Nothing (37 page)

19
These people removed of body, organs, removed of touch and sound, translated into symbols, numbers, smudged of tone.

20
Why am I still thinking about this. Why am I still thinking about this. It’s a Facebook comment. Why am I still thinking about this.

21
Inside the sentence, each word or image shits another; and from each of those, again, again.

22
All these people’s words inside my words.

23
What are minutes. I’ve been in here all these years.

24
“My mind wanders too much to drive.” Andy Warhol.

25
Their own hours at the glowbox, typing into nowhere, node to node.

26
Where’s that.

27
“
Where are these thoughts from?
Rudd wondered.
Who is crammed in here with me?
Within him someone was speaking, leading him further and further out.” Brian Evenson,
The Open Curtain.

28
The drift between each instance of any word that much larger than the word itself.

29
The knives in any house.

30
No two pictures of a person ever seem to really look the same, even exact copies.

31
There is no such thing as metaphor.

32
All blood, except quite up close, looks the same, despite its codes.

33
The chains and chains of cells grow out of the brain, draped on air and draped on floors we together walk upon.

34
These thoughts tend to rarely transcend their box—they mostly only ever serve as reinforcements for the semi-impermeable distinction between mind and skull and skin—encircling the self with gradually increasing spiral, stitches in a blanket, cells inside a shield.

35
Slumber, Shut-eye, Sleepyhead, Sleepy time, The Land of Nod, Nighty-night, Sleep tight, Sleep light, Oversleep, Shut-eye, Haven’t slept a wink, Fall asleep, Go to sleep, Go to bed, Go bye-bye, Go night-night, Turn in, Zonk out, Knock out, Roll over, Drift off, Pass out, Doze off, Conk off, Nod off, Forty winks, Sleep on it, Sleep one off, Crash, Collapse, Bedtime, The big sleep, Lights out, Shut up, Catnap, Get a nap in, Catch some z’s, Count some sheep, Siesta, Snooze, Sack time, Slumberland, Bed down, Bunk up, Saw wood, Hit the hay, Hit the sack, Hit the lights, Retire, Death, Die, Doze, Drop, Dream.

36
Sleeping gas, Sleeping bag, Sleep mark, Sleep goggles, Sleep Inn, Sleep King, Sleeper sofa,
Sleepaway Camp
,
The Big Sleep
,
Sleeping Beauty
,
Sleepless in Seattle
, Sleeping in, Sleep out, Sleep over, Sleeping around, Sleep with the fishes, Good night’s sleep, Sleeping soundly, Sleeping well, Sleep sores, Sleep aids, Sleep deeply, Power sleep, Sleep it off, Sleep standing up, Asleep on the job, Asleep behind the wheel, Crash, Crash out, Sleeping together, Sleep pills, Sleep drugs, Sleep meds, Sleep like a log, Sleep like shit, Sleep like a baby, Sleep like the dead, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, No sleep for the wicked, 24/7/365, The city that never sleeps, Sleep herbs, Sleep shirt, Sleep Nazi, Sleeper, Sleeper car, Sleepwalking, Sleep trouble, Sleep Society, Sleep advice, Healthy sleep, Sleep patterns, Master of Sleep, God of Sleep, Sandman, Orpheus, Sleep perchance to dream, Shhh the baby’s sleeping, Sleep on the sofa, Sleep on the street.

37
“To build a wall, the mason adjusts his stones one after the other in a logical order, in this case beginning with the bottom and finishing with the top.” Jacques Dupin,
Giacometti: Three Essays.

38
How many times a day I say aloud “I am going to kill myself,” each time seeming as if this actual cog in the arc is enough to bring one down, even as caused by such logs as crappy traffic, stubbing big toes, and so on—the mind filled with all those however benign images of ways I could imagine my body being done under—water, razor, rope—in some way fixed with virtual structures of what someone else has visioned for us, through false bodies—I am Jack Torrance, I am the camera, I am BOB.

39
Cells I made and carried, cells I needed, cells I did not, cells I burned to take my mother’s hand, cells as storage of my thought, destroyed.

40
A Google search for “Kurt Cobain” finds 4,280,000 results, which is actually not that much in consideration, as for how his image has faded even since then—fewer hits than James Joyce and Abe Lincoln, more than T. S. Eliot and John Wayne Gacy, less than Sting.

41
“Come As You Are” places me in hours half my life ago sitting beside the speak of a light—a certain texture of the air I relate to Sunday and to heavy blue tone and my mother in the kitchen down the hall.

42
The season after season of our self-named, self-generated rosters of teams in
Baseball Simulator 3000
, all still saved somewhere in that cartridge, a catalog of buttons that we pressed. Buttons touched for whatever reason. The space lodged inside the game.

43
They never bounced as high as I thought they should—they should have never come back down.

44
The kid I knew in middle school who’d ripped the heads off all his posters in an anger; the kid whose room was wall-to-wall with women in their underwear, for every inch, how I can still remember the way the skin formed the room into a flesh shell, how I always wanted that for mine; my own posters rolled now into cylinders or stacked flat in piles in closets, hid of light.

45
I swear I brushed my teeth not twenty minutes ago and my mouth still tastes like blood.

46
“If we had the true and complete history of one man—which would be the history of his head—we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, the vanities, the diminution of intelligence, the endless trivia we’d encounter, the ever present dust.” William Gass,
The Tunnel.

47
The spit I spit onto Scott in the scene we performed together alone on the stage, the endless quotes therein regarding time.

48
Each now another closed door—I imagine—I have passed by and in passing become changed.

49
“In the sentence nothing is incidental but in the world sentences certainly are.” Tony Tost,
Complex Sleep.

50
This onslaught having begun from a point of nowhere and having approached through casual acquaintance a state of near hysteria, in the clothes I should be using to seek rest, the way that people do.

51
“A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.” Schopenhauer.

52
“The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth.” Deleuze and Guattari.

53
“Learn to leave your worries outside your bedroom door just as they did their shoes in the ‘good old days.’ ” Webb.

54
Speaking now only or wholly ever all in borrowed language
.

55
“I am the witness, I am the only witness of myself. This crust of words, these imperceptible whispered transformations of my thought, of that small part of my thought which I claim has already been formulated, and which miscarries.” Antonin Artaud,
The Nerve Meter.

56
“True sadness, said whoever wrote it, is when you have nothing left to say, or nothing left to add, when you have exhausted, he said, all the resources of language, to make understood, something, to someone, who understands nothing.” Christian Gailly,
Red Haze.

57
Iranzo, Schenck, and Fonte, 534.

58
Leger, 117.

59
Ascher and Schotte, 76.

60
Swann’s Way
, 46–47.

61
Ibid.

62
History of Madness
, 520.

63
“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” Alan Watts.

64
Really? Again? We have to? Do we have to?

65
“But I haven’t told everything.” Clarice Lispector.

66
Even if you close the book, the book goes on.

67
Go to the bank, the post office, call that woman back, eat some candy, write the e-mails, run, walk, talk to someone, do something, make something, cell phones, doorways, doorknobs, doors.

68
Should “myself” always be written out “my self” or even “my Self,” or simply “self”? Would I smack or want to smack somebody asking me this question out loud? What is the best way to smack the me inside me?

69
Writing, writing about writing, writing about writing about writing. Holes.

70
Down as a direction, as a way, as an expression, an emotion, color, down as something to wrap the body in, Down as a shitty rap rock band from the nineties, I think. Down as down, the opposite of many other things, all with variable expressions. Down. I’m down. I’m in. I’m there. I’m in there.

71
“Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he exists.” David Markson.

72
I can never remember any jokes, good or bad, in any situation, even having just heard one; in and out.

73
“I look at a tree and exhort myself to remember a specific leaf whose odd shape and burnished colors appear unique, because I’ll never see that leaf again, I tell myself, but then I forget it, remembering just the admonition not to forget it.” Lynne Tillman.

74
Mumbling, drugs, death, talking, microphones, drugs, sound.

75
Another thought begetting thought begetting thought begetting.

76
Other men have dicks, and balls.

77
I should have run longer today, a little further, burned more skin off, burned more weight, what is actually inside a guy, I mean a gut.

78
Body portal, full of teeth, saliva, bacteria, slick gums.

79
The first burger served to whom in which room?

80
The meat that isn’t even meat, the steam clogged in the crack, the fake veins, the tumor that woman pulled out of one, the gushy bite in, teeth, incisors, ouch.

81
The idea of eating something referred to as a “nugget.”

82
The collapsed ex-body inside my body, wanting, wanting back into the light.

83
Seems like I should get sick more often than I do. Seems dumb to type that and leave it typed there. Seems dumb to say it’s dumb and then leave it typed there anyway. Seems.

84
I like to stop on the treadmill with the LCD reading 432.1 calories or 33:33 minutes or 4.00 miles, and, on more crystalline days, some incidental cross of more than one.

85
I prefer like in
Sling Blade
when they say it “extry,” seems to mean a whole lot more.

86
This day is gone as it begins, even before I get to begin to waste it. Run around.