Evenings are always harder.

There is nothing here to challenge your senses or your deeper instincts. Everything is mild; everything is comfortable. The sky is never red or purple or black or yellow; there is no blistering heat or devastating cold; there are no unscalable peaks or roaring, impassable rivers.

It is warm. The sky is blue. Roads are smooth and flat. Wind is gentle.

There is nothing here that is ruthless, nothing to force you to feel alive.

Really disturbing dreams. Just really fscking disturbing.

I haven’t been mad at Je—e in a long time, but now I am really bitter again.

God I feel like hell.

1.00 in the morning on a Sunday.

I just printed out the blog and diary portions of my personal texts Two reams of paper, nearly a thousand pages. I still have to print the miscellaneous notes, rants, and lists, probably another hundred or two.

I don’t know if it will come to anything, but I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple of years.

Funny how when you’re young you hear people say, “I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple of years,” and you think, “you big fscking loser, how can you possibly think for a couple of years about anything without managing to get around to doing it?”

When you get older, you don’t even realize that you’ve been trying to get something done for years unless you stop and think about it. Otherwise, everything on your to-do list seems almost as though it were added last week, and you really do mean to get around to it in very short order.

—

Strange also how when I’m living alone there never ever seems to be any incentive to go to bed, and I end up staying up until all hours.

I suppose work will be an incentive to go to bed.

Lousy fscking incentive.

—

This coming week is gonna suck. I still haven’t figured out what to expect for the summer. I just know that it’s gonna be lonely at times.

I realized that someone nice had stuck some cash in my bank account, so I went and bought myself a housewarming party:

– a bag of ice and a bottle of that swank new blue-label diet coke
– a big mofuggin fan to stick in the window
– a cheap-ass DVD player that cost less than my cheap-ass television
– two reams of paper, to print out 1,000 pages of nonsense
– the entire susan cooper series, to read front-to-back tomorrow

Fan in window, DVD in player, ice in Coke, clothes off, I feel better.

Much better.

Muchass betterass. (I’m in California now, I have to learn the language.)

—

One last problem: the fan is loud as hell and I can’t hear a thing.

But that’s minor.

All good.

All good.

Everything old is new again.

It’s me and my webpad and a basketball game on TV.

It’s only a million degrees out and yellow as China sin.

Don’t ask me because I don’t know.

I don’t know.

This shit is a drag and it ain’t my place. I ain’t excited about anything.

I want to be excited.

I can promise a hundred entries tomorrow, each more drunken than the last.

I should have bought the Dostoevsky.

Morgens: LAX.

nothing is forever

but sometimes you can’t tell the difference
between forever and right now

anyway

and you hold your whisky bottle high
because you are the last young hotshot before the crash

these are the best years of your life

and you smile
tip your hat
know that you will live
on
in a thousand

faded

photographs

Sitting here in my apartment.

I’m remembering fondly things from the past. Like: I remember when email used to be cool, and it used to work, and I used to love using it. Or: I remember walking around U/U campus in the snow, talking about Hamsun and Dostoevsky. Or: I remember

nevermind. I don’t care.

I’m not prepared for this at all. I am and have been in denial and I’m trying to stay that way. It’s gonna hit me like six or seven tons of bricks on Saturday night. Then, it’ll all hit me again Monday morning. And again Monday night. Svck.

And I only have 1 channel on TV.

I gotta get more channels on TV.

I gotta get more channels on TV.

It’s halfway through the day and I’m beaten up and ready to go home.

I don’t know where home is.

But I’m ready to go anyway.

More than an hour until the time I usually take lunch. How is it possible that I’m only halfway through this fscking day?! How is it possible that I still haven’t reached the end of this fscking week?!

I wanna publish more. I gotta get off my arse this summer and do more writing.

When I arrived this morning, someone had cleaned up my endless array of empty glass and plastic bottles. I’m terribly distracted by that fact, and by the sudden realization that I have 1,500 messages in my personal email box that I haven’t downloaded yet. I’m contemplating doing away with email altogether. I never read my personal box anymore, and I get enough of it at work.

My phone works poorly in my new apartment, nearly as poorly as it did where I’ve been staying. That sucks. I’ve been trying to buy stuff off Craigslist but in order to call any of these people I have to walk outside into the parking lot. I guess that’s better than having to drive downtown or something, but still…

I’m not happy or sad right now. I’m not anything in particular.

I just am.

I am losing my acute consciousness; in its place, little shoots of bamboo, shards of sunlight, and droplets of mist are filling the space behind my eyes. I am nowhere to be found in me. I am positive that my co-workers can’t see me right now. I’m invisible, a part of the atmosphere.

Walked past the soda guy — the guy that fills up the vending machines — as I came in. All he does all day is drive around from place to place spending twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there wheeling crates of soda around and shoving them in machines. Every now and then he says hello to someone walking past, or answers a question about what gets put in them… but he never smells a place for more than half an hour at a time, and half of his day is spent in his truck by himself.

**I want that job.**

Sadly, I don’t think it would pay the bills around here. I make nearly $3k a month and I can barely afford to live now, what with $3 gas, $900 rents and $50k in student loans.

—

I was just in Chicago. I swear, I was fscking just in Chicago like last week.

—

Bought a TV last night for $35. It came with a free computer. Got a TV stand with wheels for $2. Not bad. It all falls under “things I must have when living alone.” Also on the list:

– Lights. Lots and lots of lights
– At least one windchime
– Working e-diary machine (i.e. Webpad/newton)
– Good booze, like Revelstoke, Jagermeister, or Alandia
– Cable, for C-SPAN and cable news
– Microwave oven
– Video games, lots of video games
– Self-possession and a long-term plan

—

This will all be gone in a minute. As much as I have mixed feelings about the present and the next four or five months, I also am altogether too aware of the fact that they’ll be behind me in what seems like an instant, and just like that, without any fanfare or friction, I’ll be half a year closer to death.

Half a year spent in a cubicle.

Or, is that:

Half a year spent in a cubicle?

—

Is it possible to strike a “balance” between responsibility and dreaming, or are they two things that aren’t just mutually exclusive, but that belong to entirely different spheres of existence or philosophy?

Am I sitting here gasping without realizing it, a fish out of water?

Worse, am I gradually growing lungs and losing gills, dminishing my chances of ever returning to the water again?

—

Nonsense. It’s all nonsense. It’s all crap.

—

Hemmingway is a genius. Proust is a bigger one. Dostoevsky is the biggest of them all.

—

(reprise)

Rivets!

It’s another strange, surreal moment in my life when I don’t feel at home inside my own being. Everything around me is in a strange perspective, like I’m seeing the world through a wide-angle lens. All of the colors are blending together. I can see myself walking around, or sitting in my chair.

Last time I felt like this I was walking through the rain in Chicago in early June, listening to Radiohead. Before that, it was the night I drove home from eBay for the last time at 4.00 AM, after saying goodbye to no-one and sneaking out the back.

This time there is no rain.

Uh-oh.

Dread.

I pull up to the building this morning, and I felt like I used to feel arriving at school at the beginning of the school year. Only now I’m an adult and have to be responsible enough to pay for myself and not drink myself to death.

This does not bode well. This does not bode well at all.

Benefit of living in a dense apartment complex: someone’s bound to have wireless setup, without any access barriers. I’m getting a pretty decent signal here — a lot better than I used to get at I-House!

And to think that I just bought a cable modem, and was getting ready to go and buy a wireless router of my own… Heha!

Things a lookin’ up.