The start of a headache. Not sure why I’m at work at all. I want to go home, drag everything I own to the dumpster except the computer and stereo; put the rest in my piece of shit VW and start driving until it breaks down. Then fix it or get a rental car and leave its silver and rust carcass to die at the side of the road in the Nevada desert.
I almost typed Nevada dessert.
More open spaces are forming in my apartment as more stuff goes into moving boxes or garbage bags. I saw the top of my bookcase for the first time – since 1995, it has been a storage area for zines and assorted vomit bags I’ve collected from different airlines. And more stuff in the closet keeps vanishing, so you can actually see the shelves. It’s a good feeling.
I think I made it to bed by three last night. The night before, it was closer to five. That night, I was actually working on Summer Rain and had a reasonable excuse. Last night, I didn’t. I think I opened a file and looked at it, but not much more.
I’ve been feeling what I’d previously define as a low-grade depression for the last few days. It might be withdrawl from not having a TV to fill the empty spaces every night, but sometimes I get like this when there’s a slight gap in life and I don’t know how to fill it. I’m ready to be in New York, but I’ve got time to kill until then. If I was sentimental about this city at all, I’d be going to restaurants and crying about how much I’ll miss Discovery Park and the Space Needle and all of that. But I’m not that kind of person. I just wish I was moving tomorrow. The extra time gives me an opportunity to worry, or flash back to 1995 when I moved here. Then I think about how I first wanted to finish Summer Rain, pay off my student loans and credit cards, buy my Escort from the lease place, etc etc etc. I’d rather just leave in a hurry and not think about any of this.
It’s like the lesson of Summer Rain, which nobody really knows because I haven’t finished writing the fucking thing. But in that book, John (i.e. the fictional me) decides to stay in Bloomington for the summer and makes a bunch of promises to himself about what he’ll do for the summer – the justification – the job, the classes, waiting for his estanged girlfriend to come back to him. Over the summer, none of these happen. In fact, he fucks some of them up in fairly significant ways. But other things happen – he meets other people, he works other jobs, and he tries to start dating again. And in all of this, the book’s moral is that life never goes the way that you want it to, but it goes on. And after it goes on, you still look back at things that are technically mistakes and cherish them, maybe even more than if you hadn’t screwed things up.
And then I think about when Henry Miller left for Paris with five dollars in his pocket and nothing else in the world, and I think that at the very least, I have 550 CDs I can sell for food if I completely fuck things up.
I’m listening to Queensryche – Promised Land, which is their darkest and most introspective album, IMO. Songs like the title track and “Disconnected” have such a depth, but also a certain frequency which makes me want to sit on the deck and look at the traffic jam on I-5 and the red sun creeping through the clouds to vanish for the evening, and just sit there in depression and solitude. I don’t know, it more of a low-level thing like I was saying. Just a deep, heavy feeling. Maybe it’s just anticipation. I think I’m repeating myself.