1. regain consciousness without assistance of alarm(s);
2. light first cigarette despite concurrent resolution against continuation of such;
3. alight upon futon, which, in practice, is nothing but a couch with possibilities;
4. worry a poorly toasted croissant beyond dismemberment, then leave it to die a slow, lonely death, wounds untended;
5. pay scant attention to another movie that hollywood forgot (or never really knew) on cable;
6. return to the keyboard and monitor that stand synechdochettishly for communication and connection;
7. remain conscious from this improvised (almost impoverished) sunday-morning-on-a-sunday-afternoon
    until such time as seems appropriate to relinquish the state;
8. wonder why we (in the british plural-singular speaking subject) wax whimiscal...


[an attempt at alphabetical alliteration, and also agressive americana]:

always assume all americans are asymptotically amoral (a.k.a. assholes).
big brother belligerently beseeches:  begin by belittling beggars, brothers and broads.
continue by callously categorizing contingent co-conspirators;
deliberately, delicately denigrating democracy.
effect elaborate elocutions; ever election-minded, ever establishmentarianist (e.g.):
"forget family-values, father! 
     for free fun, fuck fairness! 
     fly flags furiously for freedom! 
     feel free:  fear foreigners forever!
grab great, glistening golden gobs! 
     go, greedy; get greed glutted! 
     garner godless goals!"
head held hellward, heed hedonism humanely;
     heuristic hearts harmfully holding hatred hidden.
ignore innocence (immaturely injured intentions in infinite insurrection);
     inuredness (i.e. insanity) instantly and inaccurately identifiying
     incongruities, inconsistent intimacies (ibid.), and ignorantly inflicted injuries.
just joking, jesus! 
kill kindness, knowingly, knowledgeably. 
location, locution, locomotion! 
merciless masters, manaically monitoring mass murders (in the millions!
     meanwhile multiplicitous, murmuring minions mindlessly mimick murky manifestoes),
never notice national negativity;
     neutralize nostalgia;
     negate non-compliance
     (next, non-compliants).
     newsworthy or nothing! 
opportunism over ontology;
     overlords of oracular omniscience;
     opposition in obscured obsolescence;
paternalistic, powerhungry pigs preventing pluralism;
quaint quaker quills quite quieted;
revulsion; recantation. 
sleepy. 
time to...
uhhh...
voluntarily
weaken...
xylophone...
youthful
zealousness...

i saw an author talking about heaven on television a while back; maybe in the last three weeks?  maybe salman rushdie?  anyway, whoever it was, he was talking about heaven in a religious (though, i think generally so) sense, and he said that, in the presence of the creator, or something to that effect i think, there could be no inducement to artistic expression of any kind; because, he said, artistic expression can only arise out of what boiled down to desire, and that such a thing as desire could never occur, as all desires would, by definition, have been (or maybe go on in a continuous state of being) fulfilled. 

okay, so i'm pretty far removed, chronologically speaking, from having viewed that particular interview; but i think i've more or less captured the crux of what the guy was saying.  but, yeah; there's a lot of my own nonsense flying around in the above.  anyways.

anyways, i remember living through a time during which i'd felt all my desire for artistic expression disappear.  it was a while ago now, but the impression was very clear to me at the time, and it remains.  only, now, so far removed from those times, i find my desire to create is still heavily diminished.  i'm filled with unfulfilled desires; changes that i'd like to see encouraged, if never actually to completion.  you'd think the writing would just pour right out of me...

at least, this way, life is bearable.  it's the loss of all desire while still stuck here on earth that really kinda sucks.  after going through that, just getting the unfulfilled desires back feels pretty damn good, unfulfilled and all; like knowing you're still alive, if that makes any sense.

for some time now, i've been carrying around inside of me the notion of writing something along the lines of a long letter of apology to the world.  the idea took form as i looked back over the mostly pedestrian landscape of my past, dotted here and there with peaks of happiness and pockmarked uniformly with disappointments great and small.  though i'm already taking too many liberties, imagine taking a pen to the map of such a surface, and then connecting the dots in chronological order, but also sometimes by category.  you may object to the looseness of the metaphor.  all i wish to convey is this:  i'm not sure what the process involved, other than that it involved my memories of happiness and disappointment, and some sort of ordered analysis; all of which ended in the notion i've been harboring to write the letter of apology mentioned above.

i looked back upon the most passionate moments; examined all the catastrophic failures; ruminated until the foggy vagueness of memory had been reduced to crystalline thought-shards of the finest grain imaginable.  and in the end, it seemed quite clear that, time after time, i had been stupidly overpassionate; the catastrophic failures had been mine alone; the happiness had always been a gift from others.  in short, i felt apologies were in order.  it was too clear a pattern not to recognize, and employed as a guiding theme, it led me to see all my preceding life as a jumbled mass of missed apologies.  either i hadn't apologized when i should have, or else i long-since owed apologies to all those i should have been thanking along the way.  and as i bumbled forward, often in time alone and no other dimension of progress, i could see that this would continue as a matter of course.

i still haven't sat down to actually write the thing though, because really, it's not a writable letter.  this far removed from the events for which i should have either expressed more gratitude or else apologized, the words themselves would be meaningless.  worse; read by anyone other than those to whom i owe the sentiments, they would only become ingratiating and insincere; further cause for more letters to even less reachable recipients.

but i've still been carrying the idea around of this grand letter that grows day by day, despite helping to reduce the further incidence of such neglect.  for all the unintentional pain i've inflicted on others, for all the pain i felt in revealing and admitting that to myself, misunderstandings and moments of unintentional neglect still plague my every day of existence.  and as its necessary length and the number of days it remains unwritten grow, i find myself filling up with the idea of the letter, leaving room for so little else.  yet, it does not constitute a burden. 

it's a cold day today in the valley; cold enough to convince me that
fall has finally begun.  the passage of thanksgiving was also a
clue, but being able to stay in bed with a book until afternoon without
my feet getting sweaty, that's the sinker.  it's after 12:30pm and
it's still pretty cold.  hello, fall.

it wasn't so gloomy earlier in the day.  it was one of those days
so full of potential that just trying to ignore the possibilities
dredged up the oldest memories of guilt my procrastinator's existence
had prudently stored away, just for such a moment.  but the
brightness of the sun, like the guilt it had conjured, faded to nothing
but a troublesome afterthought.  and here i am, still sitting at
home, still bed-coifed, still sporting t-shirt and boxers, still
contemplating what to eat for breakfast at lunchtime.  and,
despite the cup of coffee that had temporarily fortified this attempt
at extended consciousness, it's cold enough to make me consider
burrowing back into the covers.

i need a haircut.  there's shopping that needs doing, and then
there's shopping that wants doing, and lastly there's shopping that
probably shouldn't be done, but still might be anyway.  every
bright dream that came to light and then died in the gloom today has
had something to do either with spending money or else exposing myself
to to the world by stepping back out into it.  and both seem such
shallow, selfish categories.  so, sitting at home and reading
books doesn't seem so irresponsible or wasteful.  i should
probably eat something.

you should probably eat something too, if you're having a day like
mine.  or maybe eating something is absolutely the last thing you
should do right now.  maybe, just as i am tempted even now to do,
what you should do is open the windows to the cold breeze, climb back
under the covers, and read the next book until you fall asleep. 
the afternoon has hardly begun, afterall; you'll wake up in time to
make breakfast of dinner and maybe even catch some nightlife, if your
friends made plans while you slept.  clean up the apartment
later.  do the shopping later.  how about a nice read-into-a
nap?

days go by; weeks, then months...years.  i have no idea how to
punctuate my pauses anymore.  my life has become a mad experiment
in choosing crisis management over risk avoidance.  or maybe the
problem is that i've got several, incompatible ideas.

though time is less and less clear a conception, the confusion doesn't
seem to stop me from getting even a little older.  i try to pay
attention most of the time, try to learn from that observation now and
then.  change of hypotheses, or change, even, of basic assumptions
when warranted.  always bring a clean change of basic assumptions
with you; cause you just never know when you might need one. 
self-consciousness continues to stifle, and the self-examination
employed to stanch the regression sometimes pushes me further back,
with just as much force.

i sought a doctor for a prescription to help me quit smoking. 
after the consultation, she ordered a blood test.  i had to
fast:  fourteen hours without food, seventy-two without
alcohol.  it was a week before i managed to get into the correct
condition and then, finally to the lab.  my blood-sugar looked
fine, which surprised me.  i was planning to blame some of my more
nameless ills on adult-onset diabetes.  so much for that easy
scapegoat; gone the way of chronic fatigue syndrome and so many other
hypochondriac daydreams.  my cholesterol was less a
surprise.  all the years of fastfood living are, as they say,
catching up with me.  i'm not dying as quickly as i'd surmised;
which gives unexpectedly little relief.  after fearing that it had
all fallen to shit, now i find that i have most of my health still to
lose.

and it seems that the more i think i know, the less sure i am of just
about everything.  does that feel right to you?  me neither,
though they do say the beginning of wisdom is knowing that you know
nothing.  i'm pretty convinced i know nothing, but i don't yet
know it. 

when did my life become mine?  is it even that?  i used to
hope that finding the right woman would take the feeling away, make
everything "right."  that somehow, in the work of fitting myself
to someone (anyone) else, i would find my shape bettered, maybe even on
the way to completion.  now, i just want to find a viable
motivation to keep on keepin on; some rugged, durable vehicle to carry
me forward.  this is not a suicidal thought, but there are days
when it seems i'm living for next to nothing; just pushing molecules
around in this absurd, thermodynamic dance.  wake, eat, strive,
suffer, sleep.  and on those sorts of days, i think about husbands
and wives and their inevitable children.  you know.  us.

then i think about the rest of us.  what are we to do with
ourselves?  free of the responsibilities of parenthood, single and
almost justifiably self-absorbed, we're the ones they're jealous
of...at least, in the more difficult moments, i'm sure.  but
they're insured against the feeling that i've been feeling.  no
doubt, they graduate to bigger and more harrowing fears; more
frightening consequences, should they fail.  if, in the end, i
find i have to admit to myself that i failed in my life (however that
may end up being defined), no one will have been harmed but me. 
at least, that's the plan; minimize casualties.  this, perhaps, is
another manifestation of the fear of failure which now more than ever
sounds like a psychobabble copout.  am i reconciling myself to a
bachelor existence as a bid at avoidance?  probably, sure. 
indeed, why not?  this world isn't long for itself, it
seems.  and any children i have a hand in raising would be
handicapped relative to the children of an increasingly crueler world.

regardless of the psychodynamic analysis, can i find other means? 
or does the world go round the way it does because there is no other
way?  as time ticks onward, the possibilities dwindle and
fade.  and everyone supposedly feels this same way.  is the
grass really always greener?  what am i supposed to feel? 
sometimes it seems that green itself is the illusion...even though it's
the word "other" that i'm starting to disbelieve (while desperately
clinging to my own illusory self).  but disbelief is still an act
of belief, and i think it'll take just as much faith to hold onto the
notion.

yeap; still alive.  hello.  still alive, despite the
universe's unending attempts to make me otherwise.  i survived a
near-collision...twice...with the same guy.  i was coming up the
405, getting ready to exit, when i look up and see these bright, blue
headlights, coming up too fast from behind, too close to break in time.  i
figured i was about to die.  but before the thought could finish
itself, the guy swerved hard to the left and smashed into the center
divider; little chunks of concrete falling to the ground, dust swirling
in the light.  i started dialing 911 as i continued very slowly
down the off-ramp, still in a daze, still trying to calculate an
objective distance; how close i had just come to death.  and it
rings and rings and...oh shit!  there's the same dude, coming
right at me again, way too fast down the off-ramp.  he swerves
into the dirt and misses me again (is it the red paint job?); speeds
off down a local street.  a message, then it hangs me up; so much for 911. 

and i'm starting a smoking cessation program; patches, wellbutrin,
group talk and everything.  one way or another, i'm going to be
done with cigarettes.  it's not a relief just yet, because it
hasn't started yet, but i'm looking forward to the eventual relief, and
that's somewhat a relief in itself.

and now, more than halfway through my vacation, the housecleaning
begins.  i've made small, fitful starts, but today is the true
first day of it.  no more shall my domicile resemble a
college-student's apartment.  the tower of pizza boxes has already
been banished; it took three trips, but the thing no longer intimidates
me with its indictment of neverending sloth.  i am free of its
oppressive presence.

and there remains the issue of restoring music to my automobile. 
it's lack has been wearing on my very soul. 

and then, maybe the
dentist.  maybe.

fuck it.  that's the fourth time i've scratched every last word
off the screen.  i've been sitting here, slightly brain-weary
after work, trying to get something (anything!) to stick to this text
field, but no matter how little i try to care, no matter how much i
tell myself that it doesn't really matter what i write here, nothing
will stick.  nope; nothing.  i type and type, and then the
damn cursor comes and highlights everything, and poof!  it's all
gone.  so...fuck it.  fuck it all with a gas-powered
jackhammer.  fuck it raw.  fuck it until you're blue in the
face, and then fuck it some more.  i'm not depressed or
anything.  or am i?  fuck it.  fuck it till the cows
come home, and then?  fuck them too.  fuck everything. 
somewhere, deep down, there is a love that cannot be overcome, a love
that we can all find within us.  dig down.  dig deep. 
find that love.  find a way to wrench it from wherever it was
hiding.  and fuck it.  fuck it, and fuck it, and fuck it
again.  sometimes i wonder if there's any point.  to knowing
the difference.  to striving.  why would god give us brains
and opposable thumbs and all that if he didn't expect us to use
them?  why does happiness exist?  is it a goal?  is it a
whip?  if you can get some without having to sacrifice anything
for it, is it even happiness in the first place?   fuck it. 
fuck philosophical questions.  fuck philosophy, and not just a
textbook, but the whole of the discipline.  fly a fuck at a
rolling philosopher's donut.  hah.

hah.  consider the preceding some verbal calisthenics.  i
feel like i just got back from forcing myself to go to the gym, but i
had a terrible workout.  don't get the wrong idea; i don't go to
the gym to work out anymore.  you can see it as a slackening of my
will if you want to, but to me, it's just about giving up on certain
standards/intentions/motivations.  i like the idea of being
physically fit and healthy, but that isn't why i went to the gym when i
used to go.  then, it was all about vanity and living up to media
reinforced standards of attractiveness.  the only people i
feel sorrier for than trophy wives are the men that sacrifice their
lives to be able to attain them.  hey, we're all sacrificing our
lives to something (in that we're all dying); i just want my something
to be more meaningful than an illusory social status.  what's the
point of being rich/famous/beautiful aside from feeling entitled to
some notion of superiority over those who are less?  and am i
really any different, even after forsaking all these things?  all
it seems to get me is the feeling of superiority over those who still
want those things.  that, and i no longer have to contradict my
own innermost beliefs or compromise myself.  of course, you can be
born rich, famous or beautiful. i guess it's the aspiring to it, the
making of the aspiring to it a priority, that bothers me
sometimes.  bah.

bah.  consider the preceding some total bullshit that i've been
fashioning into a shirt to wear out into the world, heart on my sleeve
for an accessory.  i'll need pants too, but i haven't decided yet
which existential quandry i'll make those from.  maybe the
question of the afterlife?  would be nice and airy, perfect for
summer! 

i had a weird walk from the elevator to my front door just now.  i
had been thinking about my appearance on the ride up from the
garage.  there's not a lot to do in the elevator, so my mind tends
to wander.  today, i was thinking about how i was dressed: simple
navy shoes w/stripes (can you tell i'm not used to describing
clothing?), simple khaki pants, simple powder-blue dress shirt, sleeves
rolled to the elbows, my emo glasses as usual, and my
backpack/manpurse.  i was thinking, this is about as nicely as i
ever want to be dressed on a daily basis.  really, i'd rather be
slouching about my day in a tshirt and jeans.  i don't ever want a
job that will force me into a tie and jacket, or dress shoes. 
sounds boldly unambitious, i'm sure, but it was just this fleeting
thought.

and then, during the walk down the hallway, past the anonymous green
doors, i was overcome by a thought that struck me as one i'd seen
coming, long ago, but then forgotten.  i think it was triggered by the act of reaching into my pocket for the
keys.  it was such a pedestrian fixture in the everyday that,
maybe with the taint of my previous thoughts, it somehow separated out
of the moment for me.  suddenly, i was reliving parallel moments
in various locations, reaching for keys (sometimes keycards) to open other doors.  but
this one was my door.  as i reached to unlock and open it, i
realized that i was one of the untold, anonymous millions that populate
every other place i'd ever been as a visitor, or ever would. 

i'd always find myself struck by thoughts of the countless, unknown
lives that go on behind the windows and doors of the alien buildings in
places other than the one i was currently calling home.  no matter where i
went, or for what original purpose, these thoughts would draw me to
gaze and wonder at homes and officebuildings alike.  and all this time, it was my life too that i'd
been wondering about; only in someone else's mind, and from their
other's perspective. 

ever think to yourself, who are all these people, trapped in their cars
on the freeway with me?  what are their lives like?  what do
they want the world to be?

6:18pm, saturday, april 22nd, 2006

though i'm not entirely sure, i think i went to bed sometime around
midnight last night.  reasonable enough.  woke up at nine,
just off the dot.  got up, smoked a cig on the crapper (while
putting that to its designated use), crawled right back into bed, and
slept again until right around noon.  got up, smoked a cig on the
crapper (same reasons, same conclusions), crawled right back into bed,
and slept again until just about two.  got up, did more or less
the same thing, then did it again, minus pooping around three, and once
more at four thirty.  i think it had something to do with the sky
today.  the sleeping i mean; all the crapping...i'm not sure i can
account for it, though i must admit, it felt like i was making up for
lost time.  but the sleeping.  every time i opened my eyes,
i'd look up into the sky through my window and see more or less the
same patchwork of grey, same intensity of cloud diffracted light; the
air was the same cold temperature, still is.  so you can see how,
minus a few trips to the toilette, it would be real easy to just roll
slightly to the left (or right, depending), realize how comfortable the
bed is from the slight shift, and just slide out with the next
tide.  on any other saturday, this would have been a miserable
waste of a precious weekend day, a complete failure in time
management.  today, i think i'm okay with it.  i can
calculate the toll on monday, once i'm back in the office. 

it appears that caffeine has become something of a necessity to the
proper function of my brain, and hence, daily life.  even now,
cloaked in this mysterious thing called "vacation," a vague shadow of
freedom if anything worth noting, i cannot seem to imagine going on
with the day in a conscious stance without the supplementation of
freshly brewed coffees. 

cigarettes will be the end of me; i can't seem to rid my fingers of
them, they keep appearing like a magician's props.  sometimes,
when i'm sleeping, something will labor my breath, and i'll wake later
from nightmares of running from shadowy fears.  and while i wage
the war to remain awake during the day, i am constantly beset by
seductive views of the unmade bed, of the ever inviting futon, numbered
though her days here may be.

having thrown myself to the four corners of manhattan only to come home
whole, i find myself perilously balanced on the support of not much
more than a few, clumsy addictions, the freedom to sleep, and a good
book--all to the constant backbeat of the television.  there's the
outside world; but i've had so much of that lately, and of such a novel
flavor, that what i can get at here just doesn't appeal.  maybe
once i've lost free access to it once more...