Glad Tidings

My lovely sister Sarah and her lovely beau Paul got engaged tonight. And I couldn't be happier.

Cold and hot feel exactly the same at first.

I began writing this in August. And even then, it was really just a transcription of the things I wrote in a plain, brown journal. Mostly notes taken while reading, occasionally ideas of my actual own. Potential titles for future journal entries. Potential kindling for future fires. None of this will mean anything. I promise.

I was dreaming and it was war and there was a monkey.

He's too singularly responsible for my current unhappiness.

It's an impossible amount of time. And yet, there it is.

What is and isn't important begins to blur together.

My body is sore from being told "no."

Apophenia. The spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.

I am not such a nothing after all, I think. I am not such a nothing.

You have a lot of time on your hands.
Picasso had a lot of time on his hands.
Shut up.

No fair. You changed the outcome by measuring it.

Dream. At N's house for a party. Downloading photos but not talking to her. Then Audrey tried to eat a min pin puppy.

Flipped through a deck of cards and pulled out an Ace of Spades.

"Nothing in life has any business being perfect." King Henry, The Lion in Winter
"Departure is a simple out. You put the left foot down and then the right." Eleanor, The Lion in Winter

Schoziphrenia. Adler. So little personal ballast that he has to suck in an entire other human being to keep from disappearing or flying away. He asked the doctor quietly and with tears in his eyes, "You won't make me disappear, will you?"

The weight of days is dreadful. Which is Camus, I think.

Only angels know unrelieved joy -- or are able to stand it.

He was alive and empty, which is so close to Godhood that it was crazy.

An old woman was squeaking as she walked. Her companion answered a cell phone with the oldest-sounding "Hello" I have ever heard.

That's another thing that sucks about The Wizard of Oz.

A sophisticated and veiled form of rejection.

Thinking begets doubt.

Limitlessness is the cause of all evils.

A prayer is significant but neither true nor false.

The deliberate lie

A triangle laughs

Catching the shadow of shadows

leere Gedankendinge (empty thought things)

reason's need
reason's uncontested rulership in the household of the soul

the powerful sovereignty of the mind

the soundless dialogue of the I with itself

a deliberate withdrawal from appearances

things which are not yet and things which are no more

toward the understanding of things that are always absent, that cannot be remembered because they were never present to sense experience

In order for us to think about somebody, he must be removed from our presence; so long as we are with him we do not think either of him or about him; thinking always implies remembrance; every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

At times I think, and at times I am.

Take on the color of the dead.

Mnemosyne, Memory, is the mother of the Muses.

Thinking annihilates temporal as well as spatial distances.

Remembrance versus anticipation

Orpheus and Eurydice

Every thought is an after-thought.

A word that signifies both fame and opinion

"You're more than popular. You're pure lowest common denominator."

forever solitary by reason of his excellence

to illuminate an experience which does not appear

This helps to explain, too, why the typical phallic narcissist, the Don Juan character, often takes any object -- ugly or beautiful -- that comes along, with the same unconcern. He does not really take account of it in its total personal qualities.

Dream of Taco Bell with D and M. Dinner with P and Beulah and E and J. Telling jokes and feeling like I was trying too hard. I said that if I had a baby born with a birth defect, I'd probably drown it. P said, scoldingly, "Mary Forrest, you wouldn't." And I said, "Well, I'd want to. But of course I wouldn't. And then thirty-five years later, I'd be sitting there with little Jib Jab." And then Beulah was teasing J, who grabbed her hand and began bending her fingers apart for fun but broke her little finger completely off. And I freaked out and went to get ice and take her to the ER. In the Taco Bell, they kept asking us to leave for a moment and making us stand in the rain. It was actually a Subway. And half my sandwich was empty.

I actually have to be up at A TIME.

"Three" is your answer to every question.

Vitamins stuck in my throat. I washed them down with whiskey.

You're not death. You're just a kid in a suit.

Wonder begets rainbow.

It's a streetlight. But it may as well be the moon.

Dream of Beulah and me. Flying around the world (like in Around the World in 80 Days). Paper fish balloon plane. Hotel in Japan. Flying over the ocean.

Going mad with eloquence

Bad people are not full of regrets.

Absence of the inner accusing dialogue. A lack of conscience.

Between Chuan Chen and a butterfly, there must be some destination.

That episode of Futurama where Fry finds his lost dog makes me so sad. That dog waited his whole life for Fry, and Fry never knew it. It's the saddest, saddest thing.

What is brought into being by action is that which could also be otherwise.

The future is nothing but a consequence of the past.

John Stuart Mill. Our internal conscioiusness tells us that we have a power which the whole outward experience of the human race tells us that we never use.

Rock, water -- would believe they moved of their own will. Spinoza surmised that we act in the illusion of free will because we are conscious of our actions and unconscious of the causes by which these actions are determined.

Descartes. Refuse then to be free, if freedom does not please you.

Every hope carries within itself a fear, and every fear cures itself by turning to the corresponding hope.

Leibniz. Everything that is, looked at from the viewpoint of the whole, is the best.

The futile attempt at willing backward which, if successful, could only end in the annihilation of everything that is.

A change of pajamas.

Nap dream. There was this leviathan. A fish snake. I had this dream before. I had to use a flute to escape it. I lost someone. The fish swallowed the flute. There was a ship. I was in the sea. I was going to die.

My first awareness of Adolf Hitler was by way of Family Feud.

We are your better selves.

I would totally have dated Ray Bolger.

It could have been a very different life for me.

How reckless human courage would be if experienced pain left no memory behind.

A self-evident theory, standing in need of no special reasoning

Augustine. In his youth he had turned to philosophy out of inner wretchedness, and as a man he turned to religion because philosophy had failed him.

"I have become a question for myself."

Anybody who says, "I'd rather not exist than be unhappy," cannot be trusted, since while he is saying it he is still alive.

It is in the nature of the will to be resisted.

The durability of love. Even able to coexist with revulsion.

Deepening of genius.

If I foresaw my future and it held devastation, I would go forward as planned. I have never been one to spare myself where suffering is concerned.

"Our whole life is nothing but a race toward death."

Would have defined us not as mortals but like the Greeks, "natals."

They say that all good things must end someday. There is no surprise in this.

When love loses its restlessness
Neither pursuing an end
Nor afraid of losing it
Doesn't it also lose its flavor altogether
Maybe feeling can only be translated
In the vibrations that radiate off of
Nervous tremblings and fear

He died too young. Too young for a philosopher.

Possession extinguishes desire and delight.

"The bird and the plane are nearly the same."
"Every shoulder has a highway you can cry on."

1st person personification of Oscar: "My Metal Self"

Quantum fissure. Alternate realities. Everything that can happen does.

"One of the first things a child has to do is to learn to abandon ecstasy, to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind."

Cary Grant takes the stairs two at a time.
Tall, dark, and Cary Grant.

Adler describes schizophrenia. So little personal BALLAST that he has to suck in an entire other human being to keep from disappearing or flying away.

the dispassionate quiet of the soul

No one who possesses the true faculty of thinking, and therefore the weakness of words, will ever risk framing thoughts in discourse, let alone fix them in so inflexible a form as that of written letters.

"The internal limit of all thinking...is that the thinker never can say what is most his own...because the spoken word receives its determination from the ineffable."

"The results of philosophy are the uncovering...of bumps that the intellect has got by running its head up against the limits of language.

"But, as I said before, I had no time to be bored; there were my old friends, Logos, Bucephalus, arras, lucubration and so on. Why play chess? Locked up like that for days and nights on end I began to realize that thinking, when it is not masturbative, is lenitive, healing, pleasurable. The thinking that gets you nowhere takes you everywhere; all other thinking is done on tracks and no matter how long the stretch, in the end there is always the depot of the roundhouse. In the end there is always a red lantern which says STOP!" (Miller)

Sinus Relief. Delousing. Tomayto. Tomahto.

If you ever decide to try SudaCare Shower Soothers, I hope you will look on the box and check to make certain the active ingredient isn't listed as Zyklon B or prussic cyanide gas. Because there is nothing about the way these things are being marketed that doesn't look like a way to conveniently turn a shower into your very own home gas chamber.

The center cannot hold.

Dog on my lap. Sun in the glass. Cloudy, non-specific sense of urgency somewhere in my chest or throat. Nothing out of the ordinary. I am guilty of not counting days when they are beautiful. Of waiting for the streets to be wet with rain before I appreciate them for not having been.

This is my favorite weather. Even on the days when it rains. This time of year is the one that makes a year seem like a year. When my hands need pockets for warmth. When indoor climates are more unpredictable than outdoor ones. No matter how cold it gets, there is nothing more unpleasant than overheat. I've never been burned by acid or bitten by a wolf or drowned or electrocuted or stabbed much. But I'm pretty sure there is nothing worse than sitting indoors in a place where the heat is on too high. The stuffy injustice of everyone around you flushed and sweating in cashmere and too many layers of t-shirt. I prefer the cold to lead me to warm drinks and fireplaces and maybe an outdoor heat lamp. But let the heat be localized. Please oh please let the heat be localized.

This year, I haven't been to Vegas. I haven't had a car accident. I haven't gotten a parking ticket. I haven't gotten my camera fixed. I haven't learned a new language. I haven't baked a cake. I haven't sent a handwritten letter. I haven't left the door wide open, even when it was unbearably hot. I never said these were things I wanted or needed to do. But I notice their presence on an imaginary checklist. And I notice the absence of checkmarks.

I went to the art supply store near my apartment today. I hadn't been all year. They've moved everything around. It's easy enough to figure out where things are, but none of it is where it was. The aisles with the pads of paper and notebooks are marked by shelves that seem taller than the others. When you walk amongst them, it's like being in a forest. Some secret place. And when the guy with the two piercings coming out of the corners of his mouth asks if you need help, it startles you. Because it felt like you were the only one in the world in need of paper for drawing.

After a bath, I put lotion on my arms that I haven't used since 1996 or 1997. The fragrance is aggressively familiar. I remember putting on this lotion in my bedroom in the house that later burned down. I remember listening to CDs while I got dressed. I remember looking in that vast mirror and wishing there was more light. I remember sitting in the corner at a small drawing desk I no longer have and writing something rhymey by the light of a clip-on lamp. I remember seeing the moon through beige blinds above a grove of eucalyptus trees. And finding ways to write about it without saying the actual words. Sometimes, I sit in the bath with a book and lament the eventual loss of the bubbles and the heat and the perfect sultry stillness. Sometimes, I sit there and just wait for the bath to be over. As if it's something to endure. Bored, but unwilling to let all that hot water go to waste.

My mother says, when you're staying in a hotel, to take lots of hot baths. That's what you're paying for.

It's well into December and I'm nowhere near ready for it.