Stop it.

"I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on some path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the thir time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them."


Insomnia is productive of déjà vu, in my experience. Perhaps the hallucinatory state sleep deprivation inspires opens up a portal that is peculiarly susceptible to incantations of past experience. I am making a choice (of sorts) to stay awake and click these keys in the hope that something redeemable will come out of it.

State of stomach – think coffee ulcer with an overlay of not-quite-done rice and vegetables.

State of mind – oscillating between pure confusion and ecstatic clarity.

State of the union – oh, well, that’s just precious, isn’t it? I’m reading Robert Penn Warren’s Poetry and Democracy, which if nothing else supplies an historical pedigree to the feeling that everything is so ineluctably fucked the proper step may be to subvert all expectations and enlist in OCS, the better to get inside the schizophrenic animal that is our national consciousness.

State of the book – Joan Didion’s old shit kind of rocks, you know? Don't even try to creep on the White Album or Slouching toward Bethlehem; you have to bumrush the both of them, setting aside entire afternoons when you should be writing that seminar paper but instead you're sitting in some cramped Fargo bar alternating between coffee and Grain Belt until it's suddenly six and your brain is warped and elated for it.

State of letter writing – I have purchased paints in order to add excitement to the non-existent missives, the writing of which I have penciled in to my non-operative datebook.

State of insomnia – omnivorous. See above.

State of technological détente – I log on to a computer for about seventeen minutes a week. I have this labtop here in the apartment for clicking and clacking, but the world wide web does not generally ensnare me for long periods of time. This is refreshing, especially given the possibility that world war four is not just a rhetorical device employed by that one guy from Soundbombing III, but a clearly educible potentiality.