11.02.2001

nothing/everything. the plans of my world are falling into being plans and not necessarily into place, but there's a sense of relief coupled with anxiety nonetheless. my plans are not growing from my fingers like words in books as should be their intention. my life is not taking the shape i am intending for it. i am in-between. i am waiting. i am working on the quarter and being tired and uninterested in the lives of those around me and generally pretty uninterested in my own life. i am curious as to what the therapist, were i to return to her as i am supposed to, would say about all this. would i have anything to expound upon - my life, the forms it takes? for right now it is in this amoebic shape, going nowhere, doing nothing, merely waiting for winter to come, to swallow me, merely waiting for the moment when the novel is ripe in my head and thus in my hands - when it is ready to spring forth from the wells of my being. yes, the waiting. currently the thoughts in my head involve balancing the checkbook and doing the laundry - tasks and tasks and chores and tasks. what did i forget to get at the grocery store? how much of this material must i read in order to do well on the midterm? will anyone ever come into the computer lab while i am in here, this huge sterile white box, filled with the heat of these machines and their incessant humming? would it matter? and these thoughts are of the mundane - i am beginning to think that i am of the mundane, that same stuff the rest of the world is made up of, i too, am apart of this, these actions, daily and overpowering, their consequences miniscule and unremarkable. am i too then unremarkable? must i admit that the fantasies in my head of daily life with children and family and my own home are the mundane, the weak, the opposite of powerful, striking, fantastic? must i admit that all that makes me an artist are simply the same things that make others human? that i see the same thing, perhaps not even in a different light or with a different edge, perhaps it is merely the same thing and yet i am struck by it - i am fascinated, and one day, when i have managed my fantasies of my own family and that life, it will all disappear into the cloudiness of everyday. for what is it that keeps us wide-eyed and child-like? what is it that keeps us fascinated by sunsets - the stillness of twilight, anything simple and remarkable? what is it precisely? i have noticed in my time here, on this earth, that there are those folks who make everything we do seem amazing. there are those in the world who make being in a parking lot incredible, those whose smile is an electric storm on your brain, kerouac's mad ones - so is it them? are these, whose aura is so electric we cannot spend vast quantities of time with them, the reason that life is beautiful? or perhaps is it that the world is beautiful already and yet these mad ones become the eyes we need to see it with? is it that everyone is capable of seeing the world in this light, with star-struck eyes, but some of us lose our grasp on how to use them? is it that everyone sees the world as this incredible thing that it is, but forgets when they are wrapped, unconsciously, in this blanket of the mundane? is it possible that i might lose my sight and forget forever? barring that, is it possible for me to write it right, to show the world in my words that everything i see is incredible for split seconds, that the way that light reflects off walls is more full of meaning than a volume of my descriptions of it? there are moments in this life where i am conscious of what things look like and what they mean by looking the way they do - and though i am without the language for it, i hope to be able to convey somehow, somewhere, the meaning and the history wrapped inside of each and everything that i do; that anyone does. i remember specific instances in my history - sitting in an old car with a good friend watching the sunset, talking about our futures; standing above the city in which i grew up any number of times with all the men that i ever loved, feeling truly sentient; and last night, as i was leaving the bar, giving hugs to those i love, finding two friends, deep in discussion, hugging and kissing goodbyes, but holding on longer, squeezing tightly, without words knowing and conveying that i am sorry, for whatever it is, for whatever it might be, i am here and your tears do not need to be hidden. and how do i tell you, with typing, what this was for me, however momentary? how am i to keep telling you, years from now, what i think and make it beautiful, and make it worth the reading? how do i say everything that the world is, everything i know or don't know, when i am all filled up with functionality and the mundane is creeping in and threatening to kill me? more importantly, does it matter just now, or am i trying to fill my time up with the contemplation of anything of remote importance?

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