It’s not that most of the time I feel afraid, or like I can’t express myself. In fact, the point is exactly that I don’t, I just feel normal. My normal is pretty roomy, compared to most, I mean I’ve carved out some breathing room and I don’t bump my head or stub my toe or any of that shit. But that’s part of the problem, really, it’s easy to get comfortable.

The subtlety of it is what’s most amazing, how you can get out of the habit of seeing it. Because it’s negative space most of the time. But I’m starting to repeat myself.
I really like Egan’s point about needing to remember that concepts are what we think with much more than they’re what we think about. Very similar idea. And nothing can be done without good tools.

feel. just what you feel. stop being afraid of the noise. do you want to miss her now. or just keep it there a while longer. this avoidant behavior lately.

stop trying to sculpt it, you can’t have it both ways.

stop being afraid of the fucking noise. have some tea.

ahhh, tired. when you slow it down, it really draws out slow, the jitteriness sometimes I can do without. what if it doesn’t mean anything to anyone. that’s why you put it out there, really. because that makes it brave. nudity isn’t brave when you’re all alone.
how to live, the little invisible choices we’re always making.
eventually, before we realized it, they define us. when is a choice not a choice? when it’s too little, too often, too quick. when you can’t see it for choosing it always, so reflexively. it becomes the ground, not the figure, the background against which you work.
glasses on your nose.
damn.

occasionally I worry if I still have the strength, but the worry feels manufactured, it’s ‘something I should take under consideration’, not a heart-worry. it may well be slow and I don’t know that it will be as dramatic as the early ones—well. I’m thirty. it's ok.

flame

So I decided to start a flame war with another blog, http://removealldoubt.blogspot.com. What is a flame war, exactly? Is that when you send each other obscene text messages? Well, that’s not quite what I have in mind, more I want to periodically respond to their posts—
they are, best I can tell, a bunch of Republican Lawyers, RL from here on out. Just so the record is straight, I’m left left left, I mean there’s not a place for me on the fuckin spectrum. I think the problem, ultimately, is that we’re all so conservative, I mean psychologically not politically. But that’s a long tangent I’ll avoid.
Point is I’m getting all self-referential, ‘self’ here being that great Blog of which we are all part.
Anyway. I’m liberal, they’re political, fucking boring.
So I’m going to try to be meta, see what we’re actually disagreeing about.

Except the most recent time, regrettably, I agree: The UCB law prof who is being protested because he wrote a brief about to whom the Geneva Convention applies. not, mind you, about the morality of doing X to Y under any circumstances whatsoever—about that, we have no idea, thank you. About to whom the Geneva Convention applies, I also have no real idea, but then I’m not a lawyer. The prof wrote a good opinion or a bad one, yet another thing I don't know. Critique the opinion, by all means! But don’t protest the guy for discharging his duty as a lawyer, not to mention his duty as a fucking man. or woman. got me all worked up.

5/28/04

I don't know, I guess it's as simple as I just got too comfortable.
All the shit we were squirming our way into an understanding of back in high school, about the depths of people's fear and habit (ourselves inlcuded), well it's not that I forgot it or even stopped seeing it, but I just sort of got used to it, bored to think about it.
I'm not feeling used to it anymore. Haven't started moving on it yet much, but I think that's where I'm headed for a while.

there's a longer, deeper story about how it wasn't as simple as that, had to do with Japan and slowing down into a different aesthetic that was just as rich but that just doesn't work back here--but I'm high and that's all I can muster about that.

5/28/04

I’m such a sucker for people stretching beyond their everyday limits—
the girls I fall for all have that—stretching against constraints, living beyond their station somehow, fighting through the bullshit that locks you down—getting carried away now but you get the message—so I fall for the relative, and forget the absolute. Forget that even if we’re both right at 75% of our potential (which ain’t bad man, ain’t bad), the gap can still be there and be too damn big. Fuck that it has to be, but there it is: Too damn big.
The romanticist in me, the romantic, fucking hates that, because that’s not the message I internalized—love conquers all man, I mean even if in the watered down, reasonable version of it I’m left with post-SC. So for me it’s another fall, another fall from innocence to realize it—she’s great, dear, sparkling. She’s fucking wonderful and how she disarms me, her guile-free laugh, her vein attempts at guile, her sideways suspicious eyes (damn—de ja), fucking spicy eyes!
So it’s another fall to have to realize her 75%, which is the most she’s going to be able to rev up to this late stage in the game, her 75% just ain’t enough.

All that said, I like that I love that thing in people—loving it lately with J-ya, that she’s able to meet me, to need me as an intimate friend, to call me late to not cry, to have me settle her—to be in sync enough that she could cue me like that—
when the conversation (gotta narrate so I’ll remember) starts she’s shaky, teary, on the edge of a collapse, holding it back—of course I ask, and she says yeah, something happened, in that way you do when its big. And I don’t ask, giving her time, and it’s too much, she’s there still or she’s not ready to go there, face it, so she stage directs in the way you should be able to do with your true friends: “Tell me about your day”. It’s weird and artificial as questions go, not something she’d ever ask, we’re past the phrasing, but in this case it’s what she needs: So I do. Go into it. Parts are boring, but I do those too. Just talk to her, lay it out, get her in: “you’re crazy to want to drive to Toronto! you should have just flown” and such.

Okay really bored of this story now.