I’ve thought a time or two about quitting this.  I don’t need to sing to you, to string words together that aren’t half as good as what I could put down elsewhere, to tell you the story of my life as though its saying was worth the breath.  I don’t know that it is.  I don’t know that it ever was.  There are plenty of others who do it better than I.  My mind has never been focused that way.  Time is better spent elsewhere.

Last night I did the right thing.  I didn’t before, and that cost me.  I didn’t know that it would and maybe it shouldn’t have, but that’s not the point.  I did the right thing last night.  It was not a transformative experience.  It was hard in a dull way.  But that’s probably how it should be.  If it were an easy thing everyone would do it, and looking outside you can see that isn’t what’s happening.  I wasn’t relieved when it was over.  I wasn’t happy or proud.

I feel as stony as my friends joke that I am.  I don’t feel bad.  I don’t feel particularly good.  I feel pulled in different directions but all of them are away.  I feel encumbered.  I want to be rid of things.  What I want leaves and what I have is unimportant.  I want to wear my soul thin from walking.  I want to barely feel myself except in the thinnest boundaries; my skin against the wind, my feet against the ground, my eyes against the sun.  I want to open my mouth wide and forget how to speak.  I want to invent a language with no verbs.  I want to stand so still I become a monument.

This was never meant to be such a diary as it became.  It was supposed to have a tinge of that, but mainly to be about writing.  I’ll be trying to refocus.  Will discuss John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing and talk about music, playlists, and their influence on my writing next time.

It’s not that I’m numb or disconnected.  I’m where I want to be, given my means.  This is what I wanted.  I come alive on the page and otherwise I’m not invested.  My heart rests.  But that’s not true.  Broken up into these pieces, there are phases, moments, quadrants, in which I literally shake.  I feel so strongly about some things these days.  I’m up against a wall with one part of my life and with the others I grab at the thin air.  I feel surrounded by absurdity, by irony, by things so abstract I can’t discern any meaning and I see people relishing in them.  I’ve been rededicating myself.  I found myself searching for a kind of morality in Ohio and here I see its opposition.  I know what not to be.  I know where I stand and I know what’s below me.  We all walk on the bones of the dead.  It’s not something I’ll forget.

My field of vision narrows.  My interests dwindle.  I love the writing I’m doing.  I’m trying to read Notes from the Underground and I struggle because it’s so self-indulgent.  If it’s not a story of sacrifice and toil I am repulsed.  This is my Metamorphosis, except I wake up in bed to find myself a bitter old man.  But it’s good that some people write about other things, about themselves like I am now, about tripe like “the boundary between public and private”.  If everyone wrote something of moral import I’d have a much harder time getting noticed.

I’m trying to become more moral.  To live the way I write.  It’s a code I believe, it’s just not something I’ve been able to follow yet.  I find myself becoming a little harder again.  I don’t blame God for anything anymore.  I find myself becoming more religious.  I’ve asked him for something twice, recently, and I won’t deny it was selfish.  But I haven’t been confronted with anything I wanted that deeply in so long.  Ten years.  He didn’t grant me my wish and neither did the stars, and what does that mean?  That the alternative is better, I hope.  Not that it’s His plan, and He had it ordained this way, but that the compromise is too costly.

I feel best when I’m my own master, and I feel better knowing there’s nothing to lay blame on but myself.  I’m taking that weight.  The weight of the future, of the distance.   I have an idea of what’s to come.  The end isn’t clear but the path is worth it.  She’s worth it.  She and California, the distance to and from, the miles to Ohio.  When we started talking she had a path of her own, a long trip, and she told me she’d be better for me for having taken it.  It’s coming true of me, too.  I want to wear my bootsoles thin walking to her.  And if she’s not there I can still say I’ve gone those thousands of miles.

So, in an odd way I’ve been trying to teach myself how to be a man.  I don’t think I am one yet.  Occasionally someone will describe me as such, and I take it as a compliment.  But I’m bothered by my complacency, and if a real man is anything, complacent isn’t it.  I was on a balcony at school the other day and I saw a guy take a seat on some steps, peel open a pack of cigarettes, and let the wrapper drift away.  I wanted to yell at him, but I didn’t.  I thought, have I been blameless on this front?  Have I littered, or let friends litter?  And, yes, of course I have.  So it would be hypocritical to call him out on it.  But that’s not right, is it?  Your moral standing should not give you pause when you see an injustice.  It’s a luxury, hypocrisy.  We happy middle-class, we’re able to stay our action with political correctness, with our own position, and that shouldn’t be so.

Well, nevermind the miscellany.  I had some things to link you to, but I’ve forgotten them or didn’t save them.  Down the pike I think I’ll try to remember all the books I read this year (not many), as a lot of litblogs are doing that sort of thing.

You’ll note at right that I’ve linked to My Soul is a Butterfly, another one of those lovely, soulful blogs.  Hannah’s writing drips with the stuff of existence.  Also, I went and got a Twitter account, for god knows what reason.  You can find it here.  That’s it for today.

*I don’t know why you’d ask a rocket scientist to do that.