Sanctification

I am waiting in a tiny room. I grab the smooth, silver handle of the chair to get up as the nurse walks in. 'Walker,' she says. I sit back down. I am not Walker. 

I can feel the capacity of my lungs growing smaller. It's Spic N Span, gasoline,and cigarettes. Air isn't stable like we think it is when we see dust floating in the lazy summer light. It flies by us at a thousand miles an hour. Today it feels like a million miles an hour. 

The most tranquil paintings become the most suspenseful. An open field, a beach with a calm shoreline, a mountainside next to a large lake, all become disaster scenes once you put a human in them. The human stands there and we look at him. What will he do? He cannot stand in that field forever. Where will he go?

There is so much suspense and terror in public that it vanishes inside us; we become numb to the overwhelming perception of others.  

'Daker,' she calls. My hands are folded on my lap. I twist my neck toward the man who had been sitting by the vestibule with the glass doors. Didn't he get here after me? Maybe he was late.

When you are in the boy scouts they teach you how to use a compass. They stand you on top of a big hill and they have you rotate all around, looking at the landscape, the sky, the sun, and they explain how to orient yourself. From then on you always imagine a time that you will need the compass. A time when you will be lost in the woods, maybe guiding your family during a camping trip, and you will hold the compass off the string around your neck and determine exactly where you need to go. Your sons will look up to you in awe. You are their hero.

The room I am in is much colder than any of the places I think about. I think about European cafes, African safaris, pools by Jamaican resorts - places my friends have been, that white people have always gone to try to complete their lives.We made it through the ice age. This waiting room seems an unnatural state. I think they make it cold so that you will not get comfortable. One more of the subtle ways we are taught what to want.

'Janice,' she calls. A woman with a tall hairdo beside me gets up and walks slowly toward the hallway with the smiling nurse. I didn't even know there was a woman here. My lungs slowly inflate and deflate. I imagine them as small as my kidneys. There's a clock on the wall but I only stare at it without reading it. I cannot read it; it seems a Chinese character mounted on the wall. The time in the waiting room is always 'Not yet'. That is all that matters.

There are a million things to look at and you can never tell what someone is looking at. A person could be looking at your fashion, at your vocabulary, at your posture; you never know what another person sees. A business man only sees your wallet. I do not hold this against people, for according to this definition, I am another person. I do not know what I see. I am in a waiting room; one does not look at anything in a waiting room. I am in a chair thinking of nothing. I only sense vaguely that my lungs are cramped, tightening; I feel I will die a half-perception.  

'Mr. Durther,' the nurse says serenely. He smooths his lapels as he stands up and has a boyish smile on his old, cavernous face. What is he so happy about? I know there could be something, I just don't know what it is. I am in a state where I must question happiness for its roots. What could be in it? The image of the woman one loved? A building one designed? The thought of a field with no one in it? 

A baby is in a stroller with a cover over top of it. The woman across from me looks gently and lovingly into it. I was once a baby in a stroller. I was once a million things. Or: a man is whatever room he is in. A being in time can define themselves according to any part of it; so what are they really?

'Mrs. Sylvan, he'll see you now.' 

I am still staring at the man in the solitary open field. There are trees on all sides of the field. He is looking slightly to his right, but is still motionless. Where will he go?  

After several thoughtless moments I perceive that there is no one else in the waiting room. It is just me. I think of leaving, but I imagine the nurse calling my name a second later if I do. Yet there is no arc to waiting; there is no plot. It's just waiting and waiting and more waiting. You could wait forever; there would never be an interesting development. And here I am, waiting.

Bad Dreams

The warm weather brings bad dreams.

Death is a question mark at the end of life.

I sit at my desk, quietly looking at myself

hanging in the corner of my office.

I felt my body burn beneath the covers.

I could not take it! I burst awake.
I ran away from the orphanage in search of love.

In the woods I got caught in a thicket

and my foot came off in the brambles.

I looked at it and did not wonder why.

Do our feelings end in the lives of domestic creatures?

Watching lives better than ours play out in the theaters?

She saw me the night my life was weeping.
Once she left my heart gave way to sleeping.
In the morning time had still been creeping.
And nothing came to mind that was worth keeping.

An honest person cries when the seasons change.

Dreams wear off, skin grows thin, the weather becomes cool.

So I look at myself hanging in the corner of my office.

What's the matter? Regret your whole life?

I have lost my foot in a thicket but the only true hell is

God gave us a childhood such that we could ruin someone else's.

Mr. Holla's Opus

under the covers

Writing is easy. It is about truth.

I tried to fall asleep but I could not because I did not know what a woman is.

Sleepy eyes. My eyes are droopy. They cannot see the truth anymore and they do not know if there was a truth to see. Are my eyes closed or did the world disappear?

Writing is easy. It is about the truth.

The truth is that people are miserable. Boredom. Hope. Pain. The future, the past. The eyes of others.

More than anything a bureaucracy will make you bored. That is its true victory. It does not frustrate you so much as it lulls you to sleep; it makes you believe there is not even a world out there to interact with, to engage. We thus wander the streets believing ourselves to not be in conflict; and thus we lose the conflict.

Is society different? So many people, living lives of mimicry, subtly believing that we must be progressing. They do not know that each life starts all over again, has its own responsibility to be alive. No one believes that. So what does it mean?

Sex. Let our bodies collide. Then we will make money and have each other and grow sad as we grow old but before then we will be able to float through the moderate pleasures of life and grin as we have forgotten anything else that was worth fighting for. Many people do not believe me when I say I will never be an adult.

Whenever people fall apart I think, why didn't they fight? Why didn't they fight to keep it going, to make it right? Why didn't they try their hardest to let the other person know they love them? What could be more important to them? Than loving others?

You think you are writing about the truth but you are not. Each life is directed by a flow of actuality, the under-the-water mechanics of a soul, and we can only find it if we ask for it again and again, falling to our knees in darkened rooms, screaming in whispers, asking something we do not know to reveal it to us.

I feel like I've lost a lot. Maybe if I had had more time to study I would be making a bigger impact on people? That's probably a lie. Why haven't I done more with what I have? Perhaps because I feel pulled in many different directions.

At work: 'The worst part about thinking about what is keeping you from getting what you want is when you realize it's that you don't even know what it is.'

I am wailed at all day long. He called it 'noise'. Oh, these voices. They crush me into inactivity. They tell me more was possible with one person, they call the life of another a waste of time. Then they curse me for thinking about others in this way; they say 'follow anyone long enough, and you would see a soul there'. They think about all of life and I stare wide-eyed, paralyzed. They wonder if other people really think what they are after is good, the good. So much stretching, so much strain. If only I had stayed funny, stayed upbeat. What people believe matters for what they will hope in; what they will hope in for what they will create.

What is the right reason to marry? Because of being known? Or just someone to try really hard with, to love? Because you want them around you a lot? How does it work?

I thought of a scene earlier of a girl and a guy together. The girl looked to the guy and said 'Describe your perfect girl'. And he would describe her and then she would say: 'I'm not her'. Then the girl would describe her perfect guy and he would say: 'I'm not him'. Then they would hug and decide to love each other and not expect the other person to change, to not judge them by what they were not, to know they are in line to love a real out-there-in-the-world, their-own-thinking-and-deciding person, and that we are only haunted by spectres of perfection, but we are instead given so much more.

You are not your potential or your thoughts or your past. You are your time; spend it creating, living, trying. Do not spend it in death, in lying around and feeling the pain of lost things.

I thought of everything, I thought of Max scenes, but mostly I thought 'what is a woman?'

I had been drifting off to sleep, perhaps getting tireder, when suddenly it struck me: I am going to die.

My eyes burst wide awake.

the first snow of spring

If you are not ready to write, you know it is time to do so.

Planned pleasures aren't pleasures. Your life is good as much as you lose track of the time.

How terrible that the more truth a moment has, the more we are crushed into non-expression.

Every sentence that starts with 'I remember' is at least that much painful.

The most important moment in a relationship is the one where you start the chapter entitled Humor.

You demonize people in your mind when they do not give you what you want.

Sentences: the only true confidants.

Depression is the greatest crime in a society that values happiness.

Conversational Existentialism: being willing to surprise yourself with your own comments.

The opposite of loneliness is not being known - it is being loved.

Aging: the losing of one's faith in the ability of words to connect people.

I was lost and alone and I thought about calling you, but then I realized that I was actually lost and alone, and that there was no one to call.