Wednesday, May 03, 2006

At Edible Complex

Here is a note I found in a notebook dated June 29, 1988, a year after Patty left
How did I get here? My life is like a singularity compressed out of time and space by my own collapse, utterly cut off from the universe by an impenetrable horizon of my own thoughtless making. I am so invisible that you could stare right at me, talk to me for an hour, and never see me. Still I am here. I glow so faintly that I can only be seen with one's eyes and reason turned aside.

I am a cliche of alienation. Literally a government clerk, a cinder of a failed marriage - burnt to a fine ash of solitude and indifference, an orphan, a former life, hoping for nothing, expecting nothing. So much has been lost and forgotten that even anger fails me. I may metamorphose at any moment.

My evenings have become so empty that I haunt coffee shops meant for student lesbians and lesbian students - the Rockridge in the summer of 1988. Just to write it so, in hopes of it sounding romantic and a long time ago, chills me with the near prospect of when it will be a long time ago.

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:08 PM

    even a faint glow is still a bit of a glimmer.

    my fav quote:
    in the depths of winter,
    i finally learned that within me
    there lay an invincible summer.
    --camus

    my current saving graces:
    living in the moment
    and
    lots of vitamins...!

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  2. Anonymous5:41 AM

    but look how far you have come since then. you should be proud of yourself. i hope that you will use your notebooks in a fictional piece or perhaps in an essay.

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  3. Anonymous2:57 PM

    This is a fabulous piece. It is a man in dispair writing, as opposed to the flash fiction which is a man writing about dispair.

    You need to become famous, if only a niche kind of famous, so that some grad student fifty years from now will pour over your journals for his thesis.

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  4. Who would read that much to learn that little?

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  5. Anonymous2:13 PM

    A grad student, who else. Everyones journals are like that. That is why grad students will read thousands of pages and come up with a couple of lines that he will try to give some significance. Even brilliant minds are just monkeys banging on the typewriter. Bang enough and something will not sound tivial, at least to this generation.

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  6. You are right. Grad' students will do anything. Patty is working on a dissertation largely based on comparing the various literary critical points of view of William Hazlitt. William Hazlitt. I think I had sort of heard of him. I think he was around at the time of Keats and Shelley and Byron, whom I have also not read.

    So I bought a copy of his "Spirit of the Age" and intend to read it on the road. It is not everybody with whom she can discuss dear William.

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