Thursday, October 28, 2010

October 2000

So nothing really happened. Not a yes and not a no, but a "wait a little while longer". Interminably drawing out the process. Let me go and let me be. Never do I feel so insignificant or helpless as when I am in the courthouse watching the toils of the judicial system. I created this set of circumstances for myself; I never conceived how this would evolve.

I leave the court and make my way downtown to wait on a connecting bus. I'm standing on the corner trying to read Stendhal and not think about my agitation. A black man in bibs comes walking down the sidewalk carrying a placard with references to the relevance of the Oklahoma City bombing in lite of some obscure verse from the book of Amos complete with magazine pictures and ad art. He is shouting in an admirably booming voice that I can hear from fifty yards away, but which I cannot discern any words until he is almost upon me. "Nigga gonna do everythang! What mah Gawd say!" I could glean no other pearls from his rant, but I tried to ponder these.

I spent the weekend trying to avoid thinking of anything important. I chewed my nails and fucked around on the computer. I went to the movie yesterday to see "Lost Souls". I got off the bus a few blocks from the theater and was chewing my thumbnail. A man who was coming my direction down the service road perpendicular to my right as I crossed shouted, "Look at that grown man suckin his thumb!" He went on shouting, but I was too far to hear exactly what.

I came out of the movie unimpressed into a pouring rain and waited almost an hour for a bus getting soaked to the skin. I finally made it home. Sometimes the hardest thing I can do is to say nothing at all. I do not do reticence very well. I drive you away with my attentions, and I suffer acutely by my own concentrated energies towards you. I'm consumed by my own fires. Your indifference is the fuel that feeds them. I only wish to be close to you in order to feel that warmth reflected and not be burned up.

I've slept little, but I'm accustomed to that. Some day I will die and have the rest I deprived myself of during my life.

It occurred to me riding home soaked in my clothes and freezing in the air-conditioned bus that my sin is my willingness to endure; to endure the consequences of my acts and adapt to them. My cheerfulness is my curse; my melancholy is my solace. I live in my head. I act precipitously in my affairs. It seems to remind me that I'm alive; but it is caprice that drives me in such things, not strength of will.

God, let me fly away. I'm so tired, and I'm smothering. Save me from this body of death.

I'll sleep tonight and feel better tomorrow. That's how it always goes. I'll endure my own mediocrity. That sort of attitude is applauded nowadays. I'm a survivor - inert.

I cry so easily, but what do I love?

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About all we get outta life is what we graze along the way.

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