paul auster: the book of illusions

beautiful and sad

my last dream last night was very vivid. stephanie and i climbed a cliff made of cork and grown all over with moss. the waves washed up over us and i dug in with my hands and feet. we were very high up, but we laughed and held on tightly.

we cleared all the furniture off of the roof last night so the roofers could get at it. later i brought out a single chair and an ashtray and installed myself by the door to read the book of illusions. tonight i continued, glancing up to watch the heat lightning flicker. downstairs the boys argued over a boardgame, stephanie crocheted and uri and rebecca watched anime. even when all the noise and fuss irritates me, i enjoy the presence of my friends. i've been withdrawing more, not answering my mother's calls, my aunt's e-mails, i'm failing to feed the snake, who presses his nose against the glass every night, searching. when galen came over to make music with rebecca i bought cigarettes and went up to the roof. it'll pass, but what will have changed?

why do the most inane passages from a terribly-written webcomic make me go all hopelessly squishy?
i am le squish fest today.
i felt like i was on the point of bawling all day at work, like every minuscule decision i made was: log into computer account or bawl on the floor. ask intern to fetch supplies from closet or bawl on the floor. answer visitor's question or begin bawling. i told emn i was going to cry if she hugged me the other night and i haven't yet.
it is cozy here in my corner of the world and i shall go to sleep in a downy nest and in the morning i will go through the motions and i will keep going through them until the things i do make sense again and i know why i do them.

here i am, on the verge of something i don't feel like i can post on a public forum. on the verge of changing something. i'm thinking about the things i can control and the things i can't. i'm thinking of the person that i want to be and the places i want to go. this morning i walked out into the muggy sunlight and i saw businesspeople taking their children off to daycare. will i ever be able to support children of my own? will i have to leave for work in a suit to make that happen? my lifestyle is possible when i am the only person i worry about, and that is me as a healthy twentysomething. i never thought much about the amount of money i would need to be comfortable growing up. i was too worried about not getting stuck in pennsylvania and/or some constricting formal environment. the reason i chose bard in the end was because i wanted something more unconventional, but i've also always wanted to be able to take care of myself. at the least, to be independent. that drive to independence has made me a less giving person, less willing to be vulnerable, and i haven't even been able to achieve true independence. i can't have everything, but that's no reason to settle for nothing. which parts of my foolish dreams are worth holding onto, and which do i need to let go? my parents sacrificed so much to stability. they became these small town jobs, they accepted so much mundanity, but they knew why. my brother and i were so lucky and so loved by them. we had everything we needed and quite a bit more. when does that choice become easy? was it easy for my parents? i see parents playing with toddlers on the subway and i think, yeah, that would be nice. it seems much more likely that i'll spend the rest of my life chasing after wisps of dreams that i don't fully understand. you pick a path and you follow it, or maybe you get lost following dancing lights. do i wait for certainty? will the arrow in my heart tell me which way to go?
since i started working after school i've told myself i have to fake it to survive. that was when i started going by my full name, to generate this air of confidence. and i don't believe that it fools anyone for a second, but i try to lie to myself that it does. if i can't convince myself that i'm capable of certain things, then i won't be able to make anyone else believe.

and my brain won't go back to sleep. stephanie decided to start a book club, so here i am reading "i am a strange loop" on the subway, and getting overanalytical about everything. he (hofstadter) seems like a kindred spirit, a vegetarian and pragmatist. he has a gift for putting his thoughts down in such a way that i keep thinking, but that's what i think! i should have written this book! when clearly that is not the case. he makes it seem easy, which is a good way to get philosophy into the people. it seems so easy that barely into the third chapter i begin to question his assumptions. am i being snowed by his easy confidence? the use of silly jargon makes me think of specious self-help books, with his "soul shards" and "simmbolism." will this turn out to be some corny "chicken soup for the atheist?" this book club was a good idea. i am waiting for people who understand and care about these arguments more than i to trounce me in debate so i don't just write the whole thing off. but first i shall finish it.
thinking critically with a goal in mind is energizing.

Abundant sunshine. Hot. High around 95F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph.

i'm restless.
it's late.
the city became a fucking oven overnight.
that's all.

the transformation, by juliana spahr

reaffirmed my polyamory and gave my doubts comfort. we suffer doubts, we make mistakes. there's no conclusion; we try to work through our messes. as work grows more intolerable and difficult i'm learning to float above the stress. get the job done, and let the niceties go. support the people around you and look out for your own sanity. i stayed late because i had no where to be and certain individuals seemed to think i had time for more projects. after, i went into the courtyard and bummed a smoke from gaston, more overworked and cheerful than i. i lay on my back on the dance floor and spread out my arms. blue blue sky, drifting clouds, the red walls of a building i love surrounding me on three sides. a perfect summer evening. when i come home drunk on the subway i feel tall and stretchy. feist coos to me and i try to look more fierce than vulnerable. there were thoughts i wanted to write down and no pen in my bag. now it's time for sleep. in the morning i take another crack at it.

it's a good night for writing. i'm all pensive and restless in head but not in body, listening to the saccharin sweet mix on repeat. it's mostly mountain goats with guest appearances by the smiths, feist, the sugarcubes, matty charles, and the magnetic fields.
john darnielle seems to have done a lot of stuff and experienced many interesting things, but for his first who knows how many albums he made up stories about people. compelling, intricate stories about fucked up people with broken hearts and chemical addictions. sometimes they don't make any sense to me. the rest of the time they make me want to cry with relief or jump up and shout and scream THAT'S BEAUTIFUL! DO YOU ALL SEE HOW BEAUTIFUL THAT IS? he sings like someone whose body has been taken over, rocking forward onto his toes and lifting his face to the microphone with his eyes closed.
the snake is nosing around. he looks thin. so do i. it makes me angry that that makes me feel good.
it makes me angry that going to weddings makes me lonely. i made a decision years ago that to be true to myself i had to find a way outside of the traditional monogamous western couple. no white dress, no one true love, nothing that is easily explained to the parental units. get me on a soap box and i can go on for hours about the morality of my position and the foolish optimism behind most marriages. whence comes this piercing longing for one perfect lover? perhaps it is vestigial. i ignore it and carry on, but it betrays me. my actions are inconsistent. am i growing up? am i a grownup? is this the time when i learn to do the things i'm supposed to, because i'm supposed to? perhaps i should suck it up, have my cake or eat it, and recognise that i have been acting like a selfish child for years.

mark sent me a tsuba, the disc that serves as the hilt on a japanese sword. it's decorated with three rabbits that chase one another's tails. one side of the disc shows their bellies and the other side their backs. i tied it with a string and hung it from my bedframe. they look a little cramped in their circle, almost like crawling cats. it has a nice weight to it.
since working at ps1 i've developed this irrational fear that i'm growing stupider. i don't understand or learn things as easily as i used to, and they say your brain is pretty well shaped out by the time you're twenty-five, so i'm stuck with the person i've become. of more use than becoming stupider would be to become simpler. my capacity for complicating the simple unfortunately has not diminished.
when will i want what's good for me?
when will i stop dreaming and start living?

bad luck today. i couldn't muster the motivation to take the bus upstate, or even leave the house for most of the day. i did plink around on the mandolin a bit, though. it's starting to get fun and frustrating as i experiment with little riffs and chord variations. there are pages and pages of song lyrics in my notebook that i would like to put to music.
so i finally decided to leave the house and went downtown to go to meeting for worship with an odd feeling in my stomach. when i arrived i was the only one there. the reason i like tuesday meeting so much is the thickness of the silence, but with just me there it was a bit too silent. i went for a walk down to the atlantic ave shopping center instead and looked at shoes, thinking about belonging and not belonging, wondering why i feel so shy and nervous. thomas lent me a book about a threesome that move to hawaii. he led me to expect the book to be about the threesome, but really it's about being an outsider in hawaii.
got back in the subway to go see akie and kyle play, and it turned out akie was in the hospital with his tonsils.
no meditation, no music.