Dear Jackson, apropos
I am excited that
It is that I never can write automatically that is my problem. No matter how automatic, I’m terrified (and simultaneously, this is all I ever dream of romantically) that something deep within me will swim violently to the surface, and shoot out of Jacques Cousteau to ascend left from a water-logged box in the North Sea that he has been taken prisoner in for five years, to know that this is really what he is all about, and he will fuck up the epidermal layers, it will shoot off in every direction and land on a million civilian spaghetti dinners. I am not a creative being. I do not breathe, like artists breathe. I see the world around me through lenses, through a dangerous prescription, and I feel the ultraviolet judgment of everyone else. I have moved to
I have just realized that it is the opposite. Here I have for nine months lacked the cancerous judgments I am so comfortable to succumb to. I am too invisible; just strange enough not to get noticed within the militia of my peers. One step more and you are a lunatic, I always think but the opportunity absconds in exponents, one day I take a step, the next day I take another but I never become a true lunatic. I feel as though I am dying when the key I have does not fit, an arboreal prisoner for a terrestrial conversation, a salamander in a salt lake. How much longer can I see the world in terms of longitudes and latitudes, obsess over maps and calendars, not unlike a mathematician’s foaming, emotional abacus of rationality? I flounder in oxymoronic decay.
At the same time I wallow as do the oily elephant seals with the albatross in
I have trained myself that all I need to speak is one sentence a day, but this is a sedimentary sentiment, and I can only seem to look at that one layer of strata; maybe there are none others. One sentence to pull Jacques Cousteau’s box down even further into the freezing Petri-dish of the sea, losing more hope of an oneiric aerial renaissance. But instead I convince myself that I have been fed, one sentence a day is my appropriate ration. But obviously, I type this to you, it is longer than one sentence. It is better than small talk, I should read it aloud to my classmates for the pure sake of its synergetic existence. People talk themselves out of their accidental celibacies every day,
Eliza and I appear to be growing beyond each other to the point of occasional insolence, as
“There is nothing beyond this room.” Sometimes its message is ingrained through repetition, but usually I keep the future and the past in mind. I am looking forward to my upcoming travels so much!
I just got back from an awful show, I left because I was going to faint, not because of the band. Fallacious arguments indeed. It’s when everything in my sight turns white and grainy and then the ground beneath me falls away, I know I will faint. So I walked home and here I am, eating food, thinking about eating more food. I am right back to where I started; it is kind of comforting and kind of terrifying. Trapped again, blah blah blah. I think it is time for me to read another Bukowski book. It’s been a while, and I feel like it will cum into my life at the right time (now?)
And then, just with another spoonful of a night, it gets better. More embarrassing, but better. I DON’T GIVE A FUCK! I DON’T GIVE A FUCK! I DON’T GIVE A FUCK! I ate fish the other day. I ate a trigger fish and there was some chorizo on the side and it was good. I just have to do these things in order to be stay a man. I might get another tattoo, of a man in a cowboy hat staring down a louse. Homage to H. Miller. It may or may not happen. Depends on how the drawing works out. It may or may not happen, like I already said. Lately I’ve been enjoying coffee. It has been really harsh as I am not a coffee drinker; I feel like I’m on meth all the time but I like drinking coffee and then going to class because it makes me interject and talk and focus. However, I often forget to eat after I’ve had coffee. This is now all about the simple, floating-on-surface-of-nasty-but-refreshing-pond-water talk. I’m in, man. I’m so in. Are you in? Are you all about the post-rock?
I look at photos from last year and you can tell they are photos taken by a fearful person. Every subject is distant and its head is turned. I look at photos from the present time and you can tell they were taken by someone who is now so fearless that she would survive being gored by 16 Indian elephants. This is true. But being gored by 16 elephants is terrifying nonetheless. I like to fantasize about a reasonable world, where things grow exponential uncomfortable, but at the same time retain their pillowy quadratic heft. In my head it’s been
I feel like I thought I learned a lot at boarding school, like it completed me in a way. It made me more rational. But I think it was a waste of time. I’ve always been told this by my friends, and I have disagreed, said that it happened and whatever, you can’t change what happened, but now I am furious. It has taken me a whole year and half to even realize that I am furious. Of course I am not furious all of the time. It is all about time and place. TIME AND PLACE.
Goddamn, do I even dare to send this son of a bitch preachy letter?
