120103 So I'm down in my dusty-tapestry-covered, party-lit, wired den of obsequious absurdities and beer. Just one beer. It's not THAT kind of party. Uh-oh. Here she comes. Oh. Okay. That was a worthwhile interruption. She wanted to show me an eBay item. A big plastic USB steering wheel with car simulation software for little tykes. It's cool. In other news, I'd really like to go online and pine for my illicit girlfriend. But I can't yet. eBay and stuff is still going on up there. Probably just as well. Not. Smoke. Instead. Okay. What the hell. I'm not really pathetic. I just act like it most of the time. I've got about two hits left. Just the intention to post my journal online makes me stumble through my offline journal, second-guessing. Oh well. Fuck. It. * And now I have zero hits left, and my GF is not lurking. Or if she is, she has chosen to remain invisible. Again. Oh, the dulling pain of fat dissatisfaction. * We taxpayers are complicitous. If you could read the pain of everyone in prison, you could read your own comfort. And then you would stop being a hypocrite. Information does leak out faster now. It's more like water. I just read a letter written by a guy in prison who killed himself. I never would have read that letter without the way information travels now. But will it make any difference? Outside our own mangled brains? And then, just for kicks, I looked back at my own journal, the entry from the date closest to when that guy wrote his letter (which also, oddly enough, happens to have been my last entry before 091101), and it said: Today Cholula & I walked thru Wook 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. Cholula 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. Cholula 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 Cholula 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 the steaming city, some woods are in your mind, and some are somewhere else. But if it makes you happy to walk around those places, then 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 Cholula was telling me was a little like Alice Walker's <i>The Color Purple</i>--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. 120303 Quirky bit for past me to overhear present (then future) me saying: "I can't believe people ever actually spent that much money on computers!" (eg, $3300 for a 512K Mac--see <a href="http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/512k.shtml">Low End Mac</a>.) * the day i wrote one thing that mattered it's official: i'm a published author. i can go on second-guessing, double-crossing, and generally irritating my own creative spine and soul as long as i want, but from now on i will have at least once negotiated the asteroid field of impulse, allure, brass, desperation (quiet and otherwise), humility, doubt and (rarely) simple, kind good humor that lies between mortality and that other thing: the black-on-white in shades of gray, the kundalini of the literary, everything you knew but had forgot, laid down for anyone who cares to see. because a week or so ago, i wrote one good piece, comprising one word. eight letters of considered, casual honesty deposited by the campfire of one (lonely?) blogger out there (?) who said: what's the one word you would use to describe me? leave it in a comment i typed one word, and the next day got this e-mail: how cool are you?? that is such an awesome adjective to describe me...I feel so special now! Thanks! i'll let you know when the book signing tour is.... 121003 Whatever else I may have failed at today, at least: I didn't buy tobacco (and consequently I am not smoking), I didn't rush to register the shareware I just downloaded, I did call Ann (having said I would, having sensed she needed a moment of touch), and uh, let's see, what else.... Ah, that's good enough I reckon. Here's a funny bit: right after typing that about the not smoking, some pockmarked dude at the next table just asked me for a cigarette! (Okay, so it's not that funny. I'm a little out of practice. Give me a break. I can feel the pull of the cocksucking lava, but my little goatsfeet resist!) 121703 Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That's what I did with it. I let it die. I let it die. It was blushing and burning, a perfect sunset of opportunity, and I let it spin on into night alone, ashen, growing colder, abandoned, dead. I never went back for it. It's still out there, the teddy bear on the curb in the rotten part of town where the sidewalks' cracks aren't charming. Where Mugger's Alley really is. I never went back there. I let myself be alarmed out of bed before the dream was done, and why? For a job. To satisfy the opinions of some people. To Do the Right Thing. I am an idiot. Not savant. Just an idiot. The real reason I don't kill myself? I don't deserve to die. This computer screams around in circles. Shut it the fuck up. 121703 There was a guy, an odd guy, a little older and hairier than I, with big glasses. He lived in a thirties-era stone house with a big porch. His neighborhood was old, citified, secretive, and slightly curved. Very homey streetlights and porches, mist, that sort of thing. I was visiting him. Our bond was tentative but growing stronger. He was very particular about his things, his private rituals. Anyone that new him at all knew not to move things or put things out of order in any way, or risk his dramatic annoyance. His wife was thin, a tad shrewish but also birdlike. She had glossy short black hair. She made some brownies and some other delectable treat. It was really very good. She got offended when we didn't eat all of it, and she let us know about it. I said, well I didn't know we were supposed to eat all of it, and also, could I take a piece home to my wife? She was mostly mollified. The odd guy had a few macintoshes, one of which I was looking at on their dining room table. It was a very old one-piece mac, like a II or a Plus or something. The black-on-white was very sharp, and I was admiring the computer while the guy was in another room getting a bath ready. I was starting to wonder if we were going to take a bath together, and starting to imagine if I would like it if he touched me intimately. The notion seemed strange, a little off-putting, and weirdly appealing. Throughout, there was the feeling of being almost all the way in on a secret, in the presence of intelligence and quiet subversiveness. The sunlight filtering in was wan but wistfully cheerful. Even the dust had eyes. * Feeling vaguely destructive. Maybe not so vaguely. Precisely. Destructive. I want to smash the radio. Even songs I haven't heard before are merely fashionable recombinations of the same seven ingredients. I want to hear some unidentifiable screams. Images without captions. Boxes without windows. Honest pretention. Give up this laid-back kick, surrender your precious tastefulness. Fuck all. Fuck all. Fuck all. What the fuck. This illusion is stale today. 121803 There is a population of pigeons over here on esriel's island, too. As well as populations of other species similar to the ones found on the fleur. Will these groups cross-pollinate, so to speak? remains to be seen. * i enjoy discussion (not bickering) about morals the same way i enjoy fiction. relative absolutes are given magically, not shackled by the unimagination of necessary truth, and the interconnections among them are open to passionate exploration and delighted interpretation. 122403 My Mayfly project () entry: Ambiguity in marriage and sex. Beautiful toddler brings much joy. Another one coming. I think I need some new friends.