All good days come to a close.

Reading Transmet and hating all the people around me, makes me get to thinking of myself as Spider Jerusalem. This is it! You've reached the end of "blogaday." Hopefully my classes will be able to take up the necessary time consumption that this did for the last month. But I should still be back here occasionally. So I'll see you around.

I feel like I'm dreaming. I think two pages are missing from my notebook; one has on it a very important poem to me. One of my mother's cats has flown the coop; I wonder if I'll ever see any of them again. I'm not eating much; not hungry much. Everything just feels shimmery around the edges like this laptop screen. I feel like I'm dreaming. I'm not sure I like the way my life has turned. I want this to be a dream. You're dreaming, this is just as real as any other part of existence. Phantom pains still reappear in my right middle finger and foot; what an odd combination. That poem was very important to me. It was a breakthrough piece. I'm maybe not eating enough...but I'm not hungry... Will Snowball ever come back to play with the girl cat Marble? Why does life feel all odd and out of whack? What is this.

I have a lot on my mind. It's sitting there, like the earth on Atlas's shoulders, and bits and pieces of it are really starting to bother me. The overwhelming feeling of uselessness. Why did I have to get so dark? I'm here in a room with all the lights out writing out my individual depressions. That fucking poem! If only I had forgotten it, not noticing when it went missing, not having to put myself through counting all 58 pages of what is supposed to be a sixty page notebook. It was a poem referencing, in my memory, a "locked door mystery" and not I can't seem to figure out how the pages came off without leaving at scraps of paper in the spiral and without taking off the cover or back cover (the latter of which did just come off and set off a chain reaction that led me to start freaking out about this damn poem).

I've just finished the third volume of Transmetropolitan and R.O. Blechman's Dear James. I'm reading The Mayor's Tongue, the next volume of Transmet, The Gum Thief, and Nicholson Baker's U and I and Checkpoint. This is a way to pass the time. It perhaps gets one's mind off of the poem that is gone. For class, I've read the first chapter of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, and loved it, truly surprised to find that literary focus I did not know the man had. I'm putting on preseason football or other sports for the same reason...To make the world spin. This is coming out much more pessimistic than I had hoped. And yet the time must get away somehow--I feel rudderless, unsure of what I am trying to accomplish at any given moment. On campus or the town with a plan, I'm fine, it's now, nights in front of my keyboard or behind a book or not being able to sleep that it gets to me. I termed it to my mum "homesickness," but it's not that so much as unfamiliarity, as if I've been dropped into a world that I don't understand the inner workings of. I feel like I'm dreaming.

In creeps perhaps too much repetition. To think that a few hours ago I was in a very strong feeling of happiness. It's these sorts of days that make you realize there is something in your head that's you and it's not anyone else but it is similar to some people and of course if you didn't have it you wouldn't be you, but you're crazy. Insanity runs among artists, Mark Vonnegut surmised, because the other crazies don't get laid. It's the ones who can make things that reproduce and so it's those that continue to flourish. I'm sure that's bad evolution and it also implies that reproduction has to do with artistic talent, which I might question. Maybe the world has changed since Mark's time. The world has changed since the time of Said's Culture and Imperialism, where a book like Kim or Robinson Crusoe helped in fact shape the world or at least the worldview. Said's arguments for the impact of culture on empire are not only interesting because of their reference to the specific word "empire" which Bret Easton Ellis's online presence (95% twitter?) is making use of in his own way, but because it shows to some extent that art really does do something. The age old Auden quote "poetry makes nothing happen" glimmers in the mind and you realize he's wrong, it once did and still can, but the rules of the game have changed. When you were reading novels maybe in your life but that was probably it, they impacted you. When you listen to the 24 hour news channels like one might today you are less bound to see your world as wrapped up in whatever art you are studying is.

I don't know if I'm scared or stupid. That could be a poem or a novel or a concept album. It could be a poster that was also a comic book. In U and I Nicholson Baker recounts a dream of looking at a popup book of criticism on Melville in a bookstore. A white whale of "Kleenex" lies jumping out of the page at you. Said refers to the "whale" as society and getting inside or out of it. He's actually referring to Salman Rushdie referring to George Orwell. It's a long rabbit hole, it's a hall of mirrors. I feel like I'm dreaming perhaps in Baker's dream and I will walk into a bookstore and see him with his book there and wake up at the bottom of this hole where the hare has brought down one of the my favorites of my new poems scrunched up between his teeth. Writing and losing that writing is like leaving behind a part of yourself, not something even as "significant" as even your spleen, but perhaps the part of you that suddenly realizes that you are dreaming and finally pulls you out. This is coming across all ripoff Inception-like but what the fuck are you going to do. I don't know if I'm scared or stupid but I feel like I'm dreaming.

Perhaps, someone is calling on the phone line to my brain, you can quit this odd pity parade. It's not  nearly as artistic as you feel it seems. These are simply new images from that feeling of your entire life, which you localized as being how you felt in a foreign language: treading water and you don't know how long you can keep it up. Or worse. Drowning.


We now interrupt this uninteresting narrative, this terrifyingly dull bookend where the artist as much as told you he phoned it in, referring at one to a phone line and writing this into the text like some sort of mad man which was relevant because he had already called himself crazy, to bring you a few ideas of the future. We control the narrative, do not adjust your eye glasses, the past, present, and future are ours to behold and betake and beget. To such an extent that we can say words that are inaccurately placed for meaning but correctly for order, in come all the bees and we take their honey. We betake ourselves to the hive once they're gone.


The plan, as of now, is to do some "rare books" reports, recounting my days in Smathers Library in the rare manuscripts area going through stuff I can't simply check out. These days have not yet begun. Dialogue will likely return, hopefully with more edge, more swagger, and perhaps the least likely of them all (and I'd still give it over a fifty percent shot) are some visual ideas I've been considering. However, if any of these end up coming out small and minor in my creating them, they could of course end up on the tumblr. I'm closing the gate now, to be opened soon perhaps but not left open as it has been, it's been fun, innovative, interesting and something I truly enjoyed doing, but my life is moving on (I feel like I'm dreaming, I might be scared or stupid) and so I will with it. Run away from all these missing objects and perhaps you find them. And to leave with the sort of feeling I'd rather this whole post had had I will say "one can at least hope."






STATS
nearly 43,400 words. 31 days with a post going live at 3:00 PM EST. a start. definitely that. it's a finish as well, but i can't help now but look to november. something may be brewing.