Twenty words and life is better.

Or is it?

God I’m a downer sometimes.

Also, I miss phone calls.

Life is not what you make of it. Whoever said that was a jackass. Life is what other people make of you, and you don’t have a choice, and you can’t get out of it, and you won’t like it, and you won’t want it any other way, because everyone is self-destructive and everyone is a masochist, in their own way, some with pins and spikes and leather straps, some with guns and masks and jail cells, and some with needles and bottles and joy, joy, joy, of the kind your mother always warned you about, back when you used to actually listen to her, but not obey her anyway.

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“I’m not satisfied.”

“I’m not satisfied!”

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Rumpole of the Bailey never had these problems.

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Rumpole of the Bailey was fictional.

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I am trying. Maybe I am not trying hard enough. Or maybe I am trying too hard. You never know until afterward, and all you know then is that whatever you did was the wrong thing.

If you’re a stupid, cheerful person, then you don’t get this at all, but I can tell all the cheerful people out there: what you did was wrong, that’s why it went to shit. What you did was always wrong. That glass isn’t half full or half empty, it’s just half what you could have had or infinitely more than you knew existed or wanted to cope with.

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I’ve talked to everyone tonight, smoked with everyone tonight, drank with everyone tonight, and I’m lonely.

Everyone is a very bounded quantity.

Not a problem, if you get to define the boundaries.

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I don’t get to define the boundaries.

Can everyone agree that this whole life thing is shit?

I did nothing today. I didn’t read like I said I was gonna. I didn’t even wake up until 1.30 or something, but that’s okay, because I didn’t want this fucking day anyway. I wanted to put this one back in the fucking basket, but by the time I knew it I’d left fingerprints and they charged me for it anyway. And now I’m eating it.

If I only knew what I want, I’d be able to ‘work toward’ it.

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Not so long ago, I accidentally dropped apples out of a cart and ran over them. But even though I know it wasn’t so long ago, it was a long fucking time ago.

The biggest distance from today to the past is between today and yesterday. Last year, or last decade, is only barely farther back than yesterday, if it’s farther back at all.

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I’m gonna go outside and chain smoke for the next eight hours. When I’m done, I’ll have loved and lost and loved again, the story of my life and everyone else’s, too. When I’m done, I’ll be ten years older and a hundred years wiser, and all that wisdom will be gone by tomorrow, which, paradoxically, is very close.

When I’m done, there will be nothing more to say. When you’re done, there never is.

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I miss things, but they’re gone. I don’t miss other things. They’re gone, too. That doesn’t make any sense. If the result is the same, why bother to miss some things and not others? I must be stupid.

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From where I sit, I count six bicycles out the window.

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Whenever I hear an Oasis song now, I think of you, aqueous.

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This monkey’s gone to heaven.

World: I am your man.

Still didn’t get any sleep.

Drank pitchers and pitchers of water. Played around with HMM3. I’m so sleepless I’ve made another pile of consecutive entries on this damn blog, pushing everyone else below the fold. I’m so vain.

Films watched, in order:

Full Metal Jacket
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Are You Being Served? The Movie
A Clockwork Orange

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I just realized I gotta finance my summer somehow. Book project? Part-time job? Sell the unused bits of my soul? Strip?

Borrow again?

Pain in the arse. Oh wait, no longer International Beer Day. Pain in the ass.

I’m not usually one for planning ahead or even believing in planning ahead, but it’s like 3.30 am and I haven’t been sleeping and I just got happy. After six months here I’d tentatively decided that I didn’t want to stay in school as long as Ph.D., but I’ve been getting worried about that: what if I get out there and can’t find my place still, and everything goes to shit?

Then I realized: I’ve still got deferrments! I can still go to New York in fall, 2005, without lifting another finger, if my life isn’t looking like I want it to by then! And if I do lift a finger, I can probably even score a better financing package.

But of course eyedoewanna getta Ph.D. anymore. Maybe.

Who cares. For once, I’m ecstatic that I planned ahead. Life is cool.

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“My head’s on straight. My girlfriend’s beautiful. Looks pretty good to me.”

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Shit, I gotta get some sleep.