N) Neurasthenia

Neurasthenia:
Or, “how refusal to edit himself led to poems that were repetitious and full of dreary longueurs”
Or, IMs Away: Leaves me a message

Wednesday, 4PM EST

CoordinateTim: Hey… you there?

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: a failure of the will and it can be dispelled

CoordinateTim: I liked the old guy at the rock concert in your last… Sort of a stereotype perhaps, but I like the gingery acerbity of the guy. Reminded me of you, the future you. Sort of. Old Man Mask. A daunting lizard-wise undertaker of hidden gray wit and sharp edges… dipping liberal helpings from the potato salad while the little kids run around in the wet lawn fucking in the grass. Weird Uncle Masky. Sitting around the fire, smoking dope and distilling hope with his raspy sour pronouncements of what “used to be” now gone, gone, gone.

CoordinateTim: I should get to bed. So, goodnight, d’masq’dman from the future, since you'll probably be the only one to read this. Ever.

11:53 PM

Luigio_5extus: energy can be poured

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: blogular lacuna

Thursday, 10AM

SliceOGringo: “Man-maid, begone.”

SliceOGringo: That’s from a Masque called Tempe Restored!

SliceOGringo: Isn’t that just a perfect find! Cool huh?

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: Making right choices takes time.
Making wrong decisions is harder than you would think.
Should I decide to make choices or not?

sliceogringo: real or imagined problems?

Friday, 9PM MST

Dis4Disdame: Peeking

DMsqdMn17: Duck

Dis4Disdame: Oh you’re there. Spindrift gaze?

DMsqdMn17: Corrupting my concentration with a not-sleeping gift from Wales.

Dis4Disdame: habba habba

DMsqdMn17: Friday night and the lights are low. Graft the curveship between real (high) or unreal (lo!), call the graft God. Pay with yer soul, Serpentine, Seventeen, shedskin, Mr. Skin, Seren Gibson… having the time of your life?

Dis4Disdame: That’s none of your business but yes. I just had the best sleep I’ve had in a long time and am now clean and showered and still all wet even ;)

DMsqdMn17: I haven’t shaved in a Mercurian Year.

Dis4Disdame: Ew. Why not, what’s wrong?

DMsqdMn17: I’m not above vanity. Nor am I below it. I think, on equal footing we understand each other, and have gone our separate ways.

Dis4Disdame: You’re being hopelessly obtuse and I don’t like that you are making me think. Have you eaten?

DMsqdMn17: I'm full. The always

irrational present fills

my sleepless belly

- A haiku by DMM

Dis4Disdame: ♥

DMsqdMn17: I'm tired. Do you hear me? It's real WORK getting out the door.

Dis4Disdame: Writing anything?

DMsqdMn17: What do you think?

Dis4Disdame: I think that like most kids- boys— men your age You make the same mistake of writing about College Dorm Romance or secret little boy dreams… its limiting stuff.

DMsqdMn17: I'm imploding within the pressures I put on myself. The pressures I put on my language.

Dis4Disdame: Stop it. Even Shakespeare said “I ain’t what iamb.”

DmsqdMn17: Ha ha.

Dis4Disdame: :-P

DMsqdMn17: Hey, remember that time when we drove up to Johnson and jumped in the river and then walked to campus all wet and told that guy we were students so he’d let us play Frisbee?

Dis4Disdame: No that was your other girlfriend.

DMsqdMn17: Oh yeah

Saturday, 1:11AM

DMsqdMn17: Sorry.
Auto-response from Dis4Disdame:

goodnight, goodnight
the fallen cry, the empty driveway lights

don't take me home

the time is over goodnight
leaving us the way i thought it might

goodnight, goodnight
~La Rocca~

7:26 AM

Wh0WasThat6uy: Maybe you should apologize to people

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: What to do?

Wh0WasThat6uy: do the world & you some good

Wh0WasThat6uy: before you go loco & start talking to yrself

Sunday, 3 PM PST

DMsqdMn17: So I have this dream the other night that I’m driving this big old '72 Conversion Van down the highway. Really revving it through some great northern forest and there’s lakes that are on other side of me, blurring by, and my family is camped out around most of them, I don’t know how, but as soon as I drive to another lake, my family is already there, picnicking and waving for me to stop. I stopped and swam in one but then I was off again and the day turned to night and the blue sky gave way to glitterblack and I was gearing on beneath wayward projectile stars catapulting like bridges of light across the highway to the horizon. The forest gave way to a major flat freeway and it was dawn and there was my school in an exit off to the right that I missed, it flew by really fast and my friends like sparks flickered in the wind and then the road started to crumble. There were roadsigns labling upcoming lakes but the lakes themselves were dried out dry and the road came up right to the edges of them and stopped so all the van quivered as I rumbled through those dusty valleys but there was a highway over above me somewhere, I saw cars on it, I must have missed it, and then the wind picked me up out of the dust and rejoined the road undulating across the grassy plain. There were big signs blinking YOU BLEW IT, YOU BLEW IT but I thought those couldn’t be for me. And later on as the road gave way completely to grass and then to scrub desert and the van died and I started walking, in a real hurry like, I wore out my boots and my feet were bleeding as I entered into the hills and I could hear music coming from behind me, sirens chasing, and my heart was pumping as I ran into the darkness and there was another sign, farther up and not as bright, which kept saying: YOU'LL NEVER GET A BETTER SHOT and I climbed and climbed up into the darkness

8 PM

Dis4Disdame: Quitcher cryptic shtick.

dmsqdmn17: *mangled smile

Dis4Disdame: I'm making a list of smells that I most commonly remember.

dmsqdmn17: Most of mine are wet.

Dis4Disdame: You know, you don't even talk about the future anymore.

dmsqdmn17: Was it Burroughs who said that women lacking men cease to exist?

Dis4Disdame: misogynist

dmsqdmn17: Yes. So is the world we live in, but I also write about the world /we ought to live in, and could/ which is a world of boundless imagination

Dis4Disdame: not when you’ve limited yourself to the past

dmsqdmn17: “thresh at the heights that imagination spans beyond despair, Outpace the vocable bargains in prayer”

Dis4Disdame: Are you inebriant?

dmsqdmn17: There is no explanation, no need, just a story.

Dis4Disdame: You think you can write yourself out of this? The Markedly diminished interest in activity? Estrangement of others?

dmsqdmn17: We still can't know/ anyone.

Dis4Disdame: Reduced involvement with the outside world? Contraction of intellectual function?

dmsqdmn17: This is a safety thing. Everyone is on the other side of all sorts of barriers now. Between you and me: our fingers, our laptops, phone lines, the western United States, your boyfriend, your breasts, your glasses, my mask, the past, no conceivable future, your pride, my pride…

Dis4Disdame: Fixation on the past? Atypical concept of self?

dmsqdmn17: In the ordinary hours of life I try not to think about it, but now and then lying awake at night, very peculiar hallucinations - I mean, not, they aren’t hallucinations really, but the kinds of thoughts you have when you're suffering from the flu, or you're really sick

Dis4Disdame: “Suffering from the flu” … ?

dmsqdmn17: Doesn’t suffering inevitably lead to redemption?

Monday, 3 PM

OneSwellGuy: Take it easy man.

Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: All curiosities soon extinguish themselves.

OneSwellGuy: No one sings all the {planetary} time.

Tuesday, 6:36 PM

SlowaDucha: when it’s all boiled down, what we all ultimately live for is catharsis and fulfillment of bodily desires in little beds. The fusion of hostility and all-encompassing passion for all things that you have on your
Auto-response from DMsqdMn17: Computers powered by angst. Grotesque posturing in our nascent millennium.

SlowaDucha: blog. its primed for hope to emerge. you may look tough, but it's a front. missed opportunities will haunt you. put stock in the happiness of others, not just your own. you have to go somewhere to be somewhere. have to feel something to really live