Be Pithy, Be Restful, Be Joyful

My living room looks only moderately lived in. That's just a symptom--my life feels barely lived in sometimes. There are stains on the table from when I had people over. Seven weeks ago. Now it's piled with books I mean to read. But there isn't time. Most of my reading is done for someone else, proximately. They try to make me believe I'm reading for myself. But all I want to read is (1) sad fiction, (2) stories about Soviet engineering boondoggles, and (3) enraged polemics about the pacifying influence of the entertainment juggernaut. I guess that last sentence wasn't pithy.

Nor joyful. Joy's being held in abeyance. First I must rest. Yesterday I forced myself to work all afternoon while falling asleep. Falling asleep all afternoon. Then artificially inflating my mood and ego with alcohol. Then bad sleep. And now my head is cobwebs and couldn't sleep to save its life. Maybe tonight. But I doubt it.

It's a day of sleepwalking rest. The day after the unseasonably warm day when all I wanted to do was walk in the sun and feel the non-stinging wind on my face. Instead, I sleepwalked through 5 hours of Jurgen Habermas on religion in the public sphere, a paper of continuous "yes, but..." from my end.

Consider: "You can't base a society of New Age mysticism. Cats don't herd."

Queen & Spadina, Depressed

The beat goes on; the beat is endless.
Heavy lidded pulsing in my gut,
little churning currents of blood
pounding in the temples,
in the roof of the mouth.
And in the fuzzy stillness,
thoughts half-born, like
the bloody feral's kittens left behind
when the coywolves attacked,
half-eaten now. The fuzzy fury,
approaching articulateness,
approaching full, awful packaging.
And the stillness, heaviness
of limbs locked in walk-motion,
blocks stretching out
funhouse-mirror-like in distortion.
The beat goes on, but
'tis all in pieces, all coherence gone
all just supply, and all relation
(Donne). And it goes on,
the cotton fog, the chasm between
what's in the theatre of the eyes
and that land of value,
of "yes", of "no". Instead,
all's just relation. This, then this:
the streetcar clangs seven times,
the bass beat from headphones in 4/4,
always the hip-hop 4/4,
the man in front in half-light,
there is scaffolding:
within a young woman is doe-eyed.
And so many blocks,
and such indifferent cold.

Consider: "There ain't a penthouse Christian who wants the pain of the scab, but they all want the scar."