Silent Piddling.

I have spent this day piddling about in silence. I cleaned up a bit and threw away piles and piles of things which I would be better off just donating but I'm too lazy to do it. I read Kafka's diaries in the bathtub and then sat down in the middle of my clean living room and stared at the floor. I am now listening to Art Blakey and chewing my nails. I have been letting things live through me instead of living them lately. It is a silly thing to do, simply watch yourself live out the days of your life. I feel that I am barely a backseat driver.

Perhaps it is partially due to a high consumption of alcohol but I still feel that my brain is smushed up inside my head and soaked with slime. I am looking for things to say but there is nothing to say. I let the days slip through my fingers. I drink myself into oblivion. I need to pull myself up by my bootstraps , give myself a swift kick in the ass. All of these diary like writings add up to very little. They are just small waves in a sea of emotion. I seem to have lost subjectivity. I am drowning in a sea of "I"'s. And I can see you on a small island, waving at me to swim back to you. But, I can't keep my head above water. Every time I have any significant amount of time to myself I become very depressed at how infrequently it happens. In order to know yourself you must spend time alone and I spend so little time alone that I cannot see myself reflected in my own actions, in my own words. I scramble around in a shell of myself, smiling and I forget about the part of me that used to read all the time and write all the time.

I used to be more people than I am now. I used to make them; I used to live inside them. I am still perpetually stuck inside Catherine and Gabriel and their last interaction. I would love to finish Gabriel, look it over, make it new. But, it is so dense with error and ridden with repetition. I am afraid to look at it. There are only a few sentences here and there, a few paragraphs left and write which give it any weight at all. But, perhaps I am being too hard on it. It was to be a novel. It had a beginning and an end. It was supposed to be A Happy Death but it went on for too long and became A Drawn Out Life. We pieced Fernando's fragments and tried to attach them to a human face, to a real person. But, I think we failed in many places. I do not write enough to fail. I must write and write and write and when I look back from some old age onto my youth I will be able to look back at pages and pages, at books, perhaps. I piled all my old notebooks in one place beneath the window of the living room. I flip through them and I can see myself become someone I meant to be. I can see all the deliberate changes which I talked myself into making. And they are the same as now. I am still telling myself to let my emotions take a back seat. I am still telling myself to write and write and write.

I am always losing written moments. I am always stranded between writing and living. I am convinced that the only thing to do is change, to move, to leave this land behind and find some inspiration in a different lifestyle. I am constantly stymied by all the ugly things I see, by having to see the same ugly things over and over. I walk down the street and there is a barrage of unpleasantness, of broken people and dirty places. I want to see something new. Even if it is different dirty, broken people and places.