The Epitaph for My Heart.

The pages build up behind me. There are two notebooks now, nearly full. Today I rode through the city, no destination necessary, snapping photographs of buildings standing still, some half-built- the sun leaping off of their raw interiors. I looked up through cherry blossoms and took a few shots of the birds landing on the newly budding branches. I sat on a rather muddy hill in Robert E. Lee park and watched two dogs attack each other rather viciously. The water ran steadily over the concrete and flowed past, by my feet. I have watched that water move from many different places in the park. Unfortunately, it is not terribly interesting, only a bit of frothy whiteness flowing freely. I wished that I had gone to the mountains or to the beach. I wished that I was not looking at the same streets, the same sky, the same buildings that I've been looking at since I was a very young girl.

My fingers are gnawed raw; they hurt a bit. I am silly to chew them so neurotically. I am silly to chew them because I am thinking things which aren't being written, because the time is passing and I am making nothing of it. This happens almost half of my days off from work and usually, eventually, at some point I get something accomplished. I spent the morning reading a girl's long and ridiculous blog about a specific interaction she had with her ex-boyfriends new wife. It was an obsessive, absurd, violent, manipulative internet relationship they had but her blog (written after all of it happened) was so serious and so emotional that it was hard to stop reading, even if only to find out the end. It was like a soap opera but it was mostly strange because I ended up there from someone else's blog who had nothing to do with the situation. I don't understand why someone would make an entire blog dedicated to proving oneself in a certain situation or to hurting another person. It got me thinking about the internet and about the way that people communicate through these glowing machines, how they have totally alternate lives, often anonymous ones, through blogging. And I thought of all the people whose blogs make me feel good about humanity, people who I don't know but who have fascinating things to say and who say them in an intelligent manner.

It is hard to find bloggers who you relate to, as it is hard to find friends who you relate to. Sometimes they write something inane, something annoying. But, they always make up for it in the next post. I think about Wide Lawns often, about Forksplit, about Lagal and The Great Hall. They are all a part of my life just like Kafka was when I read his diaries for months, like Camus was when I was absorbed in his notebooks. I suppose that is what makes words so beautiful to me, that they let me know people in the most intense and personal ways. And I think that everyone has it in them to write an interesting blog which is what makes it a much more universal medium than literature. You can know an author by what he writes, by what he says about himself but an author has to have a universal medium. He has to write a story, a poem, a novel. Bloggers have only to describe vividly, entertainingly and frequently of the motions of their lives and the way they fit within those motions, the way they make them. Perhaps this is why I don't do it so frequently. My life is not full, though I'd like it to be, with interesting quips, with entertaining snippets, with things I would rather write than literature. So, I spend my time trying to make real lives out of made up people instead of writing out each interaction of my own day.

I keep meaning to start fictional blogs but it somehow feels lazy. I suppose it would just have to be brief outlines of things which would eventually become something lengthier. But, already, I feel as if Fernando is a never ending character, a constantly communicating but often stagnant individual, stuck inside himself and perhaps this is because I see no veritable end and I don't wish for their to be one. A very close friend of mine who is also a brilliant writer began to correspond with Fernando via a character he invented named Catherine. Catherine only wrote one letter but hopefully there are more to come. I had come to believe, rather whole-heartedly, that she would be the one to change Fernando. He may not write her anymore; most likely it would be out of unfounded feelings of inadequacy. But, I suppose she can exist without him to write her, though I don't want him to. "The half-moon sat on a field of bright pinholes; the milky-way like queen anne's lace strewn carelessly across the sky. All of it reflected in the deep darkness of the Atlantic, the churning mirror that stretched the entire horizon. I walked out to where the waves were lapping at the shore, a strong breeze whipping my hair around my face. It was bright and the sound of the waves breaking in rhythm stirred the blood in my cheeks. And I wished you had walked out with me, to behold the perfect night in our world which was like a dream for that short time."

The spring is slowly approaching. Today I smelled it strongly and clearly in the air. There are many important decisions sitting on my doorstep and I am hearing the buzzer but paying it no regard. I am stalling an offer of increased responsibility. I am going to have to answer the door soon and sit down to speak with the offerer of said responsibility. Too bad he is such a chesire cat. Grinning and disappearing but always aware of all the goings-on in Wonderland. And it is such a tempting (though as yet unspecified) offer- a challenge almost. A challenge to mold my behavior, my personality to a specific type of professionalism, a specific type of classiness, a diplomacy that I am not quite sure I am capable of. And it is also a question of how much I would be giving up, how many hours of my life I would be worried about the thousand and one responsibilites of a new restaurant. And how many words would I lose to a year without time to experience enough to have anything to say. There is much speak of my "resume" and I don't know how much I really care about any "resume".

Still, there are a thousand and one things to filter through, to analyze. I suppose I ought to get started. But, I think I'll go eat Thai food and watch The Host instead.