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Freedom and peace of mind cost exactly 1 saturday, $1800 up front, and $900 dollars a month after that. Only they’re fleeting and superficial, so it’s not really such a good deal.

But there’s nothing else in the store.

Mebbe ittsa whiskee tawkin, but rightaboutnow I feeel like I wanna Oxbridge all overtheplace.

I’m so hopelessly confident (singsong)
I’m like a kid in a candy store (singsong2)
I’m a part of the intelite (singsong3)
We’re a bunch of idiots (grandsmile)

Gotta
run
south
to
truth.

I am really, really, really uncomfortable and tense right now, and I don’t know how to change that. I just want to jump out of my skin.

I think I’m depressed. I want to go home, wherever that is.

I know that I don’t want to be here right now, wherever this is.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, BLAH.

things:

– camera today
– apartment sometime within a week
– absinthe early next month
– i have the bug, the bug that makes you wanna apply somewhere and go to doctor school
– list: Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Michigan, Berkeley, New School, NYU, Cambridge, Oxford
– i need snow and red leaves and gruff genuine people like nobody

With apologies to the California people all around:

I can’t help it, the rain makes me fscking happy!

A couple of good apartment leads, but no front-runner/dream-place yet. Gotta get a move on.

Life is so fscking strange.

Okay, so I’ve started the day with this incredible kink in my neck and left shoulder which, when combined with the continuous coughing I’m doing and the stomachache I seem to be developing, should make for an insanely great day.

I took a nice, strong painkiller, but it hasn’t touched the thing at all and may even have made it worse. Hooray. I can’t move.

So I’m sitting in this godforsaken coffee shop again trying to get some work done and this girl will not stop staring at me. Just straight up staring. It’s driving me insane, and it’s hard to get anything done. I don’t know what her issue is or what she wants (she seems to expect something) but I wish she’d go and find a project, because I gotta work.

I always get to this place where I just don’t feel like myself and I just don’t know up from down.

Everything is so surreal and transparent, and looking around I feel guilty and indignant and apathetic all in one.

Rules are not meant to be broken.

I am tired, but since 2000 it has increasingly dawned on me that the statement “you can never go home again” has its shortcomings and probably ought to be revised to “you will never be home again.”

The thing I miss most right now: Autumn on the U/U campus… Wearing a heavy jacket, walking those endless, frostbitten sidewalks and acres of urban outdoorscape, with red and brown leaves flying around me everywhere, holding a warm cup of coffee, heading to class.

Last night I realized the effect that missing one season cycle has had on me. It’s like time has stopped for the rest of the world, nothing aging in the midst of an endless summer. But it hasn’t stopped for me, and I’m afraid I’ll eventually die without having managed to do even one more thing, the physics of the environment having made it impossible for me to objectively move from the spot.

You’re right, I’m at the point in life where I just want something I’m familiar with to be right-side-up for two days in a row. I just want to know where my core is. I just want to know where my soul goes when my eyes close.

Never and not understanding where things went wrong you nevertheless develop the sense that somewhere along the way your basket has hit a bump and things, having been jostled unexpectedly, are not what they should be.

It’s often hard to know just where the line is, or was; you know at the end only that you have crossed it.

This all needs to be redone. It’s not feeling like home anymore.

So I have all of these words, these diaries and blog entries and scribblings and… and words. And when I look back at them, sometimes it’s the most beautiful thing, like visiting insights I haven’t had in years that changed everything, or seeing old friends again that I haven’t thought of since…

…and yet at other times, it’s terrifying. All of this time — gone. Gone and never coming back. I will never be 12 again. I will never be 16 again. I will never be 18 again. I will never be 20 again. I will never be 23 again. I will never be 25 again. I will never be 29 again.

The words I have written are the shadow of my own death, getting bigger and longer with every day that passes.

I miss people. A lot of people. A lot. I miss my sisters. I miss you, CHA. I miss you, Li Bai girl. I miss you, my grandfather. I miss you, professors. I miss you, schoolmates and classmates. I miss you, E. Fox-boy.

I even miss people who weren’t a big part of my life at the time. Sara, and Joe, and Sau, and Adam, and Jon, and Ryan, and that girl I kissed in the middle of theatre 101, much to everyone’s shock. You were all more influential than you thought.

We are all more influential than we think.

Really, I miss myself — the self I was when I was 12, or 16, or 18, or 20, or 23, or 25.

In the end, it’s all for naught.

Poppies and faded photos and a little wooden box.

I know nothing. I’m a fool.

A drunken fool.

So apparently the second stage of this is burning eyes because my eyes are burning. Also, mein Bauch tut mir weh. I am dissatisfied and want my money back.

Rivets! Rivets!

uh-oh

Didn’t go to work today. Feverish. Ill. I feel incredibly queasy and achy and my knees are shaking and my head is a million degrees hot.

And yet here I am connecting up to sync on my night project. I won’t stay, I’ll only be here for a few minutes.

I feel like a maniac right now anyway, strange and uncomfortable and tense. I just tried to have a positive experience and instead of course ruined it for everyone involved.

I am not cut out for this. Everything in this part of the world is open and unprivate and chatty and shared. I’m not like that. I’m an urban eccentric, really. One of those guys that never in ten years comes out of his studio apartment on the 14th floor stacked from floor to ceiling with books, or with old laptop computers, or with forty thousand brand new copies of the perfect can opener so that I never run out for the rest of my life — forty thousand brand new can openers that make me happy. I once had four Newtons and two copies of just about every one of my favorite books. I still have duplicates or triplicates of most of my favorite clothing items. I have two abandoned Fiat X1/9 cars taking up what little extra space my parents have in their life.

I must have my familiar relative schematizers and everyday processes around me, immutable. I am wary of having to face the unfamiliar or the unexpected or the overwhelming or any number of other things, and not unjustifiably so. It’s not fear, but experience. People tell me: if you were really crazy like thay say, you’d do crazy things. The skill and the trick is in never going anywhere or doing or seeing anything that makes you want to do crazy things. No one who has ever done so before touches a hot stove again without the absolute intent to do something crazy; by the same token, I make sure not to be without my favorite can opener. Ever.

They told me once that the social contract was a thing, like an egg or a caterpillar or a bottle top or a Frenchman and I took it to heart and saw through it a little bit too much, and now I myself, like you, am nothing more than raw material and a moment in history that is all to quickly forgotten and altogether not terribly salient. I would say this in latin if I could: the infinite reduces all finites to singularities. And if this were a metaphor that I planned to continue, I’d say that singularities are immesely massive without being at all present. They’re the illusion that masters the orbits and realities only of those things that are in immediate contact with them; beyond their event horizons there is little evidence of their ever having been present in the first place.

Maybe I’m at the more functional end of urban eccentric. Maybe I can talk to people. The neighbors say I’m odd but nice, and nobody bothers me, nobody steps in on me and gets into my space, interferes with my pile of can openers, or my project to bookmark with one of my own hairs every instance of the word critical that appears in the complete works of the Oxford press since its founding, in case I ever need to know where they all are — for example, to prove a point to a well-read gone-postal mailman who has decided to dispense with me unless I prove to him that I can demonstrate a level of trivial mastry that he simply can’t.

I am perpetually in a state of having damn near made a mess of something, maybe everything. I exhaust myself. “So don’t,” people say, and then they wander off and live. Just like that.

So I say the same thing. I promise, I’ve said it already. I’ll say it again.

“I won’t. From now on, I won’t.”

There. Done.

There is this temptation, that I have given into too many times before,

to

let

go

and

fall.

And then always afterward I regret it and spend the rest of my life in angst about the many and sundry pieces that can never be picked up.

Is there some inverse relationship between the ability to properly craft a grammatical sentence or to solve an intricate problem and the ability to function within the social order as cast by the fates and our gestalt of interaction?

Am I overwhelmed by absurdity? Underwhelmed by it? Simply whelmed, period?

I want to ask for some sort of help.

But I don’t know what I need and I would be afraid to receive it anyway, and would run a mile if it is offered. And now every reader is thinking that I am petulant and selfish and is wanting to tell me off for being so self absorbed. Well. Good for them.

I was tempted to do or say something drastic out of spite, just to prove us both right, simultaneously, and in so doing, to make us both into utter fools.

But I didn’t. I won’t. Or at least, I won’t anymore right now. A small victory, at least.

I think.

It’s the fever. It’s all the fever.

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

**saves no
lives**

You look around and you realize things and they make you nervous and happy and sad all in one. This morning I can taste liberation and the open road.

I’ve been looking dreamily at Anthropology department home pages.

It’s all lovely and misty and grey outside, all kinds of clouds rolling around and over the mountains. They shrink the world so that it ends just a few miles away, and then you have a lot less to worry about and a lot less to face. When all of existence is only one valley wide, it’s a lot more manageable.

Everyone in the office seems to hate it. I don’t. It looks almost alpine.

Almost.

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