p1k3::2006/8

Thursday, August 31

37+ thoughts for the coming month
including actors, objects,
hopes, fears, and thematic elements

Kansas. Acoustic hippies. Candles. Truckstop Honeymoon. Cold class war and camper size. Tents. Whiskey. A golden ambulance. Nebraska Populism. I-70. Firewood. Jam sessions. Jackets and hats. Dying gardens. Debt. Incense. Dust. Tie-dye. Arrogance. Overtime. BSD. Literary violence. Lizards. Wolf spiders. Ethernet. apt-get. Infringement. Ink. Cooking. Ignorance. Corrugated cardboard, clattering tin cans. Rainwater. Biscuits, gravy. Contradiction. Longing. Contempt. Hope. Bemusement. Resignation. Regret. Possibility. Backpacks, notebooks, beer, coffee. Contemplation. Argument. Sex. Dirt. Donuts, stoned. Movement. Life beyond the corrupt and corrupting fantasies of the horrorshow modern body(mind?)politic. Hummingbirds and small children.

2006 August 31 :: read the margins

Saturday, August 26

my permanent accessory, or, possibly the only way out is not through

So last night I had some drinks.

Actually, last night I got fucking wasted, although not in the Adam Sandler sense of the term. Which is not to say there wasn't weed available. It's just that I didn't want to make an ass out of myself in front of a bunch of pre-school teachers.

Dammit.

The point of this entry is that I think I've entered a new phase of my long-term relationship with alcohol. There was a time in my life — from here on out I'll just refer to it as "college" — when any morning stood a pretty fair chance of being this hungover. And then there was a while when every morning, along with several other parts of the day when I wasn't actively drinking, was this hungover.

Except not really, because it's amazing the sort of tolerance you can develop when you work at it, and I spent a lot of time running around chasing discs or pushing lawnmowers, so that whatever other damage I was doing to my body I was still in the best shape of my life.

Nowadays, things are different. I sit in front of a computer all day, and between having no friends and having no money, I have little inclination to drink and even less capacity. I stopped being a social alcoholic the day I got on a plane out of Nebraska, and a year and a half later it's fairly obvious my body has caught up. I know this because now, when I am presented with large quantities of free booze and I crack that first beer or down that first shot and the inevitable spiral into drinking like I still drink follows, I wake up in the morning and everything is fine until the memory surfaces and I have to go wash all the blood off my face, or what have you, and it occurs to me that none of this was a very good idea. And invariably I have some conversation with my girlfriend where I come to realize that most of several hours has vanished entirely from my brain, and this never stops reminding me of another conversation which made me realize I was in the middle of utterly fucking up my entire life. Even if I didn't do anything worse than look like a jackass by shouting at some poor kid about George Lucas betraying his own mythology, it all starts to seem like part and parcel of an earlier terrible mistake — and mistake is the wrong word here, because it implies a kind of innocence or a "nobody's fault, really" quality which is utter bullshit — which I then begin to feel is somehow ongoing. And in a way of course it is.

I'm doing a bad job of articulating what it is that's changed, but it's clear to me that something has, and it feels important. Largely I suppose it is just context, and in the context of this different life getting really fucked up doesn't feel like a shared endeavor of almost holy urgency the way it once did. It feels like creating a sad spectacle of no particular interest.

I'm not sure that I should mourn this, but in some way I think I do. I think I mourn leaving the path of excess, or my easiest access to it.

2006 August 26 :: read the margins

Sunday, August 18

Elizabeth is driving halfway to Grand Junction to pick up her brother T, who is coming to live with us for a while. We're taking him to see Ani DiFranco tonight, which ought to be some kind of shock to the system.

2006 August 18 :: write in the margins

monday, august 14

it's almost cold this morning
after last night's rare storm
my plastic rainbarrel trashcan
is full to overflowing, and i collected
another seven gallons in jugs and buckets
with what we waste on hot showers and
the dishes, laundry and all that,
this conservation is probably an illusion
but i enjoy it.

2006 August 14 :: read the margins

Friday, August 11

12:18 a.m.

All right, so I was wrong. The book is not quite done, because I still have to fiddle with the margins and I'm afraid of what might happen if I tried to understand the way this actually works in LaTeX in my present state of exhaustion. Soonish.

7:04 p.m.

Ok, it's done.

2006 August 11 :: write in the margins

Wednesday, August 9

more book

I finally got a proof copy of the book today (media mail, doncha know). It looks ok. Which I guess isn't surprising; it's just a collated printout of a PDF file with some glue and a glossy cover. I already know what the PDF file looks like. On the other hand, it's undeniably also a book, even if it's not a book which has been published by a For Real Publishing Entity, and this carries some kind of weight.

There are a couple of minor things I want to fix before I call it good and move on to the next one. If anyone's holding off on ordering a copy 'til it's final, it should be good to go by Friday morning.

2006 August 9 :: read the margins

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