i'm paginating the initial version of my dissertation right now. a street fair is going on 10 floors below--first they were playing electric avenue, and now they're beating bass drums.

bob just walked by my desk and said, "do you have a high-powered rifle for me to shoot those mother fuckers with?"

this is why i love bob!

a reactor, fifty milliliters, with osmium

it's hot today, and very dense outside. like my head, my mind, my soul.

people who put your fingers in your ears when a train comes into the station: i don't know about you guys. why you doing that? i also see you got them i-pod thingies around your neck, dangling--one michael jackson song might be worse than two trains. i mean, maybe. i ain't done the acoustical testing on it or anything like that ...

i mean, it's fine. live and let live, i don't want to imply that i'm criticizing you, finger-ear people.

for thought, though: ever seen a girl do that? nooo, you haven't. that is a good rule in life: if there's something a woman wouldn't do, consider quietly to yourself why you're doing it.

or, that's just my rule. you can have your own.

it's so grey and beautiful today.

alison, slowdive

i built a glass reaction apparatus, something i've built a thousand times before. it's a glass sphere--with some ports coming out--about as big around as a hole you'd make with your thumb and finger to hold up to your eye and look through. i charged it with a solution of water and protein. i'd add osmium later.

i went outside, where it was fairly pleasant and dusky. yesterday afternoon it had stormed, and it'd felt nice since then. i walked the brick path next to sculpted hedges, around and then down the main steps by low library. the inscription on the library says King's College Founded in the Province of New York, By Royal Charter in the Reign of George II. some asian tourists were taking pictures.

i went in a building--named for a rich man from a city i used to live in--and passed a sign that said SORRY WE ARE CLOSED. i went into an empty and dark cafe, to an ATM, where i took out sixty dollars. i used to always take out forty, and once i was with a friend and saw her punch in 60 and suddenly felt irrationally inadequate. better keep it a secret, your quantum number of cash. but hark, no, now i've graduated to sixty myself.

leaving, i petted a doggie right outside the door, and he wanted to come in past me. i scratched his ears while it shut behind me, and went up broadway and turned on 112th. i wanted to visit my favorite bookstore, labyrinth. tree branches reach across the sky down that particular block, which dead-ends into the front facade of the cathedral of st. john the divine, the largest cathedral in the world. the block is so skinny that all one sees is a section of the cathedral and its steps, and at dusk i couldn't make out any details--just the awareness of something large ahead.

pushing open the door to the bookstore, i discovered it was closed.

i love you the way i used to do, rocketship

television can be good for you. you might hear me say that mia and i don't have a television, but we actually do--it's black and white, you tune it with a dial much like a radio, and its brand name is megatron. lately, i took it out from under the table and hooked it up by the bed, and i'm trying to watch it for a half hour before i go to sleep at night.

your mind is like a spinning globe. this is inside your skull, where it fits in its place perfectly, and goes around on bearings perfectly smoothly. imagine it's spinning around and around and around fast like something in a car engine. it's hard to fall asleep when it's got so much energy in it. you have to slow down. television helps.

in our old apartment, the tv had a nice spot on top the kitchen cabinets, which was pretty central. it was way up high, and every once in a while i would turn it on when the apartment was dark and lie down on the floor in a different room and watch it. it was permanently tuned to 13, and i only ever remember watching charlie rose. i like charlie rose. but in this new tv experiment i'm trying to try different channels. i watched ugly betty the other day, and it was funny. i also watched friends maybe last week.

friends is weird, for this reason: the last time i really had a tv--one that wasn't an eight-inch antique--was living with my friend charlie, and every time you turned on the tv this dude named richard jewell was being ripped apart as terrorist. so that's a long time ago. but when i watched friends the other day, i remembered it. i'd seen it before. even though i've never purposely watched friends. some things pervade the world. you're at someone's house, a bar, home for christmas, whathaveyou, and friends is on, and you see it. i think i've seen like every episode of friends, seinfeld, and the simpsons. by osmosis, it just happens. i mean, i love the simpsons, but when did i ever watch it? i can't remember. you breathe it.

considering that a violent storm blew through this morning at 6am, and a tornado may have touched down in brooklyn, and there were two-and-a-half inches of rain in central park, how can it be this miserable? it has never been so hot and bright and still and awful.

puzzle pieces, tiger trap

when i was a kid, my parents had an apartment in nashville, which was the nearest city to where we lived. every weekend, we would go to nashville and become city people for a couple days. often this weekend ritual was lonely for me, since i am an only child, i didn't know anyone in nashville, and none of my friends ever did anything like that. they all stayed in our hometown over the weekend, and did weekend-type things there.

but, i'm a melancholy sort, and being lonely is often the thing to be. some people, no matter what they tell you, or tell themselves, want to want something. they want to feel lonely, they want to feel sad, they want to avoid being too happy. because god might get you back if you're a little too happy.

my greatest pleasure, as i remember it, was renting movies in nashville, from the video store. i would go look for movies every friday night, and that was how i would spend my saturday--watching the movies.

right now, i am 33 years old, in new york city, spending my days hiding in a library. in fact, i am there right now. there's a little green lamp by me, and a big wooden table. it's dark, except for my little lamp, and majestic shelves of books are going twenty-five feet up to the ceiling on every side of me. every once in a while someone comes out on a catwalk up above, getting books from the shelves way up there. i'm finishing my doctoral thesis.

every hour or so i have to go outside and walk around. watch people. and you know what: the foyer to this building, it smells like the video store in nashville, twenty years ago. remember when video stores were new? when not everyone had a VCR? every time i walk outside, for a break, if feels like it's friday, and i might pick out the weirdest movie i can find, to watch in the dark, alone, while my parents go out for dinner.

this is the truth: you are not living your life. rather, your life has already happened. your birth and your death, and everything in between, it has all already happened. it all happened at once, in an instant. it appeared, like a series of bending tubes. the beginning of the tube is birth. at the end, you die. and you're just moving along it in time. this thing we call time.

when the tube bends around on itself and almost crosses an old part--this is where metaphor and allusion happen. there is cross-over. the lobby of this library and a video store in the mid-eighties--they almost touch. it's the makings of a knot.

are you the type to ignore such things? would you prefer your life be a straight line, with no subplots to recur, no subtext, no metaphor, no hidden meaning to search for? please recall that quite often something bent, something knotted, in the perfect way, may be beautiful.