Bread: I should change my profile picture.

Meat: Someone from my* graduating class died today. She is the first of my class, as far as I know, to die.

*This is only an “I am the center of the world” post insofar as these moments have a tendency to trigger a “How does this affect me?” reaction, right?

Sometimes it’s a slow series of gears between the emotional and the intellectual.

Bread: Thank you for the Bender review.

It’s entirely possible that I underachieve to spite my enablers.

Without much effort, I teared up when she was tying his tie.

I tried to tell a woman the other day that I thought Kurt Cobain was a bad role model, but I didn’t communicate myself clearly enough.

She was in her scrubs, I guess she was on her way to work because she didn’t look exhausted or I didn’t see any stains or at least I didn’t catch any hospital smells. She was buying a book about Kurt Cobain, I said I hadn’t read that one, she said it was for her daughter who’d done a report on the guy from Alice in Chains and the American Dream.

It occurs to me now that her daughter is probably using heroin or obsessed with not using it, as there is a heroin problem, apparently, in Madison.

Anywho, I wanted to tell her that for all Kurt’s slacker posturing, for all his I didn’t want this rhetoric, few people have wanted anything more than he wanted everything he got. Nay, he probably needed it. There was a comfort-in-discomfort thing.

So this mythology he created, that people who don’t want something can still get it, is a pervasive mound of shit. People talk about the youth of today coming off as entitled, and yeah, everything is at our fingertips. Everything, at worst, is a matter of lottery. You are not a star simply because you are in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Someone out there will love you for exactly who you are. There is a check waiting for you, somewhere. Until then, you’re the state’s responsibility.

Nothing is Hard - that should be the title of every Kurt Cobain book ever. But I don’t mean that in a double meaning way. There is no great cause outside ourselves.

I flitted through work.

I listened to badass emo country records.

I “finished” a song

and first-drafted another one.

I did not, however, write anything that *needed* writing.

I also spent too much money.

Some things change, some things stay the same.

As I was falling asleep a sequence of thoughts occurred to me that I very consciously refused to to accept. It was weird. Very “I’m not going to think about this.” And I didn’t. And today I have no idea what those thoughts were.

So the story will be ghosts hunting down someone who has exiled them from his mind. Hmmm, exciting.

I was looking to develop an interest in the greater world. My idea was to start reading Bartleby Snopes everyday because, I thought, they posted a story everyday. They don’t. And the stories are not good. And I don’t think it’s just because I just finished the Pushcart Anthology.

I thought about getting a magazine subscription. Rolling Stone? But I could just get those from Marc. And magazines, man, advertising. Advertising for what, Dan? The world.

I’m of two minds: 1. To participate. 2. To operate in the periphery (pressure free). They’re not mutually exclusive, of course. So I’m of one mind… which has two parts. Seriously, I’m more of a realist everyday.

I’d rather be writing love letters to myself. I’d rather be writing exercises in empathy. I’d rather be railing.

But there needs to be something to write love letters about.

Mmm, commentary.

Present tense, past tense, future tense. Bah. Someone else’s idea. I have peripheral tense. Peripheral state, if you must. Peripheral station.

It’s nice, this grammar book is open and all the puss that’s been accumulating in my introspective blister is just evaporating faster than I can catch it with this napkin. Gross? It is. It is.

I want to tell my adviser that I like my sentences broken. But there’s a language I have to speak. I was thinking earlier, that you write for yourself but you edit for everyone else. But that’s meh. I like the idea of writing other people’s stories. Finding the beautiful and the tragic about some other situation. You mean I don’t have to be one of my characters? Interesting… interesting.

If I type hard enough this desk bumps against the wall like fucking. Metaphors, mmm.

Sentences in turn are built with eight different kinds of words…

I’m going to start writing love letters to myself.

The lesson of the day is: I don’t have to turn in THE paper. A paper will suffice.

My procrastination has something to do with my perfectionism. You wouldn’t know it, though, that I have a sense of the perfectionism.

For whatever reason, chemistry I guess, this Amp Overdrive thing tastes terrible.

Oh, that too.

The other lesson was that all things need to be good is time. That’s all they need, I mean, is patient, gentle time. Nurturing time.

I guess, if you just set a square peg on a round hole one will eventually change and the block will pass. Yup. Sufficiently tired.

This Captain Crunch was better two days ago. Do all things taste terrible at, whoa,  five to three in the morning?

My words have velocity.

Kurt Cobain was super-driven. Not a slacker. Nothing that anyone remembers about him happened to him. He got what he begged for. He got what he practiced for. His actions resulted in equal reactions (more or less). So that’s a lie. There’s no poof.

I was going to tell someone earlier that we all want to semblance of control. We want to know that someone out there is in control. We want narrators, authors, that are in control. We want to believe that someone, somewhere, has something figured out. It makes it seem possible. Reinforces the very fabric of belief.

But I didn’t. I wrote three drafts of the e-mail and deleted all of them. That kind of commentary was uninvited. Is uninvited.

It’s three o five in the morning.