2/1

I want to sit in this room alone and write the world into oblivion. I want to walk out into a clean white space, a lifeless, geometrical tundra, unasking, uncompelling, void of expectations and behavioral schemes, of reeling, societal nausea, of all-consuming quests for ideals left behind once achieved. Or I want to be able to stop the animate and consider, minute by minute, what should go here, what dialogue should go there - oh this would solve that, and such-and-such would improve this-and-that - like a chess match, a poker game even...like a book, a story, a tale; something I CAN TAKE TIME WITH! I can't keep up the way it is. I can't think fast enough for conversation. What comes out isn't optimal, or even satisfactory. If I could think about it I'd feel at ease, able to at least get by, but my improvisation doesn't seem to work anymore. For one thing, I've lost my sense of humor. I'll rack my brain trying to put someone in high spirits, and usually fail, or induce the hollow giggle. Sometimes I'm lucky and there's a real laugh, and that carries me for a day or two. I'll be on my toes, weightless and smiling, and I'll think I have the knack again, but at the next opportunity I prove myself flat, dull, vapid.

I'm lost in the crossfire, I don't know what's said or meant, or not meant - I can't understnad the words. The mouths are not forming proper language for me, and I miss it, I miss it, I miss the point, I can't seem to click over into comprehension. My brain floats absolutely still in a dead brine, and I walk away confused by my own failure to exist. I look at the boots of a Maine lobster fisherman, in a photograph, and wish I were in those boots, a simple, calloused worker, slinging traps off the end of the boat, cracking the jokes about the women in my brother's office building or the drunken fire chief or the new road that's inconveniencing everyone, comparing rubber fishing boot qualities for thirty minutes, or the ailments of age, or unfairness of taxes. I did that once. I lived among the bulls, the humpers, the mules of society, and I was one of them as fully as I could make myself, and I came to enjoy the simplicity of discussion, and I think I could joke much more effectively then...

But I change with the days. Tomorrow a three-minute transaction might haul me out of my plastic-blooded lethargy and leave me deposited on a crisp air of ridiculous joy, punching the air in victory, doing that private singing and mumbling, and eating, eating a lot.