- can’t remember anything past “aye, that’s the rub,” or “within its bending sickle’s compass come,” or which one ends with “so long lives this, and this life gives to thee.” of lesser importance are the lines of howl, ulysses, that robert frost poem about the woods, that other robert frost poem about the wall. I’m forgetting my poetry. I’m turning into a vanilla English major. soon I’ll be sitting at my computer at ten thirty, finishing up my eighth paper of the week, and it won’t hit me until I wake up well-rested and bored- I’ll be a plain old English major, churning out long long sentences, each idea blocked off in neat, uniform spaces set between commas, proofread as written. no art, just citation. I can feel it rotting out my teeth, line by line.

- some people shouldn’t play the guitar. I used to be one of those people. years of quiet, sheepish humiliation have tought me several things:

1) the louder you play, the more embarrassing it is. and likewise with the number of people there are to hear you play. and if you’re singing at the same time, the equation looks like this:

b= baseline embarrassment (what one feels when measuring your cover against the original)

v= volume

c= crowd

s= singing

E= b^((v+c)s)

notice that when s=0, as in when you are not singing, then E=baseline. which means if you are playing so that everybody in the crowd hears you, the only way you can embarrass yourself more than you would’ve been if you’d just stayed home is by opening your mouth. notice also that by making the sum of v and c negative, the value of E becomes a fraction of the baseline. which I suppose means if somehow you play backwards, as in your guitar sucks in noise and creates, I don’t know, maybe a kind of light as a trade-off- or if you play to people in bizarro world- as long as you also sing, you will become less embarrassed than usual. make of that what you will.

2) I’ve been playing since the fifth grade. I’ve made mild improvements. if the current trend continues, I should be ready for prime time before I turn fifty.

2.1) frankly, though, I don’t care about being better. now I have some sense of how long it takes to get better at something, the years of practice, etc. now I can look thirty years into the future and ascribe a rate to it. some kind of rate, even if it’s just, “by the age of fifty, I will play the guitar approximately… better than I do now.” I was expecting to wait longer for a sense of time like that, and now that it’s here, I don’t know what it’s like to want to do anything other than stick to those kinds of plans. another sad, quiet thing.

- thought about writing something about the myth of the ordinary in american culture. (our obsession with celebrity is a product of a cultural anal-retentiveness. if people can’t become famous, they’ll at least feel famous by holding within themselves all sorts of shit about people who are already famous. if left alone, this shit builds up inside a person into a kind of egotistical megacolon. it actually corresponds to the freudian thing quite well: when anal-retentive toddlers begin to realize that the world takes things without caring to give them back, they exert control over their shits, refusing to acknowledge the scary truth: we’re just food.)

-or what normalcy means in a culture of excess, or that the aesthetic of exhaustion is a means to keep the normal-waters down- the whole concept of heroic fatigue. aren’t we a sleep-deprived nation? nation of insomniacs? nation of epileptic consumption spurred by our own joyride blinking neon traffic lights? slowly I remember.