| Only fire again, compressed. |
[08 Sep 2007|02:13am] |
What Begins Bitterly Becomes Another Love Poem
by G.C. Waldrep
The earth has a taste for us, in its unknowing
appetite there yet resides a hunger, incompletion
that draws all life to its dark self. What, then,
shall we say of the flesh's own desire, distal
thumb-brush at evening? There is nothing to say,
the vowels cluster uncertain in the beautiful vase
the throat makes, fricatives corralled behind
ridge of gum and bone-splinter. Flesh and earth:
fire is an illusion, to which water is the antidote.
The day was a bright one, there seemed no need
to move about with mirrors, the usual circumspection
and indirect approach. The abundance of small life
argued some measure of clemency, likewise
the Jerseys lowing in the paddock breeze, tender
shoots of cress and sweetpea spiralling upward.
But fire is a cruel hoax: now you see it,
now you don't, the object of your affection
cast in carbon on the hard ground which will,
in time, receive. Roadside the irises bloomed
two or three feet max above soil's surface,
rough tongue resting lightly on each leaf, each
violet exclamation. In full sun your hand guided mine
to the wound. A small one. Water and blood,
like the nurse said: prestidigitation of the body.
We stood without shadows on asphalt at midday.
What we call patience is only fire again, compressed.
I remember: your face flushed, stray petal lodged
in the damp whorl of your dishevelled hair.
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|
|
[29 Aug 2007|01:57am] |
The day I decide to stay out--and up--until 2 in the morning is also the day before classes begin, because I'm wildly intelligent like that. I can't think of the last time I was up this late. And yet: a new semester. I'm sorry to see the official end of the summer, though! I have a four-item list send-off. (I always found four-item lists cheerful, which is possibly a sign I think too much about lists. Oh man, now that classes return I'll probably have to return to lists. Bah. I am not a fan.)
( summersummersummer )
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| All's fair. |
[15 Jun 2007|11:48pm] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Mike Doughty "Busting up a Starbucks" |
] |
JJ’s turning nine next month. Earlier today we were competing over who loved the other more, a fairly standard game for us, when he said, “But I love you more than electronics!” and slack-jawed, dumbfounded, I stood there, disbelieving my ears, and just—wow. Wow. (‘Electronics’ being my family’s term for television, computer, GameBoy, etc.) Though granted, he might be exaggerating. JJ: “I love you more than mom!” He proved this later in our wrestling match, another fairly standard game. “NICHE! NICHE!” he screamed fiercely as he kneed me in the stomach and fought to pin my shoulders to the carpet. “NICHE! NICHE!” I screamed back into his face, clamping my hands on his sides. In JJ-speak, “niche” means war. He spat out a series of syllables. “That means I will never—ow! ow!—surrender!”
“Do you surrender?”
“NO!”
“Do you surrender?”
“Ow! Ow! NO!”
“NICHE!”
“NICHE!”
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|
| I just wanted to be your housewife. |
[06 Jun 2007|01:11am] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Damien Rice "Volcano" |
] |
I’m so hungry every day when I get back from work that I immediately think of what to make for dinner. Tonight was veggie “mushroom lover” burgers, peas, and dumplings. Maybe tomorrow we can have pasta with sautéed spinach and peppers (just a thought). Alfredo sauce? Or maybe butter sauce with garlic. I might want to throw some mushrooms into the pan. I’ve discovered that maybe the mark of a kindred spirit is the love of vegetables. What cold-hearted person wouldn’t be excited about recently purchased snap peas in the freezer?
For the next few weeks, I have a house that’s somewhat unfurnished and I’m getting vaguely frustrated about some of my housemates’ more whimsical cleanliness habits. I like dishes washed right after they’re used, and floors mopped every other day. Mostly I want to spend my day in bed reading Alice Munro and dreaming about butternut squash, steamed asparagus, zucchini, artichoke hearts cooked in butter. Friday I made challah from scratch and it wasn’t as good as my mom’s. I keep coming down the narrow staircase next to our door, which leads into the kitchen, and bristling at a sinkful of dirty dishes. My hands smell like dishwater all the time.
This is a strange transition time, or maybe not as strange as it is transparently impermanent. I’m leaving for China in about a month. I was thinking about how to qualify how I feel about this—excited? nervous?—but I just feel matter-of-fact about it, having to take care of shots and visas, and worrying over what to cook for dinner every day.
Stir-fry and noodles? Veggie sausage and omelet? Cream of mushroom soup?
|
|
| April. |
[04 Apr 2007|01:47pm] |
You guys know April is NATIONAL POETRY MONTH. Also you know I'm not kidding about the urge to get in my car and get away, but instead there's this poem:
When My Car Broke Down
by John Brehm
I was somewhere in Utah or Wyoming,
somewhere in the high inhuman deserts,
in the thin blue flame of wavering air,
bluffs of red earth scorched and
stratified on the horizon. I had stopped
to admire the desolation, to smoke
a cigarette and consider that ten thousand
years ago this was all under water,
that strange fish would have swum
through the space my eyes now occupied;
before that ice, and before that
something else again, unimaginably alien.
The Buddhists say first thought best thought,
but my first thought when I saw the stream
billowing up from under my car was:
if I just keep driving, maybe it will go away.
After all, I was moving three thousand miles
not to “escape” my problems but to put
a nice distance between them and me.
A problem has to be fierce to travel that far.
My second thought was to stare at the engine
for a while. I leaned over and looked
down into it as into the bowels of a ship
or the cranium of some fantastic beast.
And recalled how my father tried to teach me
about cars. Mostly he had me hold
the light for hours and mostly I studied
the back of his head, turning over the words
he said and knowing even then I’d never
understand. The blood would drain
from my arm and I’d prop it up
with my one free hand to keep from
caving in or betraying my halfheartedness.
Even then I was hopelessly afflicted
with the disease of the Wandering Mind.
Even then I was dreaming myself
across magical landscapes, just like this,
and learning all he had to teach me
about standing rooted to one spot,
wishing I were somewhere else.
|
|
| (And you don't know it, no you don't know it) |
[24 Mar 2007|03:21pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 chipper |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
The Pipettes "Your Kisses are Wasted On Me" |
] |
Me: I’m secretly an elementary school boy.
Thomas: …secretly?
It’s been gray and flat outside, and sort-of drizzling. Yesterday, a couple Oxfamers & I put up some boxes for our book drive in various departments around the campus, and it started full-out raining. I had to run back to my room before work, and I scrunched my eyes & put my face up to catch the raindrops on my skin*; I went to work dripping everywhere, all over my workstation and other people’s printouts.
It smells like spring. I plan on being both foolish & irritatingly cheerful for a good while.
Michelle: Why is it that during spring you have these urges to climb on things?
Me: (balancing on the concrete blockade that runs the length of the parking lot) It’s spring! What else am I supposed to do with myself?
Michelle: Fair enough.
*I probably would have stuck out my tongue, had I not known that Lancaster is a dirty dirty place.
|
|
| A huge mistake. |
[07 Mar 2007|08:52am] |
|
Don't get me wrong. I'm loving that I can get a decent amount of sleep this semester. However, the fact I can no longer really function on more than two consecutive days with four hours of sleep is turning out to be inconvenient.
|
|
| Obscenity. Also, cake. |
[04 Mar 2007|02:38pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 mmcake |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Mirah "You've Gone Away Enough" |
] |
KELLY walks through the door. She’s formally dressed in a long cream dress that falls elegantly to her feet, the straps bunched over her shoulder just before the joint of her arm. Her hair, which had been straightened so the line of hair rests at her collarbone, is held back at the ear by two butterfly clips, and it is beginning to curl at the forehead from sweat. SARA and MICHELLE are sitting on their respective beds, tossing a 99 cent purple shiny ball between them.
MICHELLE: Kelly! Hey!
SARA: How was the Crystal Ball?
KELLY: It was great! We crashed the Black and Gold party afterward but like two fights broke out—while we were there!—and we were re-e-eally overdressed, so we had to leave. I had fun though. KELLY smiles genuinely. With an ease afforded by a new robotic leg, she walks toward the center of the room and looks at SARA (stage right) How was your girls’ night?
SARA: (smirks) Shit went down.
MICHELLE laughs (at Sara.)
***
It’s so cold that as the sun began to rise the grass cracked, it crunched under my sneakers. There are still tall drifts of snow all around campus, and on the Green you can see long stripes of ice from the compression of tires, the long thin tracks of school golf carts (as it were.) There’s something about seeing the sunrise, I thought, that feels so … cliché. (The cold, empty campus at 6 a.m.)
***
Drama: naked boys with no shoes (naked boys with shoes?); people who aren't lesbians (other people who are lesbians?); mysterious text messages that read "come up to my room I have to tell you something." Two of these things are related.
Layne discovered all my secrets. I’m thinking of her as it was yesterday with icing clumped through her hair, blue frosting smeared into the side of her face, up the line of her jaw. Imagine the scene: three layers of red velvet cake, white cream frosting smeared and stroked and slipping everywhere. The cake is so huge Michelle & I can’t finish our piece. The cake is so huge it begins to topple over from its own weight. Then there’s also the sheet cake with blue icing and rosettes, and the brownies that are still hot to touch, and the vanilla ice cream (to go with the brownies, probably.) I’m so stuffed that I can only look at all the toothsome trays loading the table, a string of tea candles snaking around the red velvet cake.
|
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| Jelly belly. |
[02 Mar 2007|12:22am] |
| [ |
music |
| |
New Buffalo "Cheer Me Up Thank You" |
] |
I’ve been sort of ranting / frothing at the mouth about “Death of a Salesman” all day. It horrifies me perhaps more than anything I’ve read. Well, at least more than anything I’ve read in the past several weeks. Of all the characters in Death of a Salesman, all of whom I hate, I hate Biff most because you get the feeling (or at least, several of the people I talked to today get said feeling) Arthur Miller is all “See look this guy know what’s going on!” but all Biff has going on for him is the kind of nauseated truths that he vomits up almost helplessly. It doesn’t mean change or progress or some kind of model for behavior. What good is Biff for anyone? You can see what I’m getting at here. If it hasn’t become obvious by now that I’m incredibly self-involved you should be paying more attention, seriously.
My parents sent me a bag of jellybeans for Valentine’s Day a couple of weeks ago, which I’m nearing the end of. Truth be told, I feel kind of gross from too much jelly bean consumption and my knee’s creaking again from slipping on black ice several thousand times. It’s becoming clear that I’m not going to do my memo for tomorrow. Sometimes I feel hedged in, the whole good student thing. “I just think school could be schoolier,” I told Shachar weeks ago. Great, let’s all have a discussion about semiotic codes and redefining frameworks (my new pet) and maybe then I’ll feel more inclined to do your silly 2 page responses. I honestly can’t tell if this paragraph is non-linear or what, but you can tell me.
I was thinking today that I want to stop doing productive things and do something unnecessary but interesting, like reading science fiction or going for a 2 hour walk -- I just ate another jelly bean (confession!) Ooh, it’s peanut butter. I enjoy confessionals rather too much (I confess?)(“God Sara, have you been dipping into the Sylvia Plath again?”) Maybe I secretly want to be Catholic. Really though, I just want to go swimming in an obviously synthetic-blue swimming pool. And eat an orange. By which I do not (self, pay attention) mean an orange flavored jelly bean.
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| I have dreams. |
[24 Feb 2007|11:28am] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Kevin Max "I Need You, The End" |
] |
(Updated as I remember more.)
I had a dream there were two planes going on an Oxfam trip and one plane crashed and everyone died. The ghosts of the beautiful happy dead got up from their seats and keep coming toward us. If they touched you they would kill you so you had to repel them by spinning three times, but you waited just to see them. Slowly the injuries presented themselves to the ghosts, like they were being injured again in slow motion. Rob’s shoulder had ripped through and hung limply out of his back. Fei’s skin had burnt off entirely, she screamed when each new strip peeled off. Brian’s limbs had crumpled into each other. Adrian had died, and Jesse, and Kelly, and Stina, and Marisa, Steve Carrell, my dad, Fei’s dad, the blonde girl in my fiction class, a student worker I know from the Writers’ House. Those of us who lived set up camp and went to sleep, knowing that the devil would send us the illusions of everything we wanted as tricks. The thing about the devil, someone said, was that he thought everything in the world just as empty. The dead appeared to us in flashes, asking if we wanted to go to the movies or what we’d done with the map. We ate food we knew to be only the illusion of food, but we were so hungry. My dad called. I knew that my dad had died, and the voice made some mistakes about the way he was talking, but I just wanted to hear my dad’s voice. After a minute, it turned into low, nasty laughter and I couldn’t turn off the phone.
Then a group of us were walking across the streets of Boston so we could go home when I realized we were all dead too, and horribly malformed. When we got to the house, everyone was embraced in a circle of dancing and music. Some of the dead were playing poker in the corner. Anne, who was the dealer, had a cigar pushed into one eye socket. I hung back. Finally Layne looked back and saw me. “Oh, you’re here?” she said, wrinkling her face. “That’s kind of sad.” Both of her arms were cut off, one at the shoulder, one just below the elbow. The joint swiveled uselessly.
I had a dream I was at a support group for people who couldn’t say I love you. I was running from a shadow, and a man with a blurred face and butcher knife barreled through saloon doors (like in an old Western) and ran toward me. With a quick motion, he stabbed me through the neck. I tried to scream but the knife was hilt-deep in my neck, my vocal chords severed and spilling out of my neck like tentacles. They fell all the way to the wooden floor. "Oh, the Sar," the man said pleasantly, and I realized he was Jake. When I stepped backward, the floorboards gave beneath me and then I was falling.
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| Whose side you on? (My side!) |
[17 Feb 2007|02:09am] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 tired |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Metric "On a Slow Night" |
] |
Maybe it’s a lie that I’m the shy, awkward, dreamy girl -- though I can’t say I’m convinced, not viscerally, even though evidence tends to point in the other direction. For instance, I’m running a protest poetry open mike, which is on Thursday, which is funny because I’ve been working on this event since oh December. Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not a leader and I’m not organized and I’m not good at being in charge of things. It’s just that there’s no one else who’s doing it so I guess that makes it my job. Is it awful that I’m thinking of Kitty Genovese? Thank God for small schools.
I don’t know how I ended up here. Last I checked I was a moderate who kinda thought activism was, ya know, annoying and activists were self-righteous assholes. Now (to sort-of quote Alix Olson) I’m the self-righteous asshole. I don’t even know.
This evening, Fei and I were looking at the photographs from the kids in the red-light district of Calcutta and talking about the power of art, and I’ve been realizing that what I want to do with my life is work at the place where art and activism intersect. Maybe that’s the most pretentious thing ever, but that’s the only way I can think of to understand the world, be present in it. I used to think there was a limit to how much you could care, but recently it seems like the amount that I care about things just expands and expands. I worry about that because how could you not worry? Sometimes I listen to my own thoughts and I think, I’m so young, I’m just so young.
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| Off to save the world again? (Shut up.) |
[13 Feb 2007|12:51am] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 sick |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Belle & Sebastian "Funny Little Frog" |
] |
Olivia, one of the Oxfam freshmen in my car driving to the annual Hunger & Homelessness Conference, sort of reminds me of myself in certain ways. Maybe an hour into the drive there (8 hours to Boston and 8 hours back from Boston) useless superpowers came up (they do have a tendency to come up) and Olivia thought it was a great game. That is how you know she's good people.
"What about," said Olivia, "the ability to turn into a seven foot leek?"
"You could make a lot of soup," proposed M. "And then you could feed the world..."
All of us, hopeless idealists, sighed at the thought.
***
We call Oxfam the Oxfamily, and we do take that with a certain amount of seriousness, which is silly and nice. I suppose it's a little different for me being at the core of Oxfam, where all the other core people are my friends, and sometimes I wonder if what we consider a baby community comes across as a cult or a clique or just annoying. Worrisome. That's worrisome.
***
Hedgehogs are awesome.
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| Someone's being awkward! And it isn't me! |
[07 Feb 2007|01:31pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 busy |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
The Hush Sound "You Are the Moon" |
] |
"AAAAAAAARGH!" someone yelled, pulling down my backpack on the way to class. I turned around and the someone turned out to be: my friend Rob! "Hey, are you wearing make-up?" he asked.
"A little," I said.
"Yeah, your face looks nice today," he said nicely.
I laughed at that kind of earnest cluelessness. "Wow, that was the worst compliment you've ever given me."
"Really?" said Rob.
"Yeah, you need to work on that," I said.
He thought for a long moment. "What about, you're like a ray of sunshine in my life?"
"No."
Rob and I fought our way up the stairs of Stager Hall. "But it's like, it's becuase you're, uh, bright and ch--"
"No."
|
|
| (in the blueblack cold) |
[06 Feb 2007|12:19pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 masculinized |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
The Unicorns "Child Star" |
] |
Instead of paying attention in my 9 a.m. Manly Class* I anagrammed “Sara Megan” on the top of my notebook (my favorite was ‘manger’). Class ended and we went outside, hurling ourselves against the wind. I can’t really complain about the frigid temperature because it’s at least in the positive numbers, but—you know, I’m going to complain anyway. Six degrees? Still on the chilly side.
Jesse tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey, did you hear it’s cold out?” I asked.
“Is it?” he huffed.
Today I’m wearing three layers. Plus a jacket. And a scarf. “I mean, I heard a rumor of that sort.” Also, leather gloves.
“Maybe we should go out and check for ourselves," Jesse suggested.
I considered that thought. “I think I’m too lazy for that.”
Jesse may or may not have smiled from inside the zipped-up top of his jacket. “You’re right. We should probably just stay inside today.”
“Yeah, good idea.”
*I am real manly now.
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| You know. It's awful but I manage. |
[02 Feb 2007|10:27am] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 lazy |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Spoon "Anything You Want" |
] |
There are a handful of people I actively dislike.
“So,” he said, “what’s your major?” He looked vaguely scenester, was wearing a cast-like bit of fabric on his hand held together with safety pins. It looked, um, totally awesome.
“American-Studies-and-Creative-Writing,” I said in one go.
I think he actually winced. “Oh, writing, ugh." He tilted his head and laughed a little. "I’ll try not to hold it against you.”
Wrong. Response.
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|
| (Thinking cannot trade in metaphors directly.) |
[08 Jan 2007|01:31am] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
calm |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
Amy Millan "Wayward and Parliament" |
] |
[Linguist George] Lakoff's theory begins with his analysis of metaphor in everyday language, first presented in 1980 in a brilliant little book written with Mark Johnson called Metaphors We Live By. When we say "I shot down his argument," or "He couldn't defend his position," or "She attacked my theory," we are alluding to an unstated metaphor that argument is war. Similarly, to say "Our marriage is at a crossroads," or "We've come a long way together," or "He decided to bail out of the relationship" is to assume metaphorically that love is a journey. These metaphors are never stated in so many words, but they saturate our language and spin off variations that people easily understand (such as "We need to step on the brakes"). In each case, people must grasp a deep equivalence between the abstract idea and the concrete experience. Lakoff insists, not unreasonably, that this is an important clue to our cognitive makeup.
But this isn't the half of it. Conceptual metaphor, according to Lakoff, shows that all thought is based on unconscious physical metaphors, with beliefs determined by the metaphors in which ideas are framed. Cognitive science has also shown that thinking depends on emotion, and that a person's rationality is bounded by limitations of attention and memory. Together these discoveries undermine, in Lakoff's view, the Western ideal of conscious, universal, and dispassionate reason based on logic, facts, and a fit to reality. Philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge and ethics, it is a succession of metaphors: Descartes's philosophy is based on the metaphor "knowing is seeing," Locke's on "the mind is a container," Kant's on "morality is a strict father." And political ideologies, too, cannot be understood in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor "society is a family." The political right likens society to a family ruled by authoritarian parenting, whereas the political left prefers a family cared for with nurturant parenting.
Political debates, according to Lakoff, are contests between metaphors…
-“Block That Metaphor!” Steven Pinker (The New Republic)
See? It’s not just me that’s obsessed with metaphors. It’s everyone. It’s the endless discourse our entire culture participates in (you’re just annoyed at—well, who knows what you’re annoyed at.)
Speaking of being annoying, let me continue being so (!): I think I should try to finish The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I got about half-way through in June sometime. It’s clear at this point that I’m never going to get through my current book, a fragmentary intellectual jaunt by Important French Thinker Roland Barthes called The Lover’s Discourse -- I’m afraid that when I finish it (appr. 2300477 CE), after doing my geeky internet research on all the constant off-handed references (Gide? Racine? Mme de Something or Other?) which are invariably other Important French Thinkers I’ll end up tragically Francophilic and I have enough interests, okay? My brain is only so big.
(“Tu es très bête,” my sister mutters darkly to JJ. [Excoos my lak of spelin nowlidge] She enjoys speaking to us all in French; it’s frankly silly because none of us speak any French except what we’ve picked up from her self-defensively.)
One thing I don’t understand? Okay, this weather. It’s beautiful & I really enjoy being outside & being beaten by JJ at basketball—he kept taking away my points because I was arguing with him about what my points were, & I chased him down, ended up tackling him on the grass. “WELL NOW YOU HAVE NO POINTS,” he roared as I tickled his sides, merciless—but it’s also deeply disturbing. Funny how something could be so pleasant & so creepy at the same time.
“Like a serial killer,” said my mom, nodding. “The ones that the next door neighbors say are such nice people but then they slice victims open in the basement.”
See? Even my mother’s up with metaphorical language.
By the way, note I don't entirely agree with Lackoff; I think his ideas rather lack purchase. It's too easy to say that the ubiquity of metaphor means that we only understand in terms of metaphor: blatantly wrong. Metaphors are an important cognitive tool, not the key to cognitive understanding. Does that then make me really obnxious, to use that quote and then immediately say "SEE HAHA I'M SO RIGHT"? Yes. Yes it does.
|
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| la la la (dum dah dum) oooooh wah |
[27 Dec 2006|11:13pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 satisfied |
] |
| [ |
music |
| |
The Blow "Let's Play Boys Chase Girls" |
] |
I had a spontaneously productive day, which is mostly surprising because I—not kidding—did not get out of bed until almost two o’clock. In the past hour I even bustled around and cleaned my room, which is fun (ish) to do at home because I really do have a lot of books and every time I clean up I rediscover it. This is how I trick myself into something approaching neatness. It isn’t that oh, I can’t find my checkbook, but something more like, what did I do with that Umberto Eco book anyway? But hey, the floor’s clean now. (Feel free to shake your head at me right now.)
Okay, I know this is just a thought hanging out of nowhere, and not a very interesting thought for all this disclaimer work, but the thing about blogs is that they let you publicly navel-gaze and it isn’t embarrassing! Supposedly!
Anyway, I suppose the point is that cleanliness—there’s a metaphor, or—oh forget it. New Years Resolution: be less obsessive. (Stina, you can stop laughing at, er, any time now.)
Another good thing about books (other than the part where they’re books) is that it keeps my room from looking too much like the icy lair of a frostbitten someone. There is that danger; the walls are light blue, the carpet is white, the blanket is both light blue and white, and it’s right above the garage so in the winter all the cold air seeps up through the cracks in the floorboards. But then the books. I can’t picture the Snow Queen picking up Pablo Neruda. Or something.
|
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| The narrative. |
[07 Dec 2006|11:13am] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
AWESOME. |
] |
I don't know WHAT you all are talking about. An hour and a half of sleep is PERFECTLY ENOUGH! I feel FANTASTIC! I should DEFINITELY stay awake until 5:30 more often!
|
|
| Internets! (are for procrastination) |
[04 Dec 2006|11:05pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
teehee! |
] |
Haha, oh man. If Bash.org didn’t exist, maybe I’d have more work done than I do now. As it is, I’d just like to say that if someone told me,
Roses are red
Violets are blue
All of my base
Are belong to you.
I’d be obliged to fall in love with him immediately.
-fin-
|
|
| Late nights (oddness ensues.) |
[04 Dec 2006|02:24am] |
Sometimes I get overexcited about things, which sounds like something that could be fun but isn’t wholeheartedly so. Mostly it’s ideas that I get overexcited by, or how much there is to this world, and that’s when I end up getting no sleep and falling into things. Right now I’m trying to slow down my head and revel in the feeling of my sheets, which I washed a few hours ago so they’re warm and the soapy smell of laundry is all about me. I don’t feel quite on fire, just kind of warm, though I was looking at all the fire words on the OED because I for some reason became enraptured with the word “fire-plug.” There are lots of fire words, for that matter: fire-fit, fire-raft, fire-line, fire-spy, fire-trench, fire-wreath just being some examples.
It occurs to me that I’ve had LJ for over four years, which is a substantial portion of my life. (I feel a little meta right now. I wrote a paper [mostly that’s what I’m doing with myself, or at least should be] that footnoted itself in a metafictional way and I was amused.) My writing style used to be so easy, and it still is when I feel that way, but actually my thoughts are so much more agonized than they used to be. I’m thinking less ‘agonized’ than the calculated deforming of metals. Sorry, I’ll try not to spin too far out in fancy. What I mean is, sometimes I wonder how myself from four years ago would take to me. That’s such a slippery idea. I think I’d confuse myself, and much as I’m okay with me, I’m not sure she would be.
It occurs to me also that part of the reason I like JESSICA DAVIS has to do with the fact that she’s seen me sleep, which is a strangely intimate thing. I’m appreciating it in my dark room, which is horribly messy, and there’s no light but my computer, and Michelle’s sleeping a few feet away and things are breaking out of my skin under my fingernails oh.
See, this is why I should stop writing things after say 1 in the morning. It’s always so ridiculous.
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