And with your patience wearing thin, those Royals in the blue box cook you gently like they have so many times before on windy evenings when the lights shimmer and gloat, when the wind blows and your hair is all over the damn place so that you want to shave your head.

How many times have you been here? How many times, sitting in this seat, singing this very song, watching the wipers on the glass and the refuse on the pavement as you careen along, running from your memory, running from your pause. You are the forgotten boy, forgotten by your todays, forgotten by your tomorrows, forgotten by yourself.

All that you remember — all that you know is the taste of those Royals in your mouth and the chill of Minerva’s white touch on your cheek, pushing you along to God knows where. To Gods know where. You of the road, you of the battlements, you of the whining, whimpering many, you of the first floor club.

Alone in your box, you’re biding your time, counting the days until only your fallen mother and the friends you left behind once so long ago, on the playground, in the neighborhood, in the little red building of candy and songs know what. Twenty years after the wandering, twenty years after the bicycles and the graffiti and the laughter you are still here in the wind, you are still in love with your solutide, in lust with your solitude, grimacing and longing with the sound walls and the barriers and nobody

nobody

will save you.

You don’t want to be saved anyway. Those Royals are calling you. They’re calling you. And everybody else will be left behind to fade into the deconstructed cocaine black.

And for the first time
I’m telling you how much I need and bleed for
Your every move and waking sound
In my time
I’ll wrap my wire around your heart and your mind

—

I don’t care anymore. I don’t care. Take me! Take me, my comrades!

Joe Pine: I guess your long hair makes you a girl.
Frank Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

—

Oldie-but-goodie
S(t)imulacrum(b)
Sartre
Homophobia

—

“Borderline individuals are so completely in each mood, they have great difficulty conceptualizing, remembering what it’s like to be in another mood.”

“People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.”

“Chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom. Someone with BPD said, ‘I remember describing the feeling of having a deep hole in my stomach. An emptiness that I didn’t know how to fill. My therapist told me that was from almost a ‘lack of a life.'”

“People with BPD are often bright, witty, funny… They may have problems with object constancy. When a person leaves (even temporarily), they may have a problem recreating or remembering feelings of love that were present between themselves and the other… Their lives may be a chaotic landscape of job losses, interrupted educational pursuits, broken engagements, hospitalizations…”

—

Fuck life, fuck liberty, and fuck the pursuit of happiness. Somebody lock me up, remove any blankets or artificies of clothing, and take away all of my hope.

Nothing in reality is so painful or destructive as hope.

Something good has happened. This has improved my day considerably. I found out about it via email, wonder of the modern age, food source for a hungry world. I have brandycoffee in front of me and I try a little to write a little about a little excitement.

Cheers to you all.

I’ve got too much work to do and I don’t want to do any of it. I just hope my driver’s license renewal went through and that I get it before 20 March because otherwise I’m gonna fscking go spare.

I was wondering: do other people have all of the same feelings as me, but they just somehow manage to bottle it all up really well so that they seem bored and tranquil all the time? I mean, do they get annoyed with my intensity because it threatens their ability to keep a lid on their own? Or do they just not have the same feelings at the same levels as I do, meaning that they get annoyed because they really think I’m making it all up or that I’m off my nut?

—

All in all, I think I’m in a pretty good mood this morning, although I have a lot of work to do before early afternoon. Right now I’m sitting in the basement doing laundry, because I am completely out of things to wear.

This morning I am thinking fondly about my significant other. I talked to her on the phone last night just after reading Hunger, so I was in that misty, hazy mood that you get into when you’ve just read an intense novel and are open to anything and everything and appreciative of all that you know and love. It’s funny how when you’ve been in a relationship for a while, the sound of the other person’s voice can make your night. At the same time, I’m getting very accustomed once again to working, thinking, walking and talking as a solo act. Graduate school will do that to a couple, I guess.

I have to call the Utah DMV today to see if my renewal will be accepted. I already called the rental agency, and they won’t rent without a current driver’s license.

—

Hunger: A fine little book. A moving little book. And yet somehow, it just doesn’t get to me on the same level as some of the others from the existentialist and proto-existentialist traditions. The trouble is that Hamsun’s books are full of consciously innocent people unable to avoid doing damage to others whom they also know to be innocent people; circumstance and absurdity are the evils that toy with peoples’ lives.

That doesn’t ring entirely true to me. Absurdity on this scale implies some subjective incongruity in the analysis of context. But if we are all innocent, and we all know this, then there is no subjective incongruity. I think rather than “we are all innocent” ala Hamsun, the more true statement is Dostoevsky’s sneering, if unwritten, mantra: we are all guilty, and circumstance and absurdity are really phenomenological manifestations of our own broken natures… Absurdity is not a force a priori, but rather is experienced as the conflicts between different elements of our natures (in the individual) and different natures (in the group). Absurdity is the reflection of our individual and collective guilt, in the mirror of our claims of, and aspirations to, individual and collective innocence.

Where Hamsun somehow fails:

“I talked at length about these burns which my soul had suffered. But the longer I talked, the more anxious she became; finally she said ‘Oh, my God!’ in despair a couple of times, wringing her hands. I could see quite well that I was torturing her, and I didn’t want to torture her but did so anyway. At last I thought I had managed to tell her the broad essentials of what I had to say. I was moved by her despairing look and cried:
    ‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving! Can’t you see I have my hand on the latch already? Goodbye! Goodbye, do you hear? You could at least answer when I say goodbye twice, all ready to leave. I don’t even ask to see you again, because it would cause you pain. But tell me, Why didn’t you leave me alone? What have I ever done to you? I didn’t get in your way, did I? Why do you suddenly turn away from me, as if you don’t know me any longer? You have plucked me thoroughly clean, made me more wretched than I’ve ever been. But, good God, I’m not insane. You know very well if you stop and think that there’s nothing wrong with me now. So come here and give me your hand! Or let me come to you. Will you? I won’t do you any harm, I’ll just kneel before you a moment, kneel on the floor right there, in front of you, for just a moment; may I? No, no, then I won’t do it, I can see you’re scared, I won’t, I won’t do it, do you hear? Good God, why are you getting so frightened?”

Dostoevsky succeeds beyond all expectations:

‘Water, give me some water, over there!’ I muttered in a faint voice, realizing full well, however, that I could’ve done both without the water and without the faint voice. But I was putting on an act, as it’s called, in order to maintain decorum, although my nervous attack was genuine.
    She gave me some water while looking at me like a lost soul. At that very moment Apollon brought in the tea. It suddenly seemed that this ordinary and prosaic tea was horribly inappropriate and trivial after everything that had happened, and I blushed. Liza stared at Apollon with considerable alarm. He left without looking at us.
    ‘Liza, do you despise me?’ I asked, looking her straight in the eye, trembling with impatience to find out what she thought.
    She was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say.
    ‘Have some tea,’ I said angrily. I was angry at myself, but she was the one who’d have to pay, naturally. A terrible anger against her suddenly welled up in my heart; I think I could’ve killed her. To take revenge, I swore inwardly not to say one more word to her during the rest of her visit. ‘She’s the cause of it all,’ I thought.
    Our silence continued for about five minutes. The tea stood on the table; we didn’t touch it. It reached the point of my not wanting to drink on purpose, to make it even more difficult for her; it would be awkward for her to begin alone. Several times she glanced at me in sad perplexity. I stubbornly remained silent. I was the main sufferer, of course, because I was fully aware of the despicable meanness of my own spiteful stupidity; yet, at the same time, I couldn’t restrain myself.”

—

I really gotta stop reading these kinds of novels. I like them too much.

I should probably try to gather up some breakfast and/or lunch. Something to keep me alive for a little while longer so that I can write my papers and make progress in the all-important Project 51. But I have no ideas and no determination. It’s another ten minutes or so until my laundry is done. I’ll wait until then; then I’ll gather up my PC, get back to work on the writing that I was supposed to submit yesterday, and try to find some lunch.

With luck, I will be able to submit my writing by 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon… Still early enough that I can’t really be accused of anything. Hopefully.

—

I have run out of things to say.

Yes, it’s a shock to me as well.