two guys walking in the rain today:

guy 1: WET!

guy 2 [chanting]: what's that word i'm lookin' for?

guy 1: WET!

i have an artificial tendency to avoid sentiment, fueled by my actual tendency towards sentiment, which has caused many overly dramatic separations in the past. sara is gone for a few months, then forever; everyone else i'll be missing, it seems more like just forever after thursday. i care more about most people than they do for me, and i care about a lot of people. so maybe it doesn't always seem that way, because of my artificial tendency to avoid sentiment. i let far too many of my connections to other people lapse without a word. which is strange, because what else do we have? step two is basically regretting it forever, but not doing anything about it. i'll assume people don't want to talk if they don't talk first, and assume that if i talk first it will be unwelcome.

if i don't say goodbye, it's probably because i wanted to.

'only the artists are on the right path. it may be they can give this world some beauty but to give it reason is impossible.'

-- georges clemenceau, quoted in the proud tower by barbara w. tuchman

'what a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.'

-- miranda july, 'making love in 2003'

'i don't know how humanity stands it
with a painted paradise at the end of it
without a painted paradise at the end of it'

-- ezra pound, the pisan cantos

this april is ephemeral. twenty-plus days of it, gone without a trace. a couple of the better parts near the beginning obscured or ruined by drink. no original thoughts, only patterns of quotation and memory. isn't it that way always? yes, but now more than ever.

i married joan of arc so i could write a research paper, the way i dreamed about in creative writing class in high school. the marrying her part, not the research paper part. i used to scrawl long streams of my elizabeth-obsessed consciousness into that big blue notebook during freewriting sessions with bob dylan or reggae covers of bob dylan filling the classroom. i kept coming back to music i was more into, and if jeff mangum dreamed of travelling back in time to save anne frank then i pretty much had the same desire for joan. finished the paper early. that's something new.

and some other stuff came together or came apart.  either way, it was there.

yesterday my unsettled emotional state became physically palpable, as it does in its worst moments.  walking down loring on a cold february night.  and after.  things like that.  i couldn't stay in my house so i went to laura's.  she held me and fed me peanut butter toast, then i took a hot shower and fell asleep in her soft bed reading about the death of jean jaurès while she worked on a keats paper.  she's almost done with school.  it's too warm to be scared. 

at night now it's not too cold to think. this morning everything started blooming as gas prices rose overnight. stealing moments to enjoy it. crunch time this weekend, with the venetian inquisition and la grande guerre. on into a summer, a new job, and a stockpile of books.   i miss a lot of people, but i'm getting better at living with myself.

why did i dream of you last night?
now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
raised on elbow, i stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.

so many things i had thought forgotten
return to my mind with stranger pain:
- like letters that arrive addressed to someone
who left the house so many years ago.

-- philip larkin

'of course all these last, apparently, scraps, of cantos, are your self, the memories that make up yr. person. is one then only a bunch of memories? i.e. a bunch of remains of contacts with the other people? gawd -- but it might be a reason for making the other people's memories contain something pleasant, from oneself.'

-- dorothy pound, letter to her husband, 1945

come to me now
you are warming weather
come to me now, the kind that comes with
sandbags along the river

-- john vanderslice, 'trance manual'

'do you hear? i'm consoling you.'

-- jöns, the seventh seal

you had this image of God the beneficent creator living in a city in the sky like lando in the empire strikes back. you used to rent the tape from the library. the essence of religion was father's distaste for the term 'x-mas' and jesus, mary and joseph like mother always said, and once when you were little she talked to you about heaven.  you talked to God until you were seventeen, then you started talking to chaucer.  neither talked back, but you found you had more to say to God, the god who became more and more distant as the years went by, guarded by absurdity in a way roughly analogous to the funny uniforms of the swiss guard around the pope.  it became easier to be more hands-off, to relate more to the one you had less to say to. why would you want to know god once you've seen some of the world you used to think was good?  the hat is the pope's last line of defence, really.  if you weren't thrown by the guards that would get you.  no way to take this guy seriously now.

'nothing produces silence like experience.'

-- flannery o'connor, mystery and manners

'Hillary was coming up the steps to my front door. In a panic, realizing I was wearing a big tin Obama button, I dashed toward the back of the house, yelling to my kids to waylay her. I didn't want her to see that I'd made the decision to support her opponent. I darted out to the back porch while hastily plastering something over my Obama pin so I could neutrally greet my high-profile visitor. As Hillary came into the front hall, I realized I'd pasted over my Obama pin with an Obama sticker.'

*

'I am inside a house, crouched behind a filing cabinet, rifle in hand. I rise up and fire, hitting my targets -- two women, one I can't identify, the other is Hillary. The first woman drops dead, but Hillary is only wounded and turns to me and returns fire. I duck, rise up again and discover I am out of ammo. I spin away, panicked. Hillary comes after me, stalking me. Then it occurs to me that I can run. I escape out the back door, relieved but not completely. I have a sense that the fight is not over.'

*

'Last night I dreamed my head was resting on Hillary Clinton's thigh, her left one, as we were riding in the back of her car. She was wearing sunglasses, the big, round kind, and didn't take them off even though I wanted her to. She brought her hand down to my cheek as I nuzzled into her jeans.'

-- from i dream of hillary: real dreams people have had about hillary clinton.

i read through this entire website at work today. dual causes: no one comes in on friday, and it's enchanting in a really strange way. also: the metaphysical poll.

'. . . sexual antinomianism (basically the only antinomianism that ever really counts) . . .'

-- bernard mcginn, '"evil-sounding, rash, and suspect of heresy": tensions between mysticism and magisterium in the history of the church'


'an in-eradi-i-cable rule of life, cassie, do not piss off the christians, they will throw their stones at you every time.'

-- haven kimmel, something rising (light and swift)

i remember having these deep, epic conversations with claire that convinced me of something i should have noticed even further back in high school-- that if i'm fortunate, life will be one long conversation. it is the same with any conversation, i find, and it is a comfort to be so self-aware as to know that i will always remain young and sarcastic at heart regardless of what turns my personality takes in the future. on tuesdays and thursdays laura and i have been lunching with emmie, resulting in a round table of laughs and, later, the inevitable lonely drive home.

i like talking to people, but it just struck me today what the implication of my life-as-conversation paradigm would be. death is the end of a conversation, the sad moment one, both, or all depart, and the empty feeling you are left with. i am not sure if this view makes death easier to stomach in its familiarity; regardless, its punch makes contact with a more acute spot of dread.

death is four in the morning in that conversation we thought would go on all night, when our eyes closed and we had run out of things to say long before. it's not a comfort at all, if that loneliness is so precisely lonely that we already have died, that i already have died, because monica left and those days with claire are gone and the band always packed up and left my garage for home on waning sunday evenings for a such a long stretch of time it seemed it had always been so.

. . . so.

so tell me more about yourself. we can't let the conversation stop. did you dream of something more? were you wrong to?