Wednesday. October 29. 12:45 am

careful about your age, I have have been believing in magicians. some cynical sense that is well and right and that we will become resurfaced at least before drowning. I am making a plan and it is tantric in origin with roots in Oregon and with desires for Denver in the cusps of my comprehension, while the other sleeps in a desolate sleep, some some of obscure longing fought off with drunks and dreaming, while the realist wakes up early and confronts the sunrise without fear and without apprehension for the day that follows the suns arrival into our atmosphere. oh yes you can breathe now with your lungs full of tobacco smoke and your teeth gritted green with envy over the younger classes of citizens who can write with more angst than you and you worry about how overthought your phrase have become... well it seems a false alarm when they can splay themselves out over your operating table with a willing ease even before taking such paralyzing medications that keep the blood warm, the heart beating slowly, the brain moving through tunnels, the muscles believing they are stretching that eager stretch, the fingers believing they are scratching that eager itch, and the drunk lays out for sleep on the floor, hardly making it clear its intention when the Franklins of the world are out pillaging with legal representation and the borrowed time of our considerate piecemeal accounts of ballast are sewn together only by choppy retrospective narration. There is hardly a truth greater than the one that presents itself to you when you are dreaming. My truth now is that my life has become a spiderweb of insinuation and that I hardly have a hope for growth in the lower levels of my psyche even when the higher levels can come to own agreement that English is fucked because it allows vowels to end and begin words in succession without an apostrophe. Oh wink. Oh joy. Oh orgasm with the weight of my vowels, hanging and lingering the rafters of thought and yet so estranged from the big words of Faulkner and the Mississippi queens that lure the sovereign nations into foraging for grapes after the wine has all been drunk as if that is a solution for sobriety. The morning comes with a quick glint of faction, or of an ability to supply armor to the troupes or amour when they love natives and spawn and rebirth and settle and build cities in their collective likeness and the history of the world, oh why not, ode to mother, she is sleeping and would wake with a fright to find us fracking up her insides with undiagnosed root canals and cerebral palsy shock therapy treatments and illogical combinations of people and objects and clarity is so difficult to resolve oneself to find in this muddled mess of being. We are stranded in a lake that has no shore. A seaside epiphany also so close and yet the bedraggled tide of the moons brings us back like an anchor to the depths of total abandonment. I am lost tonight as I have been searching for articulate words to share to my love and she passed out after I said something about our relationship lacking danger, though this took on the characteristic of a person hiding from truth as the famous worst politicians do or as courtesy clerks hide away their failings as if going out and fetching carts for three hours is an affordable waste of paling white button up shirts and black slacks and the conglomerate company edges ever forward with an impaling hue to the ever stretching skyline and the move out took a few days because it never mattered much though it was probably about twenty five dollars a day and the English language comes in handy to form such disparate thoughts yet no one will ever translate this to be mistaken for something that can be counter culturally read.

october 27

Be careful, be careful. Racing across the continent out of the darkness, out of at least 10 hours of darkness, a light show, soft fireworks backlighting the clouds, so they are cut out stencils depicting ancient battles no pen or voice ever told of, before the harmony of the earth became disrupted with the development of the human intellect and the original settlers, their own desire to cut up and divide and the land underneath their feet must have slept otherwise they'd, we'd, be shaken off like little fleas on the back of a mangy old dog. 

Sleep with your eyes open. Imagine yourself drifting down a river on a piece of debris from some disaster. Imagine a calm river. Slowly, it rose and the sleeping town had no prediction for this rising, being subsumed and taking off of plots of land and replaced with riverbed, where we will eventually sleep, no fear, just dreams of oxygen or of a dry day from the past before the deluge uprooted our houses and sent them slowly drifting down river into the ocean, up the smiling face of the secretly erupting mountain, no geologist could predict, and the top is exploded, forgotten hikers are lost, and the writing is forced and feels like an exercise in patience and perseverance over self defeat when easily I could begin to write about the doubt involved in writing and the freedom of cleared away cobweb inspiration also gets subsumed by this slow, huge river. I'm imagining a glacier that melted in a splash, in an instant, miles of ice phase changed in a light bulb flash, and a brief waterfall as if a raincloud split open and poured itself out like my belgian beer or the whiskey stained back seats of the car, mixed in with potting soil, birthday cake icing, salt from the flats west of salt lake city, movie moments erased by a tidal wave of thoughts. Thoughts dark or ominous or full of potential regret. 

Kill the guilt narrative. There may be an undertone in all of your writing. There may be insecurities and yet when the writing comes out well it is unapologetic. 

Met up with Tom to go see Rural Alberta Advantage and makes me want to pretend their is a draft so I can move to Canada and start anew in a Banff cabin or the Mt. Stevens byway, the Jefferson Crater national fire monument, the green-sky ravine, under the aurora, the great barrier reef of the mountains, the hard edged sword rock or the copernicus butte. whatever mountain terrain names. disappear into them with a headlight and never let it burn out entirely. 

Intended to go to Dry The River. I rushed through work to do so. Tess refused to meet up on top of the hill and we wouldn't be able to catch a bus until 10:30. The hill had blacked out. The whole greek system went dark and the chaos of candle-lighting inspired the fear to to come back, the daunting trees and shadows caused by them and yet what backlight? we are suddenly lost in the woods after dark and the trees creak and houses all take on resemblance of tombs and she was scared left in the apartment with a few candles and shivering under the electric blanket... 

october 14

This is not time for writing. Must read Shield's comments on the distinctive prose poem vs. the ceaseless rant of the unpracticed writer, who blogs or something. All different shades of pretentious quips pour out of him and I find myself boiling in my seat, sometimes preferring the color changing trees outside the window to his hyper objective analysis of his own selected pieces of literature, so confident in his abilities. I am invisible on his radar. Nothing I have said or written has infected his mind enough for me to even be remembered by sight. Blame myself, without help, lose the rhythm of those background words, fall to pieces when I read his shit book and swore one too many times in his classroom, all golden frazzled and round tabled with the eager students lapping those tear drops. Mother over protects and makes us wear helmets made of tin foil. Sister drives up in through the rain and gets caught in traffic and lets smoke cough out her window, drifting along the astroplane. The harsh irrational value judgments that fire up about her or her or my girlfriend, these insane women, in three different ways, the sister on a deck of cards is a wild card, something unpredictable, just depends on the game played, shield's bald head on another card, the condescending self-satisfied guru, or the careless teacher of the arts who is too deeply involved with his own burgeoning theories of the medium to help us students to grow in our own most productive ways, the teacher who knows the field he teaches can't be taught, the students, the guppies, then the lover with a nervous condition, the other lover with a lethargic mind and dozing on the couch, leaves the burner on and the little cottage, the wood bricked cabin burns down, hidden away in a plot of unfurnished land.

Read the Crevecoeur. Give the cat eye drops, he may be going blind. Paranoia isolates itself in the reconstructed floorboards of this adjective friendly apartment, something of the nature of wild beast becoming tame and fighting back with last little pathetic energy once their master knows they are docile and lets them roam about freely. Bars of the cage ripped open but the beast naps on his mattress within, spent from all the energy expended in the attempted escape, though failed and snoring, the owner removes the cage and the barricade becomes invisible, habit-based, the trainer is a manipulator though she knows nothing of it, she knows her mind is rational, her habits sometimes painful to her body, her motions are accurate and purposeful, she tames the lion within her that could be called a heart. There is a heart card, a lion card, a sick cat card, a mediocre grade card and a french grammar quiz card.

Anxiety swells up. Stacked deck with anxiety monster cards. Gotta get out and going to the jazz show and feel a peace free of anxiety even with the french questions haunting my ears the beats removing their eyelids and having it out in underwater ghost ship battles where plumes of black sediment well up from the centre pompidou and the art exhibit becomes the whole world because even a pile of garbage can be beautifully framed and captured and I saw two people in neck braces surrounded by firemen and paramedics, evidently victims of attempted vehicular homicide or a hit and run or they fell off of a room somewhere and crawled to the center of an intersection, 42nd and university or 25th and ravenna or the new thai restaurant gave someone cardiac arrest, or the clouds crushed a skull because the pressure, oh god, I know the pressure of angry screaming clouds.

oct 9

In a flash I miss everyone. I have burrowed into my own life and rarely tunnel over to see the others. An apartment that entices lethargy because of its comfort. There are tapestries up-hanging, multi-colored posters and art and a cat and some guitars. I desire, so strongly now, a flat in New York. Drunken friends experimenting with the wherewithal to remove clothes and dance. We could use a cocktail shaker to mix up the acid with our blueberry lemonade, fresh picked from the rooftop garden, our huge glassy windows over looking other huge glass windows but even with the telescopes and inevitable binoculars we would not close those blinds. We would tear down curtains and perform for them. The act of thoughtless youth. Of folly and mistake and tears and sex and drugs and a carefree existence up within the clouds. The soot and rock of depression crumbled under foot, trampled plants, sweeping evening under the rug.

Art reviews and poetry. Publishing ritual deaths with asterisks including blood pyramids and pagan beheadings.

What am I talking about?

I miss everyone. I miss the people I never had relationships with. I miss the opportunity (because of where they are and who they are now. Looking at a few specific connects. San Francisco. New York. Vancouver. Spread across Washington and Oregon. Denver, Colorado and a ridiculously expensive trip to see a great friend. A shame full up in the heart to turn down the invitation based on plane tickets.)

What about the others. Can there be others?

Long Beach, California. Los Angeles. Olympia, Washington. Anacortes. Boston, Mass. These are cities, not friends. There are loose, loose threads connecting me to these cities through my friends. Matthew in Denver desires to see me this winter break for a week or so. With infinite resources and a totally blind lack of guilt for the squandering of such money.

Is it squandering money to be youthful? To visit a friend? To be frugal and spend nothing on booze for a month and save more money than I can admit.

Woodbury. Ashland. Tacoma. Brooklyn. Neighborhoods. West Seattle. Capitol Hill. Eastlake. Ballard. Fremont. Northgate. Et. al.

Be a better person.

oct 8th

They handed out little purple and gold new testaments to swarming hoards of early morning college students. Not even early morning. 9:15 or so. I almost attack myself again. For not waking up earlier and writing and feeling zen, if possible. Keep searching for balance. Motivation and execution. Enough hydration for the needs of my moving body. This morning was a sad awakening and I slept in and saw the rosy red violet morning sky and the brightness of the orange night sky with the light pollution hitting both sides of the clouds like flashlights.

I've never heard a more offensive, subjective phrase in literary criticism than what is determined "purple prose." Yesterday, accused of writing in this way, I sat insulted. The phrase has connotations of self indulgence, of pretentious attitudes toward writing, of over-writing. Not sure about over-writing. Does it have to be a best seller? Shouldn't prose imitate life? Isn't life a chain of discordant thoughts that we wish we could edit?

Nonesuch. Nonsense. Used as a bad example. Well did I learn anything? Other than to "tone it down" I am not sure I did. Aggravated by this vague and elusive condemnations, I spiraled into a pit. I couldn't sleep much. Contradictions in descriptions made my writing seem without value. My habits seemed without value. (What habits! You fell off. Get the fuck up.)

By habits I mean the routine of writing, of free writing, in the mornings or during the nights to help excavate the brain a bit, loosen the tie, the knot untangles, whatever. In the morning it is to wake up and connect with the myriad elements within. To write in half French. Half dream. At night would be to write off the day and some nice (or awful) memories to immortalize that day.

What has blocked me so greatly (besides drinking, my girl) is an incessant thought that my writing needs direction otherwise it is worthless. No. What should happen, my little devil, is a return to consistent writing practice, including a study of methodology and the revision of the process through the eyes of my favorite authors (and who the fuck are they anyway?) Do I enjoy any writer or musician with any honesty anymore? Or is it just a wave of envy and self doubt when I read or hear something beautiful? I should be able to write like that. I should sing more. I should I should I should I should. 

After the pollack mind explosion free writes (it's like warming up the muscles before fucking cage fighting) it is then time to work on writing stories and poems. Things with rectangular boundaries and page numbers and organization.

It is time to live and write and play with utmost urgency and to no longer feel so dead.

Take Benjamin Franklin's advice about drinking, as he believes it to needlessly muddle the clear mindedness necessary to become successful.

No inspiration comes from drinking that is legible enough to remember.

Another thing. Memory. All of my years of drinking have destroyed my memory. The moments are there somewhere. Buried. All blurred together like melted ice cubes.

What fills in the spaces these memories inhabited.

My mental life is fascinating yet violent to my spirit. Whatever that means. I have horrible negative internal self talk and it is disastrous for many social situations when I need to be cool and collected. I would prefer to be cool and confident all of the time anyway as I never tend to get anything done beyond sitting and stewing in an angry doze.