ON FROM NOW

011319 - Sometimes on my day off I can sleep late
till 730 or 830 even but some days lately I'm
excited, kind of, don't want to dream anymore,
want to take advantage of the day, make
something, feel my freedom. Sol LeWitt said do it,
make it stupid, let it go, like speaking to an anxious
gifted child. Hesse's spirit of play was necessary and
essential and lasted, so intent she kept going with
that energy through work, making things to last long
enough to show them and sell them too. Amazing. A life on
this macabre peculiar planet, on the edge of privilege
without actually ever diving in, as every opportunity for
her was an opportunity for art - making, seeing,
anticipating, showing. As I write toward the end of this
page, of this notebook, I have no right idea or plan
whether to stop writing or not but that means I may
as well keep going since I have other notebooks
just the same unless the color is different on the
perfectbound spine. I don't remember where I bought
them but one by one they get used by me or one of
my kids when they've needed something like this to
write in for some reason. A class, I think, but
maybe not. I noticed in 2011 I was commenting on
how bad my memory was, how easily I lost
something, so I don't think it's drugs or Alzheimer’s,
I think it's part of my nature, the economy of my
mind, both what's available for me to instrumentalize
and what I use it for, what I need, what matters
to me. The current, the new, the edge, the
unexpected as much as the confirmatory and routine.
I like my week to go by pattern so I get to do
things like swim at the Y, like write, like earn
enough money to save some of it, like know
when there are times to see friends, write
letters, get high, make love, daydream, read.
The worst is when working all the time isn't any
fun. The worst might be loneliness or boredom,
but those hardly ever occur to me. I see the steam
float past the back door window again this morning.

01142019 . The way these things are built, I can't tell
the front from the back, the beginning from the end.
I can tell you I feel not so much tired as that was a
good dream to wake up from as developments were not
getting any better. He wasn't acting or looking seductive
but trying to do his job for pay at the same time
as hooking up with me and probably expecting a big
tip, for that, did I seem so attractive he wouldn't?
It's hard to tell. I was somewhat younger, because
Jasper was younger, tooling around on his indoor
trike while I tried to determine whether there were
rooms to have privacy in and this other guy
presumably was assembling materials like the pan he
hoped I'd help him grease, since he was charged with
that task but hadn't been able to yet. The nicest part of
the dream was finger rolling and popping a pea into
my mouth and the woman unpacking groceries then
wanted one too and I gestured to encourage her so she
took one. Stupid, dumb, the worst possible, beyond
embarrassment, it's not too late. Would life be
easier if we were all the same? It would be crowded
if we all did the same things at the same time. If we
were all as peaceable and patient as I can be, that
might be better. The world has been so violent for so
long, I mean people; I'm not suggesting all the other
species become the same as me too. I would like all that
killing bullying torment torture injuring exploding and
bruising to stop, but I suppose it won't. I won't do it.
But containment strategies, mutual deterrence, now
there's an invention in passive activism that had legs.
Too bad it had implications and exceptions, violations,
and nightmare scenarios. Or would you rather be a fish?
Propelled through space by undulating, swishing, and
all space being water, might feel at home, or
congruent with it, anywhere. There's no such thing
really as beginning again, there is only continuity
or there is always just this, this, this, this, this, this.

01152019 - I could, but I don't. I could drink
tea, but I drink coffee. I could take a sip
right now, but I let it sit and keep writing. I could
cross out a wrong word when I meant to write another
but I write over it, instead, leaving the possibly
legible remains of the wrong word in the same space
as the new or right word. I could let mucus drip
down from my upper lip but I do reach out to take a
tissue from its box to blow my nose. This could
and does go on forever. I don't want to write only
one sentence structure. Spelling is not hard for
me but getting the letters written clearly in the right
sequence requires some significant concentration
and sometimes I still need to add a stroke to an
m later so it doesn't read as an n, and so forth.
At least I don't write "and so forth and so on" or
repeatedly use "you know" or "whatever," though all
these might be more appropriate to an honest
account of where I'm coming from than what I
do. Do write, do right, woman. When teens want
sex all the time, are they building richness and
complexity into the oppressive power conflicts
between the sexes, or ... That seems so old hat,
now that more genders and sexualities can
express themselves, in a lot of high schools. Who
am I kidding? I am taking my own reflections
at face value, I think.

01162019 - I allow myself a lot of leeway early
in the morning, it is hard to think of others
very well, they are not here. Am I like anyone else?
I doubt it. All the more embarrassing to write of
my own thoughts feelings experience. Yesterday I said
emphatically to someone who spoke to me as a
normal person, "But I'm weird!" Over time, I
think, such thoughts pile up and someone may
reflect consciously on what I mean, about me,
about people. I will also say, "Everyone I meet
is weird" or "To be human, to be alive, is
weird." Uncanny. Preposterous. A miracle without
evident reliability. Is death the weirdest part about
being alive, being human? "Stay human" means to
stay humane - to care, I guess, about other living
beings, about one's response-abilities really for
any aspect of our environment that supports
this life. Is everything alive? Or everything on
earth? Is air alive? Is dirt? Is oil? Is tin? Is fire?

011719 . Maybe I do this so I can rest, first thing in the
morning. "Okay, I'm sitting down," I heard myself say
to myself without speaking, soundlessly. When
someone doesn't answer my email, should I ask
them why not? I responded to their invitations, and
now, nothing. I am a very obnoxious person, quirky
in ways that may seem unnecessarily and annoyingly
mannered and thus even pretentious and therefore
presumptuous, privileged, oppressive. I am a chameleon,
too, anyway. I will tend to imitate anyone else's response
back to me. But in the absence of any response, I
am lost, colorless, no winds in my sails, all cliche
and lifeless literacy, concrete and literal-minded so
that I'm all too likely misunderstood, interpreted in
ways I cannot preconceive or manage. The last thing I
want is to be reactive, yet I must and will react,
and so may anyone. Is this hard to follow? Like the trails
left by crawling slugs, each separately preoccupied,
yet without objective or conscious purpose, evading
the precipice at each edge of the page.

01182019 - Can I be a disciplined person who does
things I didn't expect to do or who does things I do
expect to do but in ways I didn't expect to? Can I be
someone to whom unexpected things occur and who
does unexpected things when expected things occur?
Do I want to, is there any value really in conceptualizing
how I am doing things, above and beyond
any seemingly typical formulation in circulation
anyway? Do I want to propose my way of doing
or thinking as a model for others to imitate? I
suppose that if I am to articulate something of
this in a way one or more other people may apprehend
then I am liable to influence their self-consciousness
and their behavior, often in ways I
have, like it or not, not expected. A life's work could
be nothing less, but there's always survival,
getting through the day, coping with loneliness and
indecision, snowstorms and shopping.

01192019 - I woke and slept again. I dreamt
and woke again. I don't really remember. I
suppose. No one contradicts me. This is not about
me. It’s true of all of us living things, even
exceptions - in some sense it will be true of
them too. Not everyone (not every species (not
everything)) takes pills, but I took one before I
began to sleep - no, I took two of them - so I would
not be woken by an itch. That was my intention.
And it worked. Or I slept despite itching and
waking, so much I don't remember any of that, but
maybe the pill or the change in the cold air as
the room cooled and the atmosphere outside the
building froze led to my remembering next to
nothing. There are no particular memories, and
even what I vaguely remember as if it were
again and again may not have been last night
and has no particular definition of form or
situation except sleeping and waking and
sleeping again.

01202019 - Okay everybody. Sink into. Sink
down into heavy snow. Each snowflake so
tiny and at times so tinny you could miss it or
mistake it for sound particles. I admire your
sound consonants and vowels. Your guest
room towels and sheets so spacious and a
color I can't imagine or name, or maybe just
don't want to. I can admire things without
liking them. I can value them only so far: it's
good to dry off with this towel, I can really
dry off, feeling enveloped in some instants
while I rub it around and wave it around my
standing body. For lying down and feeling safe
at rest, I prefer these sheets, whatever color
and weave they are, they are smooth. I wish the
texture were softer and the lay of them weightier,
more tangible. Someone is out there shoveling
around my car right next to the door, is plowing
already, got out to shovel where I've parked
off the driveway. The snow is supposed to lay
several more inches at least before it stops. I
could get up and say "You shouldn't do that,"
but how would I know? I haven't listened to or
read the weather in the past 36 hours. The snow
is relentless and blowing around, as was
predicted then. I'll go outside and move some of it
around myself after breakfast.

All excerpted from typescript of
TODAY IS DIFFERENT,
which is much longer, originally written
in a notebook first thing each morning
at home after waking and grabbing
coffee, over a period of 14 months

This part home-printed on 04-20-2022
as "On from Now"