The lady (I thought she was the landlord but turns out that’s someone else) who gave me the key to my unit in this crusty fourplex smelled vaguely like cigarettes. I thought, that’s weird, when I stalked her on Facebook, she literally had like a four week old child. I don’t know what the rules say about smoking ciggies when you have a baby, but I looked it up and I mean, it’s probably not that bad. Threw me off, though. But maybe I just imagined she smelled like cigarettes. Maybe it was her makeup. Or maybe her car smelled like cigarettes because she recently quit smoking or somebody else uses it or whatever. She had on this gray bodycon t-shirt dress, which showed off her cigarette mom figure. You know what I’m talking about. 

Also, I’m not trying to disparage her. She’s really, really sweet. I’m just revealing my first impressions, and god this makes me sound judgmental as hell. There’s nothing wrong with being a cigarette mom and having a kid named Lakynn or whatever. I just had no idea people like this actually existed. Anyway, she was really sweet. Sweet as hell and I have no issues with her. I am disgusting myself, and deserve to be judged. Who say that wont be me in ten years?

Anyway, sweet cigarette lady gave me my keys and I moved out. I moved out and I feel so much better. Like I’m finally coming out of my funk.

The first time I stepped into the apartment I cried. Maybe it was just the overwhelming prospect of change or the fact that my parents were upset at each other or that the floor in the kitchen is literally sinking but I cried. Then I thought, it’s just a year how bad could it be? That artist guy lived in wooden cage for a year. Tehching Hsieh. And then I thought well that’s dumb, people go to prison for years and years and here you are, woe is you, living your charmed life. Fuck you, I’d say to me.

And now I’m really happy and enjoying it a lot. I get a lot of sunshine here.

I’m experience whose blog I follow, You Don’t Need Maps, calls musical anhedonia. I used to listen to a lot of pop. You know, the hook. Maybe it’s a result of being in a funk. But I’m getting out of my funk. I moved out. Maybe I’m in a writing funk, too. My laptop is broken. I got chlamydia from somebody far too conventionally attractive to be normal (see post from early April). I had to tell someone I have chlamydia. My cat ran away, probably on her way home to the other house. My social battery has been drained. People spending too much time with me. But good things too. I moved out. Why do I choose to do the things I do. 

Summer is depressing because the sun is trying to kill you. Winter is depressing because the air is trying to kill you.

You know, I keep having masturbatory dreams. Like not sex dreams, but dreams where I’m in a bathtub (a really nice one), or I have one of those vibrators you see on Twitter that people promote after they have a tweet that blows up, the rose one, and I find it weird, because it’s not like I’m masturbating like that during the day. And never can I achieve those earth shattering orgasms I have in my dreams. Honestly why can’t I have a sex dream for once? I’m taking it as a sign to focus on myself.

Like that tarot lady said, I need to focus on my career right now. Honestly I don’t want to meet anyone in a year, like she said I would. I think about that a lot, and I hope I don’t meet anybody. I hate waiting. And there is no “somebody.”

A long time ago I decided that when I really liked somebody, and honestly I was already doing this subconsciously, I would steal all the traits of their personality that I liked, and add it to myself. That way I would get over them, Like that one bug that wears the exoskeletons of its prey as armor. The Assassin Bug. So in a way I’m a conglomeration of all the people I’ve desperately had a crush on, minus the parts that sucked. Maybe those too, I don’t exactly know what exactly I could’ve picked up. But that’s how I get over somebody, and I how I build up myself, with this skeletal bug personality armor.

Fake feelings of profundity, like when you’re on drugs. When you’re falling asleep. When you see the flash of a fingernail by you, like in the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.  

It feels like I’m living a charmed life. They offered to drop it by. This lady said that with my name she thought I’d be a sixty year old Hispanic lady. She and her husband were hobbling a table up my convoluted stairway to my upper unit. And while they were huffing and puffing and I just stood there helpless watching, she said, “God must love you.” Not in a mean way, but in a surprised way. She and her husband were cute. And she was funny. It looked like a cute relationship. He had to stop to pull up his pants. She said he was like this one guy from some movie.

“People always give her free shit.” Like I got a mango once. I got a free shot of espresso from the coffee shop today. Man was dancing behind the counter. Maybe it’s just being in the right place at the right time. I dont want to jinx it. Maybe I just focus on the charmed parts. My cat ran away but she came back. My laptop wasn’t fried, I’m just dumb and had to pay like a little over a hundred dollars for them to fix it.

Not to use metaphors to skirt around a question unless the metaphor reveals the emotion better than the actual, direct words themselves. People use metaphors to dance around the truth, which is not the purpose of a metaphor. That’s a ___. A metaphor is only good when it gets at the truth, or the feeling, better than the direct words can convey. We really need to avoid crypticism.

A while ago I was so depressed by how big the world was and how there’s so much going on for each person but then I realized, well it’s essentially the same for everybody and we all have similar experiences or maybe even the exact same ones. Which is why art is so effective. You don’t have to know what somebody’s up to somewhere else because it’s really similar to your own life. You’re like, how will this relate to people? All our lives are microcosms of the universal life. Which is why a story one person tells is so relatable to someone else. All our little microcosmic lives. 

Media is instructions on how to live your life. Or something Ethan Hawke said like that.

My social battery has been so so drained. Committing to honesty in my life.

My mom is under the impression that I’m a stoner.

You need to live to write. Otherwise it falls flat.

I was thinking about how far you’re supposed to go with intimacy in art and I’ve come to decide that the more intimate the better, like, really push the envelope into your guts and don’t hold back. We’re all the same. But still, you should be afraid to expose yourself and turn yourself inside out, so all the inside, the ligaments and arteries and veins are on the outside, and the skin is on the inside. To let people see your beating heart right there between your two exposed, quivering lungs. This metaphor is getting long and tedious, and I feel like it’s been done before and better, but you get it. There are idioms for it–to wear your heart on your sleeve, for example. Organs being worn on the outside. Like a bug wearing the exoskeletons of its prey. I guess those aren’t the organs, but you get it.

A while ago, mid June, when I was still living at my parents’, I was thinking if there’s no personal drama keeping me here, I feel like my life is going to float away in the wind. I don’t even remember thinking that. I don’t remember what it felt like. Like all emotions, it evaporated and I completely forgot it was there and what that funk felt like. I’m out of the funk, and the funk is forgotten. I forgot what absence of drama compelled me to write that out. I’m doing well. I’m socializing almost a little bit beyond my capabilities. I guess it felt like I was holding my breath, because I had no idea whether I would get an apartment–this apartment—or not. And I’m glad I have it. There was a lot of tension inside me then. I like it. I like the area. I like my kitchen, my bedroom. My living room is completely empty.

You forgot what the seasons feel like? you forget what love feels like, or what normality feels like. Emotions evaporate, completely. It’s insane. The depth and yet transience of emotions scares me. They leave no scar. You slip in it and you get up and it’s like you had a concussion and completely forgot what happened.

If you make art, just know you do it for yourself bc in all likelihood no one else will even come close to experiencing it like you did and your mom and dad will like it but that’s pretty much all

What is rhe correct production to media consumption ratio?

forgot i existed in the corporeal form for a long time, so you just dress the same way every day and forget to brush your teeth or your hair and who cares you wore the same shirt four days in a row? Definitely not you. 

I read the Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, and it was excellent. Here are some of my favorite passages from the book:

“A few people go to poetry readings because they like to hear poems read aloud in public. But most people go because they want to be poets themselves. In fact, most people who read poetry are reading it because they want to write it. They want to draw from you whatever you have, and once they’ve expeller-pressed your essence they want to move on to somebody else. They’re ruthless that way. That goes on for a while and then eventually they come back around.”

“At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we’re living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but no recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.”

“Out of hundreds of poems two or three are really good. Maybe four or five. Six tops. All the middling poems they write are necessary to form a raised mulch bed or nest for the great poems and to prove to the world that they labored diligently and in good faith for some years at their calling. In other words, they can’t just dash off one or two great poems and then stop. That won’t work. Nobody will give them the “great poet” label if they write just two great poems and nothing else. Even if they’re the greatest poems ever. But it’s perfectly okay, in fact it’s typical, if ninety-five percent of the poems they write aren’t great. Because they never are.

“I could never keep it up. You have to hand it to those pod-casters. They keep on going week after week, even though nobody’s listening to them. And then eventually they puff up and die.”

“THERE’S NO EITHER-OR DIVISION with poems. What’s made up and what’s not made up? What’s the varnished truth, what’s the unvarnished truth? We don’t care. With prose you first want to know: Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? Everything follows from that. The books go in

different places in the bookstore. But we don’t do that with poems, or with song lyrics. Books of

poems go straight to the poetry section. There’s no nonfictional poetry and fictional poetry. The

categories don’t exist.”

There’s no real plot momentum, but it’s a good book. Like listening to an old guy ramble. But in an intelligent and book-prizey way.

The important things are the things you forget to write about, that support the meat of your life like stilts or bones. Like, the tiny things. The tiny things you forget or can’t even be asked to acknowledge. They can’t even be pointed out to you.

Not all butterflies and carebears.

I’m impatient as hell.

No passion, doing things because people asked me to, but the momentum pull sme through. It’s gas in an empty engine. Just keeps rolling down the cliff.

that one short story in spanish

A while ago i was scared because the world is so big. Im doing fine now, im doing it for myself. Filled me with a sense of lack of inertia, what’s the word here, like what’s the point, like a sense of movelessness. Of being stopped in my tracks. Being blocked. Frozenness.

Treat the world like it’s tiny, because it’s all the same. Like, seriously.

The feeling of being home after having gone to the beach, all crispy and salty and shit and like you belong outside, not on your clean bed covers, even after you shower.

If you give a mouse a cookie relationship

music is recycled emotion. How do you lay these feelings to rest when you keep unburying them? But it feels good to do it.

Beauty is in the space between your fingers, those vulnerable little stretches of skin, I feel like they have a name but I’m not sure what it is, but you know, the spaces where other people’s fingers go. I feel like I lot has been said about those spaces, that negative space.