xxi

memo to self:

Expect nothing: expect to be turned away, over and over again. Until you learn that you are entitled to nothing from the world, you will never know gratitude and kindness, how they break your heart in waves of seismic intensity.

Promise me that you will want to feel everything.

Promise me that the Earth will persist in its commitment to tormented revolutions.

Promise me that you will know how to love. Promise me that you will always believe that the act of living does not work within our framework of logic; we do not need reasons, we only want and crave them.

if not then

I am probably too old to "discover" Bob Dylan and feel a "strong affinity" to his music, listening to his albums "like whisky" late at night and waking up feeling like a freight train carrying the carcass of a whale had derailed and crashed into me while I was fast sleep and occupied in my undreaming of everything I had believed to be eternal and true. 

There are no suitable idioms. 

I want to take these sentences and crochet them into an afghan throw to wrap around this shrunken reality, to let the moonlight fall and seal my eyelids.

notes towards a deterioration II

grasping the doorknob
she inquires where the
elevators in my bedroom are located

notes towards a deterioration

wearing an old plain t-shirt

looking for her handbag in my file cabinets

finding it in a bookcase, lying on top of Plato's Republic

progress reports

If this sense of disenfranchisement is going to the dominant tonality of all experience in life, then bring it on and don't be reticent about throwing more salt on the wound. I don't know how or why, but the past week has just been senselessly terrible enough to warrant this deadened solipsism therapeutic and feasible. There were some OK moments but these were studded sparsely and stingily in that dense, unleavened, and tedious cake of experience and forgetting. I hate February and I hate March and all the days in-between and all the days that lead up to them. I alarm myself with the cyanide bitterness of the scattered hours spent grieving in unsound delusions, wasting time like the bougainvilleas wasting their purple bracts in the moonlight, saying that these things take time and we will eventually learn to live in the moment. No one is truly articulate enough to be happy with the words he has, but until we find our ways to archive our feelings with clinical objectivity, the stars will continue to record the pathos embedded in our every movement and motion.