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.
2014
September 8, 2014
Where did James Baldwin learn to write like this? How? The style is marvellous, reads like silk. Diego and I sat on his inflatable bed and read Giovanni's Room together, silently, stopping now and then to look up a word in French, usually a dirty one.
I feel vaguely that I am doing wrong.
Glad to be sleeping alone for the first night in a while. I Applied at Perry's but they only want a foodrunner and I want to be a waiter. They made me fill out one of those odious form applications. Under special skills I wrote: "Tough as nails, sweet as honey."
I feel vaguely that I am not good. Something to do with evasion. I will trace and solve my own problems, since I've decided against therapy.
Proud to have abdicated some of my privileges, but anxious to regain some others.
Looking forward to working at Tazza tomorrow. I feel better knowing that the reason I get afternoon shifts isn't that I'm being punished for taking time off, it's just because Cassady can only work in the mornings.
Hella: "What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had." -Giovanni's Room
October 24, 2014
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.
twilit and underground, I was 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 blank marble.
Footsteps rang somewhere, the hour was late. I gave up on studying and packed up, and then 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 a long carpeted hall. 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.
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 more fantastic rooms, dim and miraculous. Tiffany style, oriental, modern, I wandered looking for my notebooks, which I had lost somewhere. In the bathroom? In the hallway?
Then after classes, I saw the throng leave the seminar room and go into little chute-like elevators, deeper underground to tiny windowless cells where they would study and sleep.
I had retraced my steps but I was not welcome there. 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.
Here are the people in my life right now, the people i want to please, or who want to please me, the ones i think about the most, or whose thoughts are most important to me.(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, 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 for the show; 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.
(t, s, o, y, c, i, i, are the letters, in that order, on her scrabble tray)
{Stray Fiction}November 18, 2014
Good evening. I'm at Epoch to study phonetics. and, I'm sharing a table with a handsome. But zut alors I forgot my notebook!
Oh well, an excuse to journal my weekend, which lasted an eternity and passed too quickly. The first night at the parents’, Thursday, there was no Diane. I texted Hannah that she really hurt my feelings when she went back on her promise to find an apartment together. Then I cried and crawled into bed with Becca and we held each others hands and fell asleep that way. The next day was the one, Diane’s wedding day.
I woke in the morning to motivate Dad to make scrambled eggs for everyone,. Everything he tries to do now is more difficult because of his mangled arm, though he hides his injury expertly. Breakfast was delivered to me by T-bot as I was having my hair and makeup done by the stylist, Kelsey, who comes from a three stoplight town in East Texas where she and her twin, daughters of the basketball coach, were famous everywhere they went for being tall.
My hair and makeup took forty five minutes. Then it was on: the florist to be entertained, the downstairs to be arranged, tea lights and decorations distributed, children to be told not to play with the umbrellas upstairs if you please.
Diane herself was exemplary in her calm. The other bridesmaid, Madison, was getting on her nerves, so she asked me to be a buffer.
the boys showed up- Kevin and his brothers- and I directed them how to move out the chairs. Then Becca and Liza and I collected the pillows and put them out. Noon to three fled quickly, then Everyone was called in to do a quick walk through of the first part up of the ceremony. Guests began to arrive and had to be corrallled outside towards all the mismkatched chairs and pillows and quilts and paper flowers and rose petals on the ground. To get their hot cocoa and settle beneath quilts against the chilly afternoon.
After the walk-through Madison and I went upstairs to dress the bride. what an honor, to place grandma's ermine stole over her shoulders. Diane didn't really seem to like grandma, but anyway. She wanted to do a photo shoot called "fist looks" that I had not heard of before. She had me cleaar out the front hall so she could go down out the front door, then to find Kevin and send him out the side door. I watched from the other side of the street. Kevin had to wait facing the other direction for a long time before Diane came around the corner of the street. Finally he turned around (inscrutable man) and they kissed for the photographer.
The ceremony, the ceremony... I can't describe it now, maybe later. Instead---
back to today. It is Tuesday, and things seem to have calmed down, with the aid of a yesterday spent in bed rolling back and forth between food and petting the cat.
November 19, 2014
5:06a
Today I’m going to try to do it all, every single thing on that checklist.
So the first thing is to have breakfast between eight and nine, and I have three hours to get ready for that.
Because I decided to go with my first whim today and wake up at five. Schmo is being a good best friend and chatting me up a lot. the place is still a bit messy after that eventful weekend, and maybe before eight I can take care of some of that. I wonder if my neighbors will be able to hear if I listen to the BBC. Probably, since I can hear their alarms going off in the morning if I’m attentive (rare).
November 21, 2014
If I were braver, or, current impulses:
No computer. I don’t need a computer. No phone. I don’t need a cell phone. Although, most of my “I don’t need a cell phone” arguments are based on “I have a computer.”
Anyway, one of them could go. Then both, later.
All of this stuff. All of this STUFF. Maybe I will stay in this apartment a while longer. I keep bouncing around from gmail to google voice to toothpastefordinner to marriedtothesea to theworstthingsforsale to thisamericanlife and if I didn’t have a computer I would be reading instead.
I could move it, or I could unplug it, turn it off.
SIGH. yeah, that’s while i’ll do. Unplug it, turn it off. Put it on the floor behind the table. Not watch TV for a while. Get the news on my phone. ok ok. ok, ok. Goodnight computer.
(it’s twelve nineteen am on the twenty first of november 2014)
December 3, 2014
Good. Morning. Third day in a row of waking and having breakfast without any hitch.
I found a new Cocorosie album I haven’t listened to yet, Tales of a Grass Widow. (score)
And I found out (by asking him out) that Alex from French class is gay.
But I asked Dana from the library on a date
so I am too.
I’m esckited because I’ve never been on a date with a girl before.
And she likes me, she even said she’s had a crush on me forever.
I wish Paul would get home from his date and get online so I could freaking tell him about it! But here I go merrily into the kitchen to bed.
I like sleeping in this little kithen. the floor is just big enough for the mattress. I am contained. Feel safe.
What a whirlwind of a day! I think I’m tired enough to fall asleep soon. I still feel torn, in life, in different directions. Dancing with Erica over the weekend, with Erica! writing a paper, editing a skit, socializing with Alex, with Joe, with Heather, with Dana (!). To make music, practice vioin, research graduate programs, look for a job. all these things. Feeding myself, all this reading I want to do, and then…
I remember a day with Michael and Emily Bruner. Emily, studying to be a nurse, is slim and impeccable. Not quite beautiful, but with straight undyed hair and respectable clothing. Not too stylish, casual. She and I walked alone down the railroad tracks near Reunion Station and Tower, next to the field of twisted metal that had been Reunion Arena. Giant pieces jutting from the ground at all angles. Downtown on the horizon. We talked about dependence, and she told me the story…
…of a man, a rich man, who used to take her out to dinner, or shopping, or along with him to parties. Very polite, she said, never “fresh”. He spent lots of money on her, enjoyed her company. One day he called her on the phone and said “Would you be interested in lunch, dinner, sex? All of the above, none of the above?” She didn’t say anything. He never called her again.
At dinner, Emily reaches across the restaurant table to point with an oval nail at a certain menu item, then reads it aloud in an incredible voice. Incredible and natural. and the reach of her finger not purposefully seductive. What is tragic about this memory? why does it stick with me?
Alexander C_______. What a mythology I had built around my desire for him. And now I find myself free to talk to him without nerves, without games, without designs. “So this is good,” says Becca. “It is almost better this way,” she says.
Becca has stories for everything.
The last one she told me yesterday while I was breaking up with Daniel. it was about a boy named Andrew, when she was in college. She called him on the phone to break up with him, while Dane was in the room. Andrew asked why, and Becca told him that he was just so awkward. "Which was true, but I shouldn’t have said so." Becca told me she didn’t think Andrew had ever had a kiss before her.
My heart hurts. I should not have asked Dana out. I am thinking of the other girl from the Architecture Library. The one with the long curly hair. A date with her would have been a more pure, a more exciting thing. With Dana, well, I’m … not sure.
I asked her out because I thought it would make her happy and because I wanted to ask out a girl. It wasn’t because she is who she is. It wasn’t for herself. It wasn’t a heart pounder.
It is becoming easier to feed myself. I love the world. I love humans.
And onward. December. Time for me to get a job. Where will I work? At a bookstore? For Dig Site?
Yes, I am tired enough to sleep tonight. But I am not at rest. My soul boils. Today I have been exited, disappointed, angry, proud, confident, embarassed, false, sweet, intimidating, invisible,
But not very kind, I find.
April, 1 2015
Everyone is so happy and friendly today. Or else it is a reflection of my own manic effervescence--either way I feel loved. Forest is returned from sailing in the Grenadines, and it hardly seems two weeks. Through bizarre circumstances I am in possession of two cars and a bike. Faye wants to quit drinking, she says. I well imagine her despair. Paul and I are listening to the new Sufjan Stevens album for the third time today. The truth is shelled so thickly it will not be written.
Spring is come and with it irresistible good humor. In the Grenadines, Forest says, people are conservative, while smoking a lot of illegal pot. His example was funny: ‘They’ll tell you to put a shirt on, while they’re smoking a doobie’.
Wider and wider I open my heart, and the gaps grow too. Where can I look for strength? Its very definition eludes. I think it is to be not-clever. Calvino offers the path of passion, which acts, or that of wisdom, which waits.
Marco seems like just a kid, but he's 27. Rico is a sympathetic mind but we are so isolated from each other somehow… Is it imaginary? No, but it is false. And I am brash, and too talkative. Bill, self proclaimed intellectual dilettante, demands an opinion on every subject. (People at Tazza Fresca)
Today I have run from one friend to another. Good friends, established ones, tentative ones, receptive strangers, longtime acquaintances. Jessica, Miranda, Marco, Kathleen, Heather, Ron, Forest, Paul, Katie, the other Katie, eye-caught boys in cafes or in their cars, Tobias, Erin, Faye, Ariel, Dustin, Chris, Ed, Carlos, Rico, Brandon, Christine, Alex, the clerk at the Minimax, the desk workers at the used car dealership, Audrey, Roberto, the other Marco, Millie, Adrian, Sofia. Lynn, Jennifer, the CVS pharmacy guy, Kristen. I wanted to make them happy, to make them laugh. Becca. I have more friends than is tenable. Becca.
Paul hides under his covers, experiencing some emotion that exists in his imagination, his interpretation of things, but has no counterpart in my mind. I lift the blanket to show him that I am smiling.
Is the unifying theme the search… the desire or hope for a unifying thing? I had a nightmare where I got high and had John Miller sleeping on my floor even though I didn’t want him there. I cut my contact sheets into strips and squares. Tiny photographs. Many of Diego.
There is something I am missing: some discernible value of certain relationships over others, not related to utility. In Paul’s room his head is on my shoulder; his thoughts seem almost to filter through me. Is this not what I once asked for explicitly? Vessel-dom, perceptivity, a finger on the aorta of the world?
Eliza has asked me to send her some of my writing. Once I gave Hannah some neatly printed narrative to read while I pretended not to watch. Her response was ambiguous, or at least not the praise my heart wanted. I believe her comment was about precision, detail, specificity.
Now I stumble across a fear so great my thoughts flow serpentine around its height. I am suddenly aware of the beauty of the music, the comfort of the bed, of a crushing sense of obligation.
Lache. In French, a word between lazy and cowardly. Describes me so well. Afraid to write. Afraid and I’m not sure of what. That my solutions are not sufficient. Afraid, still, of whole-hearted momentum in any direction. Sober, I prodigally distribute my most precious self among other people. I inhabit joy. Like a coat. Like a broad blue and white sky. Like a mirrored sphere.
Through practice I dull the inward facing blades of avarice, of envy. What is satisfaction but that which demands to be desired?
I cry out to my will to save me, and receive only a cheery reply from my heart, the wrong bureaucrat for the job.
May 8, 2015
Again the disconcerting feeling: things slipping through the cracks- important things undocumented. Thoughts recognized, but not recorded. I am reluctant to entrust anything to my journal. Bought a typewriter online today for 45 dollars.
Monday, after I hadn’t smoked for a day, I felt directed. I told Frances, “I am thinking a mile a minute.” My confidence grew wildly, maybe because she had her own troubled thoughts of Philip and his alcoholism. Everyone to their own challenges.
Last night and this morning, dolefully, my back turned to sleepy Salvador, I hit the pipe, saying in my head, “it doesn’t matter” and also, “I should not be doing this.”
During the brief period of complete sobriety when the world was outlined precisely in its real colors and time passed in forthright hours I came to two realizations.
First, that I have a huge capacity for work of which I have realized only a fraction, especially over the past few months. Second, that I feel much more responsibility towards this capacity when I am sober.
Perhaps the compulsive smoking is a mechanism of relief when I have overextended myself. I become incapable of work and therefore feel no responsibility towards it because to perform well is an impossibility. But I have to smoke a lot. And it’s an escape from the sort of directed thinking which makes me want to do work. The sort of interested commitment which draws me to my worktable.
I want to quit, I want to quit. The other night I considered using alcohol as a substitute for getting high, but it was no good; I didn’t want to get drunk.
That sober day, I felt energetic, powerful, independent, as though I had no need to accept the opinions of anyone else into my head because it was already bursting. No slow down, no jams, but also a calmness, an orderliness rested over my vision.
I looked into Diego's eyes until there was nothing there but looking back into my own eyes. We created a sort of vaccuum so that anything that we thought we saw bounced and magnified, then we had to laugh because we were confused or because there was nothing else to do. We were bored- nothing there but wondering.
Digo was upset about something and he refused to tell me. He promised he would and still did not. My imagination gave me no relief, especially while the mysterious circumstance was putting him in a bad mood. I was glad to be with him. I felt all the more the importance of his company while his mood was rotten, and the next day still he felt angry, and today again was short of temper, yelling at cars in traffic. This morning he took a whiskey shot as soon as he woke up. I failed to play it cool and said, “I’ve never seen anyone do that before.” It woke him up, though.Another thing occurred to me yesterday which I knew in an intellectual way but became as a concrete realization- I realized that I had missed the point of a conversation with Tim a couple days ago: That when I am high I am actually dumber. Yes, that it makes me stupid. This is gross. I have never ever thought of myself as stupid. A little silly, maybe, or naive, or lacking in social sense occasionally, awkward, yes, but never dumb.
A few days of relative hunger after my debit card was stolen have slimmed my waist slightly but my legs are still cumbersomely fat. I’ve felt a terrible lack of sexual arousal. The last time I remember being turned on wasn’t with Diego at all, who always tries to take me by force, though he doesn’t have to. It’s annoying- he’ll grab me and not let me go. I struggle awkwardly against his sexual embrace and because he is stronger than me I often end up just going limp and waiting for him to get bored, which he won’t if I continue to struggle. But I don’t want his mouth clamped on me sometimes. I want to go to a park and read books.
I'm typing and it is much faster than longhand. But the feel of my longhand compositions is warmer to me. Lusher, closer to the truth of experience.
We are not complacent, we pull and push. We rework and agitate We express, drawing from the source. I feel I am too old for my body, too old for my life. I feel I will never grow up. I feel a pressure in my stomach.
Even if smoking weed doesn’t cause permanent brain damage, which I have heard it does not, it makes me stupid, at least temporarily. Stupid people have ideas, of course, and I get my share when I’m toasty. But here’s the rub: all that time is lost. Because when I am not stupid I am learning and getting smarter. And if I am not learning and getting smarter, I am losing time. There is this linear push about my western life, always towards future goals. But adding up all the time that I’ve been high, just over the past few years it’s got to be months of wasted time.
I must at some point address the troubling issue of suicide, since it rises so often from my subconscious into little spoken directives. “Kill yourself” in such or such a way, whenever I recall some embarrassing moment. I tried for a while to supplant the words “today is a good day” but they lacked the punch and didn’t stick and I was still thinking “kill yourself” somewhere in my head. “underwater” “with a stick” “I’m going to kill myself” I say sometimes, out loud often, without even considering the words before they escape because they come so naturally to me.
Once I had a determined that the path of a scientific was the staid and prescribed one, that I could follow and be normal and maybe settle down with. To be an artist would be to continually be subject to fear and uncertainty and insecurity, to have higher highs and lower lows and- eventually- to die at my own hand.
I don’t know why it seemed to be true.Diego says quite often, self-fulfilling prophecies are the only ones that come true. So why can’t I prophesy my own old age? Because I do not quite believe in it. I can not picture it. I see only a square studio space with concrete walls and modern furniture and my crumpled frame moving aimlessly about as I do now in my bedroom, changing the world in small ways that will grow. I do not mind obscurity. I do mind insecurity.
I love the perceptive and concise eloquence of Tolstoy, the depth of feeling conveyed in a few words, the expansive detail of the stories.
May 9, 2015
I despise him.
I miss him when he goes away. It feels good to miss him. Alone, I remember what it is like to be with him. Then I hate him for leaving. Why did he leave, and what am I to do now? I am sick to death of Diego, and I want to see him again as soon as possible. So tired of doing the things we do.
May 12, 2015
Avenue H house
Mom and Dad came to visit. I cried a lot and replaced my voice recorder.
Diego came over in an ebullient mood and was fresh, handsome, smart and funny, and I felt wretched and spiteful for it. We went to Greg’s graduation party and enjoyed it seperately for the most part, then danced to Brass Monkey. We went back to his place and had ridiculous sex which ended, as is usual these days, in my being in terrible pain.
Forest was sad at the party, i think, and embraced me twice and kept his hands on my waist for too long and leaned his head on my head an then became embarrassed and made an excuse. He knows I have a boyfriend and met him, but forgot his name and called him Cameron. I wanted to talk to Forest but had to avoid him for this awkwardness...
I have been depressed, but a wonderful thing occurred to me at the Fine Arts Library today . Two Actually. The first is I found out that we have the DVD of Jan Svankmajer’s Faust. The second is that I read a book jacket with the words “... pictured in the gallery with her favorite whippet, Flash”.
I will not be doing my show tonight, and I must find out how to make a cape for Nick's movie without enough material, and my room is terribly messy, but I haven’t smoked weed today and I feel better in my brain space- not happy, but clearer and more decisive.
May 14, 2015
3 am exactly
I am whipped. So many notions, external and internal. Excitement and dread and joy and intrigue. With Diego it is impossible to say. Our love has cooled. I think of him intellectually, calmly instead of in a frenzy. I see him and feel confused at the distance between us, he is patronizing when we talk and I hold back, unsure and annoyed. It sounds bad but it isn't bad. It is good. How can I explain?
I took a hit. It was okay at first, I managed not to get too fumbled up. As I continue to DJ I lose the confidence with which I started. I want to cry or something. I cannot figure why I am alive. I cannot figure how to become better, expect that to be a good person all one has to do its be it. Doing what you want and activng like you can do whatever you want are the same thing, and so not to worry for some reason.
I can't stand it! I can't stand it! The thoughts that come and push me out and push me down. Earlier it was so easy to say, one step at a time, it's all right. Now it's too late for that. I feel weak, feel sorry, but not really, because writing it is a pleasure, I had not written all day and it kept pushint up for me to stroke it, unline the cat. And even if none of it makes sense it is still important. Even if I fail, I will not fail. I can not fail. I am terrified. I must not be afraid.
May 17, 2015
I am sweating. Big droplets course down my neck, stomach, chest, back, sides, forehead. I leapt down the right lane of Guadalupe on my rollerblades, maintained speed in front of a bus, narrowed my legs and stood cruising down the bike lane to let the bus pass me, then jumped forward into the cool rushing wind. Unlatched and unlaced the rollerblades while moving across the downstairs hallway of the library, kicked them off at the landing, up the stairs in my socks.
I feel like a failure. I’m resentful, angry, mostly I’m terribly sad.
Can’t think of a single thing I want to do after work. Don’t even want to go to Ellen’s sister’s graduation dinner, composing a note in my head: Hi Ellen, feeling depressed so I think I’ll just stay home tonight.
The thought of organizing my room isnt entirely disagreeable, but I can picture vividly thinking about it, looking at it, and not doing it. Do my fits of despondency coincide with my moments of greatest ambition?
May 20, 2015
My mood has lightened significantly, but I feel removed from Diego. We do not converse fluently these past few days.
May 21, 2015
I stayed up all night. Yesterday evening Diego and i went to Mother's, on what felt very much like a formal date. I felt great today. Got my work done, met with Hannah about the film (could be up to $200 to make it on super-8) and then hung out with my roommate Tim. now at Frances's scanning photos. I said no to a loaded bowl today.
June 30, 2015
I have a beautiful new long black dress with flowers.
From Lorca, bodas de sangre:
Duende, a figure of anarchic magic, a spirit that may possess a singer or dancer.
Moribundo-moribund
Arroyo-stream
Fuente-fount
Miebla-mist
Campanas-bells
Aneja-antique
Cancion-song
Huesos-bones
Bebe-you drink
Una rana-frog
Lejo-far
Quien-who
Madera-wood
Hojas-leaves
Pedir-to ask for
Llevar-bring
Llegar-come
Seria-serious
La pena-sorrow
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July 3, 2015
from The Idiot
“Can’t i simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me?” - Ippolit
“An agonizing but unformulated idea… what was this grand, everlasting pageant… to which he had always… been drawn and in which he could never take part?” - Myshkin
“In abstract love for humanity one almost always loves no one but oneself.” -natasya
Tu-uyen recommended me a Lorca book, said I’ll wake up at 5 am thinking about it. What I am thinking about is the time spent with her and Anthony, and their intense life of thoughts, work, desires, questions. Of Tu-uyen’s Vietnamese grandmother crouching on the ground slicing beef.
July 8, 2015
John Lawrence, (Hannah calls him ‘the artist guy’) came in today.
John’s story:
So this girl I’ve been seeing in Houston broke up with me, sent a text that said she can’t do this anymore and that she needs to focus more on her dog.
Yesterday Elijah Allred came into Tazza while I was working and we bitched about the large class sizes and irrelevant curriculum at UT. He mentioned that he was researching the history of Mexican folk medecine for something he’s writing. His grandmother was a curandera, I think he said.
I told him there were some people into that who came in sometimes, thinking of Alejandro and his two sisters- wiry, tattooed girls with sharp faces and exciting curly hair who were both reading manuals about herbal healing last time they came in. Elijah winced though, fumbled a bit, and said, ‘well, I’m interested in the history.`
Most recently, he read a history of the occult in the Americas. Then his girlfriend Katie came in, with a purple pixie cut and a large tattoo on her left bicep of a boy’s face beaten, bruised, red, swollen, bloody. Definitely a reference to something, but beyond me.
This morning Steve, the incoherent runner of community flyers, and the french-portuguese double-shot-with sugar guy got into a discussion about racial identity in America. Double shot with sugar asked me if I identify as a White American. His point was that minority groups or racial groups self-define as African- or Asian- American etc. which, he says, isn’t true in Portugal, and he thinks it’s wack.
I don’t think it’s so wack. Nor do I self identify as American very often. Texan, sometimes, and I suppose "bohemian".
July 11, 2015
Madrid Airport
Waiting. My challenges are first, to always maintain a pleasant expression on my face. For Mom. Even when she’s speaking about me within my earshot (as now) or making general pedantic address, or using a misquotation of myself as a humorous anecdote in my presence, or, most difficult, being just plain racist. So, pleasant face, no complaints, quibbling, or sullenness.
Second, to be pleasant and even somewhat ingratiating to the grad students, who elicit in me a mysterious instinctive abhorrence without getting into real conversation with them. I love my Mom. Gonna go show it.
She's telling again the story of the dog Carmen’s death. Again, and it is a horrible story. Earlier, when she was talking nonstop as if ill, as if insane, I realized that I have also suffered from this. but there is so much else to write about! Dad lent me his camera, Score!!! Spanish fasion so far has been sporty, lots of Nike and designer sweatpants.
More vocabularyempieza=begin
Sello-stamp
Timbre-stamp
enviar=send
Mandar-send
Empezar-to begin
"Queiro comprar unos sellos" 4:05 It's day 1, and I'm already beginning to think that if mom never invites me on another trip that’s fine with me. She actually brought me to tears in the Prado with her endless prattle. Her special move is following up the phrase, “and that’s all I'm going to say" with several more sentences. Another one is switching the name of the person she’s describing mid-sentence. Her history lessons sound like retrospective social gossip. You correct her and she agrees with you without acknowledging the error.
At least story ended with tea at the Mandarin Oriental Ritz.
Europe, i’m in Europe!
Everything is very old. Even people are very old. Our sorrows, our questioning. I could walk an entire day around these narrow streets, not going in anywhere.
On the entry doors of Las Bentas Bullring they've painted "sol" and "sombre". On one, "sombre/sol".
Apparently if a street widens enough to fit two cars, they name it a plaza.
After the prado we went into an extra stupid souvenir shop to wait for Ali so he could show us how to ride the bus. Ali was late and I couldn't take it so I went and waited outside and watched a blind busker girl roll her blank eyes around and jingle a can. A sign hung around her neck. She rubbed a sack of coins against her crotch.
Then to tea at the Ritz, which was perfect, delicious. As mom and Dad get older, they see me less and look through me more. Even when they’re paying attention, it’s like they’re not somehow. But I’m still afraid of how much they pick up. Mom wouldn’t get off her phone for a long time and I started crying again but she didn’t notice.
After that was great. We went back to our hotel and rested for a bit, then mom consented to go shopping. We walked those same slanting bustling streets I remembered best from my last visit to Madrid, to the Puerto Del Sol, where there was a protest, young people with posters. I would have paid more attention if solo.At Plaza Mayor a funny street performer all painted silver and standing on a pedestal holding a suitcase, a coat, a map, a hat, and his act was to keep dropping things as if accidentally and to fall all over himself picking them up. He couldn’t reach the ground from his pedestal so little kids would run up and hand him his coat or map and he would drop something else while retrieving it from them.
Then he'd take a big swig from his flask and put it in a pocket with a hole. We went to a packed indoor fishmarket called San Miguel where people bellied up to high bars and yelled over their fresh tapas. I noticed that in the restaurants in Madrid the tables are very close together and everybody seems crammed. No room to backup your chair. Except at the Ritz of course.
undated
Toledo
I Talked to a barista at a fancy place. The coffee is cheap. Two euro for a cortado, for a dirty chai. Spent the afternoon getting lost in the deserted and closed city streets, everything so old, mysteries all over. Scary, skinny cats who don’t want to play. The spirit of El Greco.
I’m still periodically terrified that mother takes my journal out at night and reads it all the way through.
We arrived in Pedraza at three in the afternoon. Middle of siesta. It was like a ghost town, completely closed to the sun. Zuloaga’s castle was beautiful, a beautiful place to live. His granddaughter leaned over the balcony to talk to us, which was cool. There was an oubliette in the yard.
Burgos was lovely, Bilbao is stunning. We’re at the Guggenheim special exhibit Basquiat.
Our guide’s accent sounds like London-Spanish. Techno DJ’s, art after dark, Jazz Fetivals, Concerts, in this museum atrium. Nervion river, we’re in a river valley. The architecture is fearless. Formica arches on the bridge. Blonde german families, fashionable young ladies. Titanium panels .38 mm thick cover the building.
Band names:
-telephoto portrait
-ruining the effect
What I felt in the Richard Serra installation
The utter goodness of self-isolation. The variety of experience. Of Basquiat-ideas on canvas. Redefinition. A speaking-aloud. Had he lived he would be alive. Had he lived he would be doing things differently. Had he lived he would be younger than my parents.