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Terrified of pollution-related birth defects, an eccentric locks his pregnant wife away in a sterile, toxin-free environment. The obstetrician delivers the baby on-sight. The baby comes out autistic, with webbed feet. The man shoots his wife, then the doctor, then himself. The child remains on stage, in a bassinet, gurgling and helpless.

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I guess this is the time of life where people really start to question their own motives, what they really want, because they're beginning to realize they're going to die someday, and they don't want to die miserable and alone

“it's so hard to find yourself when you've got someone else's shoes at the foot of your bed” –KC

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A carapace of ice constricts the earth.

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I want to sit down and write something about contextual geography and memory in the context of relationships.

0215111741 Generic Pub.

(Alright, son, have at it.)

The fact of the matter is that I realize I don’t miss her nearly as much as I miss what we had, certain things that endeared her to me. It’s pathetic; I see C.P. (of all people) holding his arms a certain way and I’m reminded of the way she used to prop her smoking arm up with her non-dominant hand, cradling her elbow. It looked elegant and unpremeditated, like everything else about her.

I’m trying to think of the last time I had this almost unutterable sense of existential despair. It’s easier when it’s acute, the pain. It’s easier to blow off steam when it’s acute, because acute emotional pain is much more closely related to anger than this. This dull, throbbing ache of purposelessness and discontent beyond discontent. Depression is rage turned inward, we’re told. I don’t really know if I’ve given myself enough (any?) time to be angry. I guess I don’t see the point of being angry; it doesn’t alter any outcome. I feel like my very being is imploding, like there’s some kind of strain that I’m not coping with adequately. But there’s no strain; graduate school is simple. I have good friends, it’s not like there’s no support structure.

I got to thinking…That Otis Redding song, “I’ve got dreams to remember” is so goddamned sad. The speaker has been robbed of his goals and desires. His very identity is dissolving alongside his relationship. Otis Redding was only two years older than me when he died.

Re and I talked once about this. Her schmuck boyfriend (Steve, I think) left her and she spent the better part of two years trying to figure out where he ended and she began, trying to disentangle her “herness” from everything she had been in the relationship.

Boy, that was a squandered opportunity. A beautiful woman drives from VIRGINIA to see me my sophomore year and it doesn’t compute for me that she wants to date me? I don’t really make any apologies; I was young, and it wouldn’t’ve worked anyway. Her car was named Electra. We burned the parking ticket she got in front of *generic dormitory*, the penultimate thing before her departure. A hug, a smile, a kind word, and the chance had passed.

I wanted to write more than anything, but nothing that’s coming out is any good.

I imagine myself driving south and trying to depersonalize, to disidentify things as innocuous as interstate exit numbers. Everything you’ve ever done contextualizes everything you ever do. There’s a sick part of me that wants to do some “disaster tourism” on spring break and drive by *******’s parents’ house, walk that walk from my old dorm room to hers, go smoke a bowl at the brush dump and remember and hurt. It’s hard to keep self-indulgence from leaking into the recuperation process; I want to aggrandize my pain, make it literary and exalted somehow, when my rational mind understands that such an attempt is, precisely, self-indulgent. People are starving. People are getting put through the machine and summarily executed. Thousands of lives come to uncinematic, violent ends every day (hour?), and I’m complaining because I live in a corrupt, declining society and I don’t have a girlfriend anymore? First world problems are the inanest problems. On an unrelated note, I’m SHOCKED that Word recognizes “inanest” as a word. I meant it to be a humorous neologism.

I never go to the same mountain twice. The things that happen to and around me there compound, and every revisitation is bittersweet in a different way. College is my spirit mother. I have dead relatives there. I fell in love there three and a half times. I worked several jobs, suffered the indignity of quasi- poverty there. I found solace and new family. The mountain serves as a perpetual reminder of what I could have been and am not yet.

I feel ostracized, which is stupid.

The mountain is an immense and textured canvas in my mind; every return there adds another layer of paint. Some things bleed through the new layers more than others, and the weaker details sift through oblivion into obscurity, but it’s a composite experience. The mountain is memory, and memory is funereal. (emphasis on the “real”).

Springsteen: Everybody wants a place to rest. Everybody wants to have a home. Don’t make no difference what nobody says. Ain’t nobody want to be alone.

It’s a generally horrible feeling, knowing that your mother would probably be ashamed of you if she were still alive. There’s multiplicitous misery built into that sentence.

Writing is thinking out quiet.

If I’m going to be a writer ever, I need to start taking the “craft” seriously. The problem is this: I don’t approach writing as a craft. I approach writing as a necessity, something that comes out of me when I’m deeply sad, hurt or angry. It’s almost a coping/defense mechanism—someone wounds me or I’m unhappy, and I choose to find unusual ways of expressing my feelings through the written word, instead of voicing my emotions through more normal channels, like committing acts that end in “cide.”

God, no one reading over my shoulder would EVER date me.

What do these people think about? How do they spend their days? Beyond материальная блага, what are their priorities? They’re all reasonably-to-very good-looking, they all do a much better job of pretending to know where they’re going than I do. Moreover (and less important), what do they think about ME, the asshole who’s drinking alone and tapping tapping tapping into empty space?

I increasingly feel there’s no place for me in this world. I’m a liminal figure with a vagrant soul. I’m happy everywhere, but I’m rarely happy these days. It doesn’t add up, but do the math anyway; it’ll give you an interesting logic puzzle and a pretty good idea of how I woke up feeling this morning.

“You’re in your early twenties. Who said you have a right to be happy?”

Thanks, RM. I should play a game with myself. For a week I should pretend I have some kind of inoperable cancer, minus the symptoms. I should give myself a week to make things right with everyone. I should call TLD, bug SMG until we fix our friendship, write RM. I’m glad that’s really all I have on my plate…that I can think of. Those are the big hangups and disjunctions in my life, the things that nag me daily and remind me that I’m nowhere near as good of a person as I could be.

A good friend just called me. I’ve never seen him like this, but it makes sense. I was a pretty unfortunate wreck a few months before she left me, musing over the “could have beens,” and more unfortunately, the “isn’ts” and “aren’ts.” He’s employed in a detestable backwater. What the fuck is he supposed to do now? I’m at least surrounded with smart, attractive people. I imagine the plight of a career teacher in L*******, Georgia. It must be a sad affair, being a member of the educated minority. …hell, what am I saying? It is a sad affair.