don’t have to be stoned to accomodate dwarves kill the backfire street the down up side winder missile silo grain alfalfa cool summer long long line into cool dumb night long long night straight silent arrow into cold afternoon the river river river james jim jim field across whiskering sheaves weeds to press your heel and toe heel and toe the mud clings to bootsoles come inside come inside be mud inside with me tonight the long long silent gray magnet infinity night so many stars. you breathe stars taste better than the city dearth hot highway funneling confusion mad pollution down town into the rainstore book falls from sky open to page a hundred and twenty two. give it up look for clues relax fall back understand? nothing too licorice unrhymed combination lock to your crossword puzzle soul understand? nothing yeah, yeaaaaaaah! dassa gooboy, dassa gooboy! yeaaaaaaah. music>stroke the penis>hallow imagination>shower warm water remembering sacred irreverent bath outdoors at festival>guitar spirit laughing rusty tones down upon our heads>two dogs run amok children trolls alike>spirit tangible effervescence between two mouths talking walking down rutted road past bacon coffee tangerine. hiking stick walking stick preying mantis thorn foot watch out liquid noon slide unhesitating by, on down down down into the water hole the fishy wormy bramble hole with trees and stumps of trees left over from before yes before this was the way it was. music loud unceasing do you copy do you read me yes i hear you come inside the sweat the pit the too-intimate cleft of angled logs and fire. what goes on in there is bigger in than out. space betweening jangle jingle eyes the black lies the quiet lies the cool slow patch of interstellar knowitall the one note wonder sings whip poor will/ whip poor will/ whip poor will. muscle sinew barbed wire fence. golden fizz of make-your-legs-walk up the hill. swish aside the leaves and rocks indent your waking sole. turgid butterflies alight on three-shaped leaves; irridescent goon-bugs waver in the jello light of towering afternoon. oaks dusty sigh and sadly smile; ghost of oaks we hope is watching; sycamore and sassafrass to come down in our circle; oak’s a lonely watching; The unanalyzed life is worth living; it gives the people who like to analyze lives something to do. February 21, 2001 to this home motel . . . . so my dad said tom robbins’ writing reminds him of mine. that’s cool. and i told them too i said i’m not looking for a woman any more and that i was done being hypothetically bisexual and at this time i am ready to explore that other side and i apologized to them and everyone for alienating myself the way i have and i allowed as how it might not have been necessary had i started this process back when i was aware of it, namely in puberty, but that, well, i didn’t, i’m starting it now and we all do the best we can with what we have to work with. and they pretty much agreed that that made sense and i could hear them being confused and Maybe hurt but very very cautious, like they were walking on eggshells to be accepting, ask questions but NOT say the wrong thing, and as for me i would’ve been fine with them just blurting out the wrong thing but because it was them it made me smile (after all this time) and just wait patiently for the end of the agonizingly long sentences and then pretty much just answer as honestly as i could. and yes they still love me. February 25, 2001 And Nancy said, “that doesn’t surprise me at all.... You were always experimental, free-flowing... hip.” And, “Whatever floats your boat,” and, “Do what you gotta do, explore what you gotta explore.” And, “You and grandma were the best people in the family.” When I said being “out” (although I didn’t use that word) was like hanging around with her when we were kids, listening to records and stuff, she said, “Do you know how long I’ve been trying to get that feeling back?” And she signed off with, “I love you. I miss you. I think about you.” My journal is almost as tall as I am these days. Not everybody is good at every thing, so you haf to have some people who love you, so they will love what you do even if it isn’t all that great to anyone else. Because otherwise you might be afraid to do it, and doing it gives you something you need to live. February 25, 2001 We despise each other some, now. This house together is cold comfort. Lonely apart, yet dreading each others’ return. I despise her for her constant anguish and leaden sorrow, and the way she clings to it desperately and the self-loathing that seems inherent in her inability to give in to it or fight it off--she hates me for lying to her about why I did not want to marry her. She thinks it’s not because she’s a woman. And it is, and it isn’t. I mean, to answer the question directly: Are you in love with her; do you want to be with her, does not require me to elaborate and say that I am looking for a man. Or that I am gay, which really is nothing more than acknowledging that the ideal I am ostensibly searching for, or perhaps the fantasy I am a complicitous slave to, when I picture it, includes a man as my mate, as the one who gets my secrets out of me both gently and violently (and a version of me who is not afraid of the softness and flowering of his own soul and demeanor). But what a man! What I expect of him! How could he be real? How could he love me the way I love him, touch me the way I dream of his touching me, without our both dissolving into grotesque self-contempt and shame? How could he simultaneously exist corporeally, be alive, be aware of me in my nakedness and himself in his, and still want to stay? How could we jostle each other with the easy, clumsy grace of men, remain men, and then touch each other softly, lovingly, slowly, fully? How I smoulder for this man, and how I resent how ridiculous he makes my life appear. Last night I dreamed of going bald, in odd patches. I cannot rely on cuteness and freshness anymore. I cannot simply lay myself out like a clean cut of meat and get fawned over anymore; the older I get the more rotten this will make me feel. And yet I cannot suffer this isolation, this loneliness. And yet I cannot settle for the smothering, beamingly banal, doting contempt that comes with the affections of a woman. Am I then simply wounded, bitter? Is “gay” another word for “misogynistic”? And does it make a difference if it is? The more I press on the sore spots of these thoughts, the more sick I get, the more hollow but wanting to burst, the more dully certain my desperation is not destined to be relieved in this lifetime. Which if only I could gracefully exit, follow Glenn into the wings and there meet up with him and not have him hate me for my cowardice in running after him, big brother, little brother. Him always sitting there at any table across from me, that curious frown on his brow whenever he chews, as if the very sensuality of the act of eating were enough to intrigue him and make him uncomfortable. Him in his solidity, always a little untouchable, always giving off an air which I could breathe but shallowly, a little in secret perhaps, always just vibrating there, taking up space, implying that, pathetic, absurd, and ultimately desolate as everything was and is, it is all, also, all right. Glenn. \Sawdust. The thought of making love with a man sickens me, but the thought of being condemned to women threatens me. The idea of lowering myself again into the sticky honey of her, the viscous softness, the fuming dank of her sex--I do not want to be wet like that again now, not that wetness of a mewling kitten, helpless, licked, I do not know exactly what I want. My castle walls are rotten, crumbling. I want to repair them but I want to fill the court first, I want the peace of the cloister but I want a festival of troubadors, I want a feast but a fast, a battening down but a journey abroad. Most of all I want to feel awake again, and in my body, not so heavy, overfed, and dredged over like a shitty river bottom. I want the sun to rise over woods and rivers. I want sun-drenched rocks. I want bugs and berries. I want Ann to not wait until the middle of the god damned night to come home with the van so we can finish moving the rest of our shit, or at least have the decency to call me so I’m not waiting here with my thumb up my ass. Sitting here smoking, drinking apple juice. What’s satisfying is: having fed the dogs, the dryness and slowness of the cigarette, the flakes of ice in the juice (it has been sitting out on the porch in a glass jar). The silence, perforated by the jingles and ticking of the dogs, is venomous but also a little bit okay. Sugar and spice, revisited . . . Women are sexy like teddy bears, sachets, a riot of clean goodsmelling, revolting savage musk and sometimes wicked; men are sexy rough like trees, the terrible call of the sea, easy, perfect death. February 26, 2001 What most people mean when they say, “So-and-so never grew up,” is, “So-and-so never learned to follow directions.” Lying is a habit. Most people look at you as if trying to figure out something. Whether or not you can be trusted? Or just all their own, individual wonderings? Hoping to see themselves reflected in you. Or dreading to. All this hifalootin nonsense is my way of avoiding my own circular, barbed- wire pen that I seem to be thinking in and out of these days. lampshade eyes. i feel so duplicitous for some reason like why am i trying to convince myself i am gay? “gay.” That is such a stupid fucking word. I am not fucking “gay,” I am sometimes quite sombre in fact. I am a man, god dammit. I am a man who gets excited by the idea or fact of another man fucking his girlfriend, hard, real bad-boy-like, while he himself is somehow rendered helpless by the same man while the girl watches--but only watches for a while because soon her face is lost to passion, and his own? is the rapture of the roller coaster. I am a man whose imagination land has in it another man who is my lover. Three times I’ve asked women to marry me, two of them said yes, and I’ve never been married. La cucaracha, la cucaracha, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Because there is no, because there is no, marijuana left to smoke. I have a flock of crows behind me, various bobbing voices that tell me how to act. Act. Trouble is, they all want me to Act a certain way. And about the crows--I mean that mostly metaphorically, or rather magically because that sounds less clinical. As opposed to Annmarie’s crows, whom, it seems, she actually, literally, physically, hears and talks to. But I have no way of knowing how different mine are from hers, if they even resemble each other, or if they are lifeforms to each other entirely alien. I am terrified of roller coasters! Is it so despicable of me to want to prove myself gay, to hope that’s how it turns out, in order not to appear to have been an utter asshole to Ann? There is another reason I hope that’s how it turns out. Would you like to know what it is? Okay, okay, stop tickling me! I’ll tell you. It is: I am a faggot unlucky enough to be looking for love instead of a flashy display of sex. Sound high and mighty? Well fuck you, it’s how I feel. I tend to have a lot of SUBJECT VERB, [STRING OF MODIFYING PHRASES, ESPECIALLY PREPOSITIONAL] type sentences. It is fun to take those out and knock them around. Do you think like that? No, you just think to write like that. THAT’S one reason magnetic poetry is so cool--you[re not thinking to write, you[re not on your lamebrained quest for le mot juste, so you get magic instead. A little word is like a little lego in a funky niche, says “dog” or “viking ship” more improbably, and often more effectively, than a highly specialized, horse- or ship-shaped technolego. Like Kerouac said, don’t stop to think of words but to get clearer picture. Every time I make the effort to write what I really think, or see, or feel, or imagine, versus whatever habitual, formulaic stock response comes to mind, in other words, whenever I elect not to bullshit, I have Douglas Hunt to thank. Every time I restructure and play with a sentence to make it flow logically, as imperturbably and bug-free as computer code, I have that one guy to thank. The fuck was his name. Well, I have it written down somewhere. [gil porter] And when I notice and enjoy a structure of a whole story, particularly one more interesting than the monolinear, I have Trudi Lewis to thank. for realizing that the whole “gay” thing is not merely sexual, i have myself to thank. for finally understanding a glimmer of what it actually is, and that sex is one way of touching it, i have James Baldwin to thank. Another thing: Even if you--even if I come to think of myself as gay, if I bite the bullet and say it’s going to be all right, even helpful, as a word, dare I say as a label, despite its grotesque shortcomings and misaptitude for so many nuances and blah blah blah--and even if I have so-called discovered this dramatically late in life, and even if I approach the whole experience with the grandiosely humble air of the psychically liberated--it’s still no guarantee I’ll find that one lover, that one love. Anywhere but in my little files and dreams, that is. March 2, 2001 when we were pagans we were strong (weak) hold down the x to hear the sound / pair of hips just walking around / the lips deploy the legs to reach the ground. claire’s dunny breast pakt ful, so much sexier and effortless too than th’anemic genuflections of swimsuit editions’ pootsy pelvis robots. okay, one more rehash: not about constantly craving cock, not because pussy’s gross--pussy’s nice, sometimes; it’s loving someone so much you want to move in closer--and giving yourself permission to DO SO. March 4, 2001 In the end, it’s pure weirdness that survives. When I was a child, I made Collections of Weird Things. I threw a lot of stuff away. I typed because it was quietly thrilling to do so, because Plain life was unutterably boring without it. Now I feel obligated to prove my talent by writing about Life. No wonder I feel so stymied, frozen, isolated. I am a hypochondriac above all else: I wasn’t precocious enough. I am not analytical enough. I don’t have vivid enough dreams. I started too late. I am too shy. I am too dum. Fuck me. And that’s as far as I get because I don’t have a doctor’s excuse. Sunday, the day of coffee and cigarettes--woops, Ann left the tobacco at work. Sunday, the day of coffee--woops, my stomach’s already turgid from too much. Sunday, the day of. Reading + writing + something (visceral & muscular) with friends = everything i need (almost). On the other hand, see “Nadya & Ray” in The Time is Now by Melody Sumner. Fuck it it doesn’t matter; it is an awesome story. Literature, as I swim in it, is a beast of innumerable manifestations, each of which tends to inspire in new or old friends when they meet with it the creation of strange shadows of itself, mingled with the blood of themselves, so the whole thing is this infinity of light and shadow and some blood that always grows wilder and keeps changing and changing like a city only forever. It is also galaxially quiet. Yes, that’s right, I swim in a beast. Fuck off bitch. For some reason it just seemed significant, even screamingly epiphanic, that though I chose to burn one candle into nothingness, and now I go get another, I could have burned them both, for the result of twice the light for half the time. I don’t know, it’s just like that word in italics. Screw, I don’t know. I May not be well read popular, but the books people I love I truly love. Take this: Ann’s chameleon is dying probably as she holds him to her breast to keep him warm. Neither of us knows what else to do at this point. I feel like a villain, in here reading typing smoking just smugly being all the pettiness that makes me think I’m me, while a being is faltering, slowing, decaying, dying in this very house. The weird juxtaposition: We were watching Jurassic Park, all those big mad lizards ranting around tearing the place up, with their big angular mouths a-snapping. And here’s Louie, small, pale now, little angular mouth now shut, not snapping crickets. Not the badguy, the victim of our mammalian ignorance. Then we watched another bad movie together, something from the eighties, about a guy with two personalities, one of which kills girls who remind him of his sexually abusive dead mom. Anyway, she’s asleep on the couch, the sick chameleon still held to her bosom. It’s 3:47 am. I’m ready for bed. Do I just leave her there? March 5, 2001 Yes. She stays there halfway thru the next day. Now she’s going to PT and puts him on the stove above the pilot light, wrapped in a shirt--the shock of going outside will instantly kill him--the parameters of fragility--and asks me to look at him sometimes while she’s gone. I will, even though I don’t know what difference it makes. “I’ll see you later,” she says as she leaves and I understand she’s tired and sad, but I am quietly frustrated, angered that the phrase sounds somehow like an accusation. Am I not supposed to leave? How do I redeem myself while remaining whole? I guess she was simply saying, Will you please assuage my helplessness by joining me in it? It seems the only things human beings can really do for each other, the only things sometimes that are meaningful at all, are the utterly meaningless. --And then what does she do? Stays gone all day--it’s been over 6 hours now, without calling to tell me any god damn thing, leaving me here to be the vigilant one, to bear the brunt of the pathos. I can’t fucking believe her sometimes. She acts like she’s so fucking sensitive, and gets so morose when her animals die. For instance, what about the lizard over at the other house? Does she even go over there and check on him? I don’t fucking know. Reading Melody Sumner, particularly “Nadya & Ray” also makes me miss Jackie Ray. I probably should have stuck with her. Delany suggests analysis as a balance (or perhaps a foil?) for fantasy. Can analysis be done intuitively, in a magical or fantastic realm? I have to remember that my part and Delany’s part of the big tapestry are not identical. Then it can still be interesting, the things he says, like the things anyone says that I have to sweat to understand. March 7, 2001 She is such a fucking bitch sometimes, Look at me I’m talking about her with an unantecedented pronoun, like she’s my wife or something. Sometimes her presence is cloying, smothering. March 9, 2001 Delany, talking about Starship Troopers, said he felt much of Heinlein’s argument was “specious.” Is literature necessarily argumentative? I doubt most of my arguments get much deeper than the world from where I sit seems beautiful, scary, painful, delightful, incomprehensible, ironic, and indescribably fascinating (etcetera). Let’s live in it. The selfish part, I guess, would be the implication that my sharing my observations and experiences of the world somehow pays for the space I take up. March 9, 2001 a blank field: refreshing is the greenish wall of my attic room after all ann’s crap downstairs! Looking back now, it’s almost hard to believe I ever lived in a house with a bunch of Chinese people, and pissed down the heat vent in my second floor apartment! But then again, not that hard to believe. How? Do you get your verve back? Verve back. verve back. I kind of hate Ann right now, and I hate all her fucking bits she puts on EVERY AVAILABLE SURFACE! March 10, 2001 ,.,.;:;:?! (no) fuck! ¤ according to the latest census: rats outnumber humans in Milwaukee. Blacks outnumber whites. Welp, there goes the neighborhood. Reading Delany’s autobio leaves me feeling provincial, dull, and lazy--but also intrigued, comforted, and energized. All in all, I’d say it’s an enjoyable experience. March 11, 2001 There is just no stopping the fervor of my selfabasement! If I hear of someone I think must be successful who writes many more poems than I do, I’m sure my output is too paltry to qualify me as a real writer. But if I read of someone who writes many fewer than I, I think mine must be very pale and slapdash, to come out with such ease and speed. Fuck meeeeeeeeeeee, man. March 14, 2001 Ah, Delany and his nail-biters . . . . Funny, Bryan drew me a picture of the self-resonance of good fiction years ago: a ball-point crawl of bifurcating veins, all growing back into the main trunk down the line. But it’s taken me till now to accept that yes, it really does work, is enjoyable, even desirable, and till now to employ it with anything remotely approaching easy, humorous grace. I think I’m afraid of calling myself bisexual because I’ve developed this nagging sense that if I accept that identity, then I will have to settle down and get married. And at least at this time in my life I would rather stay relatively independent and explore, as SD put it, “the limits of my own sexual map.” Of course, the lurking, greater fear is that I’m really just a heterosexual with enough psychological problems to cast my entire gender identity into wimpy, neurotic confusion. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem too likely. I’m a pretty together guy. Right? So I pick out CD’s at random, looking for a good voice, a fluid, woman, powerful, lilting voice to make the stereo sing, and I decide to try Ann’s Selena albums. This one, the label all printed in Spanish only, has a picture of Selena, and I fix on her bosom, bountiful, pushing against this tight, black brassiere which is exposed as she pulls back her shirt, emblazoned with gypsy flowers. Her round, delicious face gazes out. Her lips are full and red, it’s that simple: full, and red. I guess I do like women a lot. I guess I just also like freedom a lot. And I’m still pretty shy. I think I May really be bisexual. I could be wrong. I don’t usually go to bed with the men I pick up in bars--but then i usually don’t go to bed with women, either. and so on. March 16, 2001 i need a woman. i May need her to dominate me, humiliate me, deride me, drench me, spank me, smother me, shit in my mouth, cheat on me, and laugh while her real boyfriend makes me suck his engorged black cock, but nonetheless i still need a woman. March 16, 2001 nonetheless, i want to suck cock. “. . . and bam, there i’d be, waiting on a woman again.” March 18, 2001 “may the wind be at your back” March 21, 2001 Ann fucked my ass real good and i begged to be her slave, she said yes you May. I came hard and yelled. Then, lying crumpled up there on the wolf blanket while she petted my hair, i felt a wave of sadness go by like a lumbering, crashing semi in the middle of the night, full of all my hopes and stars and promises and excitement and life force. I thought Maybe it was the thing I’m always saying I’m looking for whenever I’m running away. Nero’s whining and it’s pissing me off; how suddenly life goes back to the picayunely mundane. Am I going to do anything about it this time? this time? i said, All the 364 days of the year that I exhaust myself acting like I’m looking for that thing, and then for one moment of one day it shows itself to me--and I always let it go. Ann said, so don’t let it go this time. By the time you recognize it, it’s already gone. but it is still there: that dark, windy thing, --and cock and pussy and clever new parasitic forms of art and hyperbooks and all that fun stuff notwithstanding-- it is the thing March 23, 2001 Okay, so I’m fucking Ann again, and thinking about fucking Kate again, and I got kind of turned off at the sex farm, and I’m saying I must be bisexual after all, again, dammit, I’m just not going to find a way out of it. Two questions: Why do I want to find a way out of it? Why was I so happy when I thought I was gay and I was dancing on the living room floor to the stereo, just moving and grinding my hips? Okay, make it three: Why do I act like a fuckin clown, as if constantly apologizing for my faulty behavior, in effect saying, “I know I suck, please don’t hit me!”? March 24, 2001 Stuck, but not in the mud. I tell myself, “be alert for ann’s trying to immobilize you,” and then i beg to be her slave. ahh, yes! potytrsdtssirt. hersur. peeienis. houth. SAssA>&onerafhieop. HJeee,,___ kine makef ale? Ais tis, miet bursifiurl. THHHHHTN><kess keeesSSH! BITHCD> TRHU BIKCTH> AE EA &an thensm. CCCCummmmmmmmmmm to ne booof. ri siad. IOIIIOIIOIIIOOIOIIOOIIOIOOIIOOIIOOIIIOIOIIOOIIOOIOIOIIOOIIO OIOIIIIOOIIOOI oao siisiisis isis isisssgo sisiisisisssssssssssssssuusoisoisoi suuck[ suuuuuuuuuuuuck suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucckkkk,slurp,, <swallow> ahh! March 26, 2001 I am going to the Milwaukee Art Museum today. If they have coin lockers, I will put away my many layers-vs-the-cold, and I will float around (relatively) unfettered, looking for alien poemforms to collect. And put them in my cushy warm collection tank. One way or another. March 27, 2001 What actually happened is the Art Museum wuz closed for the Calatrava construction, the advertising & design museum was closed, the bus was open, the coffee shop was open the girl’s face who served the coffee was half closed and i was half clothed. TYPED. man buss sit hat cigar fence broken brick asphalt cold summer notyet sun. also went to MATC, airport. and back home. Where i am now, almost, it is almost spring. spring. spring. spwinf. TEETS! WHWWHat I MA AM DOINDOINDOINDOINDOIHNDOINODING now is fidgettting because i want something to appear to me to come to me but because i am looking for it and am leashing it so harshly to my hip, it will not come. NOT RIGHT NOW ANYHOW> feeling like failure. why? beccuz las night i failed to be the perfect slave, and now i’m stuck with freedom again. because bullshit is why, there’s so much bullshit in my ears i can’t hear the rain. but i’m not gonna start bitching again right away. we’ll see what happens. If nothing happens before too long i canalways just rrr-R-R-RIP!!! it off and start a new page. Right? there appeared a door: It looked a little like an emergency exit from--or into--an airplane. On it was a white placard, on which had been hastily scrawled two words: “Save me.” How do you fight a larger group than yours? One thing you do is take their emblems and symbols and subvert them for your own use. March 28, 2001 I’m racking my brain, trying to figure out a way various of my particularly sex- and women-related files would have gotten modified today, around noon, while I was definitely at work and the computer should have been sleeping. And Ann has scrawled on the wipeerase board, “I’m the biggest fucking fool to walk the earth.” I am pretty sure she looked at my shit and is lying about it. I can’t positively prove it because I don’t know 100% about how this computer works, nor how paranoid or weird-conspiracy-theory-ish I’m being about how she’s acting tonight, etc. But I do know a pretty good god damn bit about the computer, and I even ran Norton to check for bad modification dates (found some, but not any of those files), and experimented with the various programs in question to find exactly what gets modified when you do what--and it all matches up. By far the simplest explanation is that somebody looked at my fucking files, and who the fuck else could it have been? I was all hyped for the confrontation--scared, excited, relieved, etc. I never for an instant expected her to say No, she didn’t. I just wasn’t prepared for that. Now I don’t know WHAT to do or fucking think. March 30, 2001 this dippy-sexy dj on wmse just did something like the operating- environment poetry i’ve been playing with: he stuck a public service message about the arbor day foundation, spoken in a massive, grave voice trying way too hard to sound regal, in the middle of several long, uninterrupted moments of a tape loop saying. “where time becomes a loop” in two fairly plain, scientific, educational sounding voices, one in each channel, phasing in and out--but mostly out--of synchronicity. It’s like the ol’ bird building a nest and using what’s there: and these days what’s there is as likely to be ticker-tape paper spat out the back end of a price tag gun and blown by a wednesday breeze out the back door of the receiving department as twigs, fur or grass. April 1, 2001 If crazy people were crazy randomly, it would be okay. You could say well, that’s just the weird thing about my friend, and I help her out as best I can. But (at least in the case of Ann) it seems to be more related to stressful or hurtful situations. Which means the more I get free, the more likely she is to get freaked out and need need need me to stay stay stay, and man I’m ready to go go go. “it hurts to be a cow,” she mumbles, and rolls back over in bed--my bed! I realize she is a brilliant person, interesting, lovable, even likeable. But now, now that we uncomfortably live together, I see the full danger of the pattern, what everyone was so concerned about, what I shrugged off as just their closed-mindedness. Open mindedness can get you in trouble. But it’s worth it. Most of the time. Just seems like any time I’m talking about the road we go down, the price of experience, the long strange trip or whatever-- somebody’s getting hurt. Is this my problem? Is this my fault? I need to bring my vacuum cleaner up here. when u archive, move what’s left to the attic, not to the trash. Okay, so I don’t even necessarily really want to fuck men--although I would if the situation were right and it came up, naturally--but regardless :it’s not for loving by, it’s for loving with . . . , i do want to love them. Weirdly, as I get more able to smile at girls on the street and not be afraid they’re going to think I’m disgusting, or worse, beneath notice--or, rather, not be afraid even if they do that it’s that big a fucking deal after all, that they all will, all except the sick ones that are freakier and more pathetic than me if you can believe that--and as I see that the more i accept and even enjoy who i am, the more i can talk to strangers, smile at women and men, get to know them or not, have a natural connexion with them or not, and all this without okay, abort that hopeless sentence. what i’m trying to say is, i smiled at a girl on the street, and she said, “hello, how are you?” and it was a very satisfying experience. And I somehow broke through or drifted past my fear of Jason-- even before I knew he was a young pup and Carolyn’s boyfriend besides--and his intimidating, sexy plans to be an EMT and a fireman, and talked with him and found him engaging, entertaining, sweet, surprising, and refreshing. And that, too, was a very satisfying experience. This is starting to happen to me because I am starting to be okay with who I am. Now if Kate and I could just be able to be in love and together without killing this fledgling strength. I’m kind of miserable because i tried to call her and got her voice mail. i want to just jump in . i want to have a good time, a good life, and have her. April 2, 2001 this is feeling like another show where the insane person gets shat on. is this my problem is this my fault Maybe you can’t always jump in. robbed of your dramatic entrance, you start to cast around for a way to scramble quietly down the rock face. Because it’s not so much--wait a minute.. i am going to call her. i remember when telling ann that i figured out “maybe she has enough people to help her, and she just wants somebody to hang out with” seemed such an epiphany. i remember when it seemed true. i remember fleeting, fleecy moments feeling king. walking down the sidewalk with my head held high, singing a country song with false gusto--or even some days with a slimy distant relative of gusto -- why i can’t be a writer: I hate myself so much I can’t even be honest about myself. And whether or not I write about myself, no wait--i can be. but it will all be lies in feeling, lies at the root unless i am being true to my self. It’s that simple. That goes whether or not I get married, get pussy whipped, love it, hate it, leave it, come back, or whatever. that is one of the best uses of writing: progress on favorite projects halts when lying to self. bullshit indicator of another kind. speaking of which, is this thing with kate all about getting that pussy? currently the best pussy i’ve ever had? and if so, does it matter? (the only answer to that besides a tingling in my loins is: look at your living situation now. ) no not the only answer: let’s go with a healthy dose of the loin tingling, and couple it with something: make it a blow and a word! if this is a game people play, then she’s the best at it of anybody. so if you give yourself permission to play that game, and if she wants to play it with you, fucking go for it, bitch! why would you not give yourself permission to play? because it would render me powerless. how? well, i would get so comforted by the game that i would let her take over and tell me what to do and we would end up in some white suburb living comfortably while all the action, all the glory, all the danger and all the life happen somewhere else, close by but exquisitely, contemptuously untouchable. well is there a way you could play the game and also--what, get involved in the action, is that it? well, i suppose, but-- but what? but who are you to ask anyway? who are you not to answer? o, so it’s a clever word game now, is it? we always come back to those. yes, i’m afraid we do. why? why do you think? can you answer with anything other than a question for once? yes. you lose. No i don’t because i’m going to tell you what i think. okay, shoot. the question game reminds me of kate. what do you mean, “reminds you?” i mean, watching that movie with her. what movie? oh, you know, the tom stoppard play. rosencrantz and guilderstern are dead? yeah, only it’s gildenstern. i know, but katy was always mispronouncing it. and that was something you loved about her? yeah. still do? yeah. then why don’t you tell her about it? because she’s pissed off at me. she is? well, she won’t answer her phone. if i May inquire, without sounding too much like a menacing prosecutor, why would she be pissed off at you? because i’m a chickenshit. how so? well i go around clucking and sitting on my hands and--see? there i go again. gotta crack a joke to avoid the subject. what were we talking about? oh, yeah, me being a chickenshit. well, thing is, see, she looked so pissed when i was out there getting another good talking to by carolyn-- wait a second, wait a second. what? sorry to interrupt, but i saw something strange in your eyes when you said that bit about carolyn. what was that all about? well, uh, i. come on, now, i’m going to push for this one. i’m going with my instinct on this, and if need be, i’ll apologize later. huh. sounds like the story of my life. well, okay. let me back up. okay. see, we went out to this bar. who went out? well, me, kate, carolyn, jason-- jason? yeah, i’ll tell you about him a little later. okay, go on. okay let’s see, me-kate-car-jas- oh yeah, and this one girl in a red sweater or shirt or something who didn’t seem to like me at first but warmed up to me past the point where i genuinely wanted to keep listening to her, and this other couple, these kinda fat pasty people who seemed pretty nice. i didn’t talk to them that much, but the one guy shot the 5-ball instead of the cue ball, and me and kate and jason kinda thought that was funny. and jason said all this stuff about how when he didn’t want to win he shot better, and as soon as he wanted it too bad it would all go to shit and dear god i am so fucking stupid because it isn’t until now, telling you this, that i realize that sounds exactly like something glenn would have said, but then it’s no surprise because i knew there was something i loved about the kid, and it wasn’t just that he had the good taste and good fortune to be carolyn’s boyfriend. wow. yeah. so anyway, what was i saying? you were just telling me about the night out. oh yeah. right, so then the pot that i had eaten earlier has kicked in so i’m already a little mushy and pliable, and kate and me split a pitcher and well, the point is, i had a great time. there. that’s it? you had a great time? well, okay, there’s more. look, you don’t have to tell me, i just-- no, it’s okay. you were right the first time to push. it’s what i needed. thank you. thank you. so, right. okay. so. right well i get all cute and do this little dance at one point to margaritaville, and they all smile at me with varying degrees of charmed, inquisitive, impressed, delighted-- damn, you must have been really awesome! oh, i’m telling you, i was. top of my form. lithe, lissome, musky and dashing. so what went wrong? why do you assume something went wrong? because i know you. okay, fine. what went wrong was, i just tried to call her to apologize and got her voice mail. whoah, okay. i meant back then. that night? that night what went wrong. i mean, you called her up to apologize for doing a little dance and having a good time? no, i-- what then? i apologized because what else happened after i was really loving having jason’s approval, because he’s a brave, smart, funny, cute young man who is going to be an emt and a fireman, and i wasn’t sure if i wanted to kiss him or clasp him heartily, but i knew i wanted to be cool with him in some way. i played a willie nelson tune because he said he was a country fan. and he didn’t seem to mind all the attention. he didn’t seem to think it was offensive, slimy, pathetic, weird, or anything. or if he did think so, he covered it up nicely. he complimented me on my pool playing. he asked if i was staying the night with everyone at carolyn & kate’s mom’s and sounded kind of like he hoped i was. he said he hoped we would get to see each other more. and i don’t know if anyone else thought that was strange. and i don’t know if anyone else was as delighted as i. and i don’t know if i was so delighted because i’m gay and i want him, i’m lonely for men friends and i want him, i’m hungry for the approbation and companionship of brave people, or some combination of all those. i didn’t even feel too bad when he got all saucy with kate and she sauced back. um--and you feel a need to apologize for all this? well, yeah, because then i was all lovey with kate, and i mean shit, man. earlier that night she said can i take you home with me when i was rubbing her back, and i said, Maybe eventually. i’m such a horrible tease with her. carolyn claims kate’s so fucking totally in love with me. she told me herself she is. and i said, i’m in love with you too, but you want to put restrictions on my behavior? and she said yes and there was a chafing silence. okay but i’m still not sure what you’re apologizing for. well i’m apologizing for going and crying on carolyn’s shoulder like a big spectacle when the rest of them all filed into the house. i’m apologizing for crying when i didn’t get my way. i’m apologizing for not even knowing what my way is, for chrissake. i’m apologizing for not even thinking to ask her to come in the house when she dropped me off. i just said, i’ll call you and she raced away. um, i have two questions for that. what? one, why do you wish you had brought her in the house, and two, why do you think you didn’t? well, i wish i had brought her in because it would have shown that i was independent of ann. are you? what? independent of ann? yes. you are? well, i’m beginning to be. what do you mean? i mean, like tonight. see, all god damn weekend, actually ever since i came back inside the house that night without kate, now that you mention it, she’s been all freaky weird. how so? well, blood in evidence having recently and scantily cleaned up, all the gloom and misery and muttering. and i know it’s probably egotistical to say that’s because i was gone and she didn’t know where i was, but i’ll tell you this: the deep mood lasted all weekend until tonight, claire didn’t call me back and i hung out at home and ann and i made cookies, and watched tv and got to talking and laughing, and pretty soon i’m getting in a funk about the whole katy thing and also this tv show we saw where the black paramedic (yes, i did think of jason for a minute) gets in this personal war with the cops because they treat the black kids like shit and don’t let him help them, and the tv woman only tells the story from the cops’ point of view, and his friend at the hospital betrays him and calls the cops when he’s secretly bringing this kid in to save his life, this kid who is a prime suspect of the cops even though he wasn’t even one of the shooters in the original incident that set the whole thing off, and it made me kind of creeped out about the nearness of violence and feeling like i am on the wrong side but like a babied son i take advantage of the perks of being assumed by the powerful to be basically okay and obedient, and so i help her put the rest of the cookies away--a decent enough gesture and peace offering, i thought, which means i knew the conflict was coming--and say i’m going on up to bed. and? and she suddenly gets all quavery and says then i’m probably going to leave then. i say where you going she says i don’t know. but i don’t want to be alone here. i touch her hair and say take care of yourself, and try to sound like i mean it, because i do. she almost halfway snorts and says, yeah right. i look at her once more. it is quiet and trembling in the room now. i call dexter and leave her there. so the fact that you were willing to leave her there shows your independence. right. but. but what? well but nothing. it’s just hard sometimes. right. you don’t want to feel like you’re just turning your back on someone you made a promise to. right. and then i’m trying to think back, well, what did i actually promise? i never promised never to leave her. i never promised i could make her all better. the only thing i haven’t been straight up about is that i think i’m still in love with kate. why haven’t you? well, i mean i use the excuse that she never asked and i’m not obligated to tell her, but shit. i mean, i asked her to marry me, she said yes, i said well i don’t know after all. so i already feel like a comlete shit fuck. and then i said, oh i think i May be gay and i’m willing to risk everything to find out, so whether i’m decieving myself or not, whether it’s just to get attention or not, i want a boyfriend, i don’t want to get married, and i still want to live with you. well, two out of three’s not bad, right? i managed to almost tell the whole truth. and then i lazily permit her the luxury of telling people at work that we broke off the engagement because i’m gay. a) it was safer than coming out to scary yokels by myself, and b) it got her off my damn back and we only had sex when i felt like it and she pretty much worshipped me while i got to do whatever i wanted. kinky, right? well it starts to get boring, and then it gets hateful. i thank myself or my god, whoever it is, that some tiny, hushed, vital part of me had the sense to hold out for a place where i would have a way--this room we’re in right now-- to get the fuck away from her. so that’s where i’m at now. and the whole gay thing? still don’t know. and the whole katy thing? still want to apologize, but not in the way i originally thought. i keep getting the urge to give her this whole thing, this little transcript of our conversation, and then choke back the urge far enough to keep telling as much of the truth as i can, and then bringing back up the urge long enough to look back over it and think if it would be a good idea or not, and so forth, back and forth like so many things in my life seem to be, and i was trying out in my head this kind of way i could introduce it, like: dear katy (or kate, but you’ll always also be katy to me): it’s been suggested by people whose opinions i generally value that it’s okay to have some secrets, in fact it’s necessary to the life of a relationship. and i’m sure i’ll always have some. but this time, right now, it seems more important for me to spill my guts entirely. so i’m giving you this whole, tedious thing to read, without trying too hard to write it just right--even though you’re my favorite person to try to get something just right for-- maybe that’s why it’s so easy for me to screw it up, i don’t know--and say okay, this is the state of my mind. i’m not begging to be excused because i’m “so confused,” i’m just saying this is what my life is like, this is who i am, i do love you and i’m trying to be brave. so, um, what do all your parts say? all of em? well, any of them that have something to say. well, hang on a second, let me see. i have to go find roy, because i’m pretty sure i gave him all the stone pix to hold on to. he seemed to think they were pretty cool. and i believe he is with the other kids in the chapel. (he is) okay, in the order he’s got em in, then: blackie: bushmill: good luck crow: you gave me this stupid love letter to hold, this pathetic sniveling attempt to get off scot free with the pussy. i know she’s the best pussy you ever had, but she’s also the best copilot you’ve ever had, and-- no, shut up. just listen to me for a second you little shit, or i’ll rip that smirk right off your downy fucking face. i personally couldn’t give two rat’s shit if you get married or not, or flirt with straight boys, or whatever the fuck it is you do. but you have got to be straight with her. you have to be straight with her because you love her and she is a good person. you also have to be straight with ann, because symbolically saving someone’s life does not give you permission to walk all over her soul, no matter how wellintentioned you were at the time. dragon: i’m not going to bore you with “if-you- need-me-i’ll-be-there” stories. i have told you before that if you need me i’ll be there, and when you want to believe me, you will. geoff: look. man. just don’t lie to her. jan: i don’t think you’re pathetic, though i know you think i think you are. i think you’re just very, very young, still learning how to crawl, still learning that you have options besides crying. when you do figure this out, you will do some unusual, interesting things, and, i hope to god, at least one brave thing. max: daddy? how long are you going to stay up? i kind of have to pee. roy: well, all i know is, carolyn was right about one thing. you are in a rut, even at the same time you’re not. i mean, yeah, you’re learning how to write, Maybe, at least you’re feeling like writing and it’s making you feel better, but there’s something still really unfinished about it. you’re still putting yourself on pause all the time, dude. stranger: an amazing thing, this silent captain. thieu: hmmmmm . . . . . tinker: well you’ve already apologized to her voice mail in a faltering, half-understanding sstutter. so you probably already look a little pathetic. i think we can redeem a little of that though, if we follow it up with a little bit of being true to yourself--also carolyn’s recommendation--a dram of patience, a sense of humor, and, uh, at this point, whatever else we can find. ty/schand/icoul: oh. you again? aren’t you off smoking marijuana and masturbating somewhere? not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. unless you ruin it for the other playmates by moaning about what you’d rather be doing all the time. hey, what would you rather be doing all the time, anyway? who are you? will: hey pop. look, i spray painted an “8” on the old birch tree. cuz that’s how old my brother is. and that’s how much i love him. are you mad at me for hurting the tree? or is your heart warmed by how strong my love is? or both? what are you all worried about? there’s sunflowers by the back fence. i painted two crows in the sky. blackie: i need some help. as one: what do you need help with? blackie: well, everything. i mean, shit! you all think i’m supposed to be this fucking superhero. Shit! I May not be from this planet, but that don’t make me superman! Sometimes it seems like everything is kryptonite here. What you people don’t realize is, all I can do by myself is make the final decisions. I know, it’s the one thing you all can’t do without me, at least not all the time. But that’s all it is. Listen to me: I need you all to back me up. Sure, you can give yourselves credit--well-deserved credit, for coming in here in this room and being honest. But in the end, you always leave it up to me whether or not any of it leaves this room! And then when I make my decision, and I say let’s go do it, you lurch with me about halfway out of your seats, and I boldly step through the door, and you laugh and yell, “Psych!” and sit back down and slam the door on my ass. You bunch of fucking cocksuckers. No, that’s an insult to the holy cocksucker. You’re a bunch of lazy, wanna-be-oppressed cuz it gets you inside something cool, half-assed, shit-talking, would-be, could-be, should-be mother fuckers. crow: damn. you never talked to us this way before. i must say i’m impressed. blackie: well, get done being impressed, and get with me. or else-- crow: or else what? they stand in the middle of the round room. they stare at each other. the evening goes as red as the rage in their gazes. the air is liquid mercury; you can see it tremble. because we all know, none of us can leave. blackie: we’re all stuck here-- crow: --in each other’s head-- ty/schand/icoul: --for eternity-- jan: --or til we die-- max: --whichever comes first-- roy: --forever and ever-- will: -- amen. tinker: we’re with you, man. [looking around] Right? stranger: everyone else: Right. April 3, 2001 basically, what it comes down to is i dont trust her. i don’t completely believe i’m really what she wants. and she is so amazed that i still don’t believe. and so am i. why do i not? why do i not? April 4, 2001 sure i May be a whiny crybaby. sure i May be making egregious and lamentable errors with a good, incredibly sexy woman who loves me. sure i May be letting her go while saying Maybe Maybe Maybe to myself which is the same as saying no no no to her. but i can still dance to the stereo in the living room. as long as i can still dance, i know all is not lost. i don’t let ann be good and i don’t let katy be bad Maybe this is so obvious i have to say it: running to katy to be close to jason isn’t probably a good idea. at this point, i either go to her and say, “tell me as if i’m stupid: what exactly do i have to do to win your love, and i will do it.” and mean it, or else, basically, as much as possible, leave her the hell alone--for a while. i start to panic at the thought of leaving her alone forever. if not for the cursed gay thing. is it an excuse? if so then why would i need an excuse? is it real am i crazy wimpy weak scared stupid deceitful or what’s exactly the deal here? come on, i could use some help with this. I’m starting to suspect that it’s less about gayness than about writing, and whatever that’s about. I’m starting to suspect that it’s less about gayness than about writing, and whatever that’s about. I’m starting to suspect that it’s less about gayness than about writing, and whatever that’s about. I’m starting to suspect that it’s less about gayness than about writing, and whatever that’s about. I’m starting to suspect that it’s less about gayness than about writing, and whatever that’s about. it’s about restrictions on my behavior both sexual and something else. but what? or is sexual enough. andmaybe a small part of it involves making getting out of my current situation seem easier. here i go. i’m starting to talk myself out of it again. do i really love her? am i supposed to be with her but i’m too scared and weak? or am i not supposed to be with her> or is there no supposed to be why don’t you just do what you want! i scream at me, then i yell back, because i want to do two incompossible things at once! and then i holler, well, asshole, then apparently what you really want is to sit there on your ass, always riding a fence through other people’s lives, moralizing and agonizing over the pathos of your jiggly, semeny little life. hm, “dear kate: god i love you. just tell me what to do--i can do anything except give up boys.” as if i even had any! and yet, i May be inching closer to the truth. but by the front door or the ass end, i can’t yet tell. \ it’s so odd how this room smells like south dakota, grandpa & grandma. i gotta get some rawhides for dexter when we’re up here. April 8, 2001 another beautiful day. i’m going out. i hope to let go of another layer of slime. April 9, 2001 today basically wasted though had decent sex April 12, 2001 So the mother fucking greaseball from upstairs, Marcy’s son, has been coming in here. They have the same fucking locks as the one on our back door to the common stairwell. He goes through Ann’s underwear, once looked in some of my more perverted-titled computer files, stole $60 from Ann’s dresser, and god knows what else. And as a sneak, he’s inept. Does he want us to know he has been here? Because it’s pretty fucking obvious. We’re going to have to get different locks, and Dick had better get on it pretty fucking promptly. It will be interesting to see how he handles it. It will be interesting to see how we all handle it. So what happened was, I knew I wasn’t straight, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly I was. I am starting to piece together a picture. My exploits are far fewer, and my prowess far less impressive than Delany’s, but I can honestly say I too am exploring the limits of my sexual map, after all. What I’m finding has elements of: dominance and submission being cuckolded humiliation being subjugated bondage voyeurism helplessness / relinquishment of control slavery self- loathing transvestitism transgenderism worship homosexuality bisexuality heterosexuality lactophilia exhibitionism the forbidden coprophilia whatever the word for the urinary counterpart to the above is torture sadism and masochism sodomy the irrational urge of the hart to throw himself on the sword, the hunted to expose himself to the hunters April 17, 2001 God I hope I don’t have herpes. And this boy on the TV is sweet. And I have been all lovey with Ann this weekend, and it has felt very good. And all my worries are not really just about what if I don’t have what she needs. It’s not all am I worthless and inadequate for her sake. For chrissake. It’s about me: Maybe she doesn’t have everything I need. Because she’s a girl perhaps or who knows why else. In any case, for a while this weekend I convinced myself that it was all okay: She could--must, really--fuck other boys, tell me about them, involve me with them, tie me to the chair, make me lick her asshole, etc, etc. And I will still fantasize about my imaginary boyfriend. And we’ll have tons of adventures and perverted sex together. And apart. Well, why not? Just remember your bullshit detector when you write her a letter this Sunday, Earth Day 2001. April 19, 2001 i could analyze it all again, but I won’t. I’m sick of all the voices saying, “Don’t move! . . . Don’t move!” it’s just sometimes i think i’m using her to get to boys. men. guys. whatever the fuck they are that i can’t seem to touch by playing gay straight. April 20, 2001 Actually, it’s not even that. It’s this: I’m a sissy boy! Oh god! Yes, oh yes! I’m a little sissy boy! And Ann’s my girl friend. But as long as I know what I am--and I know, now--it’ll all be okay. Ta daaaaah. THE TV just said “sometimes, to find yourself, you have to go to extremes.” I’m a sissy boy! I have a job, a bike, a cool computer, a place to live, a woman who uses me and fucks me up the ass and makes me beg and hopefully will bring home some of her boyfriends, some plants and animals, beer, food, etc. What am I missing? Stories. But I can make those. Right? Right? I’m a sissy boy! Of course, no one can be ALL bitch goddess all the time, and no one can be ALL sissy boy all the time. So, can you let that make the times when you are the sweeter? Or can you widsfoliv ocis voi svoid qwoijv lkalk dlv ori boisjo vbidtghh? It’s elevrtic. April 22, 2001 I foresee a nasty, nasty breakup to a relationship I don’t even admit I’m in. The problem is, I am not in love. She at least thinks she is, though she sometimes claims not to be in order to excite me sexually. The problem is, you have to have the intensity, the hell’s marker desperation before you play the dominance and submission games--at least, so far, I think I do. But that never happens, now does it. The ones you really want to do it don’t want to do it. Maybe this will work better than I think. Maybe we can--but I was about to say we can take from each other what we have to give each other, and not worry about the rest. The problem with that is, even if I see it that way, I don’t believe she really, at heart, does. Or no, that’s not the problem. The problem is, even if she sees it that way, I really, at heart, don’t. Yeah, that’s it. At least at this moment. The day I don’t kiss her feet is the day I’m punching her in the face with a big NO. Everyone needs a demon lover sometimes. Is thinking you’re in love with her/ him just something that amateurs outgrow? I do look pretty good in this sissy boy getup, though. And my collar looks nice with the beard. If only she wouldn’t squeeze the toothpaste tube in the middle--although I get the feeling she’s doing that just to piss me off now, which is nice. But if only she wouldn’t, when ladling leftover pepper gravy into the tupperware, not only spill some drops on the table, but also appear not to notice, and even stick the closed container right down on top of one of the drops when she was done. I don’t think she was doing that on purpose. If not for that, then I might be in love with her. Tonight I’m saying thank god I get a day to myself tomorrow. We’ll see what I say tomorrow. Why’d you die you motherfucker. I need some help here. April 23, 2001 11:52 AM i thought the initial reaction might be a lot stronger than it is so far. I’m not that turned on, I’m not that claustrophobic. Of course, I know I can get out of here if I really have to; locking the door and bending the wires was a gesture only, though perhaps a pointed one. I May get a little bored, I May get a little stiff--these are my main concerns right now. Of course, the fact that if someone comes in I will be somewhat mortified, now, that still has some latent charge in it. And of course, if she brings Billy home--I’ve never met him, mind you--I don’t know what that’s going to be like. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just look at it as semienforced meditation time, time-out, a kind of fast. Sure, why not. Um, and I might like to point out that these panties of hers she gave me to wear are very strong smelling, and that, even as I type about it, is registering as a kind of trickle charge, a background hum that could grow into something, or be subsumed, inflamed by something else later. And of course I’ve already come once today, so it should be no surprise if the buildup is a little slower. All in all, so far, a pleasant experience. A little embarrassing to have Dexter in the cage beside me--equal to dogs and all that. But he doesn’t really seem to care that much. It’s kind of like a field experiment. See what life is like for the dogs all day when we’re gone. The panty smell . . . . 11:58 AM Also the whole thing was a little softened by her giving me the computer, my phone--although she said “in case I want to talk to you” when she gave it me, which could lead to some interesting things. I do love to type. The panty smell . . . . My back is starting to hurt a little. Will have to find new position soon. 12:00 PM I look at a picture of a naked girl standing proudly--tall, thin, wide hips--and momentarily yearn for the freedom to just have normal sex with girls. Even though I know it never lasts long as enough. Then I open a picture of a roped and bound girl, a plump soft girl all bondage style, and it does little for me. I almost resent looking at it. 12:15 PM Weird: just sang a couple of lines out loud, and my voice echoed in the house, and it reminded me I can’t just get up and walk around, turn on the stereo, etc, and I got a tiny flash of dull dread. 12:30 PM Kind of have to pee but don’t want to this soon. There’s not a lot of room in here to avoid spilling it. Dexter is sleeping. Starting to get a little cramped. All right, this is starting to get a little bit sexy now. Was startled to find juice in my metal bowl: thought it was water. 12:54 PM cold. semi-hard. icily enjoying image of her leaving in her black shoes, free and smiling with whomever. wonder will she fuck him there? here? at all? semi- dreaming mixt with black leather strap images. every time the wind makes the house make a noise, a surge of adrenaline. 1:07 PM Again, the paradox engine: you want her to be cruel to you, and she is so you’re getting what you want--and that’s not cruel, is it? but it works because she doesn’t do it just when you want her to. And, your own awareness of your tendencies toward being submissive and perverse mediates the perversity somehow. And yet . . . . I guess it’s more like, I know what I need, or at least I am finally admitting it to more than my secret closet dreams, and I also know that I need the help of someone like her to take it past where my own muscular control can manipulate my own muscles. Does that make sense? It’s like, you can’t quite give yourself a really good backrub. Finally, you reach a place where you can go past fantasy into reality, and what you find there is . . . sometimes more fantasy. 1:13 PM Now I have my own piss to keep me company. The metal ring of the collar is beginning to look beautiful against my bare chest. 1:57 PM Sure could go for a little smackerel of something. Maybe deprivations such as fasts or solitary confinements do teach you things there’s no other way to learn. But Maybe the paradox of these things is that they evade capitalization. Would anybody reading your work, for instance, be able to tell what you have or have not been through, and would it matter? Is it a matter of degree? Surely I have been faced many times already with situations--my own or someone else’s--that make today’s token deprivations seem trivial. And yet . . . . 2:22 PM Ah, thank god--a position in which I can stretch out my legs for a while. The panty smell . . . . 2:38 PM Just a hair on the bored side, now, but not too bad. Still tiny worms of quease slithering around my gonads to wonder what situation she will bring home with her. 4:13 PM the considered response (the panty smell . . . ) is often an attempt to direct the visceral response back toward the realm of the expected. i am pretty much ready for her to get home now. it’s very windy and sunny outside and there are so many noises. hungry. a weird kind of resonant, stomachy sad have to pee again and that excites me more than it seems like it should. if i could shit in here . . . . 4:26 PM it May be a thing she says when she’s not trying to turn me (or us) on that hurts the most, and therefore turns me on the most. or it May not be. it May be when i’m just not quite all the way certain whether she’s catering to me or not --leaving me yearning towards her scorn’s true justification. 4:29 PM well. i just learned that option-up or -down arrow jumps up or down a paragraph at a time. cool. time to piss again. i had a dream a little while back in which i was talking to her after being done with this whole thing, or else very nearly done, and she said, “Yeah, I hate being in there,” and gave a sympathetic heebie-jeebies head-shake, recalling her own experience with being locked in a cage by her master. Is this a waste of a day? Hard to say. I doubt it. It has a heavy element of frustration, of course, but . . . I’ve worked on one poem, typed a very long (already) journal entry, organized my whole hard drive, gotten a little rest, thought some erotic thoughts, fasted, proven I could go through with something a bit scary, played Tetris . . . . Hard to call all that a waste, really. Dexter keeps looking at me as if he expects or wants me to do something. 5:29 PM I am so ready to be done with this now. I want to go to dinner and be warm and cozy. I am left here thinking (a sudden flash back to Lake of the Ozarks, with Pam on that houseboat, and then the ancient pinball machine in the empty lodge, silent but for the occasional mechanical clink and thud) what the hell do I really want? This? Kate? A “normal” marriage? A boyfriend? Ann? could she and i ever be monogamous again? Maybe by happenstance, if not according to stricture . . . in some ways that might be stronger, more loosely assured. AND I can’t get enough signal to keep my phone on long enough to get two messages that are on it--though the piece of absolute fucking shit never even fucking rang--and that is pissing me off more than anything right now. April 24, 2001 The thing about Ann & me is, we both like the same kind of guys. I wonder if she knows she’s helping me get one? April 26, 2001 Yes she knows cuz I told her and she said. “Well let’s find you a boyfriend, then.” She’s so fucking cool. I am drunk. Listening to J-lo. Wanting to wiggle. play my mother fuckin song! Rhythm threatens to overtake for as long as the body can take which May be a few seconds and May be several more years. April 30, 2001 Because I always see stupid things on bumperstickers and self-help books, they stick in my mind and ring true a few days later. Bbbbbecause that’s why I’m not going to bitch about the inevitability of failure, how I don’t have what it takes, because this one dumb-as-shit bumpersticker that I saw the other day said, “Encourage your hopes, not your fears,” and I was like, oooooh, thanks for the insightful advice, gosh, I suppose next you’ll be telling me to “Be good, not bad.” But anyway, I’m not going to waste time moaning and lamenting this morning. I’m going to waste time getting half drunk instead, at 11:53 AM, and type some shit, Maybe call some girl friends, Maybe dream about my imaginary boyfriend. Cuz that’s so much better. Ann just came home and gave me $100, which means we can pay the rent now. Then, when I pressed her, she told me that to get it she gave three guys, two of whom she’d just met, a blowjob. She seems a little okay with it, and a little freaked. I told her I think it’s pretty cool and I’m a little jealous. One of the guys, when he was done, said, “What was your name again?” Billy said “Oh, I don’t even have time for a quickie with you, Ann, I have to go to work,” and left her with the other two. I suppose I could have been all soft and liberal and understanding, and tried to be the one to whom she could admit the bad parts, the sleazy feelings, the scared parts, but what I really wanted to say was, “I think it’s pretty cool. I’m a little jealous.” Cuz I do. And I am. And I gave her the last Corona, with lemon juice, and offered to lick her puni for her, as an extra reward. Cuz I’m so soft, and she’s so hard, sometimes. May 2, 2001 she’s out on the porch talking to one of the old ladies. she laughs a little in sympathy. she inclines her head, nodding, says, “yeah . . . .” in understanding of something. She asks a question. “Where were they yesterday?” The old lady’s voice scratches on, like a low phonograph, just a little warped. The sun crowns their heads with dandelion. Dexter, on this side of the windows and the wall, gazes at me from his spot on the couch. The huskies pace, jingle, jingle, pace. Thursday follows Wednesday, Friday is after that, before you know it, the weekend again. Nothing ever changes, or does it. A flightless bird juts upward once more, careens back down to icy earth. I wish we had some beers left. May 3, 2001 remember saying “cuz i’m your man” to kate while fucking, her saying, “oh yes you are!” May 3, 2001 the smell of a burnt-out match the sitting at one’s own desk pace jingle jingle pace May 5, 2001 Ann’s going to be a maid for an escort service. She wasn’t having any luck finding other jobs. I think she’s doing it pARTLY out of desperation but more out of just wanting to. or both,maybe it’s the fizzy gap in between where the reality lurks. I wish I were brave like her sometimes. Maybe i am. I don’t know about working for one, but Maybe when my hair grows back I’ll patronize one of those sexy boy massage deals in the back of the Onion & Shepherd. See what happens. Yeah, I think I’d like that. Or Maybe I wouldn’t. It doesn’t really matter. Cuz just like Norman Lindsay showed: you don’t have to b3e a siren to paint sirens. May 5, 2001 Now why I gotta do that? Kate sends me picture of her being all tough and sweet and sexy and hot, and I email her about how much I would surrender in order to be priveleged to make love with her. everything but the possibility of having a boyfriend (“I really am bisexual”) and freedom, I said. What am I going to do if she calls my bluff? Either lie, or else do her bidding I guess. May 6, 2001 “Do the opposite thing . . . . ” So I’m causing myself to get my muscles to move me bodily over by UWM union where I’m going to investigate this bisexuality conference thingy, called BECAUSE 2001, and Maybe see about working on it next year. What else? May 6, 2001 And so the king . . . is once again my guest! On page 462 (out of 519) of Sam Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, it says: “. . . But here, in his own territory, I’d met a man within minutes who was Bob’s sociological twin. Thinking about it, I decided Bob was unique. But what was unique about him was that he’d read Moby Dick five times in jail--not jail itself; what was unique about him was his invention of twosided tape; what was unique about him was his bravery in coming to New York at thirteen--not to mention his willingness to live in a three-way relationship as long as he--or any of us--had. But much of the rest, in which so much color had lain, I now knew had been dealt him in a hand as fixed in its form as that of any number of tasteless jokes.” May 6, 2001 god i hope these little bumps on my dick are just irritations from having shaved my goddamn pubes. okay so i didn’t do everything right. May 7, 2001 Want: to smoke, to drink, to dance and be cajoled. To run away but be taken care of. Am perpetual malcontent, May as well get used to. Wish could write better. Duh. Memory an imperfected blanket. Shifting sea of pebbly rock beneath a makeshift ship. Rhythm: don’t that beat all. got to be something to do besides whining on board this ship he he he he he said. But all he could do was strain; his ship was a naked cage and the zookeeper was clothed, and dead. biggest soaring problem: DEBT. next problem: responsibility for Dexter. Both are forms of trade-offs. But must be resolved before I disappear. The lords have it set up to make it as difficult as possible for the serfs to make themselves independent. Their corporate web of searchlights and trip triggers makes invisibility nigh impossible. But we will see, we will see. Anyone with a dramatic soul will sooner or later recognize a geas, or even a curse, as a blessing. As to responsibility to family and friends: they are humans. I did not steal them from anywhere. They can take care of themselves. Except for herpes. I don’t really see that as a blessing. Except for the obvious way: I mean, if it makes me be a little more careful. Like Scott said, so I don’t get anything worse. Am I going to go to the doctor? I feel like a fucking circus freak, a severed head, a stumpy, a gewgaw, when I think of the frousty medical texts with the horror-show pix inside, all those sad saps with their limp dicks stretched out, showing red bumps, swells, gore, gashes, oozes and grossness, there’s no way those people were very far from monsters. How could they exist in the same world as clean, Cape Girardean, playing-on-a-fallen-tree-by-the-lake-in-the-backyard, little blond me? Well, what have I done wrong? (how often writing is not an expressive act, but a catalogue of my obsessions, a dry roster of inadequacy, compulsion, neurosis! In this way, it purports to be more of an expulsive, or Maybe an expectorant act) I sucked that guy’s bumpy cock at the spa, and let the other guy whose mouth I did not examine suck me and prod my ass with his thumb. I have had genital, oral, and anal sex with Ann, in various permutations, without knowing all about the physical health of the various guys she’s given blowjobs to. That’s pretty much it--lately. But that would be, of course, enough. If you believe in scientific evidence, that is. Still and all, Maybe it’s just a blocked oil gland, possibly related to the other skin irritations I’ve suffered since shaving my pubes. If it goes away this time, and then comes back, I’ll go to the doctor I promise. Okay, enough about that for a while. Okay, so I’ve finally finished Delany’s autobio. I feel as if a heavy, barnboard yoke has just been removed from my shoulders. I feel a tinge of hilarity, imagining what ol’ Chip’s modest but not self-effacing reaction to that would be . . . . But it’s not that I didn’t enjoy it; it was a wonderful read, delicious of detail and richly textured as a good corn muffin. But somehow there’s a sense of a clean desktop now that I know it’s done, I’m not going to pick it up for a while. I guess he really succeeded at getting the purport across--I’m not going to try to explain it as well as he did, but I’m referring to that bit (marked by one of my myriad dog-ears) where he spoke, himself borrowing from Sturgeon, of the goal of writing not to be to give the reader the writer’s experience, but to give the reader the reader’s experience, as vivid as the writer’s but not the same as. Because the whole thing was very personal for me; it has notes, photos and detritus stuck here and there as if it were my own scrapbook, and, as I already mentioned, the million dogears, each at a place where a loud, clear bell rang, refreshingly and disturbingly. So, basically, yeah, I’m finished, and I at least for now have the urge to quit trying to convince myself I should be writing marketable prose, and just go back to being a good ol’ poet--as Marilyn was, as Delany most definitely was not. On rearranging the books on the shared (with Ann) shelves in order to fit Delany back in, I moved the only Harlan Ellison I possess-- Shatterday--a book I considered reading next but decided against because it seems too much like the Delany: prose crafted fluorescently well, illuminating of a sense of responsibility mixed with chaos, and might further my unease, when I’m ready for a break from at least that kind of unease, healing though it May be, to the shelf that had, sitting jauntily sideways atop the neatly arranged, vertical books, Axe Handles, by Gary Snyder, and I decided to read some poems for a while. Ahh! Why will I probly never be a professional? I’m not very good at prose. I can write intelligible sentences, get a point across sometimes it seems, but as to creating a vivid experience, or rather providing fertile ground for a reader to create his or her own experience, it seems I approach success more readily through other, not-so-marketable means. Whether this is a result of lack of practice or lack of innate ability, I’m not entirely sure, but that has become such a tired point of self-debate as to not really matter much any more. I can honestly say I like reading my own journals, so I guess that’s good enough. I’ll have to support my various habits-- eating, breathing, smoking, typing--in various other ways. unless i change my mind.... May 12, 2001 had another dream about the wrong girl. she along with her little buddies were playing playground tricks on me [why does she always start talking aloud to the dogs when i’m trying to concentrate on something else, but not other times? god DAMN it] at this weird dinner party (where previously, during the preparation phase where everybody was drinking beer, i argued with Alvin and his old cronie friend-- KLH was playing call-in responses to the news that Bush had just started some land war, i think even in our own turf, without anyone’s real permission except his cabinet of course, and after one who protested they pointedly played some hippie-dippie “classic hit” making fun of anti-war. Al & friend laughed, I was disgusted, said so. Alvin and I actually yelled our respective opinions at each other. Even in the dream, I was amazed a bit. They basically said war was necessary and inevitable, the way that an organism necessarily and inevitably eats other organisms. I said it was wrong, that Bush had just walked all over our rights. Al’s friend said if I were a country, I wouldn’t survive. I said yes I would, I just wouldn’t . . . “Excel?” asked Alvin I think) and I got really pissed off and yelled at them. Later the “wrong” girl--she had rounded, ducklike short hair, a strange posture, huge dark-hazel eyes--was screwing around again behind my back (she and her friend were at a separate “kids” table behind the main one at whose foot I sat), in that way where you can’t quite tell if it’s at your expense or not, but you’re pretty sure it is. I got up, went over by her, tapped her shiny head with my forefinger, said, “I don’t like you very much. [pause] But there are some things I like about you. [pause] Let’s just leave it at that.” And sat down. Katy was also there, to my right a couple seats up (opposite the young guys who had also been fucking with me, grabbing stuff off my plate and giggling till I yelled at them really loud), and I realized I had been ignoring her (and felt kind of bad about it--because I felt sorry for her and because I knew she would be pissed off at me) when after a few more shenanigans by the odd girl, I went over to the “kids” table, picked up the girl, sat back down at my seat and set her on my lap. I was surprised I was doing it, even more surprised at how right she felt sitting there. I stroked her slender legs through her satiny pink pants. Earlier, Kate had come to the print shop to ask me when I was off, and did I want to join her little band. She actually had people with odd instruments who were going to be gathering later. It sounded kind of cool, but I thought I already had plans. I hemmed and hawed, not wanting to hurt her earnest feelings, but not wanting to commit. Very telling, eh? May 14, 2001 I am enslaved by largely self-incurred debt. I am paying for my naivety, my greed, and my early softness. All of my bills are past due. I am selling many of my prized books today, as well as one of my congas. Oh well. There are always libraries, buckets, and resourcefulness. I still have my fancy dancy computer, and my bike, I can’t really bemoan the suffering of the oppressed. Before, much younger, falling in leaf-piles with sweatshirt on, less consciously uncensored, some copied, some borrowed, some dreamed, some simply rhthmically tapped out, the barbed-wire fence of clickclack words down along the railroad ty, gravl, ty gravl, ty gravl, ty . . . . sun goes down in and between and thru a sieve of branches smelling like pungent rain, longing of the sun as if, looking not forward, i sensed without seeing now, i too study a little bit every day, in my hackneyed, slapdash way, sometimes rooting thru the dumpster, sometimes throwing things away, trying to learn the language so i can go on my trip next year, or Maybe next year, or Maybe the year after that. May 15, 2001 My girlfriend/roommate/alpha- and/or beta-female works as an escort for an escort service. I sneaked a peek at her journal, and she was planning to punish me for not kissing her feet enough. I’ve definitely fallen in with the wrong sort of girl, and I’m thrilled to distraction. May 16, 2001 the presence of the “i’m not special enough” virus is shown by the recurrence of antibodies in my system, expressed as pages and pages of notes, usually scribbled on scraps at work, explaining why what i do is okay, good, and why i have no good reason to off myself, and why i can, at least theoretically, be happy. Reading about the universe in Hawking’s book, i momentarily see how beneficial it is to focus on things other than the virus itself, and how it, i, herpes, and language are all just little bitty bits of life in a biglittle superultra laughingly baffling universe. so what the fuck, eh? what’s the point in justifying my own grandiosity or its opposite? a good problem, a good work, consists of something other than endless, sweaty rehashes of “it all comes down to....” stop. i guess it just helps to get a different sense of perspective. just heard emmylou sing, “my kingdom for a lullabye . . . . ” CLOUDS, indeed. Sometimes I look around this locus of spacetime, and I can’t see it as really being now. [sometimes i love annmarie, sometimes she’s just the closest i can get to loving glenn, sometimes she just gets too close, too close] stop singing for a second. think of a night, months ago, when it was cold but getting warmer, drink beer eat a sugarcube dipped in some kind of acid. the inclement encroaching of paths. three paths converged in a neon bar. pinball. gesturing with cigarettes. flirtatiousness, innocence, vast loneliness kept at bay by a tiny intersection of three paths. Now, two slightly scraggly paths meander on apace, the other one has disappeared. we tell ourselves it is temporary, we say we will rejoin with it. meanwhile we cross and uncross, piss in the jungle, eat nettles, cross and uncross. sometimes May 17, 2001 and i mean perspective in the sense of the universe and me, but also in my whole thing about being smart enough. i mean, you could say that i’m smarter than a lot of people, and then you cOULD EASILY say that i’m a fucking moron compared to someone like hawking. so it doesn’t matter. do your part, be a rowboat, help out your friends, stay hungry, have a good time. nuff said. for now. May 17, 2001 god i was a fool to move in here. i am not at home. she has too much shit all over the place. my stomach hovers in its central sea and lightning flashes. is it too far off to say the only way i can approach full experience of emotion is by acting? May 19, 2001 I’ve had to realize that I’m a person. Special (and cute) as I May be, I’m not special. That’s why I was lying to myself when I thought I could (and wanted to) do some kind of atypical (and, the implication seemed to be, advanced) interpersonal thing with Ann, namely, calling each other “roommates” and “friends” but still sleeping together almost every night, and fucking, and acting all intertwined like lovemates. If you could really do that and really not be lying to yourself, you wouldn’t be a people, you’d be something else, some variant, some exogenous thing or possibly a mutant. All my life so far I have slowly had it pounded into me that being a writer or a poet is no different from being a printer or a bookseller. It’s just a question of what works for you. Whatever knocks your noggin. Whatever floats your tomatoe. And that doesn’t mean I’m advocating mediocrity, either. It means accepting the limitations of form (“sonnet,” for example, or “human being”) and then having a blast knocking your own or somebody else’s sox off. And although I feel good for finally having told her the truth about what I want (I’m going to start sleeping upstairs as default mode), I also recognize the sadness of not being able to ask, not being priveleged to ask why she is sad now, because I already know that a part of it is that we just broke up--again, still, for the first time, or whatever. woo, woo, woo! Sirens a goin. I am dumb. hot up in this little attic. nothing escapes. singularity. dexter looks out window. May 20, 2001 awake, bleary-eyed, from the dream of the cop, and i see it again: people and their pathetic addictions. guy walking up the sidewalk, little baby pit behind on leash. stops to sniff, guy turns around, slightly hunched, waits. he carries a poop scoop. they continue on up, past our house. he doesn’t see me. i’m up here in the attic. (i’m up here in the attic! yay!) he drags on a cigarette. the smoke trails away, lifting wanly towards me. i think about how bad a cigarette would feel right now, early morning in the crisp moist sunlight by the shower of red maple leaves, and i think i May never smoke one again. [right.] the guy walks on, disappears under the maple, and i hear him: <cough, cough!> And I’m like, well, no shit, you’re smoking while walking the dog at 8 in the fucking morning, of course you’re coughing, but it’s not his fault any more than any of the stupid shit i do to myself is my fault. we’re all going down, just how “they” want us to. We all say okay, we all give in, we all do as we’re told, and we’re all pathetic. it’s like ann said, how everything is locked up. everybody has limitations, but your limitations grow as you get older, so the sooner you catch on and get to work, the better chance you have at contributing to the uncovering of “they.” I mean, now I’ve got these mollusca again. It’s a virus. I go to the doctor to get them scraped off. Does that mean I can’t go somewhere, geographically or economically, where I can’t go to a doctor? I could scrape them off myself, and I will if I have to, but isn’t it funny how you don’t exactly see those little cullotte thingys on sale at the drug store. And then, if that bump really was herpes, what about that? It tends to go away on its own in time, but they have the antivirals that make it faster and easier locked up, too. And of course, the big one, the debt. All these things that are my own fault, of course, but then again, “they” have it set up to encourage these faults. If I am ever sure it is too late for me to redeem myself in any way, too late to play any part at all no matter how small, then and only then will I really off myself. The good thing about having a list of things to do-- one that includes finding out who “they” are and hopefully doing something about it--is it takes the intense focus of energy off my own faults (which is where “they” want us to focus our energy!!!) and puts at least some of it towards what I can do despite those faults. I’m thirty, almost thirty-one years old. I can complain that it took me this long to figure this out, or I can shrug my shoulders because some people figure it out early and some probably never figure it out. And that’s just life. Or is it? How often am I just bluffing; I don’t really know what I’m talking about. My surest ground is yet the make- believe. “””” “” “ Ô” Ô Ô Ô Ô’’’ Ô “’ So i decided that for a while i am nonly going to use the buton bloatshifh to talk about myself. Anything I write about any one other than me can be said in ebnglishl Other than that, It has to be a dialect of Buton-blatsfifsh. It May not help. But it mai take my mind off the water in my brain. It May take some time to get happy again. As far as I CAN TELL, I( will get happier if I a)_ keep working in poemforms, and b) get a job that makes me feel like anm doing somebody else some good. Tangibly. Even, perhaps, if it is not too much to ask, qyantifiably. Like digging in the farsde, That was fun, it was what I needed, and it also made people feel like they were better off than they were before. It ouwld be so cool if my writing could one day do that bor people. That is, if it could one day be a garden. That i help to dig up, with the help of other people from the comuntiy. That gets planned out, mapped out, gets dirt dumper on it, ghets shoveled all around, the hard turg pixkasded, the wood chips flaying and steaming as we all get a suntan even the black kids. Will this ever happen: If it doesm I werar to you a am going to be there and ready. So I wont stop writing. Period. That is an established fact, as near as anything can be established as dact in my gray-colouds, neibghborlike life. So but what else am I going to do to give me the strength to keep doing that? What, in other words, is going to fill it up fgor me again and afain: It is not quite my job. I have to accept that, though I have learned much there, it is ot wquite enough. I need something else. I need to fgins another way. either on top of my ghonb or in replacing it. Whats it gonna be? Whats it gonna be? We will see, we will see. Annmarie is making poocorn. Se has brought out the big post.... no she is not making popcorn, she is making rice. White fluffy shortgrain or longrain rice to go in the pot with the warter, and come out as a thing we can eat. It’s that simple. I have also had to accept that I am not a sex god. GFay or straight. Oh well. May 23, 2001 Why do so many of our “philosophies,” our approaches to living and interacting with each other, seem to result in dissatisfying, seemingly arbitrary ultimata? Could it be that this is the art required of each individual--to create his own “lifestyle,” instead of shopping for one among those profferred by his relativistic perception of history, his parsing of morals plus his awareness of what he might be able to get away with? May 26, 2001 Sara Husky Eyes must have told me 15 times last night: all I ever wanted, ever since I was a little girl, was to write . . . She’s so beautiful sometimes. And she sure was drunk last night. She wouldn’t stop talking about Glenn, and when she hugged me it felt good even though this morning I felt bad at having used Glenn’s memory to get a good, long, full-up hug with her. Oh well. May 27, 2001 Today Ann & I walked thru Whitnall park. We came to the plank highways (old-fashioned, imagination-powered rollercoasters of three- or four-wide rusty gray barnboards, inches above the sucking, soggy wetlands and angling gently through weeds and overhanging trees) and walked those for a while. Then, only several paces after the planks ended and the path was gritty mud, I gasped and stopped. At first I thought it was a cat. Ann came back from a few steps ahead, What? All I could do was point, aware that my mouth was hanging open. It was a tiny, curled up, white-speckled, baby deer. We stared in loving fascination coupled with a creeping certainty that something was wrong. It breathed, its ears twitched a little, its eyeballs moved but it just stayed there, inches from the edge of the path, curled up by a tree and some weeds on ground too muddy to have been well-chosen as a bed. And no mom or buck around either. It was beautiful and intensely sad, and we didn’t know what to do so we left it there, fervently wishing it quietly well. Ann says she’s going to call the nature center (it was closed this evening) tomorrow to tell them where it was. Also bought bacon at the grocery store. (Odd, huh? Practically worship the lone, helpless fawn, then chow down on the hapless pig) It was the butcher-packt kind, black pepper bacon, thick sliced. It was good and salty. Then I tried to write poems or something again, failed, got miserable. Went in by Ann preparatory to going upstairs to fitful or restful dreams or blank sleeping oblivion. She said I could do whatever I wanted. She said she’s seen my drive and passion, and when I use it I’m unstoppable. She said some people you can just tell are going to excel, and I’m one of them. She said she wasn’t just saying all this to make me feel better. I had said, What’s so great about life? We’re taught to believe it’s this great blessing, this wonderful thing, but it’s no better than being a rock. Just a different arrangement of particles. We eat shit die etc, and I’m tired of it To which she countered, when they say it’s beautiful they don’t mean stupendous, amazing things are going to happen to you all the time. They mean you got to see that fawn. You got to eat that bacon you like. And if that’s not enough, well, yeah, you are going to be miserable because you May not always get the opportunity for anything more stupendous than that. And I thought about that, and I realized that--and here’s where it gets a little sticky, a little sweet, but nonetheless, I think that’s what a poem actually is, is that fawn in the woods. I didn’t create the fawn; I was amazed by it. Likewise, I never write poems from zero, never on purpose. They’re always (the good ones, the keepers I mean, the ones I like to read over again) a little speckled curled-up dreaming animal I stumble upon in the woods. Some woods are in the middle of steaming Milwaukee, some woods are in your mind, and some are somewhere else. But if it makes you happy to walk around there, walk around there. And if there’s something there you want to show someone else, show them. Whatever else you feel you have to do is just the price you pay for being human, for eating bacon. But I think what Ann was telling me was a little like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple--all about how God gets mad if you walk by a field all flowing and purple in the sun, and you just don’t even notice, you just don’t even care. It’s like, what are you complaining about, you want so much more and you don’t even drink what you got already. 11 sept 2001 I got to get up early and be a girl before i go to work. make some tea open the red curtain enough to let in the underwater bluegreen light get me an air mattress smell my dog’s feet get me a house that doesn’t have a motor running in every room hold my chin up, let my breasts be out get some girl clothes and wear them when i get up early prove that a girl can too be a spaceship pilot keep trying write a letter wear my boyfriend’s shirt when he is not around my boyfriend has short fingers, tan skin, cute nipples, sometimes a confused face. he is nice to dogs. he left his smell inside this shirt, and i am inside this shirt, and it is warm. get on the real internet, with physical dreams instead of merely pages my friend anh is driving. i say, look at those elephants! she looks, and is delighted, making me feel proud. one elephant, a young boisterous one, snorts his feet playfully on the dust of a high, narrow ledge above the craggy plain. there are dozens of his cousins galloping down the scree towards us. we drive on. the elephants turn into horses, come closer, faster. oh my god, anh screams, eyes brilliant! she urges the old convertible faster up the rocky sloping road. the horses overtake us. one sticks his grand face right next to mine. i can smell him smelling me. hello, i venture. the horses are seafoam white, bearded, maned and decorated with elegant curls and wisps. they easily outpace the car. we stop, they stand around us. they tell us about, we talk about . . . . wonder what my friend anh is doing she is in the darkened bedroom, either having nightmares or masturbating, murmuring speechless articulations to her nightmare touching self. quietly touch the keys say five words before breakfast I’m awake; I’ll stay up have some peace check my e-mail walk the dogs listen to the crows, what they have to say, even though i know i don’t understand it let the skirt grow longer, my skin my feet my touching knees under the table forest floor, my wrists my hands my face touching morning rain moistening ferns and fishes drink tea breathe stretch swim cast a little spell out into the water, see what it brings back let go the physical addictions i’ve been sold, the need for fame, slavish devotion to the famously official and will i turn into a boy before i go to work? Maybe not this time, not completely, not that anything is wrong with boys but i have been one, almost, all too long, at least dressed up like one, and sat like one because my family laughed at me or gym class laughed at me or other boys laughed at me. but how could they have known? how could they have known i’m not a freak, not a shirker of my manly duty, rather finding, taking all these years but finding after all my rightful place as girl, carapice of boyish body yes, but girl, thoughtful, milky, squirming, full of fierce delight, buoyant, in communion with the ghosts and wraiths and animals from the land between the forest and the ancient, amaranthine battle field. keep working on my house between-- the land between, the house inside the margin, space between the lines, between the columns, grey between the night and day, body between the woman and man, mind between insane and sane--is not always a lonely place. all are invited, many come. i have had good friends, and have been loved amen On the morning of Sept 11, 2001, I left for work. It was a normal day. I rode my bike. I had been typing in the morning, and while I was typing I heard Ann having a dream in the other room. I said goodbye and left for work before hearing about her dream. Then later, after hearing the news that at first I thought must be fiction, like War of the Worlds, I got this email from her: hey...so this is so very weird....remember how i was telling you about my dream this morning, but i pretty much just stopped and didn't finish telling you...well, in it, you were like this transient type being and we were in this huge city and you were showing me around, kind of like that alien thing we were talking about the other night, except i wasn't really an alien in the sense of being from another planet, but just another plane, it was this alternate universe and i came here to find answers for things that were happening in that universe. Anyway, you were showing me around the city....anyway,O i was looking up at these two huge skyscrapers and i grabbed your arm and pointed to a plane that was flying too low toward this building and suddenly it crashed into the side of one of the buildings and there started to be all this chaos everywhere and running and screaming and you told me not to worry and put this like field around me somehow and everyone could kind of go through us and not see us, but we could see everything and all the turmoil and then two more planes crashed and you started to tell me that you thought this was going to happen. That it was time for something like this to happen and i was starting to ask you a bunch of questions because things like that didn't happen where i was from and then i woke up. You left for work and i kept going back in my dream to the planes hitting the buildings...So, the weird thing is.....this morning Jordan calls and tells me the trade towers in NY were hit by two planes and were probably going to collapse and it was just so strange to have dreamt of something like that either while it was actually happening or had just happened. i don't know....i have this very strange feeling now.....i can't really describe what it is....anyway, i just got back from the bank...so now i am going to call the impound lot...you're welcome for rubbing on you, it helps me too, like that walking meditation thing....i have so many things in my head to work out it seems right now. i hope your day is going well....i am off to that interview at OP. heartme 12 sept the growing lust and revulsion with which i confront this part of myself cat saunters across the street gray against the gray of the gathering north wind it’s probably 15 degrees colder than when we left the shop the journal sentinel stares out of the little box: ACTS OF WAR. Under that, slightly smaller: Bush: Enemies of Freedom Can’t Hide. A protest of a few dozen people, we glide by on our bikes. They look right at me when I look at them. Some of them are smiling. Some just seem earnest. Their signs say things like KILLING FOR KILLING MEANS MORE KILLING. WAR BREEDS WAR. STUDY WAR NO MORE. PEACE IS POSSIBLE. They seem so small, a tiny gaggle no bigger than a group you might see downtown on any old weekend, protesting something you’ve never heard about, and will soon forget about. As we pass, a song carries up Milwaukee St after us, I don’t know if it’s We Shall Overcome, but it is soft, plaintive, and not really pathetic although I search, out of reflex, for it to seem so. Up the street, a van all painted with garish spray paint says U.S. REPENT! SHOW THE CITY HER SIN! I can’t get this jingle out of my head: The hardest working people in America . . . find value . . . at Farm & Fleet! It is as if the ground, while still vibrant with grass and sunlight, is now infused, enlaced with some toxic nightmare ghost presence which makes it more beautiful and more desolate at once. Each time a tiny piece of scenery crosses the path of my vision, its magic sends bipolar signals to my brain which is not used to interpreting both these kinds of magic at once. Everything is charged. A crumpled up fast food napkin blows by. Lurid yellow and red on white. We turn north uphill, onto the Van Buren bridge, and the wind, now definitely cold, pushes back down against us. Two rowers slice silently up the river, many stories below. Everything is at once more disposable and more precious. A passing flashy car, sleeveless boys and men inside, the sudden horniness is giddy. Fall is always specially charged anyway: heating up the soup, sweeping the doghair off the wood floors, the cold air gasping in the open window while you’re taking a shower silly word games, goofy faces, walking the dogs--i hesitate, do them, hesitate, do them--an almost rhythmic clenching and unclenching. Readiness? Anxiousness? Is it that these things now seem petty, or is it that we are afraid to use them up, because we sense we’ll need them soon, and bad. They holler, use me! For some of us, it is the thrill of potentially finally growing up. My personal symptom: Little things enrage, suddenly, inexplicably, embarrassingly: A rollie that won’t smoke right, a piece of cheese fallen off the cutting board into the wet sink, a butter knife that keeps sliding onto the plate when I try to rest it on the edge--God DAMN it! I’m about ready to throw this thing out the fucking window! Ann says, here, takes it gently out of my hand. Inversions: what obsessed days ago seems trivial now. What seemed pointless seems essential now. Creating poetry vs getting what you have to say said. Boombox: The Beta Band sings . . . something inside that you want to say; say it out loud, it will be okay; i will be all right, i will be all right . . . . It has that gravelly, downhill, melancholy sound that makes your blood course wider And speaking of blood, make no mistake, these people are out for blood. Bush’s “good vs evil” speak is hard, viscerally, to resist. And yet . . . . We aren’t speaking very much about the mobilization of the military: Ann is currently in inactive reserve due to her previous service. How strange if she were to go and I were to be left behind. What would I be able to do from here so as not to feel useless? Will they relax the age limits? Would I go if they do? 13 sept have never lost anyone i loved (that i know of) in a terrorist attack, but i have lost ones i loved. I heard one speaker on the radio (I forget his name and station) say that the current crisis May serve to abate what he called a “distasteful relativism” abounding in this country-- that people May, and, implicitly, should, begin to abandon the gray areas of morality and realize that some things are just right or wrong. For myself, I hope the week’s alarming events will awaken me out of the complacent gray areas of my own habitual inactivity, but I would rather they not bestow on me the arrogance of assuming my own infallibility in judging the morality of others. (Please see Chapter II of Mill’s On Liberty.) This is not to say that I condone the terrorists’ act as a legitimate form of speech. It doesn’t allow for any discussion, either, to say the least. the first thing i thought when i caught the words “south tower of the world trade center” and “crumbled to the ground . . .” was that it was some kind of War of the Worlds type of fiction. There followed a brief mental space whose contents I cannot now account for, which May have been blank, May have contained horror or something else less easily labeled. Then I distinctly remember a thrill that went through me, quietly yes, but unmistakably charged with the giddy awareness that something exciting was happening, something was happening that was really changing the world. What does this say about how completely complacency and boredom had gripped me? What does it say about my own soul? What is even harder to confess is this: sometimes, on hearing the mounting numbers of dead or missing, on hearing the increasingly incredible accounts of what damage has been done and what dire consequences the future May hold, I feel that same thrill course quietly, quickly through me, and from some dusty land of exile within my own mind I hear a voice whisper, yes! yes! Is it sometimes in defence against similar demons in their own psyches that those in positions of authority almost always preface their assessments or announcements with some expression of deepest regret, sympathy, or sorrow? Or is it just me? This is not to say that I want them to win. But I must realize I have within me the lust for the fight. 14 sept Weird juxtapositions: I’m here struggling with my patience as I untangle the phone cord so I can check my e-mail while others are struggling with massive piles of rubble, body parts . . . . Yes, it’s still there, yes we turn on the radio until we’ve had about all we can take for one more evening. kate sent me links to petitions about nonviolence and justice without revenge. I have not signed them yet. The option was given to sign them anonymously, and I almost did that. But I think if I decide I truly, honestly feel that way I will sign my own name. All the ideas “my generation” have grown accustomed to treating with irony and satire are coming home to us now as stark reality. I still resist patriotism, at least the overzealous, xenophobic flag-waving I have thought that term generally to represent, and yet the pull to join with compatriots, be they in this country or in all those countries showing support and vigilance, is strong. Robinson said “shared joy is increased, shared grief is lessened.” I think it’s sort of like that. Shared grief is allowed to flow, anyway, and becomes stronger, more moving, more painful but in some molten way uplifting. I looked on the web at pictures someone had collected of people--Europeans, Palestinians, Australians, the Pope, you name it--in diverse countries holding candles, laying out flowers, putting up American flags, and it really made me cry. Who am I? Certainly not exactly who I thought I was. I have just obtained the contact information for volunteering both as a reading & math tutor in Milwaukee Public Schools, and as an adult ally to LGBT youth through the Milwaukee LGBT community center. Step One: Check. I am remembering a card on which I typed, years ago: I need to give the help I need. Also I want to feel that people who are doing good, important things are my peers. I would like to earn the luxury of not being ashamed. 15 sept I am full of rage, hatred, guilt, lust and fear. I do what others tell me to do whenever they can see me. I am a small-minded, petty little beast of a man. I am slovenly, all but talentless, selfish, and useless. I do not know what I can hope to accomplish by continuing to live except perpetuating my futile, constant aching dull drone of numb misery. The campground light is on, illuminating a pile of water sitting around the base of the pump. Miranda is stroking her guitar. Mosquitos go about their stinging little lives, almost quietly. A smooth, brown rock massages the arch of my foot. The campground light goes off. There are smiles, sighs of relief, a new quietness into which every sound we make launches weightlessly. I feel a sudden rush of joy up to the top of the mountain at whose apron strings our worldly belongings clutch. It is certainly dark up there, and pine-smelling. Everything is happening up there. We are happy to be obliviously aware. Down here, we move in slow, large mammal time. Someone lights a cigarette. The tip flares. Miranda laughs, once, out of time, disjointed. The webbed aluminum chair presses firmly into my back. I come back down into myself, leaving mountaintops behind, for now. Doing my homework. Doing my homework. A bit of rubbish burns, and the sparks go up, swirl around, disappear. I think about my new friend. My large, nameless, quiet friend. 16 sept Miranda says, “Are you ready for another session?” I nod once, and grin that grin that only this question can elicit. Believe it: alternate worlds exist. Ann did one of her space-out looking things, then got up, put her plate on the sink and ran from the room. When she calmed down enough to tell me about it, she said she saw us, the room, the dogs, but it was all different. The same, but different. Well can you give me an example? Well, you were sitting there, but you were wearing a blue shirt, and kind of flowy pants. And the dogs were different colors. JD was the opposite: black, with peppering of white around his nose, and his eyes were pure white! And Nero was calico. You were reading a book there, too, but I couldn’t read it. It was foreign, but not a foreign I recognized. The letters were different shapes. And we had pie there, too, but it was apple instead of raisin, and then it all just --disappeared. I know it scares her. I’m sure it would scare me if it happened to me. But I can’t help it. I want to hear about it. It absolutely fascinates me. And I think in addition to the scariness, she sometimes appreciates someone who just wants to talk about it with her, someone who believes her without automatically going into you’re- crazy mode. Anyway, I think so, sometimes, at least. Am I being irresponsible? Should I say she needs help? But I just can’t bring myself to follow those rules, not with her, not this time. 17 sept Today I called MPS and made an appointment for a tutoring training session. Step two: Check. Feeling ever more foolish, manipulated and ambivalent, I gradually withdraw my attention from the broad stream of signals of grief, rage, and nationalistic fervor as it becomes more and more apparent that war equals football. The year the Packers won the Superbowl all the stores sold out of yellow and green; now they’re out of red, white and blue. The only difference is that now it will be bombing and killing instead of merely sacking and plundering. Miranda looks sad. I know it is not because I cannot play guitar, but still . . . . 18 sept While I was spending my time walking the wires, an unforeseen phenomenon occured to me. I became able, in fact unable not, to hear people’s private conversations. But only little bits of them. Here and there, in all the towns I would slice above and across, snips of dialog would suffuse my being, prickling through my hard, cracked leather bootsoles, flowing up through me like red water through a celery stalk on an elementary school’s windowsill. There was this one guy who had been informed by very powerful glow-worms that he had for the rest of life to act pretty much constantly like a big dork, or else his father would die. The guy was twenty-one at the time. There really is no justice in this world, except for the fact that the glow-worms kept their word. His dad hadn’t died so far. But think of it--what if you had to act like a complete dork, all the time--I mean, of course you would do it, unless you wanted your dad to die. Well, this guy didn’t want that, and so he graciously complied. It was brutally hilarious. There was another young man whom I overheard confessing, to the only person he dared, a very young woman wise, as they say, beyond her years, the fact that he did not believe in God. “Oh, Maybe god with a small ‘g,’” he said. “I don’t think I can help that, despite all my reason. But definitely not God with a big ‘G.’” This would have seemed unremarkable except for the fact that the young man was well on his way to becoming a Catholic priest. “I’d like to think that god, or God,” he said to the very young woman, “wouldn’t mind so terribly much. As long as I don’t hurt anyone, and do my duties convincingly and well.” A teenager in Osceola cracked wisely to his collected friends, “You never quit smoking. You just vary the interval between cigarettes.” Then he cracked open another beer. Cholula has moved upstairs. There were mushrooms growing under her mattress, to her horror. She lugged it out to the weedlot, and sidled her and her belongings into the hidden room behind the bathroom. She still pretends not to be jealous of Miranda. Or hell, Maybe she really is above all that. Maybe it’s just me--I make up these dramas because I can’t imagine being above them all, myself. “Blala lala choopie la doopie doo!” squawked the guy who had to act like a dork. “Piddley shiddley addley poooo!” There then followed a series of loud thumps. At a youth counseling center in inner Milwaukee, the Catholic priest-to-be said to a dreadlocked kid in a torn muscle shirt, “No. That’s okay. I’m not going to preach at you. You don’t have to listen to what I believe when you come here.” As a large sausage and mushroom pizza landed grandly on the formica in a booth near the back of Tom and Gus’s, just off the old town square, the teenager said, “There’s no such thing as smart people and dumb people any more. That doesn’t matter. It’s just nice people and mean people.” There was much clattering of silverware and scattering of parmesan and hot red pepper flakes. What he didn’t say was that he had acquired this philosophy during the long road back to something resembling civilisation from the seedy depths, played out in the seediest pockets of town one could find in rural Iowa in those days, of his addiction to cocaine--a drug he might never have taken but for want of the attentions of a girl for whom he had thought he had felt some kind of something real. Whenever I try to play guitar, Cholula smokes. Whenever I try to be alone, she has some kind of crisis. “I am Wee Todd Ed!” intoned the lifetime dork. “I am Sofa King Wee Todd Ed!” 19 sept I don’t have anything to say except I paid $19 for a registered version of iBuild software, and it’s as cool as legos. Like HyperCard, only not insufferably stark and grating on the nerves. Too bad I had mom pay $129 for HC, when it looks as if I’ll likely be using iB instead. The only thing I wish it did was convert its stax to web- browsable content. Oh well. Oh, and also this: I was looking at what gear I was in, coming up the sleek black asphalt part of Fratney, when I clipped this little kid who walked out into the street. I think his knuckle hit my brake lever or something. He stared, walked over to the sidewalk (as I decided I should go back, applied wet brakes and slowed slowly), and by the time I got over to where his mom & dad were getting out of their car, was bawling ferociously. I asked if he was okay. The mom said in an aggravated tone, “Oh probably.” She was harsh, bovine and domineering, and I stayed by the dad and looked at his big, gentle eyes and wide, friendly face. He said they’ve been trying to explain this street thing to him. Good thing it wasn’t a car.... I did not offer the information that I felt the whole thing had been partly my fault. But I did stick around, and the mom bitched out the dad for “trying to put it all off on him because he’s only seven! People are supposed to look out for little kids, too!” “All I said was,” dad said wearily, after exchanging a look with me (!), “it was a good thing it wasn’t a car, and--” “OH YEAH? Well when he jumps out in front of a car, who’s going to take responsibility for THAT?” And blah blah blah. The dad gestured up-streetward with his great, kind head, and said to me, “Ah he’s all right,” and I said, for some reason, “Thanks, man,” and rode away, slightly hyperchardiacally. Thinking about his wide, open, friendly sad eyes. For only $82 (and you don’t even need an eye exam!) you can get American-flag contact lenses now, at Wal Mart. Ann: “If I saw somebody walking down the street, and they looked at me and they had American flags in their eyes . . . I think I’d wig out!” Ann points out that if you’re small, marginalized, and nobody listens to you, or they act like they’re listening to you but nothing changes, you’re going to get more and more desperate to do something, anything, that will get you noticed, somehow. We discuss the zoom factors: A political or philosophical or national or religious faction crashing loaded jet airliners into loaded giant skyscrapers Alienated individuals in their own countries making homemade bombs Kids packing heat and shooting their classmates and teachers The voices inside one person’s head, cajoling, pleading, babbling, screaming, trying to get out from under the fog of the drugs, the threat of shock therapy (we’ll head off a catastrophe with a catastrophe!), until finally the razor blade is drawn, the blood flows . . . . Glenn always said, you have to listen to your dark side. You have to listen to the shadows. Reading is not reading, and writing is not writing, if you’re just bullshitting yourself. However, does Bin Laden (et al), if that’s who we’re talking about here, really qualify as small and unnoticed? Or is this one big empire against another sort of giant power? Or can a big power, no matter how good or evil or both, still manage to feel small and marginalized compared to its own ambition, just as an individual, no matter how revered or feared, can? 20 sept When I come home each evening I have to stand on my head for several hours until a day’s worth of conversation, contemplation, news and work sifts itself out Why do you want to be a tutor anyway? Flex your imagination. If you aRE unimportant, why are you being SILenced? 22 sept From an AP news story, via AOL: Bush will soon sign an executive order naming terrorist organizations and specific terrorists around the world and freezing their U.S. assets, said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Why have they been allowed to have US assets heretofore, if they’re so evil? The economy has continued its slide. Wall Street closed out a horrendous week in which the Dow Jones industrial average lost 1,369.70 points, its biggest one-week point drop in history. Wow. Katy forwarded me another e-mail petition to the white house for peace. Why can I not bring myself to sign these? And it’s not just because I’m 98% sure their fate is perfunctory deletion by some secretary somewhere along the line. 24 sept death fantasy #132. i am lying in my coffin, or already dust beneath the teeming Superior waves. At my funeral it’s either quiet or else they’re playing Van or Willie, or else someone I love is stroking an instrument. On the wall they have giant white pages with black poems on them, mine, and someone who sees them then gets permission from within to cry, or . . . 25 sept Here, drink some water. Why? It’s good for you. [she drinks] I am one of the only two who remembered her birthday. I went to her when she cried out and asked me to. I stayed until she talked to me. I did not tell her I will always live with her. I did not tell her I will always be right by her side. I told her I will remain her friend. She said it’s weird to think you’re always alone. I was not able wholly to prove that you’re not. But I don’t really feel that way. That you’re always alone, I mean. Sometimes? Maybe. I told her you have to learn to accept what people do give you, instead of always crying over what they can’t. She said yeah, and then tomorrow they leave. I said I don’t think people have been dying just to be mean to you. I said if you concentrate on the fact that they might leave tomorrow, you’ll miss the part where they’re here today. I wondered to myself, am I kidding myself and her? Am I making the world out to be a nicer place than it really is? But these are the things I tell myself, and they still seem true to me. I couldn’t sleep next to her. I was twitching. I felt manipulated by my own inability to let her hurt. I got out from under the covers. It was cold. I was naked. I hugged her through the covers. She kind of halflaughed. I said I can’t sleep. I’m going to go type, read, take a bath or something. What I meant was I have to go. She said do you think you might come back? I said I don’t know. What I meant was, I don’t think so. What I meant was, no. When I learn to say what I mean, either I will have a hardened heart and will be a cruel, loveless soul, or else I will be capable of love. And will finally stop being cruel to those I love. Is it merely capitalizing on popular wisdom to say that love is not the same as pity? Is it admirable to stay with someone because you are afraid they won’t be okay without you? I mean, unless they’re you’re kids? Is there anyone who can tell me these things? I have to decide for myself. But what if I am wrong? I have to decide for myself. When is it okay to abandon someone? How much do you give, and how much do you keep? Is there anyone who can tell me these things? I have to decide for myself. I went back in to offer her a drink of water. She drank. Am I going to heaven or to hell? Am I going to heaven for giving Deanna money, letting her play my drums, use my computer, taking her to the shelter? Or am I going to hell for the times I didn’t give her money, let her stay, take her with me, adopt her? Am I going to heaven for taking Ann to the hospital, holding her wrists down, getting bloody, staying with her, talking to her, loving her, going to her? Or am I going to hell for getting up, not marrying her, coming in here, letting her cry. Heaven for loving Glenn, or hell for betraying him? Hell for letting him die? Is there anyone who can tell me these things? I have to decide for myself. There is no heaven or hell, except that which is here, now. I have to decide for myself which one I am in. Am going to be in. Playing pool with Glenn--no, god damn it, I’ll say it-- loving Glenn was heaven. Heaven comes scattered in bits like ore, like gold dust in the striations where the stream once ran. Sometimes it’s even here with Ann. Always it’s with Dexter. Is there anyone who can tell me how close to anyone else I have to live? I have no doors on my bedroom. This is a problem. I have felt guilty for wanting to put some up. This is a problem. This is going to be hard. She is going to hate me some. I am going to be tested. 26 sept To say that the end of the world is at hand is too easy. Ann said she heard on the radio today that the W.H.O. (I will have to find out exactly who they are) is suggesting everybody buy gas masks for an inevitable chemical war after US starts attacking Afghanistan. She also said the crows are dying. When I pressed her to elaborate, she got quiet and disturbed, and left the room, saying she didn’t want to talk about it after all. All I got out of her was that there is something wrong with them. I don’t know if she is referring to the ones in her mind’s world or the ones outside that I can see, too. As for me, I felt like shit all day today. I keep thinking that if I get enough rest, eat good food, spend some quiet time with books and writing, and otherwise answer to my own intuition and sense of integrity, I’ll start feeling better. Suddenly it feels as though I’m running out of time in which to test this hypothesis I’ve carried around so long. My teeth get blacker and blacker. My lies get more and more translucent. It is coming down evening, and I am drinking tea and smoking. To get mad at George W Bush is too easy, too. Who in his place would have done any differently? Certainly not Al Gore. Ralph Nader, Maybe, but they probably woulda lynched him. And what am I doing? I couldn’t even bring myself to sign a lousy peace petition on the Internet. I bike by the ragged clump of peace protestors downtown, and marvel at how bad their singing is. At this point, it’s almost as much my fault as anybody else’s if the skies. Turn. To poison. Almost? Whose fault is it, then? Really? When I massage her forehead, her “third eye” as she calls it, or even just rest my fingers there, gently and firmly, she seems to recieve messages. The messages are in a language over which she has considerably less than complete mastery. So far I remain unable or unwilling to write it all off as schizophrenia or elaborate pretense. She doesn’t seem to be lying. And if she’s crazy then I am--so far--willing to risk being crazy too, for I want to see how it develops. Perhaps I am letting myself be drawn into a delusional scheme because of my intense desire to be an important part of something magical and big. But if there is anything real in it, it could affect all of us profoundly. Some of the bits she has related to me: There is a “blue” path and a “red” path. The blue one is not so good. The red one is the one the senders of the information want us to follow. There is someone, symbolically or literally connected to her left hand (the ring I gave her?), who is to walk the path and teach something. This person seems to be me. Everyone has, or had at one time, the innate capacity to recieve messages and see the true path. Each person’s “messengers” take a different form. For Ann it is the crows. Now, there is a group or entity at odds with--in fact who are directly trying to hurt, and this is related to the dying crows--the blue-path group or entity. They are responsible for intervening with most people’s messengers, and turning them off somehow, in order to draw people down the wrong path, the red one. They perform this brainwashing, as it were, early on in people’s lives. It seems they have to do it that way, to get the messengers turned off in time. What I wanted to know was, once turned off, can they be turned on again? She said she didn’t know but she will try to find out. I am trying to balance my intense curiosity with not wanting to lead her too much--I want to see what she comes up with on her own. If this is all the result of some psychosis or clever neurosis, it seems entirely reasonable that she should come up with answers that would be somehow psychologically satisfying to her. And if (though even to consider it makes me cringe at the power of my own egotism) she’s doing it in part to keep me around, it seems likely that she should come up with answers I would like to hear. But we shall see. While I was sitting in her bed with her head in my lap, touching her forehead and trying to breathe and be an open channel, while she was telling me in faltering phrases and half-formed words the pieces she was putting together, I was repeatedly--and pleasurably-- swamped by waves of goose-pimply shudders that recalled to my mind the time, in Seattle, when Taelin described to me the feeling he sometimes got when something from the other side of the veil seemed to be touching him somehow, of being filled up like a glass of water. I said I understood, then, but I didn’t really. And now? 28 sept Today, Alvin said: “I’ve been ignorant all my life. You can’t be, anymore. You’ve got to learn why they did it, what it means, so you can talk about it, and figure out how to stop it.” He also said: “They keep talking on the radio about the ripple effect this is going to have on the economy. It’s not a ripple. You know what a tsunami is? It’s when a meteor hits the ocean, and the waves have an effect on the whole world.” Cholula just handed me a beer. Miranda’s not giving me guitar lessons any more. She got a new used pair of dungarees, and some brown shoes. She is going out; the fall air is coming in. Several months ago I was talking with Chris on the telephone, about the state of the world and the gathering chaos. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to climb too high in a house that was going to fall. I admitted at the time that I May merely have been making excuses for underachievement, or that I May just have been smoking too much pot, and I’m not going to claim prescience now, but still . . . . Cholula just got out of the shower. Suds are glowing on her bronze, rotund body. She wet-kisses the space between us. I love the spark of hatred in my fingertips. I barely touch her. She explodes. 29 sept Another thing Alvin said: “I think we learn from our mistakes better than the US government. A lot better.” This after I ran the raffle tickets through the press the less-than-optimum way, destroying three of them. And after Jason had to make a new plate with just the word “Phone” on it, because it was left off the original copy, so we had to run them through two more times. Do I learn from my mistakes. I ask myself, what if this is the last thing I’ll ever say to this person, and say Maybe differently than I would have, before. Sex, sexuality, gender, identity, marriage, love. These are about as confusing to me right now as I can imagine them being. Nonetheless. It’s for loving with, not for loving by. If you can love with or without it, you can love with it. Said Godbody. 5 Oct 2001 Much has been made of the cup. As well it should be. If you would heal, you must give of yourself to others. What I pretend, she lives. of yourself you must give to others 08 Oct Discipline the fifth ring is. Level the seventh the seventh level is. Cholula and I are lovers. Again. But this time it is different. My memory is not photographic. If I want a photographic memory I have to employ external photographic hardware. Workaround. There are any number of ways my mental functioning and capacity could be improved. More efficient storage and retrieval. Faster processing speeds. Clearer visualisation. But if we’re stuck on the island here--I mean, shit, I’m wasting time even now, telling you why I shouldn’t compain about the hardware I don’t have, instead of squeezing every last drop of functionality I can out of the hardware I do have. And sending out the call for submissions for new software. There’s got to be some software left, or yet to be encoded, that still uses this hardware. We on the island stuck are? 10 Oct Cholula says I have a brain tumor the size of a fist, in her rectum. I do not know what she means by this. Perhaps it is the needle of the spaceship. I heard a foghorn, razor-sharp and distance-dulled, and I had a sudden longing, to be lurking by my window once again, the one without a screen, back behind the brickyard alley rundown almost home, where strangers’ visions masqueraded past my sight, instilling me with drunken fright. Here, all is too secure. We must seek strangeness, after it has left us. The evenings’ brazen quietness grates upon my spirit. I would rather be terrified but alive. Yes I live in this country. But a contract made under duress is not a contract. By my inactivity, am I complicitous with the actions of my government? Even those actions I know not of, nor was ever consulted about? If someone in a foreign land thinks I am represented by my government, does that mean I am? Is it the fault of those fuckers in Afghanistan for living there if they accidentally get hit by one of our bombs? Should I refuse to breathe the air here, use the roads here, enjoy the protections here? But I pay for all that, do I not? Is it enough? Do I not, then, judging srictly from my behavior, think killing is wrong, even if you let someone else do it for you? I also eat meat. Civil liberties are not God-given. They are muscle-taken. As long as I am happy, I will not do much to change things. However, things that happen can certainly change how happy I am. This must be what Dad meant by quoting, “It’s not the men that make the times, but the times that make the men.” And the women, too, I assume. I rent this apartment, and Dick rents it to me, not because that is the right and natural way for human beings in general, or myself in particular, to arrange to live, but because I can, and he can. And neither of us knows enough to be unhappy enough with that situation to change it, so far. I ride my bike on the road, not because I have paid my taxes, although I have paid most of them, but because it is there, and noone has stopped me from riding on it. I do not believe we (and that’s another thing--this ubiquitous “we.” “We” are not bombing anybody. “They” are, either with our support, despite our objections, or with the blessings-by-default of our apathy) should be bombing Afghanistan. But apparently I do not believe it is my place to stop it. Because I have not been directly hurt by it yet? Or have I simply assumed I am powerless to stop it? Have we all? Have all the ants and flies and mosquitos and roaches assumed they are powerless to stop humanity? Or do they thrive off humanity’s sweaty presence? Do they know it? Would they care? When I think of responses to one’s own government’s actions, immediately three main forks pop into my mind: Accept it, leave the country while you still can, or remain in it and try to change things. Accept it? I do, to the extent I have been describing, and yet I am becoming less and less satisfied. Leave? Where would I go that is any better? That sounds like a stock rhetorical question, but it May be hiding a more personal truth: I like it here. I don’t want to leave. Change things? What can I do? I can join the army. I understand they’ve extended the maximum age to 34. I do not want to join the army. I can voice my opinions. But they are only half- formed. I can join peace protests, but they seem so pathetic and their singing is so bad. I could work to make a better peace protest. But I just don’t seem to want to work on that right now. I am afraid I would feel foolish as soon as I said something unsupportable by my own education, and afraid I would feel ineffectual anyway. Or Maybe I’m just afraid to sit by the peacenik gym-class failures, for fear of public censure. It takes a lot to overcome that fear in me: either an intense desire not to participate in gym class, or an even more intense desire to participate in something else. Maybe the former of these desires will be aroused in me if they reinstate the draft any time soon. I can travel to Washington and be gunned down trying to storm the White House. I can read various sources of news, hunting for further clues as to what I can do. I can stick stickers with cryptic messages anonymously in random places. I can refuse to wave a flag or act like a racist. I can be my own teacher in my own school, and take classes of my own devising. I can volunteer to tutor a child in the MPS program. I am going to do that. How is that related? It May help give someone else a chance, eventually, to decode the messages that are swirling around us all, and, perhaps, to encode some of eir own. What good does that do? I don’t know. But at least it feels like I’m doing something, which is better than nothing, which is sometimes all I feel capable of doing. Add up all the things I am doing, subtract all the things I am not doing, and somehow factor in all the things I May yet do. Does that put me in Heaven or Hell? Or some grey Purgatory in between? I dunno, I guess ask me at any given moment of any given day of my any given life. It all just seems so random. There’s no list of things to do and not to do that I have, that I trust. So in that, the world hasn’t changed since the attacks. I still get up in the morning whenever I get up, and do whatever I do based on my own choices in the face of variously compelling stimuli. So? One’s own imagination can become a powerful stimulus for change. At times when I feel I might need a rationale for practicing poetry and suchlike, that’s the rationale. A healthy imagination is a hungry one. It feasts on beauty, it feeds on discontent. Who am I to say these things? I am but the ravaged, irrational host. Is laziness an adaptive quality, or original sin to be fought off constantly and with great show of righteousness? I am beginning to suspect that my apparent inactivity May come from some source other than, or at least in addition to, laziness or apathy. It May come from selfishness, and that May be okay with me. I mean, look at it this way: No matter how much the public or the media might say I should want to, I do not personally want to kill anyone in response to what happened on September 11. That is not my personal reaction to that. I do not consider that to be my fight. There are people who do consider it their fight, and they are fighting it. Who is to say besides me, which fights are mine and which are not? I’ll let you know which ones are mine this way: I’ll be fighting them. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen. Despite all this, I have not shaken the nagging suspicion that the only nonhypocritical approach is to drop out of government-assisted society altogether. Because I am part of the machine. All these things I have, these clothes, this dragonfly lamp, this computer, they all somehow seem illgotten. Paid for by the blood of others. Does it matter that others would gladly pay in my blood for the priveleges I have had? And yet I do not see myself going off to live in the woods and fields and (most likely) starving to death. Because it’s not really government-assisted, is it, it’s more government-controlled. They don’t give a shit if I destroy myself in protest. And if I destroy anyone else in protest, not that I believe I would have the stomach for a shooting spree, they would just become inspired to tighten the controls, and the public would cheer them on. So the temporary solution is to keep kidding myself along. I have not yet found a way to think about things that makes me innocent. 11 Oct Even if I decide, and I May already have, that I do support our military actions right now, I still resent and fear how they are being marketed to us, the general public. The alarming rhetoric--in a press conference tonight, Bush referred to bin Laden as “the Evil One.” I think that’s giving our political enemies too much emotional credit. Reason is erased by boosterism. It is as if they think, were they to present facts to us in a non-hysterical and complete fashion, that we might begin to think for ourselves, and then perhaps the fear is that we might not agree with everything they say. The implication is that the people of this country, the people our own heroes died to defend, can only be counted on to make good decisions if our information about the world is coated in the malnourishing sugar of black-and-white, good-versus-evil, God-soaked platitudes. It gives me a most sinister suspicion that there is a great deal of information withheld from us, even while we are asked to Unite and Support and Line up behind our Leaders. It is insulting, demeaning, infuriating, and very, very scary. I do not have any immediate plans to reject my country. However, I like to think I am not a starry-eyed dollface who will do anything he is told. I think the ideal relationship of citizenry to government is one of provisional cooperation; even, if necessary, concord in a state of arms. Not one of helpless wards, summarily protected against every possible evil, including themselves, including the onus of deciding for themselves what is evil and what is just, excluding only their own protectors. 15 Oct “Britain's experience under the watchful eye of the CCTV cameras is a vision of what Americans can expect if we choose to go down the same road in our efforts to achieve "homeland security." Although the cameras in Britain were initially justified as a way of combating terrorism, they soon came to serve a very different function. The cameras are designed not to produce arrests but to make people feel that they are being watched at all times. Instead of keeping terrorists off planes, biometric surveillance is being used to keep punks out of shopping malls. The people behind the live video screens are zooming in on unconventional behavior in public that in fact has nothing to do with terrorism. And rather than thwarting serious crime, the cameras are being used to enforce social conformity in ways that Americans May prefer to avoid.” I got this from the New York Times. The part that made me copy it down was the “if we choose . . . .” Who the fuck is “we”? Of course, a lot of people like to feel as if they are being watched all the time. For a lot of people, that is the definition of success, of existence, even. I still remember, back in Acting class at UMKC, the kid, I’ll call him Sporto cuz I don’t remember his name, who was all lean and muscley and jocklooking but was also an essayist and an aspiring novelist, and, to some extent, an aspiring actor, who said he felt like there’s hidden cameras watching him all the time, even when he’s alone at home, and he acted differently because of that. He was aware of his own performances for the imagined, omnipresent cameras. Jeffrey, our hot sweet TA, acted as if he did not understand this. He made fun of Sporto for being paranoid and fanciful. But I understood. I understood. How is that feeling now, I wonder, when the cameras can be assumed not to be imaginary? Everything comes down to now. This decade. The last chance saloon. I spend so much nervous energy trying to learn her world, her story. What about my own? Just because it is less crazy, less touched by serious demons of madness and clarity, does that make it less important? Maybe. Maybe historians would say that it was. I heard a song on the radio at Pizza Shuttle, a disquieting hovel I visited to drink, eat, and watch TV, that said, “Everybody’s looking for who we are. The ones that know don’t have the words to tell, and the ones that have the words don’t know too well.” Shit. 16 Oct When you make a gift, you have to give it away. This includes when you give all so that future generations of Americans can enjoy liberty, freedom . . . So-called patriots who get mad when peaceniks say, “thank you for the gift of this country, now here’s what i think we should do with it,” are missing this point. Part of the gift was the ability to make those choices. Part of giving a gift is relinquishing control. 17 Oct I can apprehend that there are things I need to be learning, concepts I need to grasp, even actions I need to take. But I am paralyzed. I feel too damn dumb to get it. I feel too ambivalent to act. I feel simultaneously empty and charged. A sense of urgency with an agitation of impotence. Should I buy a gun? Stockpile food and water? Join the army? Be an ecstatic poet? Just drop dead? No one can tell me these things. I never thought I would feel that lack of overt direction so acutely--nor certainly, that it could be so creepingly alarming. Philosophical posturing gives way to honest confusion. I heard a very beautiful man play the blues last night. His name is Steve Cohen. I guess he’s sort of semi-famous. Anyway, this aggressively chatty, 22-yr-old friend of Ann’s was quite impressed with herself for being friends with him. He was kind of lanky, and looked like someone from the seventies, a little doofusy, wrinkly, and smiling a lot. He played the harmonica like a son of a bitch. Like he was just filling it up, and pouring it out. Sitting in the bar while he and another guy played some songs, was warm, comforting, energizing. So is thinking about it now. One thing I did notice, though, while glancing from weathered face to face, between beers, looking at the bar and all the bottles lined up in perfect, gemlike colours--the strongest presence in any bar with music is still the absence of Glenn. Thank you for seeing me in the clouds and leaves and sun; I feel unfortunately very plastered to the ground these days. I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother. I know she was very important to you. You know something? You’re like a grandmother to me--only you’re more like my grandkids’ grandmother. Look at your name! You wrote your name at the bottom of my letter, and it looks like a beautiful antique. I am glad you’re still my friend, child-friend. And you’re right about this: life does go on, day by day by day. I have to take the dogs out; they’ve eaten and they’ll be wanting to poop soon. I’m having leftover noodles and alfredo sauce. The kitchen radio is broken. It only works when plugged into a certain outlet--but it’s a different outlet every day. No-one understands its moods. Let alone the news it sometimes manages to bring. I got my left nipple pierced. It hurt like hell. It was fun. 20 Oct Yeah. Unity. Right. But the US Government has not proved willing to override Bayer’s patent on Cipro, deciding instead to accept that company’s claim they can handle the whole problem on their own. Meanwhile, the Canadian government did override the patent, and ordered some of the antibiotic from a generic manufacturer, which action apparently irritated Bayer’s chiefs. Well, fuck them. Anybody who can should be making this shit. Isn’t that how a war effort works? You don’t stingily guard your patent on something that could potentially defuse a worldwide threat to humanity. Do you? With whom are we uniting here, anyway? Ann is smarter than me, thinks for herself more readily, and that makes me sick and alive with impotence and lust. I have to keep trying to become real, but right now I feel like cardboard. I fantasize my boyfriends, while I have one living with me whom I disregard because she is a woman. What the fuck is my problem? 23 Oct The government is not going to take care of us. After it has fallen, or as it is falling, we are going to have to learn to do what many of our darker-skinned or otherwise disaffected citizens have already had to start learning to do: take care of ourselves and each other. No sense defending your honor. Just go on and kiss him if you want to . . . . . . and not, if you don’t. It’s coming back. Every time it comes back it brings with it something it didn’t have before--and every time, it has lost something it did have before. My, yes. I am gay. I can say that now, having glimpsed most vividly the meaninglessness of that statement, why it is not meaningless to me, and why I needn’t explain the apparent contradiction & And all I can say now is, Magic do as you will 24 Oct I’m slightly horny. What happened was this: I was waiting (interminably!) for a 10 bus. Dude comes up to me, breaking me away from a fractional connection with another disgruntled bus-waiter-for, a dumpy friendly woman. Black, hair ropy, long-ish. Glasses. Off-white slacks. Missing a tooth somewhere, I think. Slim. Slightly shorter than I. Wanted to pay me $20 to go with him to HoJo’s and read the phone book cuz he was trying to find “the Brownstone” hotel where supposedly his friend was, who was going to hold his money while he himself visited a prostitute who was waiting for him in another hotel. Why he had so much money, he said, was he had just come from Haiti because his grandfather had died and left him a chunk of money. He spoke English quite well, but said he could not read it. He was carrying half the $10,000 with him right there, in his pocket. I went with him. I said he didn’t have to pay me. He said he would though, because he believed in paying his way. The Brownstone was not in the phone book. Then, back out on the street, he wanted me to hold the money for him--20 minutes is all, he said--I could just sit in Hooter’s-- you know, the place where they got the nekkid girlies--and wait, and he would pay me $200. You have an honest face. You’re not going to make money that fast being a printer! What didn’t happen was this: anything else. Because I didn’t do it. His alcohol breath scared me, the crinkled brown paper bag full of cash scared me, the whole weird story scared me. In short, I was scared. I couldn’t imagine what the sinister motive could be, but my sheepish blood was sure there was one. Who knows what might have happened, what I might have learned. Fuck, the $200 richer I could have been. Or not. He never paid me the $20, after all. Now I am stewing once again in my failure to participate. I masturbated at work today, thinking of getting fucked by last night’s Willie whatsisname, the smooth-dancing, guitar-hacking, hugesmiling, knotty burly tower of bulging black manhood that had my two female companions all a-flutter, and me all tight with jealousy. Well, he’s really not my type, you see, but fuck me...fuck me...fuck me... Last night after the blues, Laura agreed to have a 3some with me and Ann. Didn’t happen. Ann and I were too drunktired. Laura went to bed with us but got up and left in the middle of the night. Oh well. [4 November 2001 post script Thank fucking God it didn’t happen! <shudder>] 25 Oct It could be argued that the reason I didn’t get a celestial voice coming down and telling me Yes, you have what it takes, is that if I hadn’t had to figure that out for myself, I would have said, Oh, I do? Cool! and instantaneously turned into an insufferably stuck-up asshole, incapable of producing anything of “it,” whatever “it” turns out to be, at all. Bayles & Orland, in Art & Fear, say, “. . . the progression of most artists’ work over time is a progression from art toward craft. In the same manner that imagination gives way to execution as any single work builds toward completion, an artist’s major discoveries usually come early on, and a lifetime is then allotted to fill out and refine those discoveries.” (98Ð99) I guess I can kinda see how that might be. Like, early on being the poop on the walls, the bunk beds and the dots with Chris, the stuffed animals’ pathos, the great gross noses of the animals in the wallpaper coming to life, the secret eyes down in the basement, the clubhouse, the shiteating fantasies, the glimpse of highway riding alone on a Vespa someday with the glint of the blue hi-beam indicator to trace the path of my own steady pulse, playing chess with Chris, reading, reading, reading Chris’s books and some of my own, the river, the guns, the woods, the squirrels, the tracks, the paths, the stars, the supernovae, Smith-Corona, endless talks with Velander about the fucking universe, the whole fucking universe, man. Yeah, I’ll admit it. They don’t make discoveries that big any more. The small ones are intense, now, and full of light and gratifying, but, yeah, back then I was being wholloped with the minutiae and grandeur of the everything So help me, i’m the Lord of All that’s Left. But it’s all right. After all, I did survive childhood. 27 Oct the commercials roll on as if nothing were wrong 4 Nov 2001 I searched all over that bookstore, borderline despondently, not sure what i was searching for but knowing i hadn’t found it. I finally picked out a book, about science it turns out, whose structure is hypertextual. I’m so excited I have to go to the bathroom. 7 Oct The potentiality of the dumanstupid house exists already, everywhere. I explore, not create it. But the particulate reality of any given locus comes about when given illumination--in my case, whereIsit, by me or any of mine. The foulder called “d&sh” is not the boundary of the dumanstupid house. It is just another zoom-level of it, by chance (?) located close to whereIsit. I get the feeling that in this, as in anything “IMPORTANT,” it will be necessary to do my part. To jump up, as the old scraggle-face said, and get it if you want it. In other words, I cannot expect Megan [note from the future: this was the dream megan only; we didn’t know about our daughter yet] or anyone else to ride the machina out of Heaven and say the magic words to make me real. For all I know, she could need my help as much as I need hers. I must do all I can to be ready. Right now that means building the dumanstupid house. And that means it’s okay to have fun, too. Good night. 8 Oct consciousness, awareness, whatever you want to call it. It is kinda like knowing that someone is watching. Now that’s not as horrific as it seems, I’m not talking about the guvermint or nothin, I just mean someone, something, some sense. Even if it’s just you. And yes, there are exceptions I assume. But try it. It’s a good idea. Because who knows what you’re missing because you don’t think they’re watching, and therefore you are not watching! Or, as Ann put in an e-mail to me today, Attention is living; inattention is dying. The attentive never stop; the inattentive are dead already. 9 Oct Ann says she spoke with Zee, and learned some things from Megan about The objects she gave me a wand or scepter parts of me know how to use it parts of me are learning parts of me will parts of me don't want to a key for something i'm making as i was sitting there trying to figure it out--keys open doors, but HOW?-- it occurred to me that the nature of the key could be reflected in how i was thinking about the key. I mean, I was thinking, Maybe it's not just one answer that's going to pop into my head, BAM, and there you have it. Maybe it means a whole bunch of different things, (like the splits being like bifurcations for instance), and you can just let your awareness of it evolve, many layers of meanings that grow as time goes on, alive and not alive at the same time, you don't have to understand it all at once--! And I realized yes, that's a perfect description of the dumanstupid house. the third thing? [ann woke up too soon when the phone rang] i asked if Megan told her about the things in that order, she said yes. Well, the order I became aware of the things when Megan gave them to me in the first place was: gray dry twig, split green twig, puffball-thingy with orange growth. In the dream I was afraid that last one meant I had cancer or something. I don't think so now [this note added 2/11/02: Maybe has something to do with the baby?] And what about the unseen other thing or things I felt she gave me? Ann also said Megan said I have to help her. She can't do things in this world, my world, without my help. And that yes, I will need her help, too. Perhaps we will meet at the amusement park soon? In the woods? In a bar? Underwater--not sure I'm ready for underwater just yet. That was fuckin scary, that other time. Maybe if it was nice blue sunny underwater, like where otters and sea lions live. Also was thinking about bisexuality--a natural tendency in those who travel among worlds and lifetimes? You take numerous forms, you learn it doesn't make that much difference what sex you are. 21 Oct On looking back at my ’94 journals, so bright and full of spunk, I am comforted and melancholy at once. The line I loved so much from Heinlein jumps back into my mind, as I look around at where I’ve come to: There was nothing wrong with him except that he wasn’t happy! Exactly seven years ago, I typed this: <21 November 1994 i must admit there is a darkside fringe appeal to the nervewracking dogwalk i just had, going past the police car w/ 2 pigs in parked right behind my car, having a not unrealistic fear they were there for me. come on dexter, just turned the corner and kept on walking tried not to stare too hard at what the driverside pig was staring at. it’s a sort of o-what-stories kind of appeal. the sort that makes you HAF to ask yrself, IS MY DESIRE TO BE A PART OF SOCIETY REAL OR WAS IT IMPLANTED? i wonder if i would be thinkin that tune when they handcuffed me. o well you gets what you pays for> It’s weird, cuz all this time I’ve thought that my seattle journals weren’t shit, but now I’m looking back, not stoned or anything, and I’m finding all these fucking gems, these glittering milestones that say even as I was hurting and roaring I was teaching myself crazy all kinds of things I would really really really need and love! 23 Oct I hate her. I absolutely fucking hate her. When you hate somebody, when you accept the luxury of hating somebody, you incur a debt to them. You owe it to them to tell them what you think, honestly, straight up, even if it’s going to piss them off or ruin a diamond illusion castle. She wants us both to be cripples, so we’ll continue to need each other. I am not a cripple. I am fine. December 2001 I’m still going to be gay. Even at the risk he/she won’t like it. We’re going to have a lot of fun. We’re going to jump out of an airplane. I said I would, I thought I was getting to back down, I’m not getting to back down. For the first time. Up till now, when it was just for myself that I wanted to learn to be a strong gay guy, it just hasn’t been necessary enough. The need hasn’t exceeded the natural fear and laziness. Now, so that I will be able to show Megan Rose, or Milo or whoever the little alien is going to be, how to be true to yourself, it will. I can just feel it. It’s like a waterslide. Rosa was right about this. Maybe she’s also right about my being a weaver and a bard-to-be. I write or die. It’s that simple. I will also take care of my pack. 16 December 2001 I’m pretty sure Ann dreamed of Megan last night. The description of the girl she met (on a path in the woods, outside a rural-ish small town, snowing) matched perfectly--pearlescent skin, glowing, long blond hair, dress, cool lake blue eyes . . . . She said she had been taking something to a man who owned some sort of a shop. He had said he didn’t want it any more, but the girl wanted it, took it. The girl said, “You’re bleeding,” and handed Ann a white handkerchief. Ann said “I know.” Her gums or teeth were bloody. The girl said Ann shouldn’t get so upset about these situations, shouldn’t hurt herself. It is also interesting that Ann dreams of the amusement park too. Where is it? What is going to happen there? 25 December 2001 I haven’t the genius to reproduce it, to present it to you (who?) on demand, but I can, and I will, and I shall, honor it. It is the symphonies that happen all the time. Animals in living rooms. Animals that came up out of this black and tumbly ground, this rabbit hole, this bramble break, this rattlesnake ridge, these low and thrumming houses in a row beside the road. Give them their due, these voices vibrating in public secret, these fingerprints of failure, these atoms, on the couch Bill droning, Sean explaining, Jordan nodding, Everybody doing something, nothing, weaving together the perfect sound of kitchen, table, chair. Amber glass with lemon wedge and tea. In simultany symphonies just like this completely different, billion times around the sun. Amen. One moment: Stillness. Everyone stops talking, chance, at once. A breath? the silent mighty millwheel underground grinds up again. Effortlessly, massive, quiet chaos burbles into conversations overlapping once again. LATER: As so often happens, what I took to be the symphony was only the overture.