a fever dream cascade of old thoughts, fragments to fall down
all day i could paint, add thoughts to documents in progress
no deadline
no judge
tired of what the young still aspire to
so now aging and naming and laughing is all that’s left
middle age waits for the devil and angel to settle my case
moving to Groton, NY would refresh my view on how to make money
e-commerce is there; Jackie’s juice bar, Hanan’s tea café, the next-next door antique store Jeff’s mom has stuff in — maybe experiment selling stuff online? That crack where I live: how to make money; could try ‘working’ and see how it goes; one can’t just type whatever one wants into the machine and think money will come out — how to be valuable to others, and then once it lands, how to make others see — this becomes the childish drama of the internet I may understand intuitively and could probably drop out of for six months and enjoy the spring and summer of 2022 in the Ithaca, New York area, prepare the hotel for Cornell graduation weekend, we’re 12 miles from an international airport
every place is just a place
what cool young people are around?
the city is only as big as the next person
you’d want to meet and be next to
as they go on their conquering way
my home is in my head
and music, singing
and taste
rhythm
harmony
fear of being judged and having resources withheld is the dominant nightmare narrative of the mind, the ultimate wall our activity aims to avoid, or power through — proof of income and three references, judged by one who has what you need and can withhold it; power dynamics are the drain I keep swirling around; surely publishing can’t cure me; no, the fight is daily and endless against the voice; could I just let thoughts pass? What else to do?
The single most important decision you make is where you live.
It drives your business opportunities, relationships, food and water supply, politics, activities, and day-to-day quality of life.
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1492588894885449734
i became real (now, to find someone to refute it to, someone to disagree with over what is real)
i will do well (duh; now i get to become a version of one who could not have worked harder)
can give myself what groups and associations give others
am gonna go claire gins on their ass
wait, no, jean rhys is what i meant
it’s always about a girl
it’s a pleasure to not publish or save anything
the public game is for the lonely
not playing is divine
just reading, living and having friends
learning to not take the world or life too seriously
i learned the rules; now i would rather love than be right
i would rather surrender in loving and be transformed
is this arrival? it is an upward climb
it was easy to slide all my money across the table
to buy three months of living alone in Manhattan
it begins in two and a half days 1/20/22 and this little briar patch of Notes
spawned easily like a child, like a serpent
healing is a miracle
now i’m a man, enlightened
meaning lightened, weights put out
how much do I make? good question
interviewing myself
modeling the interest in me
turning the world into my parent
maybe learning it never needed to be done
aRtIsT bRaIn
ArTiSt BrAiN
in a room working on the whole chain of desire
to the in a room, figuring out their life on a laptop
respecting practicality and the
practical rules of life
romantic interpretation is a luxury
affect a person with your energy
i keep track of changes, impressions
i see it on a long time scale
some people are really focused on valid goals — people out there grinding, or making profit to buy luxury products, because they feel pain
saving money
developing
material
stability
and power
not just the artistic and ephemeral
Geoffrey P. Lewis
G.P. Lewis
why don’t we
figure out what’s
in the way of
uniting the independent
fear of mass destruction
and being shaped
if i may add a thought, rather than leaving you with the impression that only your beauty is valuable (it is not, …) i admire your endurance and your continued offering of a peephole into your own healing and overcoming the voices in your head.
a responsibility for others’ vocabulary, reading, thinking, believing, striving
i need all the help in the world
to be still
how to tell the sweetest girl the devil is and always will be a gentleman and let her walk away
Instagram comments to crowdsource my self-esteem
and I really can’t and shouldn’t take a break from the work. I came here to fall in love with the problem so much I will commit to finding a way to keep going. I do not deserve and have not earned a way up and out yet; like the prodigal son, I must stay gone ~ maybe. Maybe I can’t know. But it feels right to send thoughts to my father and mother and ask questions without answers.
i love knowing the queen is napping
an aggressive communicator trying to break out of my exile
it makes me wonder
what you’re saying yes to
that isn’t me —
objective impermanence
i am plotting the looniness of
decision-making
and the bitter obedience of
decision-doing; see,
i can’t even follow myself
LOVE IS THE TECHNOLOGY, MAN!
wanting and not arriving; engaging the distance
now i’m just another difficult, helpless man wanting health insurance and a mommy to make him breakfast so he can follow his genius and whimsy, fart around with books and dreams; no one can redeem how embarrassing man is — unless he writes a novel, yes, a modern baroque novelist worthy of a douchey collection of sweaters; ultrasound; ah, see, this is poetry that will never pass muster with an editor — oh how pleasant to fly away from what will sell! How pleasant to remove myself from gatekeepers who would make it into something else; how I create a market by insisting I should not fit; I shall make the market conform to me or it will not and I will do without; I see on time horizons the money managers could never — there’s no air in their card (what do you mean? “I know what I mean and I will go on without coherence from anyone who doesn’t WANT to pay the dues to understand how to keep up; no insignia is offered at the end of this, no credential and no reward; it is not going anywhere, there is no later event that we both know is legitimate; keep discarding the belief there’s a later; make it so the future event is meaningless (of course you get there, to the performance, and it goes well, but only because it didn’t need to and you resented having to think about it)
^ one cannot set out to write ‘notes on performance’ because it’s too daunting; you just have to write whatever interests you and, later, with the boring incision knife, notice what you’ve got
The conversations in my head are suddenly typed and said and sent.
it took a long time to love me.
now there is no fear in love
who do i have to tell to depressurize my memory
narcissism for some other sake
we rode that train once
green light blazing down the dark
deliverance soon
for erin
being defeated (defenestrated) by the white and black onscreen
the handheld compass and live-updating map
i wonder if i’ll learn i didn’t do anything,
didn’t participate
fear of not being real cannot be cured
your neglect is my oxygen
benign neglect is oxygen for the artist
archive something to read
galaxy-brained librarian
sorry integrity is a multiplayer game
turn the heat up on the meaning of the next interaction; stakes come and go
i am flexible to focus on projects and roles that excite me ~ i am simply doing what you asked, and the feedback is loud…i keep writing and not sending, keep the leviathan beating against the glass
i look for the friction where i can’t arrive
skirt out of fiction
is there no way to reach you that won’t go into the spam folder?
my love bounces off them as spam
i can’t afford real-life interactions with friends
he can’t read yet, isn’t ready for it yet
alarm the door
knock
he is ready for other inputs
yes i’m in a room trying to reach you
you’ve been seeking and resisting
talking to yourself through the economy
conducting attention and capital
from a god terminal
i would believe no formal anointment, but it’s fun to watch yourself on TV having friends
sorry i can’t come to the phone right now, heaven is breaking like glass shards from my fingertips and everything is possible and the mantle of stars is coming down to become dessert in our intestinal tracts
resist the urge to email a female colleague following up about the proposed changes; men love to control a system when they’re lonely and it appears their fate is signed, sealed and delivered
sometimes you just have to wring it out and not everything wrestled can be shown, to keep up appearances or keep appearances moving the concept of substance forward
don’t let “Save and publish” relieve you; stay unknowable
warning: passion may not be relieved by posting
now ever forgotten friend’s wife looks just like me
all my college friends became mediocre whites
she could never declaw me
i’m permanently in the wild
of music and creative freedom
stubborn belonging
renewable pride
come on internet, stay up, i’ve got some grief to process with my tribe!
not trusting is loneliness; distrust is the default
what to do with “it could be worse” and not being bonded
i am trying to move mountains here
do i believe in what the fragments can become
drink the soapy water
how to make the ugly beautiful
love broke my heart and i don’t believe in it anymore, it is a vengeful God, a selfish God — but I know I write this at the same time as Women write about why it’s worthy ~ i will simply force my struggle to become a bandwidth of money, enough money
obsessed with the meaning of what might have been seen
i love so much
and the love given yesterday will not do
however perfect it looks
i am amused by your rules and am here to crash them
scared by how much love was ungiven
where the art goes: mark all as read, archive
I’d let you cut my hair,
who we follow is our own story of who’s on our team
so we desperately compile family
look at the list and doubt it
who can love me on the bandwidth i share on
maybe i’ll have to learn about frequency
and meaning: oh, who is more
desperate for inclusion than me?
the problem is i love you so much
and my love is so tinged with
every color and spent bullet of wars gone by,
felling fathers
death knells abound
crooks and treason
haha you’re asking what breakage from woman i am processing, which tremor i am on, which frequency is affecting me and holding the words back ~ i have no answer; communion and silence are both terrorizing
when necessary silence to compose your thoughts meets feral intensity of wanting to talk, you find…creative conflict, creative process, a choice of whether to devote yourself to your crazy or some other god. !!!!!! the thrill of seeing what is happening and understand it!!!!!!!
Christmas is bringing up complicated feelings and needs. I don’t know who to tell, and I miss the home you provided
Indian guys (engineers) working on 15-minute grocery delivery
my need to know will hurt others
on earth, we are mostly mad because we haven’t talked about our mothers enough
do i have the patience to professionalize and sanitize so it can be computed by the banks my most molten
what is molten will not be computed by the banks, they only take stable coins
sorry not sorry to be a revolution
Erin, I would give you everything I have
but it’s not much
of course it’s enough
I’m you too and your want
Sarah
my hate will save me, so will my love
am in the throes of a serious revolution, (don’t) bother me
now, how to slow down the fast; will prose save me? will poetry? it's all a longing for an audience who separates from me every night. Recorded music really saves my life
what to do about every man being in a fight with the perceptible and apparent world in which he is left out by the numbers and well-known names; the grind is how to be before
Countless people come online and talk about themselves, an embarrassing affair to the media critic trying to be above it but is also subject to it. The thing is no one can help me with my pages or my success, no one will open a door for me, the dream of being saved in your career is over; it’s all just showing up and blasting off and giving it all to the work you think is the work, and one day it turns over and out that the interruptions and the slowness are really the product and also the world: the loud ripping open of a banana; there is no success, there is only showing up and bearing the brunt and blow of the pain of there being no safe stable place; the place dreamed of does not exist, it is only in the slow work of improving this one ~ hahaha, when you show up sharing your art, I wonder if it attracts a husband … I am the erotic outsider student in the Stanford professor’s Twitter DMs, the endowed chair loves a secret boy, a place outside the marriage and employment to be his bad, sexy, horny avatar (in lust, there are bodies and words)
Man’s only flaw now is touching the world too soon; others tell me to edit, condense, spend patience elsewhere in a new way; be different, do it how I think you should: and it’s my job to *not* get paid, not solve the problem, not be OK, maintain the problem and be the problem, be stubborn, do it my way fearlessly, blast off, show them what commitment really is, innovate on the form of attention and personhood. I am not failing.
When to put the work away is the hardest thing to know; a viewer will be jealous when they see me and know I’m working, following my genius, not attending to them, while they are outside of their genius looking outside; they know they are doing the wrong thing — I’ve become ungovernable and fearless, obedient to the inner urge which I let take up my day, and Emilia my landlady will maybe one day realize she didn’t know (because she hadn’t decided) whether she’s running a hotel or whether she rents you a bedroom; she was talking with a friend on the phone one night and I chuckled to myself when she said she wishes to live in an artist colony: sister, you have a small one with plenty of space and it’s still squandered and you can’t tolerate it because you’re bad with money: you take jobs for less than forty dollars an hour and you have a lavish lifestyle of overspending and you won’t stop and America will go into debt and New Jersey will be the shame of the nation; but Bob Lefsetz was right: these days, you make it in your own mind and that’s all that counts; NYU is a faraway place, and is like every dysfunctional family: unentitled power running rampant in the halls, meetings are for the boring men who live for them, they’re for their egos’ benefit, that deep hunger to think well of yourself and be OK. Yeah, I’m gonna insult the crown and shield, be the rose and thorn
rest in silence behind commonly called windows
the purple queen is dead; long live the queen
and her administrators
and parents' fear of their child missing out
and all the staff is paid to utter with their mouths
the sounds written on the outside of the building
the state recognizes
new york was a war zone and still is today
a bastion a base
needs an enemy more than anything
so what's the enemy in silence, really?
maybe let's go inside the classroom and find out
optimism and not-hate is the only strategy
bitterness is for food, not me
and you're me blah blah blah we know this professor! i reviewed you—you're awesome
a permanent anxiety enmeshed in heaven
connected to several muds at once
windows of meaning-making
squinting
a spider weaving desperate drama
on a sunny day
laughter out the window
and birds
— is my slice of insanity's recollection
demagoguery? believable? earnest?
i am flashing in the unbridgeable abyss between
you and me; i am languishing in my inability to speak, to listen, to do more than think, judge, remember
what are you holding back and not sharing?
my hand is on the spigot,
eyes fastened on lack of movement
the urge to make a decision is pumping
it means everything: the story ends here
the story never ends
