monday february 5 2001    |    1:41 a.m.

they've got a name for the winners in the world
i want a name when i lose

a stony evening. i've said it before, might as well say it again. and thank goodness for it.

a routine and deceptively innocuous day. slept in and rolled out of bed just in time for work in the afternoon. my thoughts would not translate into words for the kid with the kant paper. the art history book, though, was arresting. nice relaxing dinner and a cigarette with daniel, a recap, some talk. the movie for my chinese class, which was infinitely depressing but beautiful and dammit, too much thought processing in my head = no articulation. finally got a hold of julie and went over to adam's and smoked, and then julie and i went to her room and talked and talked and talked until now.

so the reason i'm dodgy and elusive, the reason i keep bringing it up and it never stops to irritate some corner of my brain. i write in here, and i write in general, but do i ever really write what's going on in my head? i wouldn't say i'm confessional. maybe that's an understatement. it's not easy for me to talk about personal things, i'm more likely to switch subjects if it's getting too close to home. a lot more comes out in my non-diaryland writing, but it's cloaked in the guise of fiction (can you cloak in a guise, or do you just cloak or just guise? i don't know) so it's still safe. probably the person who knows the most about how i really work, sometimes even better than i do, is julie. patrick never even really got there. not very close at all. but anyway, so i wonder if that can make me an effective writer. i definitely have the exhibitionist/voyeuristic gene or tendency or whatever, but to a degree. more so when i'm very aware of an audience, a defined audience, as in here. but can i really involve myself -- as in, the opposite of detachment -- enough to get through to people, to communicate to them? i suppose i'll have to see if i have any stories really worth telling.

richard bach says that the act of writing is painful to him. painful from the marrow radiating outwards, almost unnaturally so. but sometimes he has to. he has to, to keep going, to fulfill the need to make a connection with others and to sort of organize and assert reality for himself. erick sent me this book about vincent van gogh which i've been poring through (he is by far and without a doubt my favorite artist, and if he's widely popular it's for a reason), and there is this quote. let me find it.

[I]n his paintings [Van Gogh] was able to set down his own concept of order, against that of the chaos of reality around him. His art was an attempt to regulate a world with which he was obviously unable to come to terms. . . . His aim was not to escape reality, nor indeed to suffer by renouncing it, but instead to make it tangible in a comprehensive sense. In this way his art enabled him to accept the once so hostile world as his own.

it's like kluge said once last semester, that writing is his way fo making reality real; nothing's really real until it's been sorted out on the page. then it's there, tangible, documented. real. this is art for me, the way i feel about it and deal with it. the way i write. and i know that one day the first story will come together and the writing will be fierce. up until now it's all been sketches in preparation. i feel it forming in my head, a little more every day.

there you go, that's confessional enough.

those poems though, boy, were they forced. the revision will have to be brutal and extensive and even then i don't know that they'll really be real. as in true to myself. as in something i actually produced, something visceral and something i can stand by. but i'm no poet. or if i have the potential to be, i haven't figured out how yet. i think there are hints in my prose, though.

you know, jules, sometimes i do think i believe in fate. no, sometimes i just do. how that is compatible with the essentially fatalistic (what i like to call "realistic"), chaos-is-order-but-there-is-no-order (there might be a name for that, chaos theory? whatever) tendencies, i don't know. in this case, the zodiac is dead-on: one fish struggling against the current, one tied to the other and trying to let itself be dragged by the current. i think this might sound incredibly hokey when i look back on it. ah well. that's me.

so phling night (last night) was the usual disappointment. and the night before, my ride to columbus bailed, partly in english and partly in italian because he's a snot like that, so i ended up getting trashed out of my mind at john's, courtesy of a whole lot of cheap beer and a cameo appearance by the pot fairy. somehow i made it home and passed out in bed in my clothes and my contacts. say what you will, but it's a great way of removing yourself from things for a while. some therapy, huh.

i did get to wear the new boots to phling, though, so that was exciting. although they killed my feet. but sometimes it's worth the pain, oh patriarchal society blah blah blah. i went to phling with brucelee. that was interesting. he's an odd boy.

i talked to daniel about morality to an extent after dinner, over a cigarette, outside of peirce, right about the time it started getting cold. maybe prompted by that kid's kant paper in some way. and you know, i don't think there is such a thing as morality for morality's sake, because it is a human construct, even in its most platonic idealized form, moral absolutes are beyond human beings: we're innately, unavoidably, humanly self-interested and subjective beings. so your construction of morality is your own, but hopefully within certain bounds leaning towards absolutes, since i also believe humans have the capacity for empathy. but it's all colored by one's perceptions. so anyway, yeah, you try to do the right thing at the right time, as best as you know how. and i guess that's what i'm trying to do with my life. as much as i can. i guess we all -- or the vast majority of us -- do.

we saw
shadows of the morning light
shadows of the evening sun
till the shadows and the light were one

and i suppose this is why i smoke pot. it brightens the corners. (no reference to pavement intended really, i'm no fan.) it removes the layers of bullshit. things make a lot more sense when you remove the noise inside your head.

there was a time in my life, not so far removed, when i would have been quoting trent reznor. now i'm quoting steely dan. the line is finer than you would expect between the two, but oh i hope trent gets to the point where he'll be quoting steely dan, too. maybe i should mail him their greatest hits. hee.

i had no idea i had all this to say, but i guess it's been a long weekend.

experience does make you wise, but i think that happens at every point in your life, whether it be at age 5 or 25 or 65. they're all different angles, different takes with their respective limitations and insights. don't let your parents tell you they know what's best for you because they've been around and they know what it's like. on the one hand, that's true. on the other, it's a huge crock of shit. they've never been you. they've never been you where you are.

and the rants keep on coming...

i want to read more julian barnes. he amazes me like few writers ever have. for the sheer intricacy of thought and scope of vision. read a history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters if you haven't already. it really does live up to its title, and then some. a different part of my brain needs to be jogged and bothered, and it's not the side that's been plundering through richard bach and harry potter and the art history textbook and the feminist critique of chinese films. i wanna go someplace higher. (now there's a stony moment for ya.)

this might be one of the more honest things i've written in here.

here we GO!
no
one
no one
no way
gonna
stop us now!