we · have · seen · this · stuff

alarm clock like murder in philadelphia complete black, pitch and sticky. allure of dreams, something about twee pop. packing again in a complex and harried hurry, wash face and brush teeth. coffee in my brother's mug and my mother leaving home for a week as she does. long lines at the airport and all that anxiety about missing flights and missing connections and there was so much halogen and i looked like shit. will waiting at the gate and the southwest magazine more lawrence on the plane & trying to appreciate ys. the take off and red sunrise on the wings and suddenly light all around but it wasn't the end of the world. horrible nausea from bad airplane coffee and nerves.

chicago and its flatness after the industrial apparent indiana. broken luggage straps, a station wagon and the highway. cleaning my room and being inane. the bleak bartlett quad with omens, returning books and clashing colors, the bank, the anticipatory weirdness of the bookstore: a poetry anthology. cigarettes. cyclamen, beaujolais, brie, cheddar, canned tomatoes and tuna in the grocery, picking up at the metra, confused. to the north side: chicago diner, deciding on a whim to be less pissy, in a starbucks and genuinely joyous to see everyone i had missed. too loud music and we are all irresponsible for ourselves or others on the highway and then glowing trees at o'hare, goodbyes. back to hyde park, and tacky christmas trees on blackstone in entrancing colors. rudeness at the florian and more caffeine then a beer and family time and comparing christmas gifts and horrors and films. over to cornell for gingerbread and the beaujolais. dancing and seriously considering the less hateful thing and i missed everyone a lot. back home and there are freight trains on the metra tracks and tacky plastic red bows until the second floor. eating half of a half of a southwestern wrap and class tomorrow.

i suppose this will get worse, but it's okay now.

i write best of lists and they're lame but okay and i like doing them, so there.

Cormac Mccarthy
There’s something happening here, and it is clearly and completely terrifying. We will sacrifice a lot for each other, but all of that is not enough. Somewhere there are trees of dead babies and bones with the flesh boiled off of them. Somewhere people are in love, but it cannot be here. Parts of the world are burning, and we want to see them, we want to touch the ashes. The ashes are stark, but hell if they aren’t beautiful.
At some point in January, I went on a serious reading binge when there were many, many other things I should have been doing. At the end of this was a borrowed copy of Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, which is often considered to be Mccarthy’s best novel. It is certainly the most intense, and most harrowing. I had a bizarre experience reading Blood Meridian that I rarely have with books—when I finished it about forty-eight hours after I started it, I had virtually no idea what the specifics of the book were. This feeling was weird, and intriguing. I had read his Border Trilogy before, but this novel was different. Over the year, I read this book three times, and I read four other Mccarthy novels. I read them in different places, in different mental conditions. Mccarthy books don’t teach me anything—their common thread is their violence, and that they exist in a world where you are always surprised to see a radio or a truck on a dusty road. In other words, Mccarthy doesn’t write about us and our angst or trauma. But he writes beautifully, and his books get at some kind of greater, desperate experience which has more in common with our world than we’d otherwise think. These books are essentially modern, they are psychedelic, and they are impossible to read just once.

Camera Obscura, “Let’s Get Out of This Country”
With no offense to Camera Obscura, I mean the song and not the album. I mean the song because it was on repeat this summer, the Scottish lilt and string hook splitting their way through all the heat and angst and horror of months back at home. If I had to analyze what parts of my life are based on some vague form of escapism, it would probably horrify me. But this song is so simple in its wishes: I want to be in a different place, and I want to be there with you. Though the second part of the sentiment is not something I strive to practice in my daily life, “Let’s Get Out of This Country” explains that, on all counts.

i miss silk city. i'm not sure what this means. my apartment is fucking freezing, and when i wake up tomorrow to go the radio it will feel like -2 degrees outside, according to weather.com. i'm really frustrated and gross feeling, completely incompetent and sort of sad but not sure what i'm sad about, so therefore completely useless. tomorrow i have radio, work, cancer final, and then going to the reg for many hours until i get somewhere with this damn shakespeare paper (somewhere that is not giving up and choosing to read wonder boys and eat leftover pad thai). i feel really nervous and really unpleasant and so disgusting, but this is what happens now (my personal and academic failures are thrown into stark relief via actually having to assess them). i hate how cold it is now and the horrible nauseous feeling in my stomach that comes from having been fucking up surreptiously all this time. i only remember feeling truly comfortable once this quarter, and quite briefly. quite. so i miss the bad coffee and the milkshakes and the place where i knew how to pay and where to go and what to order, where we loved each other so much (and we did). how did we move away from that to these drunken frozen weekends and being posessed by our fears and strangeness to the point of total incompetency? maybe it's just me, and maybe it's because i don't trust anyone enough to love them that selflessly anymore and i'm blaming the fact that i don't have a place where i could love them. i suppose this is growing up and moving on, but i feel really lonely sometimes.

here's the truth: i like coming home alone, and walking up the stairs with noone behind me. i like singing in cars and smiling, when i can manage it. the skyline at night and how the sears tower is always demonic and the ferris wheel is on or off and either way it's enchanting and wonderful. wine tipsy and narcotics. i'm surprisingly unscathed, even if i'm an emotional cripple. it's not really late yet, but i don't want to sleep. i want to read 'less than zero' and listen to music.

here's the truth: there are characters with names that scare me in every book i read. or places with titles that are too familiar. i invite these things into my life and forget them, and i think maybe that's why i stopped reading for a while, because i didn't want to remember. or maybe i'm being too complicated, and as always, it was because i had no time. but i make time for this.

i may be intense and unpleasant. surely. but there are christmas lights now, and there is warm pita, cold beer, the draping mess of my bed, a shelf full of library books and a line of old jewelry. lovely shoes and plaid stocking and me, sweatpants and hair up, still hunched and typing the way i have typed for years, knock-elbowed and piano fingers. still looking at myself in the mirror, as though that could reveal anything. i'm going to try to be less pissed-off, but for my own sake, not for yours.