I do not know what to say for life.
I have recently acquired legality. Consequently, I have arrived at the conclusion that the Davis bar scene is a peculiar one. But I will still investigate further...it's a whole slew of new, previously-untouchable characters, which is a cause for excitement.
I have no motivation anymore for anything. The closer the future gets the further behind I fall in order to avoid it.
Funny how that works.
Other things in a list because nicely-crafted paragraphs I don't have in me these days:
1) There is a reason I have avoided American Literature. Emerson and Thoreau just aren't broken enough. They are boring.
2) On that note, I am only interested in broken people these days. My patience for the non-broken and their contentment wears thin.
3) The one exception on the Emerson note is when he finally does become broken. After his son tragically dies, he writes an essay called "Experience," in which he finally begins to sound like a human being:
Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?
and:
Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me or three, as between the original and the picture...Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.
4) What makes a person good? Compassion? Integrity? The experience of loving and having been loved? What is good? What is compassion? Can we ever even know it? Are we all too goddamn broken to let it touch our internal spaces?
Do you ever see something very simple and very pure and you know it is good but the feeling almost hurts? How do we have such access to rage and hate and grief and shame and sadness and even joy, but to even allow the smallest moment of compassion seems infinitely more difficult than all of the others? And I don't mean compassion as in oh, that was nice, but compassion as in holy crap I think I might implode from the force of this foreign intrusion of something so completely diametrical to the standard state of the human being...
This hurts far more than all the other things that are made purposefully to hurt.
5) The best moments of my days are when I get a little break or right before work and I have a spare moment and I can feel the sun on me and listen to some music or do a crossword puzzle or even read the shitty editorials in The Aggie and there is a rightness to it all.
6) Coffee prices have gone up everywhere. Suckage. Big fat suckage.
7) I cannot believe Walt Whitman isn't even on the syllabus for this class. Who the hell teaches American Literature and leaves off Walt Whitman for bloody Nathaniel Hawthorne? Balls.
8) I have to take the GRE AND the GRE subject test in literature in less than a month. All I can do at this point is laugh when I think about this because if I don't I think I might cry. Ha. Ha.
Ha.
9) I feel like I have to get to 10 for this list because lists are better when they are nice and round and in 10s. They feel more manageable that way. A list of nine would just be awkward.
10)
what to do
what to do
what to do
where to go
who to be
what to say
what to think
who to love
what to study
by extension what to know
what to not know
how to fix the innards
how to understand traumatic things
what to feel
how to feel it
what the childhood was
what the future will be
how to be in the present
how to focus
how to situate the self in the world
what to write
how to learn words
how to learn to write words
how to heal
what to heal
how to define shame and wrongness and goodness and compassion
what is compassion
have you ever known compassion
have I ever even known compassion
what are these questions
what is this illness
what is that illness
why are we all so ill
what medicine might save us
what compassion might save us
can compassion save us
can we be saved from our brokenness?
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