2003-06-09 - 3:38 a.m. - breaking down
and so i've been thinking that this lovely little journal has been neglected lately and i hope to write in it with a bit more frequency like i used to but sometimes its hard, you know? like when you just graduated from college and you don't want to teach (well, not for real, in a school anyway) and in fact you don't even know if you believe that the institution of education is even a productive or positive thing, and you want to get in and help make it better but no one seems to want to let you do that, and so all you really want to do is work at borders (way to land that 6.50 an hour job, brah) and work on writing fiction and the occasional poem and get it all published, and on top of all of this your heart is strung out on a beautiful, but somewhat intimidating girl who lives in the town you just moved away from (oh, how we would sit out in front of her house on that magnificent chair, her upside down form to my rightside up, and how you knew you adored her when she sucked on that cigarette upside down, her arm contorted in such unnatural ways making you almost offer to hold it for her, to lift the cigarette to her lips so that her arm could rest naturally)and she seems to actually like you back......and what the fuck is going on? everything is kind of strange and unsettling these days. like all you want to do is move out of your parents house but you've only lived there for a week, and everything is restless and sleepless, and everything you truly want is right at your finger tips but you can't quite finish (for various circumstances, some within, some outside of your control) a goddam thing. and so you lay on your bed and listen to records, and keep writing so fucking much that you have blisters, and you keep making cappucinos which are really lattes (people just don't understand coffee at borders) and wait for your first day on the book floor so you can sell books, and you take 23 pictures with a polaroid camera, and include all of your favorite dayton places and people, and each picture is in the shape of a heart, and you send it in the mail in the hopes that it will help this girl fall in love with you...
...and you are waiting for that moment of clarity when it all makes sense and you know exactly what is happening, and why it is happening, like ten thousand windows breaking, or every living infant screaming at the same time (can you imagine the din such an event would make?) but nothing comes and you know its too soon, that this is the part where you're supposed to relax and do your own thing, and enjoy your life while you figure the rest of it out, but you're afraird because you're not ready to figure the rest of it out, and even if you were, you're afraid that you won't follow through and you will wake up one day, twenty years from now bored, and lost, and ugly, and bald, and worthless, and wondering what happened, how did you become one of those people, how did you give everything you were once so passionate about...and you realize this and it is your moment of clarity, and it all makes sense:
"i am afraid to grab on to anything new, for fear of letting go of everything i currently hold"
you know, all that shit clutched up in your fist the way a child holds a parent's finger, its all there in your fist like a heart, pumping even, dripping blood and smiling, and saying, 'become ambidextorous, learn how to balance on tightropes' and you want to and really its just a matter of putting one foot in front of the next and taking it one step at a time...
...shit.
okay. i feel a bit cleansed.
perhaps future entires will be more coherent and less second person.
xoxo
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