I can find a small apartment where a struggling artist died.

If Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston can't make it in this crazy world, what chance do we mere mortals have at making a marriage happen?

I was supposed to go back to Evanston this morning. But I realized it was Saturday which means no express trains and it was 10:15 am and I couldn't guarantee I would make it to the library doors by noon (after that, they require an ID card I don't have), and the idea of going all the way up to Evanston only to have to turn back made me feel all prickly in anticipation. So here I am, making tea and listening to John Coltrane. I've been listening a lot lately to Giant Steps, My Favorite Things, and Lush Life -- all three albums just put on random and I hit play and move about the apartment in search of something.

I have new glasses. They are not good-looking, they are "cool-looking", according to the optician. I am fond of them -- the frames aren't radically different but the lenses are. My prescription changed and now the world is clear and my head hurts while my eyes absorb the light at new and sharper angles. I can take the glasses off and alleviate the pain, but that would just prolong the period of adjustment. My digital camera is on a UPS truck in the city and will hopefully be in my house on Monday, and then I can post every picture I've ever wanted. Including the new glasses. And maybe Sophie playing in the snow if it hasn't melted by then. And the bedroom with all the shelves I hung or built. There might be a lot of pictures.

I have been thinking lately about disappearing for a few months, somewhere remote. Not necessarily woods or remote from civilization, I guess, just remote from current life and a certain sense of physical isolation. A retreat, of the spiritual and artistic kind. But maybe it's just an excuse to not shave for three months and grow a beard. Or more likely, an excuse to avoid figuring out how to make it work here, in my own living room. Which I am doing, in small steps. Small steps are hard. Big leaps seem much easier.

Here's a writing exercise from elsewhere that I don't want to disappear yet:
( Read more... )

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As I've been working to establish a more daily practice, I've also been running up against my resistance to commitment and struggle with what words do I claim as my identity, i.e. am I Buddhist, what does it mean if I can or can't say it, and what does it mean when I do. I read an interview with Maxine Hong Kinston and decided to adopt something she said: "I am a Buddhist, etc." So, I was contemplating and reading this morning and my related thought for the day is from Sakyong Mipham: "Saying that impermanence is a Buddhist belief is like saying that Buddhists believe water is wet."

P.S. I miss thebrownhornet.
Oh, and I bought a ticket to go back to L.A. on March 4th for six days.

I distrust the perpetually busy; always have......They are the soul-eaters.

I just spent an hour on the couch suffering from sleep paralysis. One of my quasi-lucid dreams/hallucinations was that Lowenstein came home and I was trying so hard to yell and make a noise so she would come and kiss me awake but she went in the other room to not disturb me. In another dream, I was visiting the new house of my father, who had divorced my mother and fell in love and moved in with the chair of master's program (a man, incidentally). And I saw them having sex.

I eventually "woke up" for real when the postal carrier rang the doorbell.

So last week I was telling Damon about this essay I wanted him to read so I made him a copy which reminded me to send it to DYA's brother, but turns out he doesn't have a mailing address and I found the article online and now I'm posting it here because I'm in love with it and want to marry it, i.e. I want to save it for easy reference. It's long, so fasten your seat belt it's going to be a long ride.
(With apologies to Bette Davis on that last part.)

( Quitting the Paint Factory: On the Virtues of Idleness by Mark Slouka, featured in Harper's Magazine in November )

I love the part about being at a dinner party and saying he gets eight hours of sleep -- I've had similar conversations. "It mattered little that I'd arranged my life differently, and accepted the sacrifices that arrangement entailed."

The funny thing about this essay, even re-reading it? It inspires me to work. Not in the furtive thinkless way he describes, but in a careful, slow, patient, enjoyable way that's often lacking in my drawer of mindsets.