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 It started with a rear window that wouldn't retract. I rolled the window down and down it stayed. Then the headlights would turn on, at odd moments while the car was parked. I'd reach for the button on the keyfob to lock the doors and see if that would reset them but before I could press it the lights would go off. Then a few seconds later, back on. So I started taking the train.

The overhead fan in the kitchen shorted out last year. Then, over Thanksgiving weekend, the oven went. There's a loose board on the wainscotting in the bathroom. Water jettisoning from the radiator at 3AM and pooling languidly under the south corner of the throwrug. Not particularly anyone's ideal destination.

The weedwacker won't work so the yard's overgrown. Last week I went at the high grass with a pair of scissors for an hour and developed a nasty inch-long blister on my middle finger. Now every day I replace it's the band aid because the adhesive fails to stick more than 24 hours.

The snazzy new shoes I bought impulsively are, it turns out, too tight. I shift uncomfortably everywhere I go, and sometimes when I suspect it won't arouse anyone's fury, I take off my shoes on the train and sit there in my socks. There's a hole forming under the big toe of my right sock. My pants have a detached belt loop.

One thing about living in the present is we make it impossible for ourselves to do it. We divide the present into seasons, into months, into days, scheduled meetings, lunch breaks, paragraphs, sentences, words, ellipses. We stretch out time to accomodate our plans and it crunches each present moment like some Newtonian accordian into oblivion. We plan, or know that we should plan, or spend our days avoiding planning, putting it off until... suddenly the future becomes now and we can avoid planning for the next thing, riding one wave of anxious procrastination to the next. And there are some of you lucky people who may burn your bridges and forget the horrors of your past altogether, but not me. I live there, too, there rather than here. Comparing this time to ancient times, comparing my milestones to my parents', trying to honor their legacies by... what? Getting up in the morning and finding the cat spit-up on my slippers?

My great grandmother used to hide her smoking. Mom would bring us kids by the second floor apartment to check on her grandma and the place would be immaculately maintained with Pledge and Lysol. Not a mote of dust in sight and every little trinket and doodad in it's place; the candybowl, the glass knickknacks, the 30 year old remote control on the smearless glass-covered agate coffee table. But should you happen to pop into the bathroom, behind the expertly folded powdered towels and the bowl of potpurri and seashells, was the faint whiff of a Parliment Lite.

Before I settle into an empty seat on the train and scroll through the newsfeed to see who died today, I hunt for the seat. The rumbling and screaming contraption tumbles us all around but especially me since I'm on my feet. Outside, a stream of twilight florescence is the perfect repition of vanishing. I'm quick to lurch into a germy seat facing backwards, opposite a man wearing a tie decorated with roosters. His eyes do not interrogate, thankfully, me but remain indentured to his phone as I take the last sip of my Celsius and tuck my knees in, ever cognizant of my tall body's inconvenience for existing in in this shared space. The train creaks and wails and I close my eyes, embracing my old neglected friend exhaustion. The man gets off at the next stop where I notice that he walks with a cane. I steal his seat when he leaves and throw away the empty drink can in the bin.

Found myself wondering why some people meet with life's little disappointments by going into a fulminous rage. Maybe I lack fight. Younger me might have pushed back harder, a profane-ridden retort to the aggregrate of slight ingraciousnesses of fate... I'm getting older. I tuck in my gut and pull up my pants and get to work fixing. Yank things apart, replace broken pieces, try turning it off then turning it back on. How many times must we do this? When will it be the one last begrieved inconvenience and then I tear the whole place down and move to Bhutan.

In between the obituaries on the newsfeed there is a post-splashdown interview with astronaut Christina Koch who revealed that her old high school had erected a statue of her and it made her uneasy. "I was worried that the people that would walk through the door and see it would think that they weren't enough because that statue was too perfect of a representation. At the little speech-making that I did when it opened I made sure to talk about the person I was in high school and how unsure I was of myself... how many mistakes I made. How many people I hurt, people that hurt me. I just wanted them to know that they don't have to be as perfect as the statue."

Once I went to see great grandma and she didn't have her hearing aids in so she didn't hear me knock nor come in. She was sitting in her chair facing the wallpaper, face averted from the window, the light, completely oblivious to the occassional siren blues and reds. Her mind had gone somewhere else, she was thinking of something else, she was somewhere else unaccountable. I thought for a moment she might be dead, of course, but then she turned and saw me smiled and it was like sunlight through the leaves, the radiance and the shadows dancing there together in the crowsfooted corners of her eyes. She was happy to see me. I've spent years searching for another smile like that one. She reached out her bruised hand for me to hold and I held it and smiled too, I couldn't help myself.

Go to work, pay your bills, wash your clothes, clean behind your ears. Brush your teeth thoroughly after each meal, except this one, fruit plate and some black coffee, so I can spend the day smelling of apricots and Folgers. Tomorrow is, as the saying goes, a new day, but today is, too. Or it can be. That's the thing about a story of the broken, it obfuscates everything that's actually working out alright.

Koch continued "we have a long story. A lot of people behind us, a lot of misteps, couple victories, but all that came together to make us these people that very humanly carried everyone's dreams around the far side of the moon. You know, before we did that, we were enough. And I would say to them, you are too."

A woman taps my shoulder and to wake me says "I think this is your stop." I wipe the drool from the corner of my mouth and I thank her without looking at her, grab my things and rush off to walk the rest of the way home. The night's chill is so exhilerating that I forget that my feet hurt. Walking with my neck craned upwards searching for stars between the clouds. When I reach the door I the notice that the lock latch mounting is going slack. Where did I leave the screwdriver? Friday's payday. Maybe I'll have enough to get someone to look at the car.

B) brazen overtures With a gilt-edged guarantee

I insist upon myself. Standing on the bridge overlooking where this teaming bay of life falls out into the dead mirror ocean.

“You know the Pacific, it’s always cold,” she said. I wanted to argue. There was nothing to say. Pacific, from passive, right? My grandmother lying dreamless in the shit-smelling ward when I come in to visit, her lone remaining hand as cold as ice. Soon she will have no hands. They will put more tubes in her and speak softly and she will be returned to the womb. Rattled mind replaying events from 40 or 50 years ago, maybe more. Like a baby, cooing sonorous, forgetting all those Jungian archetypes and previous life experiences when they pale in comparison to the warm reality of breast milk, or, later, the cruelty of a pacifier.

Pacify. Long ago she wrote of a “permanent knot” in her stomach “slowly moving on to other organs.” I try to answer this but sense my awkwardness. My lack of analysis and also empathy. “It's also taking over the rest of my life,” she said. And that I can believe. Who hasn’t had their life taken over by a hyperrealistic continuum. The vagaries of social constructs. My dad sent me an email entitled: Male Ego, The Corvette, & The Brass Pole‏. I have not responded in 25 days.

The sun came out today. An improvement over yesterday.

“don't ask me what i'm doing because i don't know.
but i'm thinking i'm pretty lonely.”

-e

The internet is a language that our planet is speaking. I wish plants had web pages. I wish ants had blogs. I would love to read a thread of cactus comments. Get conned on eBay by actual sharks, selling regurgitated license plates. Ok, so an incomplete language yes but… its not large enough sometimes. The day I first hear of the Uncanny Valley, it seems that everyone else has too.

Freud always said we were all the same and now we are all connected on Facebook. My memory is the sea. The internet is a teaming ocean. A friend I had in middle school got arrested and my uncle has some things on his mind that he wants us all to pray about and a girl I should have never touched wants me to touch her again and I know all this as soon as I wake up in the morning. Before my dreams are gone. Before my hunger has come.

So connected and yet I suck at keeping in touch.

I insist upon myself because who else will? One is punished most for one's own virtues. In 100 years priests will be an anomaly. Robotic Gods walking through the uncanny valley of the shadow of death. On the way home I prayed and started questioning righteousness. We are all painful tonalities vaulting across our frets towards the inevitability of death. Occasionally there are harmonies. Uncanny valleys. More often there is an abrasive sound at the edge of your ear, and that’s alright too. Everyone is right, and no one should be sorry. What is right? What is virtue? What is logic? Are not their inverses just as true? What is truth?

My whole body aches from sleeping too much and I am an idiot.

“Drink tequila on a beach with a coke dealer named Jesus.”

-e

Who has time for ambition? Who has ambition for time? I wish I spoke the language of airplanes. Fucking virgin clouds and gloating. Filled with the dreams of dying grandmothers flying. My own grandmother, lay cold and dying in the ocean. Living in my memory. She looks like her granddaughter will look when we are old. Freud encouraged me to jump ahead 40 or 50 years. See Previous entries. View Live Feed. The internet speaks through me.

“The cigarettes smell better than the air,” I say “because everything smells like shit.” But when I returned it was different. Reality had cracked and gone to pieces, smooth cymbal sounds of strings strung tightly with love and snapped. Life gone awry and partly dying. “I sleep in alleys,” I wrote to get a cry or a rise, “hands fall asleep as my pillow and I wake with no hands.”

Swimming in a light that hurts she bucked and reared. Hovering over the Pacific. Beyond the wireless range. Questioned God as half a thought and took a trip into the sea which was mirrord death. A mountain dropt in light. Missed the last horrors and returned cursed and back from the dead. I thought we had talked to each other for the last time.

I have not responded in 14 days. Frozen toes and fog. Wondrous dreams. I smoke and think of wings and things solemn like moons and truth, glaring at the stalwart night near the sea assuming and angry. A bridge was repaired yesterday. Strings and wires humming in the sweet caress of Pacific winds. Even deep within the bay the sun never came out. The music continues.

I have not touched anyone. I insist upon myself.