08.14.01 - 11:04 a.m.

The time thingy says 11:04 a.m. but it's really 12:38 p.m. now. I was going to take a break, write for just a few minutes and then head back to my work, but i guess I didn't need and/or have time for the break, since interruptions kept coming, fast and furious.

or, well. not furious, necessarily. generally the interruptions are polite little things that only startle me for the first moment when someone's voice washes over my shoulder and shake me out of whatever bizarre reverie I have fallen into.

All things considered, it isn't really a bad life. Even if no one I know fucking understands half the things I think about or say, and even if I find most of the people who would begin to understand it pretentious or just plain silly. or would be oddly intimidated by their mastery of the jargon that i only enter when intrigued. I don't, after all, dare the thorny overgrowth, I just skip and flip and float around like a butterfly, avoiding the more grotesque protrubances and settling on the wild outgrowths of green little thought.

There's nothing thorough and nothing methodical about it, but somehow I have absorbed so much (and so much CRAP, baybee. so much ridiculous, preposterous crap that only looks like what you say it looks like if you willfully half-blind yourself and watch it through a series of precise and artful filters until the water, that heavy water (not HEAVY water), the water is filtered of all its elements, all its extras, all its little impurities leaving you with pure and clean H2O, just right (just ripe), just made to justify yourself to yourself in your own words without the intervening complexities or the admission that it is impossible (if you admit it, do so in a way that is specifically planned to admit it just so you can discard it. of course, of course, we all know that this is impossible and impotent and foolish, but watch me do it anyway.)

people are pretty simple.

people like to talk about themselves.

(people like to talk about themselves ALOT.)

people are much less shy than i am.

i still like people, but i'm not like them.

and, really. here's the crux of it: better to say nothing and/or little and keep whatever weird analysis i would toss out into the world to myself when any given (specific) topic comes out, or better to nod and smile and say uh-huh.

life is freaky weird. my next-door neighbor. she says the same thing, the same thing over and over again. she's an okay thinker, but she's a little less smart than most. or, maybe average intelligence. what the hell do i know? but she misses so many things and talks talks talks, and she has so many of the kids coming over, hanging out, borrowing her coffee. i don't know. maybe i'm anti-social. i wouldn't really want that. i don't want them to bug me when i'm reading, damnit.

philip roth right now. american pastoral.

books waiting in the wings: