Calendar of Days, introduction. July 12 2025

When I was a shyly aspiring writer in my mid-20s, all of my writing was destroyed. Diaries since I was ten years old, stories, books of poems, everything I had ever typed on my typewriter, and the beginning of a first novel.

After a while, I started writing again. But instead of filling whole books with tiny neat handwriting as before, I found that I couldn’t leave the notebooks in peace. I ripped pages from their bindings almost as quickly as I’d written on them. I had a wild need to open the cover of every notebook to a blank page, and felt destabilized at seeing my own words. Starting around 2014, I began to collect some of the paper debris and type certain passages into a Google Doc called “DAILIES”.

A decade later, still compulsively shredding my notebooks, still transcribing DAILIES, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. The psychiatrist, through her glassy blue eyes, from behind her enormous desk, told me that it had probably been undiagnosed since my late teens. That day, my first reaction was deep and intense grief. My second reaction, as strong as the grief, was this: Fuck it, we ball.

Remembering who gives a shit, and life’s short and then you die, I began to feel that I didn’t need to categorize everything I did as sorry, corrupt, and insufficient, because really, what did it matter? Fuck fear, and fuck self-hatred, and fuck my ongoing belief that I am fundamentally shitty. As an experiment in low-stakes, unapologetic self-disclosure, I decided to start posting my remaining journals where they are unlikely to be seen by my friends and family. I will never be gracious enough to justify the publication of these entries, most of which have never been read even by myself. But, I will proceed from 2014 and might even one day catch up to the present.

I am not grand and glowing, as I sometimes think. Not lowly and unworthy, as I sometimes think. I’m just another person.

Thanks for stopping by. I’m glad you’re here.

October 24, 2013

just remembered my dream from last night, as i was looking up courses for next semester

it was a sad, and long, and difficult dream twilight or underground, working on a computer in a cavernous marble room with huge columns. Working on homework , with my notebooks in a stack and my laptop lit, I was conscious of the few other studiers at their tables far away from me, all of us facing away from each other.

Footsteps rang somewhere, the hour was late. I finally stumbled into an honors seminar.

In the seminar room I found the friends I wanted to have, and yearned to find a way to be appointed to their ranks. A lecturer- an old man- was talking about some painting. I found some people I had once known, I was jealous of them. I left- I had to- and stepped into long empty carpeted halls, borrowed from the waldorf astoria. I ran, and running found a friend- a girl like me. She was thinner though, and beautiful, dark, vaguely troubled in a sexy way. She was running too, but I lost her on a switchback of carpeted stairway.

Then after classes, I saw the throng get into little chute-like elevators to go deeper underground.

I wandered through fantastic rooms. Some bright, some dim, some cheerful, and the colors were onyx, dark blue, deep turquoise.

I snuck into the men’s bathroom, there was hair in the tub- I wandered into the other one, brightly lit and pink. I wandered through dim miraculous rooms. Tiffany style, oriental, modern, I wandered looking for my notebooks, which I had lost somewhere. In the bathroom? In the hallway? Then I knew I was not welcome. Class had ended, the amphitheater emptied and the students were in their small cells.

And when they were gone I was lonely, and though I still wanted to be among them, I knew that it was not a nice place there, underground.

November 8 2014

collections.

(first, it's a lute, he responds, stretching out one large puffy headphone to hear the questioner. )

dad, first
Diane
Hannah
these are in no particular order.

Paul, and maybe Daniel.

My professors: Pagani first, and most challening.
then Bullock, what a sweet lady.
Pelletiers is too easy to please.

. . . I say, is that chris over there? No, it isn't Chris it is a girl. a girl with hair like Chris's. At the next table is that one bearded barista who isn't as nice as he looks, and then Lyndon, looking healthy and happy and hooded, a girl with him, undoubtedly his woman.

Christine, I love her.

Elizabeth

Margaret: I think of often but we do not speak. She must be sad to miss me.

Jennifer. except not in the same way.

myself, please.

who am i?

Goals, the best and worst five things, and the homework :
1. the homework from group therapy: the notecard containing the pros and cons
2. homework: from phonetics class, because it is easily dispatched and because I am pretty far behind. I'll do the reading and take the notes and later listen to the audio exercises, over and over and over and over again.
3. I'll begina a list of music to download; I only have until the end of tomrrow to get whatever i will.
4. Emails, correspondence: I must call Barbara and leave a message about the electrical outlets and the blinds.
I wish I were more androgynous. expecially tonight, when I feel so fiercely beautiful, so angrily ... delicate. The lipstick that shines will not withstand a sip from the cup perched ... please pull out a cigarette, handsome man facing me, and I will bum it from you... no, it is only water. damn.
the moon! ah, viper hanging joyful and brighter even than the sodium lights.

death comes to us all, so i had better get working on this novel already.

November 8, 2014

oh no, they're mormons. oh no, they're rich. oh no, they're mean. but loving, but fools, or right, their values are infuriating. for their comprehensibility as well as their abdsurdity.

(t, s, o, y, c, i, i, are the letters, in that order, on her scrabble tray)

[stray fiction]