Saturday, September 25, 2010

5

few things are like having your mom see, in the backseat of your car, the HE COMES NEXT book (with a subtle unpeeled banana on the front, papaya in the background) your old roommate sent you home with. this in itself only becomes awkward when it’s not acknowledged, like most things, and it would seem that my mom doesn’t like to acknowledge lots of things, so I said cheerfully, “did you see my book? ha ha,” and then we went inside and onto our separate computers. later in the day she stood in my doorway while I tooled around on an acoustic guitar, and she said that I am drawn to the guitar “like a duck is drawn to water,” which seems like an exaggeration. I told her her relationship with art/painting used to be duck-to-water, years ago, and she said that she can’t get inspired when she’s financially insecure, and then i said that this was too bad.

today I went for a walk and got accosted by a terrier that was about the size of a foot. I also flipped through my most current notebook and found some things I don’t remember writing or I don’t remember why I wrote them, and many of these things have times written next to them. here’s a few examples:

4:30am: abominable seahorse. drumstick=eardrum

*8/24/10 4am ish: dream premise neighborhood woman is drug dealer to parent users who won’t testify against her (obv) for molesting their children. she dismantles fire alarms for poor people in the neighborhood who can’t afford batteries (they beep constantly if they need new batteries / are hard to dismantle since they’re wired into wall). dark comedy?

2:57am: I get fuckin’ surround sound & widescreen

8/10: can’t sleep, sounds like there’s TVs all around me

9/10: go to bed hilary, the sound in your head is a lullaby from benevolent receptors who really do wish you all the best. why, thank you, benevolent receptors (and then I practice the cursive H a dozen times)

*(this dream/entry makes partial sense since there is a malfunctioning fire alarm adjacent to my bedroom door that sometimes beeps, and almost always beeps when we run the dryer)

I think/hope everybody with a notebook has things like this (minus pervasive insomnia) and these might be the most non deliberate or honest and interesting parts of notebooks. I think trading notebooks is maybe the most intimate thing you can do, and I don’t know that I’d ever do it. my favorite is abominable seahorse, which makes me think of abdominal seahorse, which makes me want to have a band called abdominal seahorse.

Friday, September 24, 2010

4.5

i had to speculate about the inevitability of the fall of capitalism for a few hours. THEN, my cat started snoring on my piano, which i haven't touched in weeks, but i didn't know it was my cat so it frightened me. if i think about how many bowls of sugar smacks i had today, a conservative estimate would be six.

5 comes tomorrow. is 4.5 cheating?

Thursday, September 23, 2010

4

" 25 – 30% of the average adult life is spent with television

20% of your life is spent at work or school

30% of your life is spent asleep

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…which leaves: 20 – 25% of your time for YOU, for the other activities that matter to you… "

Thursday, September 9, 2010

3

“I was watching this stupid program on PBS about evolution. this guy was talking about how we used to be apes, and how we’ll never know why, at some point, we decided to walk on two feet, and it was just so stupid.”
“well we didn’t decide to walk on two feet, I’m sure he didn’t say that…”
“no, he did. it’s like, come on. why can’t people just accept that we were never apes, and that god created humans? it’s so stupid.”
“I can’t talk about this with you.”

at this point she gets up and goes back to her room and continues her bible reading. and just an hour ago:

“they said on the news two asteroids passed between earth and the moon today. one of them was less than fifty thousand miles away.”
she just smiles and says, “god knows what he’s doing.” this smugness makes me strangely furious, probably because the asteroid news bothers and scares me. if only I, too, felt the protective love of a vindictive god who wants to subtlety threaten and frighten everyone else. maybe then I could rest easy with the faith that I’m not implicated in his plan for mass annihilation, since I’ll be taken up in the rapture before the shit hits the fan (yes, this is what she believes).

I am continually amazed at and suspicious of anyone who can be so sure of anything that purports to explain the origins or fate of the world or universe. what a terrible sentence. one of the main arguments against agnosticism is that it contradicts itself. in acknowledging that one couldn’t possibly be sure (of the existence of a higher power), one is necessarily sure that they are, and will continue to be, unsure. this reminds me of conservatives who argue that liberals are more closed minded, because they get offended by offensive free speech, hence bumper stickers that say things like “it’s not tolerant to tolerate intolerance” etc. I don’t think I’ll ever see a bumper sticker that says “certainty of uncertainty is not uncertainty.” the root of the problem is different ideas of what it means to be tolerant, and what it means to be certain of something. I wonder if these different ideas can really be helped at a certain point. anyway, I’m a lousy agnostic and I hate semantics so I’ll stop here.

today I got lost in the ghetto in Brockton on my way to an ear doctor appointment. my left ear does not hear as well as my right ear, but that still doesn’t explain a whole host of symptoms I’ve been having. for the hearing test they put you in a sound proof room, put the headphones on, you raise your hand when you hear anything in either ear. there was a different test where the woman on the other side of the glass told me to repeat the words she said, and for almost five whole minutes we did this:
“fish”
“fish”
“school”
“school”
“apple”
“apple”
“country”
“country”
“bowl”
“bowl”
“movie”
“movie”
“pen”
“pen”

and so on and so forth for what felt like a long time, and it was almost like some weird tension was building, like every word had a new urgency, and I could feel myself getting progressively sadder. I was very hungry and very stressed out after having been lost in the ghetto for close to half an hour, on the phone with a hospital operator who was helping me navigate with the help of google maps. man, fuck Brockton. and all of its deceiving lane changes and one way streets. I left that place in a pretty bad mood.

a good way to feel good about the world again if you’re feeling not so good about it is to notice all the people in vehicles that drive by you without crashing into your car. something about this mass cooperation is really benevolent and soothing to me. then on 495 there was a double rainbow over the highway.

I still maintain that saves the day’s I’m sorry I’m leaving album is great, and I think I’ll look up some tabs.

24 hours later: my hands are too small to play some of these chords. I went out to dinner with my dad and he said: “I am, therefore I must be.”

Thursday, September 2, 2010

2

to the world for whom I wash my hair at all,
mom is celebrating the hurricane with six beers,
lamenting humidity, and if she could fake a memory
it would be accepting that date proposal
from the future owner of Kellogg’s
(when she worked on the ship in the 70’s).

that never happened and instead there are fingernails
on battery receipts in my wire trash can,
airbrushed cats on cans of cat food.

there is nothing wrong with humidity
but that’s not the point.

I want to ignore that something in the face of poetry
is too smug and holding hands with the pressure
to achieve some staggering self, some steady parade
of bloated selfhood, I want to say what I heard in a dream,
that my fingertips end where the real thing begins but

I do have a name,
or what my mother called me when first I appeared,
and before I suspected the impossibly narrow space
in which to alternate between

keeping a safe distance from the facts that hang rudely above our heads
or
recoiling in classic horror at our options: A.M., P.M.

or loving the facts:
engineered cats and receipt literature,
although the second you close your eyes
you let the spiders braid your hair