| Transcript of a Dream |
[Oct. 22nd, 2009|10:56 am] |
This is the transcript of a microcassette recording I made on the morning of October 20. I was in a stupor trying to quickly record the contents of a dream I had just had.
It’s fading already. Something about… um… being enclosed with a group of people. We all sleep together in sleeping bags lined up in an order… uh… some sort of geometric arrangement. Uh, separated somehow almost as a divider. Vaguely, uh, nap-time-ish kindergarten or something dealing with gym from high school or middle school. There’s a project being built… uh, a gymnasium seems, seems very appropriate. Uh, the structure, the shape. I believe there may be benches on one side.
No one stays behind to help set up, uh, screens or something. They have white flags or something need to be attached to a device, something high. Nobody stays late and mounts everything together. I do and I don’t get any thanks for this. Um… The construction of these screens somehow works like clay in addition to working like cloth. So that it is like putting up flags but also like molding clay to make them into shape. In the end we are all gathered back in our groups… uh… yeah uh, our groups seemingly segregated, again, once again, to watch a movie. The subject is forgotten already. I sit cross-legged and as the movie is being shown, one group looks at something in horror and they gasp. The other group starts to laugh. They find this funny while the one group is in horror. This is definitely a sign of the segregation. Almost the difference in, the difference in some cases between what you could quote unquote call white culture and quote unquote black culture. We’re sitting there, uh… watching this but the volume is low. Somehow, for some—whatever reason, uh, the guy sitting next to me has a remote control. I am into whatever is being shown; it is fascinating to me. So I pick up the remote and I turn up the volume two bars, but it becomes increasingly loud, so I decrease the volume by one bar.
Travel is definitely involved with this… in some way. Believe I had to travel a distance or a great distance or a short distance to get to this place. Possibly multiple times, like commuting. I don’t remember if I had to walk a curvy road in the fall but that seems appropriate. Uh, possibly… sports fields to my left—my right, pardon me, my right—kind of like the Fox River Trail… in fall.
The finding slash collection and keeping of money is somehow an aspect of this. Somebody finds money and it is a point of contention between two characters.
The screens that are sails have to be attached to these long devices which apparently are like RVs or trailers in that there are people living in these devices. They live in these, these pods and one woman is upset that when I attach one of these flag-screen things that I will have to raise it up so high, but that she refused to give me a chair or multiple chairs to be able to get up high enough to attach it properly. Eventually she sees that the tray that she has emptied of water is not going to help in any way for me to get this done and she says, “Oh, that is a problem.”
Definitely some reference to OJ Simpson. Possibly with the first two letters, or his first two names that are often abbreviated as “OJ.” Definitely once again dealing with money… and money and the legal system and how money can affect the legal system. Half the group does not seem to have a problem with this. I believe this would be more the quote unquote white half, while the other half definitely has the more… black… reaction and anger toward this dealing and the possessorship or lack thereof of money and how it affects everything.
The inability of people around me to understand simple situations that I have to undertake.
Tried writing this down in its entirety only to recognize that I was still half-asleep and that I had been writing in a dream. Most of it was lost in this way. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 12th, 2009|06:27 pm] |
Woodstock is 1354 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 840 days old
I am proving to be a royal letdown. The idea was to type every day. (To type or write every day, that is.) For the past three—or is it four?—days I haven’t done much. I have done some writing, but it hasn’t come close to totaling the two thousand words I’ve set for myself. And then yesterday I did next to nothing. I had planned on going to bed, waking up early and typing before I left for work, but this never materialized.
I tried to do some… work at work. (Real work that is, not the bullshit I do to get paid.) Riding alone in the truck checking the condition of the fence I was suddenly overcome with a wave of nostalgia. The radio was low and the windows were open. The breeze was off the lake and suddenly I was taken back to Edgewater. The light was just right so that for a few moments it seemed like late summer in the evenings when I was a child. I could even smell the lake and in my mind I could see the dried out seaweed and golden alewives scattered along the sand. So many people thought those fish (or at least their corpses) were a menace, but I never did. It always seemed perfectly natural, as though they should have washed ashore when they did and that they were supposed to be there.
The whole scene was before me, captured in time, brought forward in my mind and I wanted to go home. But home is in the past and one can never go back.
I took some notes in my phone for future reference. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 7th, 2009|08:04 pm] |
Woodstock is 1349 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 835 days old
Okay, so I’m trying this again. I know up front that the two thousand word thing is not going to happen because I’ve just spent about forty five minutes ranting on about how America is backward and we all have our heads up our asses and the proof is what we call high speed rail. One hundred twenty five miles per hour they proclaim. “This is fast,” they say. Of course, if they build such a system and call it “high speed” we’ll become the laughing stock of the world. People are so automobile focused in this country that they’ve abandoned all reasonable ideas on how to actually provide transportation for the general public. One hundo twenty five isn’t fast, it’s nominal.
This is nothing new. I bitch about this very thing all the time. And once I’ve finished bitching about how God-awful slow trains are here (what the hell is a fifty five mile per hour speed limit on a fully grade separated, arrow straight section of track anyway just because it happens to be in a populated area?! And what the hell is eighty five in more rural areas with few grade crossings?) I move onto the problem with the conception of roads. Congestion begets congestion and all of that. Twenty people use a road and it gets congested. They add more lanes so traffic can flow smoothly. Now that there is more capacity—that the road has been improved—more people use it and it becomes congested all over again. I go through my case studies and provide easily understandable demonstrations to the imaginary people I am presenting my case to.
I have no originality.
And, the whole time I’m going off, I know that I’m wasting time (and breath, since I’m only talking to myself) when I could be writing. So I end up with an hour to go before I go to bed to try to type my ass off and get as many words on the page before I attempt to pass out.
In this situation, passing out should prove to be a real feat. Due to the whole insurance changeover thing at CTA (retiree benefits, some of which apply to family members) I had to have my prescriptions screwed with. Now I have to get them in a ninety day supply instead of a thirty day supply and this will require an appointment with my primary care physician. Well he’s out of town on vacation or some such—go figure—so the nearest appointment I can get on a Monday (there’s absolutely no way in hell I’d be able to get out to Lombard from Evanston in time after work and Sundays just aren’t going to happen on their end) is at the end of August. This basically left me with a one month supply of my medications to last from the beginning of July to the end of August. And I was foolish enough to believe that I would be able to get an “emergency” prescription filled to tide me over until my appointment. Well they scheduled my appointment, but they wouldn’t get me my prescriptions, so now I’ve completely run out of the stuff that keeps me marginally socially-sane (the withdrawal symptoms are not far off now) and I’m almost out of the stuff that allows me to get some sleep in. I’ve started to ration it. Skipping days and so forth, all to make it last a little bit longer. The downside is that tonight I’m not going to have any. Now we get to see if I sleep at all. Then I have work tomorrow.
Things are going to line up perfectly. No sleep tonight and tomorrow, while I’m at work, at work outdoors, at work outdoors busting my ass for not good reason, and it is going to hot as hell. They’ve been predicting ninety five degrees and with the humidity they’re saying it’ll feel like it’s going to be a hundred and five. The job does, however, allow the dress code to fit the situation: full work pants and work boots.
There might only be one upside to the whole situation. The brake lights were not working on the truck today so we had it inspected by fleet services. They now want to inspect the truck to find out what’s wrong with it (after they fixed it about a week ago). This may mean that the truck will be out of service for a while and that we have to take another vehicle while it is down. Another vehicle with air conditioning. 522 has an air conditioning system, but it is non functional and has been for who knows how long. The closest thing we’ve got to AC is 2-30 AC: two windows rolled down and thirty miles per hour.
I find that I can write more but I’m beginning to feel a slight tug of drowsiness and given the state of medication I’m not going to attempt to fight it. These are my last words of the night. Eight fifty is really not a bad word count for a rush-job. Perhaps two thousand is not so unreasonable after all. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 6th, 2009|06:22 pm] |
Woodstock is 1348 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 834 days old
I set myself the rather lofty goal of writing or typing two thousand words a day. The idea was that the two thousand could be anything: work on the website, writing a journal entry, typing up some of the stuff from The Black Book, writing a poem, etc. The idea was generated by the fact that my writing has seriously dropped off lately. And by “dropped off” I mean to say that my writing has dropped off to virtually nothing. This is a particularly frustrating situation given that my job has seriously taken a lot out of my will to write. I’ve reached the point where I no longer want to go to work and I no longer want to go to skating or training. Both are beginning to seem utterly pointless. This is a truly fantastic turn of events as these two things have pretty much become all I do.
I am supposed to be cleaning this house and doing minor repair work but after coming home from work the main things on my mind are eating an ice pop or two and pulling a Rip Van Winkle. Of course, on Wednesdays I have training for speed skating and on Thursdays I have practice for speed skating so I’m getting ready for those things in one form or another once I get home. On Fridays I start packing my things up so that I can make an easy getaway once I clock out on Saturday. (A typical Saturday after work is making that speedy getaway.) This leaves Mondays and Tuesdays. (Sundays—with the exception of training in Northbrook—are spent entirely in Hillside.) Given that there is training on Sunday, naturally there is training on Monday so that I don’t have any real days of rest seeing as how those are my two days off from work. And following in this trend when I get back from training on Monday all I really have energy for is passing out.
So now we come back to Tuesday. Tuesday is the only day I have where I don’t have an agenda after work. So yes, I should be kicking ass on Tuesdays. Sit down, take out an ice pop, get down to business. That, of course, only happens to a limited degree. It just goes to prove that I suck.
That last sentence is a hoot. Talk about understatement. I set the goal of two thousand words because it was a really high goal and I need to really kick myself in the ass and get back down to important work. Not that stupid stuff I get paid for. Real work. My work. But two thousand words is a lot to do in one day when you have a day job and it is painfully obvious that it is not going to happen today. I’ll be able to get a fourth of that done, maybe a little more, but nothing major. This was the first day so I’ll give myself a break. It is as they said back at Columbia: “writing is kinetic.” I find that once I’ve gotten started and that I’ve set my mind to doing it, it begins to get easier and easier. It’s like a steam locomotive or a boulder beginning to roll down a hill. (The steam locomotive comparison works, but I like the boulder one better as it discusses something going downhill. That’s everything for me; everything is going downhill.) The thing starts off slowly, begins to pick up a little speed, picks up a little more, and before you know it, the thing is blazing a trail into infinity.
If only my writing in The Black Book were going this well… For the past few months I’ve been trying to write in detail the events of my last day of my undergraduate studies. One day. Just one day. And I still haven’t finished. This is one of the main reasons why my writing has come to a standstill lately. I can’t write anything else in the book until that particular entry is finished. Truly finished, not some half-assed copout or some complete and utter caving in and giving up on it.
For whatever reason, I have not been able to finish it in one fell swoop. It should have been done ages ago and yet it isn’t. So I’ve decided that I need to force myself to come around and come back and I’ve circumvented The Black Book by doing this. That’s the idea. It isn’t “against the rules,” it’s the point. I needed to kick my own ass and get the website into full parallel again anyway.
So here I am and this is where I stand. I’ll just have to take what I can give for today and live with that. Which, I guess, should really be true for any day. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 26th, 2009|04:01 pm] |
Been silent but not dead. (Though those are virtually the same.) Life continues in a general state of shittiness and going to work is getting in the way of me accomplishing work. The job is not so bad when Ralphie isn't around, but that only accounts for the last two days of the week. Would rather not think about the little jerk at this time so I shan't go into details.
I am left with the question: how does one find one's way out of Heavy Void? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|02:17 pm] |
Forcing myself to write again. On some level the desire is still there, but something has sapped virtually all of my will to do so. (I suspect the job.) I have been trying to recount my last day of class/Manifest 2009 and my graduation in The Black Book, but this is taking far longer than I had anticipated. I had expected it to take no more than a few days at the very maximum to write, but it is stretching on now for several weeks. At the time, I was filled with such sadness that my college years were over as this essentially meant that I had failed and that my life was over. The classroom situation allowed me to meet new people (by the fact that we were all scheduled/obligated to show up at the same place at the same time for fifteen weeks). Instead of having a one-off introduction and failing to make an impression on them or to get an impression of them, I had the time to get to know people and vice-versa. This was a comfort to me because it gave me the luxury of the idea that I could possibly “meet someone,” but when the last day of class came around and that the full realization that in five years this had not really happened once, I knew that I had failed in my one true hope. My time had run out. This had not happened and would not happen. My life was, for all practical purposes, over.
But now, at the beginning of what—my third week after graduation?—all of those things seem impossibly distant. College is all covered by haze that I find difficult to penetrate. I have been at work for four days this season and already that is all there is. My brain is shutting down; I feel as though this is all there is. I’m having difficulty remembering that there even is anything else! This has left me in a constant state of stress and dread. After only four days of work I have a strong desire to be killed. My body aches and I can barely remember any of my yoga. I hated high school and have sworn up and down that I would rather die than go back, and yet, this is exactly where I am. Most of the guys in the Parks Department are all stuck in high school, no matter how old they are. Fortunately, I only really have to see them in action when I go to clock out Tuesdays through Fridays, but that is more than enough.
Training for speed skating was yesterday. This was the first Sunday session of the season, the training with Sam Polous in Northbrook. Not a very difficult training session (as the “first” it is designed not to be) but still a little tiring. Afterward, of all things, I went to hang out with Gertrude at North Avenue Beach. Earlier she had insisted that I go in the water “at least once” and I had made my mind to do so, but when I made my way over from the North & Clybourn subway station (caught the wrong North Ave bus—the one that terminated at Clark instead of going all the way to the beach) I found that the weather was a bit chillier than I had anticipated (training in Northbrook had, for a while, increased my perception of the temperature) and I decided not to take a dip. It turns out Gertrude had decided to refrain as well. We spent the entire time at the beach on towels in the sand talking about a limited number of things. I talk too much about nothing.
Eventually Gertrude decided that she was hungry and wanted to leave to get some food. (The food provided at “the boat” is overpriced.) I had mentioned something about Chinatown or Chinese food and it apparently got stuck in her head. She wanted ribs but neither of us knew any rib places within a reasonable distance in the city. She repeatedly mentioned some arts and crafts place in the Humboldt Park-Wicker Park-Logan Square area that apparently served food of some kind (hot dogs and hamburgers or something) but neither of us cared enough to make a decision as to where to go. We walked to Sedgwick to load some more money onto my transit card and since we were already in the station, decided to go to Chinatown since the other place would have required taking a bus.
Again, I say I talk too much about nothing. On a lot of the trip out and back I talked about the “L” as it was. Much of this—as she pointed out—I had told her already. In Chinatown, in the restaurant, I must have sounded like a slightly arrogant professor. Come to think of it, I probably sounded like that the whole time. Discussing the history of Streeterville, Logan Square, the Great Chicago Fire (and its relationship to Logan Square), the nature of the sand on Lake Michigan’s beaches, the history of the “L,” and tidbits of the unification of China. The world would probably be better off if I cut my vocal cords.
We parted in the subway so that my mother would not have to wait so long to pick me up. I had “hung out” with someone, but only found it mildly entertaining at best. Work still hung over me like a dark shadow, possibly putting a damper on my enjoyment of the situation but possibly not. Perhaps I am just not capable. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 27th, 2009|08:24 pm] |
Woodstock is 1283 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 769 days old
The nameless chicks are 32 and 31 days old
I am becoming increasingly convinced that my original assumption is correct: now that I am done with my undergraduate studies, my life is over. Without the forced environment of a class, I cannot meet people. What is my life to consist of? I will wake, go to work, and return home to prepare for the next day’s work. I was not enough of a person previously to expand upon this and I have not grown. I eat, drink, and rest to work. What is the purpose of this existence? It is not my own. It does not benefit me. It does not benefit anyone else. It serves no purpose. My life has been reduced to that of an easily replaceable cog in a failing machine.
I ask myself, “Why do I continue to exist?” There is no reason. Should I exist to work to work? I find this to lack all sense of reason. I am an American by birth and it is the American way to live to work. Personally, I have never understood this ethic. It has always seemed to make more sense to me to work to live. As is my understanding, this is the ethic in Europe. However, in my case, this is impossible. As I exist without a life, I am working to not-live. This is the same as working to work. I do not want to work. As I do not want to work and my life is apparently nothing but work, I do not want to continue in this existence. I will not say “I do not want to live” as “living” is preferable, it is just that I am not living. I do not know how to and I do not even know how to find out how to. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 26th, 2009|09:02 am] |
Woodstock is 1282 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 768 days old
The nameless chicks are 31 and 30 days old
I have been neglecting this journal again.
I guess today is, for all practical purposes, my last day of “freedom.” Having graduated last week and receiving all of the honors (if not the actual document) of a Bachelors of Art, I am done with classes. Done with all sorts of “good stuff” that never happened to me anyway. Tomorrow I start my first day of work, real work. Work where I go and do not because I am doing for school, or as an intermediate of school. I go to work for work without the possibility of getting an early parole for the start of the semester. It weighs heavily upon me. I am returning to a job that I could not stand last year for the sole reason that it is one position I know I can acquire in the job market.
I must try to remember that I am being punished and that my whole situation is punishment. Atonement is almost certainly not possible so the closest I can do is to bear the punishment and continue.
For whatever reason Gary wanted me to start work on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, the day after Memorial Day—the first day of the pre-season. This Tuesday now becomes my last day of freedom before my eighty-or-so years of solitude. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 8th, 2009|09:35 pm] |
No, I'm not dead. (Probably should be, but that's an entirely different story.)
The Evanston North Shore Open was yesterday. Skated as the only competitor in Senior B and therefore "won." Ended up being combined with Senior B Ladies. Skated four distances: 777m, 500m, 1000m, and 15000m. The 1500 was surprisingly easy.
Today it rained and the streets flooded. Water began seeping in through the basement and we closed the valve. No water out to the sewers means no washing dishes, no showers, no brushing teeth, and no flushing the toilet.
Strangely lethargic. Would have gone in to much more detail about the race but I'm far too tired. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 13th, 2009|01:11 pm] |
Woodstock is 1149 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 635 days old
As written yesterday in The Black Book:
Frustration. I intended to spend today writing, but I have failed miserably. It was my plan to rewrite the bullet story to bring it to publishable quality and to then begin the process of submitting it. I've read through it twice and made some minor alterations to it, but it still lacks a strong visual quality that I feel it desperately needs and, as Sean Shifflett put it, it isn't a story as is. It is more like a connection of strange events that don't really culminate to anything. Yes, the character causes the death of a man at the end, but it happens without meaning.
I could look for all sorts of reasons why, but that would produce nothing of worth. I can see what needs to be done so clearly that it is astonishing, yet actually doing it and getting those things on the page manage to elude me. I do not understand it. I am certain the constant interruptions by my father—who is now retired and in the house all day—do not help in any way. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 27th, 2008|10:26 am] |
Woodstock is 1132 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 618 days old
Nothing good is good anymore.
After several days of snowing and several days of sub-zero and near-zero temperatures it finally warmed up. Yesterday it got up into the 40's and all the accumulated snow and ice finally began to melt. Today is even better, being in the 50's. Of course, all that melted snow and ice has to go somewhere. Or at least it has to go somewhere if it can go somewhere. Given the situation of almost two feet of snow all melting at once, it comes as no surprise that everything is now flooded. There is no separation between the street and the sidewalk anymore. It is all just water now. And making the situation even better is the fact that for some odd reason, it has now decided to rain.
Normally I'd be very pleased with all of this water. It doesn't often reach 50 degrees or rain in winter in Chicagoland. I remember it raining very briefly in I believe January about four years ago and thought it was the most beautiful thing. Now I am forced to believe otherwise. The water is coming into the basement, and to stop it we've had to shut the valve. The sump pump is working overtime, for whatever that's worth. With the valve closed no water can come up through the drainage system. This also means that we can't send any water down through the system either. No washing dishes, no brushing teeth, no washing clothes, no showering, and--this is the kicker--no flushing the toilets. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 24th, 2008|12:02 pm] |
Woodstock is 1129 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 615 days old
Christmas Eve.
Supposed to be a day of some importance in the culture, Santa notwithstanding, and yet here I am sitting on my ass waiting for my father's gift computer to arrive so that I can sign for it. It is snowing, and that is supposed to be of some importance as well (though I never understood the significance of frozen precipitation on one specific day of the year). It isn't even really snow anymore. Its better described as "falling slush." In addition to waiting around for this package I'm supposed to go "plow" the snow. This should be good. There's about a two inch layer of actual snow and beneath that is about seven inches of wet, saturated slush. If I can ever get the snow-blower started I expect the sight of a stream of slush pouring out of this thing to be quite comical.
Of course, I'm sitting around procrastinating because, no matter how comical this might be, I really don't want to do it.
Yes, I have been neglecting this journal just as I have been neglecting The Black Book. The Fall 2008 semester was insane in terms of work required, effort given and work actually produced. It proved to me that I am not strong enough to go for the BFA and should just stick to the BA. Overall, the semester was kind of a waste. Had I known I could have taken a Photo History class without Art History II, I would have finished up my degree and gotten the minor all in the summer and have been done with everything on time. As it is I've just discovered that I'm a terrible excuse for a person and can't deal with the workload most people have. I have no social life whatsoever, I have no job, I have only class and yet that work alone almost destroyed me. It makes me ponder the reason for my continued existence.
I get the feeling that I'm writing this solely for the sake of writing something. I think it is time for me to stop this and get to work clearing the sidewalks. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 5th, 2008|06:02 pm] |
Woodstock is 1081 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 566 days old
Unworthy of the writer's salvation. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 27th, 2008|12:37 pm] |
Woodstock is 1072 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 557 days old
"I took a 3hour
shit in here and
to show of it I only
have this stupid tag."
-graffiti on the inside of a bathroom stall |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 26th, 2008|07:59 pm] |
Woodstock is 1071 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 556 days old
Life gets stranger. Falling hoplessly behind in some/one class(s). (Had I been born/hatched as any other creature on this planet, I would have died long ago.) Found yet another bird. A ringneck dove. This makes seven. |
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| Finished |
[May. 15th, 2008|03:17 pm] |
Woodstock is 907 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 372 days old
As written in The Black Book:
I saw her again today. Once again, the encounter happened by pure chance. She was sitting by the stairs near the entrance in 623 S. Wabash with a female friend. This time, at least, I recognized her and stopped to talk.
It was a brief conversation, mostly full of standard bland pleasantries which mean (or say) absolutely nothing. Yet at the end I did do something worthwhile. I apologized for leaving her at State/Lake so abruptly on June Second. (I didn’t attempt to give her an explanation of my actions for as much of the fact that she was not alone as that it would be too complicated to even try.) She seemed not to recall the incident in any case.
It was only then that I came to truly realize the truth of the matter. In the three years (almost three years) that I have carried her in my heart she has become idealized, perfected. There was absolutely no way reality could ever compare with the fantasy. She would have always ever come up short against the perfect version I carry with me. But then again, seeing her face to face was the end of the dream. The reality had shattered it.
The reality could never compare with the dream and the dream could not exist when confronted with the reality. They annihilated each other and I need no longer to go on counting. |
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| My elusive Ginger Nymph |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|04:46 pm] |
Woodstock is 892 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 357 days old
From The Black Book:
I am still haunted by my past mistakes.
This past Monday while walking toward Studio East to prepare for more still lives when I saw her. She was walking north while I was walking south. It was her red hair that I noticed first and, ironically, this may have been my down fall. I thought at first that she was someone else, someone in my studio class who also has red hair and who bears a striking resemblance to my elusive ginger nymph. I took this person to be the other, the not quite identical duplicate. I had seen this other numerous times recently and it did seem as though she was coming from Studio East, so naturally I assumed that it was her.
I smiled at her in passing. She smiled in return. That same wonderful smile that I discovered on Lake Street—the one that has haunted me. Yet something seemed wrong with the exchange. The face was different—not quite the face I was expecting. The freckles should have given it away. I found myself stunned out of speech and action as my mind raced to put the pieces together and I realized in full who I had just seen. I turned and watched her walk away from me, still trying to decide if it really, really was her and—if so—what to do or say. My first thought was to run and catch up with her. To stop her and say something. Yet I found I couldn’t think of the right words, or any words to say to her and so I let her go.
Fool. Ass. Thrice cursed am I. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|07:16 pm] |
Woodstock is 880 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 345 days old
Off my medication again. Feeling utterly [nauseous] and tired.
I am afraid I am getting away from my writing. Done an absurdly little amount of writing in the past few months. It feels so very wrong.
From The Black Book
Feeling extremely depressed and pathetic. Probably my normal state which is usually suppressed by the medication. They are pills of lies. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 23rd, 2008|11:10 am] |
Woodstock is 794 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 259 days old
I am getting old. Not old in body, but old in mind. I just had a Dream about Road America. RA as it was.
Strangely enough, it opened with the Simpsons. A strange absolute blending of animation and the real thing. The kids (Bart and Lisa) were racing along the twisting, winding rural roads of Wisconsin. They drove in a line with many other drivers who were all going to the same destination and, because of the nature of the roads with their many curves, this caravan became a race (a friendly race) across the countryside.
Their destination, it turned out, was none other than that track of my youth: Road America. While there, it was usual for the family to stay in the small rural town which they passed through just before arriving at their destination though they did not stay together. They stayed with various local residents. (And now, it seems to me that I have been in this town before. This fictional dream town. I cannot rightly remember when, but I do remember the houses and the landscape. There was some sort of conflict going on, which I was or became a part of. A gunfight.) Once they arrived at the track, Bart was saddened to hear that he would not be staying with the family that he had believed. There was some illness or other that a family member had and Bart, by virtue or possibly by the lack thereof, was not immune because he didn’t get the malady earlier on in his childhood.
It was at this point that the dream shifted seamlessly. No longer were the Simpsons present in their perfect meld of the two dimensional and the three, but now I was there with my parents. The track was strangely changed. It was regressed into an imagined earlier form. My parents too had grown younger though I remained the same. It was a beautiful place full of many small woods and twisting, charming access roads. Nowhere present was the barren, sterile, overcommercialized Road America of today.
We walked up a small hill where there was a wooden structure, painted white, with tables. This small eatery my parents knew but I did not. It was before my time. As I walked with them I tried to get a grasp on the situation. Was this the past or was this an older version of a reality that was somehow laid on top of the current version? Had we traveled “backwards” or “sideways”? My parents were young, but I was not. They recalled all that had been (or would be, if this was indeed the past) and they knew and remembered me though the track that we now visited was an RA from before I was born.
These questions I asked my parents and they began to explain (they obviously had a clear understanding of what had happened and seemed to be enjoying it) but before they could we arrived at this concessions stand on the hill. It was swarming with mosquitoes. Or if not mosquitoes (for they didn’t look quite right) then some other small biting insect. Many fled when I began swatting at them to clear the area, though an equal number remained. I smashed six of them into the table when they began to bite again and more fled the scene.
A woman somewhere on the far end between youth and old age came forth to get our orders. Again, my parents knew her though I did not. There was a sealed loaf of cinnamon raisin bread beside me on the bench. I looked at it and the woman began discussing the situations and tales of people I knew not. One old woman had apparently eaten some bread a few weeks back and had to be taken to the hospital. Before it could be announced I knew the malady: diabetes. Apparently the bread changed her blood sugar levels enough to send her in a coma and she died.
With her tales ended she set to take our orders. I looked around for a menu chalked on a wall somewhere as I did not know what they served here but I did not find one. My parents ordered without needing to think. Before I could explain my situation to this woman, she announced “Fried wontons” and left to prepare our food. My father looked at me from across the table and said “See? We’ll take care of you.”
We got up and walked a little ways away from the table. I looked around at the track. It was marvelous in ways that camera crews, and big name sponsorship, and money could never make.
“They ruined this whole area,” I said, referring to the way it exists today.
My father looked down at me with satisfaction and a twinge of nostalgia. “If it wasn’t for” (some reason which I remember not) “I could hug you.” |
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[Jan. 22nd, 2008|07:52 am] |
Woodstock is 793 days old
Blondie and Dagwood are 258 days old
My life is utterly uneventful and I’m really quite sick of lamenting it. Perhaps it would be better if I was dead. No wingless angle can come and show me any differently.
On January 16th Sycamore laid her very first egg. It would see that Woodstock was not “man enough for her” but Blondie seems to have made quite the impression. I sat in the studio and actually watched her lay the egg, quite dispelling any thoughts I had about her not being female.
But I guess I can’t claim that my life is entirely without incident. A week or two ago Woodstock had some chemical drip on him from the florescent light fixture above his cage. Of course it only spilled where he likes to sit and so nailed him by freak occurrence. There was a bad odor of something burning about the cage and I caught him dry-heaving. We attempted to wash this substance off with shampoo and warm water as, whatever it was, it was clearly not good for his health. My father was afraid it was PCB’s (whatever those are.) A visit to a veterinary hospital in Niles which treats birds (a rarity in itself) fortunately turned up that there was nothing wrong with him. |
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