no new sensations at all.

Nothing to speak of today.

Just a lot of "don't want to be here"'s. Spoke up. Spoke down.

Didn't expect much and got it.

Oh well.

a partial admission.

Thought of a new story idea today. This makes three in queue.

Just need to take the time to write them.

You're just somewhere, blotting up time in alcoholic collapse syndromes and falling to floors.

(I think in "we's")

another day actively being active.

Tonight a family of opossums.

Epsilon and I walk up the same always street under the same always vague orange light. There is the sound of car traffic streets away from us. The chatter of occasional dog bark and then nothing. The wind in the trees. The kinds of things that make sound but you never register them in your brain after making a permanent place for them somewhere to be forgotten about.

Crossing the street looking down it in the dull orange spotlight a large opossum stands up with its muzzle facing me. Three smaller tykes surround it, eager for a show perhaps. A spectacle. I stand in the street facing them watching their deep black silhouettes keeping still against the light and Epsilon, impatiently, is trotting up the sidewalk. He is smelling grass and I look at him and wonders why he hasn't seen the family and look back just in time to see the leader of this pack, a mother perhaps, a father; lowering itself and the children at this motion moving on out of the light. Fellow travelers of the night disappearing between moments of fading electricity.

I consider safety in numbers. Pack mentality. Wonder if I've ever had it or ever would. The security of knowing we all look after one another. That loving is synonymous with survival and that to be loved one must love. Be willing to. Able.

The most significant things that happen to me during the day often seem to be the most recent ones. Must stretch this memory machine and make it work for me again. In a habit of missing too many things between cracks and synapses. Storm clouds of electrical pops zapping all the important thoughts in here. Forcible eviction.

an attempt to pinpoint something.

This is what it is like:

I am at the hot dog place. There is no food but there is water and I am waiting and on the television the sports channel is on. But like every time I come in here it is extreme sports and today in particular it is skateboarding. I watch the screen as a camera pans out and it is a solitary figure on a skateboard skating circles up and down a dried up pool. I am transfixed and hypnotized watching his smooth movements. The wide arcs and rise and fall from bottom of the pool to the lip. As if the water were still there and he were surfing the invisible tides it brought forth. Everything is fine.

Within two hours I am at work and suddenly, with no real catalyst. Or perhaps none that I am willing to admit to, it is all over. It is like a deep nothing has been bred inside of me. Like a balloon or a tumor that is made of something cold without having to feel it. Pressure without form. I feel my insides pressed against my skin like something trying to escape and the chill of loneliness sweeps through me like some emp. I feel it all and suddenly I feel nothing. There is a heavy weight dragging me down. An understanding that no matter how close I am to someone I am not close enough. Not to love or be loved. It is irrational perhaps but it carves up my spine and I have never felt so distant from anyone as these moments. In the midst of friends or strangers. It doesn't matter. It doesn't care.

In the newly isolated afternoon glow of a bookstore it is as if I can see all my emotions tumbling down my skin and shattering on the hard tile below. Abused and forgotten. Mostly by myself. I cannot remember a warm day or anyone's warm touch or pleasant words once whispered in my ear. Just this pressure building somewhere in my guts and I would fear exploding if I didn't fear imploding even more.

I feel faint and heavy and light and nowhere and stretched too thin and stressed and lazy and ultimately just so very unhappy with myself. And I start to think that perhaps writing about it, narrowing down these feelings. Trapping them in electricity to be observed like something wild will tame it. As if putting it on display will dull the edges of the beast; make it less ferocious.

Perhaps. I think I get closer to the state of things at times. But for right now it doesn't make anything feel any more right.

any number of items from random days.

The lady bug was not there the following morning. To no surprise.

Yesterday was largely a failure. How does one not find a marsh? We drove around it for half an hour, unable to find a place to drive into and park and perhaps somehow manage to walk into the marsh from. I have theories but they have not been put into practice. Largely I found a decent if awful place to swim this summer, but this was too late.

A park snowed in with pollen. It drifted down from the trees into two foot piles and we (or John anyway) made pollen balls to throw and I suggested a pollen man but we forgot by the time we made it back to the car. A secret path that led to nowhere worthwhile at all. The industrial side of riverbeds and tankers moving trade one island to another. Your dog jumped into the river after sticks endlessly and all we could think of was how awful that river must be how awful for your dog and the tedium of it all.

And then nothing but slow, moderate drinking for eight hours. I was perhaps unenthusiastic but not surprised.

Today was not a failure per se but in no way a story of success. Son of Rambow was an excellent film. Today the house went up on craigslist and the result has been a nonstop cacophony of phones ringing and doors knocking. I sat on the stoop and you walked down after checking out the room. You sat next to me and for no reason really, you knew I was leaving, and we chatted for about fifteen minutes. I thought you were very cute but very young perhaps. Very innocent maybe. You said you would be back later in 2-3 hours to drop off a check. It didn't matter to me. How does it involve me? Regardless I made sure I was still on the stoop by the time you came back and you did but with company and this company was also your boyfriend. Perhaps you really are just a decent person that likes meeting new people.

Certainly I am not.

I spent a lot of time doing nothing at all. Maybe thinking about the things I ought to be doing. Wondering about certain mistakes I may have made or whether or not I could have changed things somehow. But these are largely worthless wanderings of the brain. This chemical factory popping off one too many 0's and not enough 1's.

Less Than Zero? I should have read this in high school. Somehow it has evaded me until now. Perhaps it is bad that I still can relate to this overwhelming sense of disconnectedness.

Then again, perhaps it is all too entirley natural.

I thought of a few story ideas. Maybe we'll share them with each other.

a bashful look, I guess.

And that is why you don't post after drinking.

some of it.

i escape and
none of it none of it
all of it all of it
none of it none nonen none none nonenon neononeoneoneoneoneononeone


none noen noen none none of it

all of it?

all of none of it.

none of anything.

say hello to the missus.

be missin ya.

s.

temporary friends.

Certain objects, times, events, people sometimes though no as often, invade my writing. During these times they make their way into many more of my paragraphs than perhaps they otherwise would have a right to belong in. Lately it has been the green sheer of the blinds that cut me off from the world outside. They obscure my view and give a sullen sickly pallor to everything. I find sometimes when outside of this room I imagine the things I see in that same sick coating.

This evening is much the same but instead of concentrating on what is beyond those curtains; instead of what is just past that thin layered obstruction, my attention focuses on my side of the curtain. For the past few weeks of heat I have left my window partially open in order to encourage some sort of coolness to make its way into my room, suggesting a truce between myself and the outdoors. Some intermediary location where perhaps we can negotiate the terms of my release (and really I feel they are going well).

In the midst of this green sea a solitary lady bug perches. It clings to fabric and does not move except with the ebb and flow of the sheet itself in the summer night wind. The light bulb gives it a shadow that lengthens and shortens in its flapping vehicle and I cannot help but imagine it (in my montana and mexico dreams) as some insectoid cowboy riding against the violent buckings of fred meyer cheap sheets.

I can't imagine how it got there. Aside from the obvious open window anyway. This curtain must have looked like the most extraordinary bonanza of green leafery every contemplated and what utter disappoint that it is not nourishing at all. What potential for feast something to go back to the lady bug (again I have problems with multiples here) pack? colony? and be proud of something to bring back in conquest or shared love or consideration. But instead nothing.

What a long trip. It has been an hour since I have noticed it and aside from moving away from a gentle prodding of my finger it has not moved at all. Does it consider going back now a shame? Would it make up a story to save face? Struggled to get to a point where everything would seem good and once there, just to realize it was fake. Made up. The product of someone elses whimsy.

At some point I will fall asleep tonight and perhaps for once I will not wake up at 7am unable to return to sleep. When I wake up I imagine you will be gone. Neither of us knowing what happens to the other. Histories incomplete except the small conjectures we have no basis for.

Then again, you are a lady bug so really I suppose it will only be me wondering.

tags for bags.

Things that make me happy:

Women in green dresses. Or really green in just some form or fashion.

The dog when he stands at the top of the stairs and watches me walk in from work and wags his tail and is excited.

Flirting at the register (though this at times is also nerve wracking)

Watching films in the company of others.

Writing. Sort of. Sometimes this is more a source for frustration than it is anything else but this is just my needing to put some more practice in. Get back to where I once was. Become better.

Burritos.

Being alone but also being in love. Companionship. Not a need for someone, but the desire to do things for someone. I, like most people, find myself wondering about this whole love thing from time to time. Whether a sham or not. Having someone to share things with.

I suppose routine makes me happy but so does spontaneity and so does walking and walking purposelessly but doing it for some cathartic sake and nothing else, but I guess this is purpose.

There are other things. There are a countless number of people who have made me happy over the course of my life. Some of them no longer do. Perhaps some won't in the future. I hope I make them happy, and think that I do. And am equally sorry for the wretched things I have done to people that have been dear to me.

This became a strange list.

I guess advice for myself.

when the only response available is to scream. when there isn't a place here to scream. everything so close so near so open. when freeways don't offer solace and the cars nearby don't have answers and neither do the bars. there are physical cancers and there are more abstract ones.

just breathe.
breathe.

not exactly a post about the zoo.

I did some walking tonight. This (assuming I have this whole image thing down) is a map of where I walked:



I started at about 830 and made it home by 1130ish. The sky was dusking over as I left. Two boys in a park beside a school smoked a joint while sitting on a bench and occasionally leaning backwards to watch even smaller kids playing basketball beneath a rooftop court. Like somehow in their pot haze they found time to stop and consider what it meant to be as young as that, something they would never return to and maybe didn't wish to, but something evasive nevertheless. A slippery feeling that only happened yesterday yet now still won't come to mind. And of course I played my own voyeuristic role in this pondering their yesterday as my own and an even further yesterday through their considerations. A tireless loop of back treading.

I walked over the train tracks seperating the residential north from the industrial north and considered walking to the river but by that time it was already dark and between myself and water stood the airport and it did not seem terribly appealing. Along Columbia Blvd there is no sidewalk just a path eked out in the dirt and rock by a numberless amount of past travelers. I left my own tracks as semitrucks bouldered past me only 6 inches away and the shining constant lights striking my eyes left me in a half blind daze.

I thought about nothing. For a long time. Then I thought about women. Past and present. I considered for a moment the time you (and this you is my attempt towards anonymity and may be you or you or, well quite frankly, even you) and I sat in the car outside my house for over an hour. We were talking, or anyway you were talking, arguing more, just with yourself and the light in the lamp post kept fading in and out of electric life. It started as nothing then just the faint hint of light like heated metal and then the filament caught I guess and the street started becoming filled with its dull orange luminescence but it just kept getting more and more bright until it became just pure white light and then collapsed in itself. It was a three minute cycle and I know this because instead of listening to what you were saying I timed it. A number of times to make sure. And then, in an effort to make bad metaphors I considered (internally) how our relationship was much like that light and that here we were at yet another of those much too bright moments. They were starting to come too quickly now and it was as if we were collapsing daily.

I walked past the cemetary and tried to remember the last funeral I had attended and realized it had been Jim's. I wanted to think on this but really there was nowhere new to go with this thought and so instead I thought about how I hadn't really been to many funerals and that, aside from that most recent one, I couldn't really say that any of the ones I had been to had bothered me much. No, maybe one other. But that is what happens when you are young and someone you think you are or could be close to dies at such a young age. All this and I don't even remember your name. I drew you a picture I think. I have no idea your name.

I walked past restaurants and bars and shops and homes and spots where it seemed as if there was nothing at all.

I guess really not a lot happened. I am going nowhere but circles in my walking but I feel as if my destination is not so much the concern as is the motion. I find myself wondering how long I will need to walk to get past whatever it is I have been feeling so much of lately.

Tomorrow the zoo, perhaps.

a dog sleeping on my bed.

At something like 430 am I awoke (yeah I guess I can't get past it, sorry) to the cacophonous screeching of crow caws. What do crows come in, packs? murders? It seems unfortunate to be labeled as the latter but I guess when you sweep down on glossed black wings people can't help but associate you with death. Anyhow it was 430am and the sun was starting its early rise and was poking up out over the tops of the shingled roof across from my house the sky was still dark except for the lightened blemish starting to expand and take over like some disease the doctors weren't able to amputate quickly enough.

I watched this through the dull green sheen of my curtains, afraid somehow that if I moved them aside crows would all turn their oblong headbeakcombos towards me and understand that I was awake and imposing myself upon them by listening to their little town hall meeting. It was loud and ridiculous but one deep call of all of them stood out and perhaps this is simply because it was the closer of them and maybe they weren't all just perched in my tree the way i like to imagine it but i was groggy and the whole thing had an otherwordly feel to it and quite frankly i couldn't entirely deal with it. so this leader of the murderpack would make up some inhuman noise and then the squabbling would start amongst the rest of them until order was restored for some short period of time. I found myself wondering whether they were considering the path they might take away from the tree, where they wanted to be next or where the next good source of food might be but honestly i think mostly that any sort of squabling like that is only the result of grumpiness and a general disdain for being up at 430 in the morning. It was hard not to stick my own head out the window and make some sort of similar sound from my own gullet and perhaps if it weren't for the curtain i may have.

four hours later i woke up again and they were all gone. one crow stood in the street below like some keeper of gates or monuments. a lonesome doorman awaiting the next meeting. making sure rituals stay the same. i am moving soon from this house. i will probably miss the next meeting. i would not have had new business anyhow and last comments would have still been summed up by the simple slur of loneliness, inebriation, and lack of sleep. They can do without ths.

Then again. I walked to the zoo last week and perhaps at some point there will be pictures but it seems that over the years my ability to manipulate the internet and its faithful html have diminished to a point where picture hosting sites confound me so maybe in no time soon but however. walking to the zoo in its 3 hour glory gave me a feeling of clearmindedness. i walked it alone but felt good about being that way and realized that somewhere in all of this is just some drive that i am missing. i am going to break records by saying that i will try to start writing again and remain a loyal lover to it but my infidelous(i wonder if i am not using an entirely incorrect word here) nature may lead me to stray.

anyhow. i suppose i need to think of things to really write about. life just doesn't seem enough.

just a few things. Not much on the whole. I mean it's late, seriously.

I can't help but find myself wondering whether or not Betsy's question didn't have some form of validity to it.

I need to find other things to occupy my time with.

I used to be pretty concerned with waking. I feel like I've missed a lot pondering where or when or if my eyes would open at all.

What a time for reassessment.