zen = amnesia = book = notes = type = profile = nhwc = px
43things = soma = three dog party = fotolog = host

and the angst don't stop yo!

1:30am, listening to jacques kopstein, feeling inflamed with summerness and unable to submit to the passivity of sleep despite the puffy charms of my new futon beckoning silently beneath polka dotted sheets. i now dwell in amherst. i lay in wait for inspiration, and wait and wait...and wait. everything i do is perceived by me as "i'm not writing my book right now" or "i'm not making sketches for the book", which i realize is a severe form of self-flagellation and not helping matters. it is as crazy as a constipated person constantly thinking (even in the midst of enjoying some sublime thing, like viewing halley's comet) "right now i'm not taking a crap. damn it!"... instead i should think of all the bad things i'm not doing, like "right now i'm not stealing tricycles from toddlers." then i will feel like a winner even when drooling on myself in a sub-human slump on the floor in the shadow of my looming typewriter. oh well. there is a typewriter repair shop in town(!) and i got a new ribbon for my smith corona (such a sweet piece of 1980's transcription-machinery), so i'm packing serious heat once the bullets-o-words finally arrive.

the potential distractions here are endless, yet i feel a torpor. it is a strange thing to have so many conveniences so nearby, to be able to drive again, to have infinite english-language reading materials available to me everywhere i look (from flyers on poles to weekly newspapers on street corners to bona fide bookshops and libraries--it's a parade of comprehensible words that never ends)....

ultimately, whether i run around seeking distraction via wholefoods or trader joe's or some other mecca of yumminess which i would have considered to be heaven when i was living in korea, i feel restless with the interim-ness of my current situation and a continuing sense of being out of sync with life around me in america. this discomfort reaches critical mass at night, so i take lots of nighttime walks, enjoying the love of a fine nocturnally-extroverted cat on a side street, appreciating the newfound ability of my knees to tolerate walking (2 months of antibiotics and the lyme disease symptoms are starting to lessen). i vacillate between a heady-bliss of appreciation for my existence, and a sort of panic about being lost (feels like when you were a kid and, in a large crowded store, got separated from your mother, only in this case my 'mother' would be the universe). i am hoping this instability is somehow still run-off from my re-entry shock and will dissipate with time.

btw, miranda july's book of stories, 'no one belongs here more than you' has moved me to laugh out loud in public on more than one occasion, and also made me very sad at times. such honesty, pathos and hilarity--she does it like nobody else....

before = after