july 1st. i woke up. i would not sleep again until about 10 pm on july 2nd. it would be one of the most insane periods of awakeness of my life thus far

i got everything definitively packed up. my round brush, my bluetooth speaker, my laptop, my laptop charger, my spare laptop charger, my spare face mask,
maniac magee, the complete cosmicomics, intro to capital, lots of protein bars & cheese crackers, a travel toothbrush, my olive green shorts, my red hoodie
with white drawstrings (a gift from the very friend i'd be embarking to see), several pairs of socks & underwear, a bra, a spare phone charger, my floral
skirt & floral blouse (gifts also), bus-disallowed scissors & pepper spray, scented lotion, scented body spray for the intentional creation of nostalgic
smell associations, & the blouse & skirt that used to be in my tumblr header. my id, debit card, & cash in a thing clipped to my belt loop

i left my spare luggage tag hanging from my fan chain. it is a red heart. my dad, my brother, & i headed to the bus stop. we arrived at about 4 pm.
it wasn't a dedicated bus station, just a tiny gas station at the edge of town. after the ticket printer printed the first ticket, which was for the
manager to keep, it started endlessly printing gibberish, just running the stack of ticket paper through continuously. so the manager had to go to
the back & use a different printer. a girl working there said that she loved my blouse. my dad said he liked the wrist cuffs & called them "peasant style"

about fifteen minutes later, a bus arrived. it wasn't the bus i was originally supposed to get on, but the driver said i could take it to st. louis &
get my ticket amended there to route me to my destination: iowa city. this bus was five hours behind schedule. it had passed through Albuquerque.
the driver informed us that some unknown thing was going on in Albuquerque that uniformly caused the buses to run five hours late. he was
a fantastically gruff, no-nonsense man. whenever he was solicited for the barest of information, it just seemed to so powerfully tire him

an amusing event here: my dad has been consistently calling me "she," but he called me "he" to the bus driver, perhaps by mistake, perhaps
in the interest of not... obliging me to be functionally trans in an uncertain context? but the driver wasn't listening that carefully,
& just immediately called me "she" based on appearance, after which my dad quietly switched to "she"

there was a guy wearing a cool denim jacket that had panels from Uzumaki sewn all over it, & Swans stuff. the
Filth cover, the text "Public Castration is a Good Idea," a "You Fucking People Make Me Sick" shirt underneath

at around 4:40 pm, i got on the bus, scored the last window seat. i was sitting in the back, right in front of Uzumaki.
i told him i loved the coat. he said thanks. he was with his girlfriend. they both had green highlights in their hair.
over the next few hours, i overheard that they were on their way back to Raleigh, North Carolina in the return
portion of some kind of disastrous cross-country trip to California where his car had permanently broken down

we set off. my brother honked twice as they passed the bus

a guy across the aisle liked my shoes. the bathroom of the bus, with the way it swayed, was definitely one of the strangest spaces
i was afforded access to during the trip. seeing parallax between clouds always feels sort of like a religious experience. we passed
a billboard that said "advanced nutrition for puppies like yours." at our first stop, i watched a train of endless stacks of two
shipping containers scroll by. there was a taco truck outside, which i thought was sweet, to let people hop out & get
some real food instead of freeze-dried gas station stuff. a new guy in a Frank Zappa shirt got on & sat
across the aisle. the shirt had Zappa saying "my guitar wants to kill your mama!"

about three hours in, the bus pulled over on the side of the highway without explanation. the driver immediately called someone on
his cell phone & just sort of listened, without addressing us or anything. i wasn't the only one to suspect he had lost consciousness.
here, something upsetting happened for Uzumaki's girlfriend, a sort of quiet & irritable girl who seemed pretty distressed about her
overall situation. she was, in her words, the only one with the balls to go up & make sure he was alright, & he just yelled at her to sit
back down... the driver got out, walked around to the back of the bus, fussed a bit with something, & it started back up. we were off

... for fourteen minutes, then we pulled over again. we wouldn't be resuming travel this time. not in the same bus, at least.
we were adjacent to a Denny's & a Quality Inn. we were nowhere. the bus driver called the company, was told he'd receive
a call back. so we all waited for a call back. "it's her fault with the Skechers on," said the guy who liked my shoes, in a
display of humor that somehow doesn't really make sense on paper but made perfect sense from the mouth of a crusty-
looking guy around his thirties. as i took the above photo of the bus, the driver said "don't put me on youtube!"

i listened to him chat with some of the riders & heard him mention Uzumaki's girlfriend going up to
check on him earlier. he was unsympathetic, seemed a bit resentful of the idea that someone had
leaped to the conclusion that he had passed out. it was the kind of nonsense he didn't cater to

he got a call back. a bus was being sent down from st. louis to retrieve us. it would arrive in two
hours. so we waited. i saw what i thought was a ludicrously bright light on the horizon, but
it turned out to be a fairly nearby streetlight that happened to be perfectly aligned

i talked a bit with Uzumaki in front of the bus while he smoked a cigarette. Uzumaki's name was Giovanni. he asked
me how i felt about the situation. i said that at least we were in a pretty, expansive location that we'd have had no
reason to stop & appreciate & connect to otherwise. he agreed. he was happy to have his shoes off, to feel gravel
between his toes. he wished we weren't in an area with light pollution.. he wanted to see the stars. he said he
loved the stars above all else. he'd noticed me taking photos of the scenery, called me a "nature girl"

night fell. the Denny's closed, but i opted to pace back & forth in front of it. it felt more comfortable. i was
joined by two old ladies on a bench, & a guy who looked like he was in his twenties. he sat on the curb watching
a Twitch stream of a first-person shooter on his phone. the two girls who closed up the Denny's came out & gave
us a few water bottles. i waited for rescue. i listened to molly nilsson - whiskey sour a good deal of times,
& came to consider it the theme of the situation, the theme of the whole night portion of the trip really.
my dad called, & said that if i wanted to abort the trip i could book a room at the Quality Inn &
he & my brother would be there to get me in the morning. that was nice of them

i'd wander back & sit on the bus on occasion. the guy who liked my shoes truly liked my shoes, asked where i'd gotten them.
he said he tried to get a unique look for himself sometimes by tucking his pant legs in his socks. a woman sitting in the baggage
compartment made a joke about performing oral sex for a ride. later on, she said i was beautiful & asked me questions
about myself. i'm describing these things adjacent to each other but the former didn't give the latter a creepy
tint or anything... i started to get hungry & develop a headache. the idling bus was so loud

at around 11:40 pm, the replacement bus arrived. something incredibly baffling happened here. when i gestured to the Twitch
guy that the bus was here, he just... said he was fine. he didn't get on. he stayed where he was. the bus ultimately drove
away with him still sitting on the curb of the Denny's, watching Twitch, in the middle of nowhere along the interstate

after an upsettingly loud & busy process of getting all our luggage transferred, we all boarded & off we went.
the interior lights went off. the ride now had an amazing, hallucinatory, nocturnal quality of seeing both the
view through the window & the reflection of the view through the opposite window. i felt intensely drained,
hungry, in need of a real bathroom. but i didn't doze off here. i kept listening to whiskey sour on repeat,
staring around vacantly. i tried box breathing to help myself relax a bit. midnight passed

july 2nd. finally: St. Louis, my second brush with it. i recognized the initial expanse of suburbs immediately, began to recognize more
landmarks i'd seen in 2017, more & more the further we got. it did things to me. i got to glimpse the arch. we were deposited at 2 am in
a transit center that served buses & trains. my last interaction with the driver was this: i approached. his eyes seemed to slither in his
head, laboriously, to redirect from his phone to my face. i said, "if i just go up & tell them i need my ticket altered... they'll know
what to do, right?" he nodded three distinct times. these nods made me, would have made anyone, like a puny worm
for asking. it only deepened my admiration for his very distinct character & total lack of concern

i went in, feeling like i was on the verge of death. i was to be there for five hours. i got my ticket amended, sat down,
ate an italian sub, drank two bottles of milk, started to feel alright. i would have liked to have wandered around outside
& explored st. louis a bit, but it was a sketchy prospect. so i hung around, drinking in the "no one in this building likely
wants to be in it" energy. i got set up on my laptop, at a table in the corner of the little cafe. i listened through the
first Talking Heads album for the first time, & part of the second. the center was under an overpass,
which i found gorgeous. i took some pictures of cute claw machines [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

i watched the sunrise. it was very pretty. i like st. louis, i was sad that my stay there would be so short. the transit center had
strange, harsh, colored tinting on lots of the windows. the placement didn't seem to have any rhyme or reason, except
maybe for not having rhyme or reason. a tv displayed the FOX 2 channel. the ticker at the bottom showed about seven
consecutive variations of "(type of person) shot (& killed) in (some part of) st. louis," all equally vague [1]

finally, at 7:20 am, i departed. as we passed st. louis' airport i missed an opportunity for a photograph that i thought could
have been very good. the way an air traffic control tower was framed against the whole sky with the rising sun felt sort of
astonishing. somewhere around Illinois saw a cardboard cutout of a Bigfoot way off in the middle of a big empty field.
i started propping my phone up on the tray in front of me & watching myself crawl along in google maps. we crossed
the Mississippi, which i didn't care for at all. i don't like driving over water. a minor traffic jam had us stuck
suspended over the river for a few more minutes than necessary, which was really not ok with me

at about noon, i arrived at the bus station where my final transfer would occur. it was a cute & quaint little place, it gave me
laundromat feelings. beige walls, big outdated tvs, a pot of coffee. it was a bit crowded, so i couldn't take the best photos.
& although it was sort of cute, i wasn't looking forward to spending two hours there. a man with a sort of unnerving, erratic
demeanor said to me, unprompted, "it's okay, sweetie, it's gonna be fine." or something along those lines. i ignored him

about forty-five minutes in, i went & inspected the selection available in a vending machine. there wasn't
much else to inspect. the man suddenly approached me, gave me a handwritten note, & promptly walked
away. the note said "Hi / My name is Michael / I am Going to / St Louis / I own property there"

well, i stashed the note in my purse as a souvenir. then i tried to avoid eye contact with the guy. about ten minutes later
i went to another vending machine for a diet Pepsi. Michael suddenly approached me again, & handed me the sequel:
"Get on Bus." so i stashed it in my purse as a souvenir & tried to avoid eye contact. fortunately, the st. louis bus left
almost immediately after this. Michael headed out, fortunately. along with a lot of other people, also fortunately.
when i didn't get in line, he looked back at me, & said, indignantly, "i could've paid for it!" he got in
a bit of an angry confrontation with the girl taking tickets, then finally headed out

so Michael was gone. it was at about this time that i reached twenty-four hours of being awake. i box breathed again.
i drank my diet Pepsi. i drank a cup of tomato soup. i didn't bother to microwave it. my body's fuel thus far was mainly
a plethora of protein bars, plus one italian sub, two bottles of milk, two bottles of diet Pepsi, about forty-eight ounces
of water, & a cup of soup. i listened to more of Talking Heads' second album. i felt myself possibly coming to
the terrifying conclusion that i just think they're okay. i'll have to spend more time with them though

finally, at 2:28 pm, we departed for my penultimate stop. an awful & loud tutorial video about bus riding began playing on
several monitors. i quickly learned that much of Iowa had absolutely nothing to show me beyond corn. we stopped at about
3 pm, then it was off to my ultimate destination. nearly an hour into this stretch of the strip, i discovered a large packet
of ranch dressing at the bottom of my backpack. it would have been an absolute disaster if this had ruptured

at 3:52 pm, i arrived at the Iowa City bus terminal. i grabbed my luggage, went in, fixed up my hair. it was
essentially a small waiting room. my friend's mom would pick him up around 4:45, then it'd be about a half-hour
drive to the terminal. the terminal happened to close about eight minutes after i arrived, so i was booted out. the
city block i was on was mostly occupied by a parking garage. so i started strolling through Iowa City [1] [2]

basically the first thing i saw as i headed up Clinton Street: the most heartbreakingly pretty person
i've ever seen, immediately getting into a car & vanishing. it was as lastingly flustering, & as,
i don't know, traumatic, as any witnessing of someone that pretty generally seems to be.
i stopped in a Starbucks, drank a can of raspberry sparkling water, & pressed on

as i strolled further through the city, i quickly fell in love with it, deeper in love with practically every new
thing i saw. i passed a man playing an electric guitar on a park bench, with a sort of watery, twangy effect on it.
there was the Iowa City Jazz Festival, with a man charmingly describing the capabilities of different instruments
& directing musicians to display them. there were so many people, there was so much life. i was flooded with desire
to live somewhere like this, it was an alien feeling, it was intoxicating. i didn't want to leave. to this moment, as i
type this on the afternoon of july 3rd, i can still feel the lingering effects on me of my brief encounter with this city

& as i review it, too, on the afternoon of august 2nd

but i hadn't come all this way for Iowa City. so my only option
was to circle back around to Starbucks as a rendezvous point

my friend arrived there at 5:27 pm. i was drinking a can of grapefruit sparkling water
now. so i walked out of Starbucks with my grapefruit sparkling water & rounded
the corner to the side of the building. my friend was standing there

so now we had met in-person!

we packed my things, boarded his mom's car,
& set off for the city that is undisclosed here

(at least until the point later in this diary when i
just stop caring about that tidbit of confidentiality)

at around 8 pm, we got checked into the hotel. we did some
more driving, got tacos, candy, soda, alcohol, that sort of thing

so then we were settled in

i had been awake for about thirty-one hours. the past twenty-five had been marked by... constancy, constant
happening, constant motion. i felt like i had lived a lifetime between the two relevant cities. now i sat
in a hotel room with my friend. i was in a rolly chair with my hands clasped. there were no strangers,
there was none of the constant rushing, whirring sound from the bus. all that had happened
was only the prelude to now. it took a minute to adjust. we were eating tacos

he gifted me a stuffed walrus, a cd of Trout Mask Replica, copies of Stanislaw Lem's the cyberiad & the star diaries, a copy
of China Mieville's the city & the city, & copies of Ann Leckie's ancillary justice, ancillary sword, & ancillary mercy

we finished the tacos. we turned on the tv. i had brought one of my little stuffed animals, & placed it on top of the tv. we
watched the absurd final battle of the Twilight series. we saw a Garnier micellar water commercial, followed by a fourth of
July Budweiser commercial, followed by the same Garnier commercial, followed by the same Budweiser commercial, followed
by the same Garnier commercial, followed by the same Budweiser commercial, followed by an episode of The Golden Girls.
this made us laugh a lot. we fell asleep. i had do your best playing on repeat. it is a well-established sleep aid

july 3rd. we walked to dollar tree & bought these things: a copy of denis johnson's the laughing monsters; a 350-piece
puzzle that looked like a pizza; a bottle of red nail polish; a bottle of base coat; kids toothpaste; four knockoff lego
sets of a steamroller, a helicopter, a motorboat, & a gas pump; some awful Takis-branded beef jerky; a little bottle of
hand sanitizer; cherry jello; werther's originals; hershey's cookie & creme bars; some watermelon gum; sunglasses

then we ambled through a floral shop. then we went to goodwill. near the entrance there was a big pink bear sitting on a chair

we bought these things: two dresses & a skirt; a copy of colson whitehead's the underground railroad; a copy of the pc game
the kings of the dark age; these tapes: tin machine's oy vey, baby, a v/a comp called mad about piano, & some Chopin
recordings; these CDs: vitamin c's self-titled, enigma's mcmxc a.d., aaron carter's oh aaron, seth marsh's whole
lotta noise, vince guaraldi's charlie brown's holiday hits, robert belfour's what's wrong with you, a v/a
comp called i can only imagine: ultimate power anthems of the christian faith, & your #1
requests... & more!, a promotional cd featuring nsync & britney spears

as we left, we looked at the bear again & it was now a guy sitting on the chair

we got lunch at burger king. i wondered what the exact rationale had been of whoever ultimately made the decision to remove the
old drink machine & replace it with an ostentatious touchscreen one. i caught one of my hip bones on a corner of a booth & felt
it in a whole half of my pelvis. we walked back to the hotel & wandered around. on the way back, i found a baseball in a parking
lot. we returned to the room. whenever we'd walk in, it'd smell strongly of ramen. but the smell would fade from awareness
after about a minute. we listened to five albums, four of them being ones we'd found at goodwill. we ordered
two pizzas. i tipped the driver fifty percent. i was feeling celebratory [1]

we drank vodka & spent a while working on the pizza puzzle, listened to more music. a lot of jazz on the
radio, the Iowa City Jazz Festival, in fact. we sang the carpet crawlers by genesis. i got very focused on
the puzzle, had to be prompted somewhat forcefully to abandon it & get some sleep since it was 3 am. we
lied on the bed & listened to random songs for a while. i opened Audacity & made some slow, asynchronous
sine wave dings that functioned like a music box. i played them & fell asleep without noticing

july 4th. we went to target & bought face moisturizer, vinyl gloves, & room spray. we heard such great heights
playing on the intercom, which i thought was weird. we worked on the puzzle more. he took a nap. i wandered a bit
around the empty area immediately surrounding the hotel, then paced the halls reading more of intro to capital

he woke up. we ordered a taco pizza. we listened to six more of the things we got at goodwill, & my lumiere album. we ate
the taco pizza. at one point i drank a little cup of vanilla coffee creamer. it was really pleasant. it was so smooth & such
a concentration of vanilla that it didn't feel like drinking something, more like just experiencing the essence of vanilla

we worked on the puzzle. this wasn't just any session of working on a puzzle, it was a bit furtive because it was
what we directed our focus on as we overheard a commotion outside. a family had been having a cookout on the patio,
& a woman was reacting to the sudden unexplained collapse of an elderly woman, either her mother or her grandma
but called "grandma" regardless. she wasn't moving. an ambulance came & took her away. i would assume that
someone went with her, but the woman stayed behind. they seemed to have just proceeded with the cookout

i dozed off for about an hour. i woke up. it was time for his mom to drive us downtown to see the firework show.
i blearily packed the things i wanted & got a coffee. his mom's car is very small. she has to tilt her seat forward,
then i slither in like a contortionist or jack skellington or something. she had the windows down, so
the drive over was a blur of whipping hair & noise. i had my eyes shut most of the time

we parked & started walking for a couple of blocks. people were riding those app scooters everywhere. there
were lots of people. i enjoyed the celebratory atmosphere in a vacuum from it being related to the 4th of july.
i thought about how... i hoped a minority of the people here were here for the patriotism, that there was
the necessary proportion of people there for patriotic reasons then a big crust of people wanting
an excuse to be celebratory or drink in the celebratory atmosphere like me

we arrived at a very loud, crowded bridge, the location of the "freedom festival" & the sanctioned viewing
location for the show. there was distressingly loud pop music playing from inescapable loudspeakers.
there were tacos & funnel cakes & porta-potties. you know the drill. we sat on a curb near a
giant grill & chewed watermelon-flavored gum, waiting for the show to start

the fireworks would be launched on an adjacent bridge, from behind a nearby historic building. but i was under the mistaken
assumption that the launch site would be in our field of view. i imagined a firework-launching mechanism mistakenly tipping
over & launching it towards us, of this detonating the propane tanks on the big grill & turning us all into charred skeletons.
this didn't happen. what was in our field of view though, over on the adjacent bridge, was a small replica of the statue of
liberty. this was the exact location where hillary clinton had filmed a video of herself "chilling in cedar rapids"

we heard some words from the regional manager of a local supermarket that was funding the event, then the show started.
i had been hoping to record the bangs & pops with my phone's sound recording app, but the show was accompanied
by music from the loudspeakers. i didn't expect that. some of the fireworks were actually choreographed with
the lyrics. it opened with the national anthem. there were some other poppy, patriotic songs but also among
them were rachel platten's fight song & the star wars theme. my favorite firework resembled a drum
being hit, & was synced with... well, a distinct drum hit. there were also smiley faces

the show ended. as we left i found a very satisfying keychain on the ground. it looked like a frog. it was
made of flimsy rubber, & had all these buttons that could be popped back & forth. we drove back to the hotel.
we got drunk & worked on the puzzle more. we sure do love that puzzle. we listened to ambient one & four

july 5th. we walked down the street to a greenhouse, where the city grows decorative plants for transfer to local parks & the like. the building
was closed, but there were some trails that still had pretty plants growing along them. i crawled through a little tunnel that resembled a cave with
cave paintings in it. i photographed some very cute signs on a little fence. on the way back, we passed through the alleyway behind a Quality Inn
& found a cassette of a guy reading the Bible. we went back to the room & took the puzzle apart. we tried our best, but we just couldn't finish
the sucker. i packed up my things so as to move them to his house, in preparation of checking out of the hotel tomorrow. "packing up" always
feels melancholy, & it did here even though we had a good while left. he told me i'm more fun & goofy & warm in person. i went & saw his
house, his room, encountered his dad, met the two cats & the dog. the house is nice & old, a kind of house i'd like to live in. we drove
past a house that is significant for having "ALEX" written in the sidewalk in front it. we got salads & ate them back in the room.
we listened to a bunch of Slugbug while i dozed. we finished the vodka & had an emotional conversation. it made me cry
while my brain kept inexplicably forcing me to smile in discordance with my actual emotional state

july 6th. the last day. we got everything definitively packed up. we called a cab & checked out of the hotel.
while we waited on the patio, i decided to see how many of the 69 love songs i could sequentially remember & sing
from memory before the cab arrived. i made it to the end of the second verse of the luckiest guy on the lower east
side, which is track seven. the cab took us downtown. we explored the library, went up on the roof, saw a bird
that wouldn't react to my presence until i got fairly close. then it'd hiss & fly a couple feet away. i thought
it might have been a baby hawk. he took a photo of me taking a photo of it

we set up in the library near two teenage boys who were playing a grand theft auto-ish game. it might have been roblox.
their banter was great. classic tween roblox player banter. we got lunch at the library's cafe. i had a really good blt &
a cookie. when we sat back down near the boys, their situation had grown dire: there was someone using an aimbot

we went to the art museum. a lady at the front desk had to confiscate our bags, & she was stunned by the weight of my
backpack. most of the stuff on display was by Grant Wood & Marvin Cone. one of Cone's abstract paintings was titled
a wiggley thing. there was a whimsically tedious section devoted to parodies of american gothic. there was also
some Mauricio Lasansky & Conger Metcalf. there was a flock of children being led around

i saw a one-hundred-&-four-year-old oil painting, inches from me, not even separated by glass. i could
see the slight topography of the brush strokes. & it occurred to me that i had never really seen
anything like that. & then i saw two-thousand-year-old Roman busts, right in front of me

more than anything, i fell deeply in love with a bricolage titled where have you been? it's
almost dark, by richard d. pinney, who died in 1996 & tragically, tragically seems to be fairly
unknown. i wish my ability to experience this work wasn't now limited to these photographs

we bought two tokens for an "Art-O-Matic" machine that dispensed small original works of art. we got these. i got
the one on the left. then we went to the gift shop, after i filled out a survey that netted us a five percent discount &
aided the museum in obtaining grants. for myself, i bought a small hand-cranked music box. it plays Tchaikovsky's
flower waltz, & is housed in a cardboard box with edgar degas' prima ballerina on the front. i am very enamored with it

i got him two gifts. one is a little heart-shaped sculpture, with a fourth of it being sort of lopped out & having
circuit boards. the other is a button with this quote from Chunghi Choo: "i like to see simplicity, harmony,
& grace. i would like each piece to appear sensuous & celebratory, a pleasure to use & a pleasure to view"

we went back to the library. one of the roblox boys had left. i refilled our water bottles at a sort of fountain i
am familiar with, in that it had a digital counter of how many bottles it's filled. my bottle was #45,489. we sat
for a while, simply biding time. i e-mailed ms. harris about the artwork i'd gotten from the "Art-O-Matic."
i told her about myself, showed her which one i'd gotten & told her what city it'd end up hanging in

eventually we walked to a costume shop full of halloween costumes, props, prank devices, & the
like. the owner's little dog was walking around the store. i bought a pair of glasses that made it
appear as if my eyes had sprung out of their sockets on bouncing metal springs. then we walked
to a pizzeria. i wore the glasses as we walked. i wore the glasses into the pizzeria. i asked
him to take a picture of me wearing them in front of some ratty, rusty metal siding

i wore them while we ordered. we ordered cheese sticks & a small pepperoni pizza. we had the box
of vinyl gloves, so i could wear them & be able to stand touching the pizza. they were a thoughtful
purchase. there was an aquarium in the pizzeria. on the side of the soda machine was a yellow
sign that looked like it should have been a warning about legitimate danger. but it just said
"warning: we charge for ranch." i couldn't tell if it was restaurant humor or a genuine notice

we finished our pizza, walked back to the park in front of the library, waited for his mom to pick
us up & take us back to their house. she did. i noticed a painting of a dog in the kitchen. it looked
like Grace, the dog in the house. i asked his mom if it was a painting of Grace. she said a painter
she's acquainted with had indeed painted Grace. she thought the painting looked strange

she said everything in that kitchen had a story. she gestured to a watercolor of an owl & told me
a long story of how she found an injured owl in a parking lot & took it to a rehabilitation center,
where it spent four months recovering. after it recovered, the center called her & asked if she'd
like to release it. so she went & got it, rode home with it standing on her hand, & took it out
into the backyard. it flew up onto a branch, then turned & looked at her, then flew away

i went up to his room. we spent a while up there. it was the last space that i was to inhabit before we set off for the
bus stop a little before eight pm. he showed me all his lps, showed me lots of sentimental toys & trinkets & doo-dads.
it was a cluttered room. we listened to his most recently acquired lp, which was todd rundgren's a wizard, a true
star. he'd told me a good deal of times that this span of days had been the best experience of his life

i walked downstairs to refill my water bottle. i encountered his brother. his mom caught me in the kitchen, asking questions
about my trip. she asked if i'd like to see the backyard. i went out with her & saw the backyard. Grace came along. i played
Fetch with her. the ball was a deflated basketball. i spent a while doing this. i was the only one throwing the ball, but
each time she would drop it at his mom's feet, then i'd have to go tsk-tsk, & she'd pick it back up & drop it at my feet

well, eventually the time came. i changed from my floral gown & skirt back into jeans & a hoodie. i clipped my little wallet back onto my
belt loop. we headed downstairs & outside. i slithered into the tiny car. we drove to Iowa City, to the bus stop. we passed the Starbucks
that that first in-person moment had taken place at. we stopped at the bus stop. i slithered out of the tiny car. i still had the empty
can of grapefruit sparkling water. it was in my backpack's side pouch. as i struggled to pull the heavy thing out of the seat,
the can fell out. then the backpack fell over & meticulously crushed it. oh well. it's all dented, but i still have it

here, as i review all of this on august 4th, sitting at a cabinet with
my laptop in it, it sits above me on a little shelf of the cabinet

we hugged, said our goodbyes. or he did, at least. i actually forgot to speak at all, which made me feel
fairly unceremonious after. regardless, he got in the car & they drove away. i was again without company

without company. that is to say, without anyone i know, around whom there would be an excuse to express
my latent whimsicality, silliness, frivolity, flair. without whom there is no excuse to be anything but stiff
& methodical. it feels like a constant tragedy, to have unexpressed whimsicality, to have no outlet,
to have no one around to watch me begin skipping. so many people are diluted freaks who
can't even appreciate skipping, not in the way i need it to be appreciated...

so i ambled over to the bus stop & waited. a woman with a cast on her arm sat down next
to me. she asked where i was going. i told her. she said she was going to Des Moines,
then from there to some other place, to bury her father. so it wasn't a happy trip,
she said. she had pillows & blankets in preparation for a twelve-hour layover

the bus arrived. we got on. so off i went, back towards home. my purse was stuffed
with receipts for random purchases. i had kept them as souvenirs. the sun was setting.
i took out my little music box, sat there & turned the crank a little. tiredness fanned
the inherent melancholy of the conclusion of any very big thing. but it was ok. i idly
thought about the state of being at once the author & the protagonist of my thoughts

i am now a girlfriend again... which is fine. nothing more, nothing less

the only thing i listened to for quite a lot of the return tip was whiskey sour, over & over & over. we passed silhouetted wind turbines.
i spent a lot of time with my eyes closed, crying sometimes as i spent time with the person in my head whose company i can always retreat
to, the person who says my silly checklist of sentences, the person who transcends my numbed feeling of my close social interactions so
often feeling like nothing more than objects moving around around me, the person who transcends it simply because i define them as the
person who transcends it regardless of their traits, the person who is definitionally my home... he isn't this person. this person isn't real

we stopped in Des Moines, where i was to transfer. i nearly left my little stuffed animal in the seat, which would have
really upset me. as i got off of the first bus, on which i had been sitting in the second-to-last row, i noticed there had
been a forgotten bottle of mountain dew sitting under my armrest the whole time. at the stop, i held a door open
for a very old woman who barely had the strength to open it herself. it was late. the stop was very small. i stood
outside with a lot of other people at this loud, boring island in the dark for a while. eventually i got on the second
bus & sat in the second-to-last row. there was another forgotten bottle of mountain dew under the armrest

we set off. one of the driver's rules was no profanity. i was okay with that. i didn't intend to swear

july 7th. for the first time, i nearly dozed off while on a bus. also for the first time, i got
out my laptop while on a bus. i worked on the journal for a while. i was very drowzy, so
i resolved to simply get as much as i could down, skeletally, then come back & edit it later

i very nearly dozed off listening to burial - archangel, but not quite. i did finally decide to succumb, though.
i sat my bags on the floor & did my best to lie down on the seats. i suppose i might have fallen asleep for
fifteen minutes, but i was awoken by the announcement of our arrival in kansas city. so i was to be deposited
into my lousy, drowzy five-hour layover in this bus station that my dad had gone out of his way to warn me about

as i blearily gathered up my things, a man filing out actually grabbed my luggage & yanked it
into the aisle. i threw my hands out for it. he muttered some excuse about meaning to assist me,
& carried on. even if he was telling the truth, i think it was a pretty ill-conceived thing to do

i got settled in the station. this was terrible. the place was crowded, small, empty of things. there was
a restaurant, but it wouldn't open until ten minutes after my departure. i was horribly drowsy,
& too paranoid about theft to nap. it was difficult to rationalize being here for five hours

in my paranoia, i would hook my arm through the straps of both my purse & backpack, & keep my hand on my waist.
then i would extend my luggage's handle, place my leg between the bars, & tighten the handle around my leg.
i sat like this & read more of intro to capital. i thought maybe i could just throw myself into reading for
five hours & have them blow right by. but after about an hour, the tiredness really hit me. i knew i
wasn't going to be able to focus on reading. a man's rick & morty face mask fell off of his luggage,
& i returned it to him. i saw a brave, avant-garde soda can & a funny graphic on a sign

i began to feel like i was being subjected to torture by means of sleep denial. i resigned to buying a coffee-flavored energy
drink from a vending machine. the price was an absurd five dollars, which i needed to pay in exclusively ones. plus, somehow,
i managed to amble over to a different machine with exclusively water in it, & punch in the code to make sure i hadn't misread
the price. when it said it was three dollars, i put three of my ones in without looking at the machine, then
realized... eventually, i noticed i could just use my debit card to get the energy drink

i drank my drink & listened to more talking heads. the sun began to rise, a pleasing affirmation that time was
indeed passing. a woman enlisted me to remove her card from an atm for her, because her fake nails were
so long that she couldn't get at it. life during wartime really clicked with me. i listened to it ten times

finally, finally, it was time to board. i noticed that in seven-hundred-&-forty miles of travel, i had never actually
been obligated to have my bags checked. i wasn't supposed to have the scissors that were in my purse, or the mace in
my luggage, but there was nothing in place to stop me. i wondered what sorts of interesting things the other passengers
might have been hauling. i figured the staff would probably drag me out into the parking lot & shoot me in
the base of my skull like an animal if they knew i had a little music box that played Tchaikovsky

i departed from kansas city, forgoing my chance to hit up an electronic musician i was once acquainted with & meet up so
i could listen to him go on a weird rant in arcane 4chan language that had isolatedly mutated into his own idiosyncratic
dialect. another gorgeous sunrise ride awaited me. this was the drowziest stretch of all, a flickering blur of angelically
lit farmland. my head would droop, i would slip in & out of microsleep, have tiny vague dreams...

before i knew it, we were pulling into the tiny gas station at the edge of town. i got out, greeted my dad, told him
i'd left my drink in the hotel room so i'd be hopping back on in a couple of minutes. i walked in, stood silently
behind my brother, watched him make a burger, waited for him to turn & notice me. he did. i waved. i saw
two cute snow hats... then we headed out, drove to the apartment. i came home to freshly laundered
linens & new pillowcases. i worked on the journal a bit. i lied down on my bed & passed out

i woke up. at long last, i opened up my backpack & unpacked: the packaging of my eyeball glasses; my bag of dove milk chocolates; my two
uneaten blueberry muffins from the hotel; my eyeball glasses, sans the left eyeball; my little stuffed animal who was on top of the tv; my
microbe plushie; my new copies of ann leckie's ancillary trilogy; my copy of the complete cosmicomics; my round brush; my bluetooth
speaker; some souvenir brochures; my special sparkling water can; the other eyeball; my new stuffed walrus; my goodwill bag repurposed
to quarantine some smelly socks; nine & one quarter leftover protein bars; the Bible cassette; the receipt for the taco pizza; pizza
coupons; the receipts for the papa john's pizza; intro to capital & maniac magee; eight uneaten packs of six cheese cracker sandwiches

then, at long last, i opened up my luggage & unpacked: my travel toothbrush; my floral skirt; my olive green shorts; my new copies of
the city & the city, the star diaries, & the cyberiad; my bottle of face moisturizer; my floral gown; my new floral dress; the baseball i
found in the parking lot; a tube of kids toothpaste; my phone charger; my body spray; my backup face mask; my umbrella; my two bottles
of nail polish; my mace; my lotion; my room spray; my new stripey roses blouse; my lacy collar blouse; my new floral skirt; my skirt; my
pink blouse; two pairs of underwear; my new cds of charlie brown's holiday hits, oh aaron, your #1 requests...& more, & trout mask replica

i spent a while recuperating, eating food, drinking water, et cetera. then, at long last, i opened up my purse & unpacked: my little
music box; my little painting; my original bus itinerary; my sunglasses; an empty tiny bottle of Southern Comfort; a gifted tiny
bottle of peanut butter whiskey, which we both understood to be conceptually revolting; the receipt for the hotel room; "rules
of gathering herbs"; the receipt from the gift shop; a note card he'd written our shopping list on; a recipe for spinach dip

now i direct my attention to the process of taking stock of all the photos, looking for ones i never sent anywhere,
processing them, collating them, putting them where they need to be... & i guess that's all i have to say about my trip

july 8th. i shampooed my hair for the first time in quite a long time. it made my bangs really orderly & soft, &
gave me poofy witch hair. i walked to the gas station in my googly glasses. a customer at the door said he really
liked them. the clerk was very tickled. he asked me if i could see alright through them. the best part was when
he asked if i needed anything else, & i shook my head, hilariously flinging the springs left & right

i spent most of the night putting a lot of concentration into sorting & taking stock of all the photos & videos from
the trip. interesting how as i live my life i'm racking up corresponding debts of self-imposed archival work, there,
in the moment, at a varying ratio to the realtime duration of each experience, even if i'm not thinking about it then

july 9th. i got a shot. i wore my googly glasses to the clinic. the receptionist laughed. the nurse lost
it the moment i walked into view. it made her day. she said she really needed a laugh, after the crazy day
she'd been having. she adored my commitment to walking around all day in the glasses. she thought my dress
was really cute. she asked where i'd gotten them, said she didn't even know one could find them anymore,
which led to talking a bit about my trip to Cedar Rapids & the circumstances around it

on the way to the coffee shop, i stopped in a bar to comb my hair & another lady lost it. one of the
cashiers at the coffee shop said "nice glasses." Philip's paintings of Andy Warhol & the police
car "burning rubber" were on display, among a few others. they brought back the "apple
pie latte," a special from november 2019. i drank it & remembered...

later, sitting idly in a bar, i realized i couldn't find the glasses. i was pretty sure i'd left them sitting on
a table in a room that i had my back to, which had only one entrance & exit that necessitated walking past me.
i figured someone had walked past me, picked them up, & walked away with them simply because i'd forgotten
that i had them sitting provisionally on that table... i felt like my soul had been ripped out! i walked around,
glancing frantically, feeling like i was sinking into a deep dark pit. i thought to ask a bartender about
them. she had actually seen them! she brought them to me. my soul didn't feel ripped
out anymore. i may have kind of a "special objects" problem

i asked my brother for a ride home. during the drive, i wondered what it is exactly that always seems to separate
me from the present moment, make me feel detached, lost in my head, lost in the incessant context around myself,
never viscerally living. this feels like the only thing separating me from the blissful feeling of being a child.
i feel like there had to have been some violent shift demarcating childhood versus now. i tried to identify
what it was. i supposed it had to have been related to the internet

as i type this i am considering that i may just be tired, & feeling detached from the present moment,
& blindly projecting that feeling onto every second of every day even though i'm usually fine

july 12th. i fell asleep in the early morning listening to four tet - morning side. i got woken up by unspoken. i felt
really blissful & cozy & calm listening to it. then timer-tab.com, which i had on a ninety minute countdown,
went off. a video of a chiming grandfather clock played loudly over the song. that was good too

july 13th. i went & got sushi with my brother. i made the cashier laugh. he said
he had the exact same debit card, & i said "i hope the number's different"

i felt good & mentally present in bed with my dog with the chirping bugs outside

july 15th. again, i walked along a crowded street with booths & vendors. i was in my stripey roses dress. i meant to
bring my googly glasses, but i forgot. my dad organized some people to walk down the street with signs that protested
the homelessness problem. "housing is a human right!" it was awfully hot out, so i spent most of my time in the coffee
shop. i got a chai tea with too much cinnamon in it. new order - blue monday compelled me to ask what the song
on the intercom was. i've purposely listened to it before & just found it very bland. how times change...

i watched a bunch of youtube videos that i made when i was twelve. i briefly un-unlisted them, but it appeared to change
their upload dates to the present day & detach them from the order they were originally uploaded in. this hurt my brain
really bad, made my face burn. re-unlisting them restored it all, fortunately. i might still do it. i need to think about
it. if i do, it'll be one video at a time, since bulk updates republish all the relevant videos in a random order

i saw a car with a "post punk librarian" bumper sticker, & an unrelated lady in a devo shirt. i left my umbrella in the
coffee shop again, but i went back & found it. once again, i banked on the increased volume of people downtown leading
to an increased volume of people in the bar, at which maybe i could meet a friend somehow. so i sat in there. i ate
a pepperoni pizza sandwich & nearly cried because i felt so lonely. i downloaded all of slugbug's albums

later, at home, i lied in bed & beatboxed at sweet pea while she just stared
at me. then i barked at her once, quietly, & she instantly sprung at my face

july 16th. i received a prescription for progesterone. i had an exchange with slugbug about some of his oldest releases
& whether there's cover art for one of them. he said he'd look for the file, maybe rescan the picture if he couldn't find it

july 17th. around midnight i saw some totally poggers lightning to the south... it never hit the ground,
it only sparked around inside a big storm cloud that was invisible in the night sky but would light up from
inside, translucently... i went on a late night walk to the convenience store for snacks. once i had the snacks,
i kept going. near the convenience store there was a spot along the street where the bright lights gave me
four parallel shadows. i made them dance. i walked to a park & back, took some creepy photos, while
listening to a bunch of talking heads songs. & she was & artists only & air clicked with me

july 22nd. i guess nothing has happened between now & the seventeenth... sort of a deficit of activity to
compensate for the big trip at the start of the month, you could say? at least, i hope nothing worth journaling
about happened, as opposed to me getting lax about writing stuff down. i honestly can't remember...

i watched a squirrel eat from our bird feeder. the feeder dangles right next to the bird bath, about a
foot higher, so they have to perch on the bath & awkwardly hang onto it while they grab the seeds

at about 10:30, i walked to the convenience store for snacks. once i had the snacks, i kept going. i walked to
the park, & kept going. i walked all the way downtown & back, which is something i've never done at night.
it was quite a long & ethereal excursion. i took some creepy photos. i saw a fat sort of bug that i've never
seen before. at about one am i had the daylights scared out of me by a little bichon frise screaming
at me from about a foot away through the face-high window of a tiny dilapidated house

july 24th. i went... to the nature trail!

i picked up a live cicada with a broken leg & inspected
it closely. i attempted to die for all of humanity's sins

july 25th. in the early morning, i had my laptop on my bed instead of rigidly keeping it either in a cabinet or a dresser.
the dresser is the only surface in the room that i feel safe burning a candle on, so with it free i was doing that. i'd had the
laptop there for weeks, so i hadn't been burning any of the three candles that i have. which is silly, because i think they are
great for me. there was a small dead bug floating in the wax. my dad was snoring in the living room. i could faintly hear
generic sleep aid music that prominently featured a flute. i lied next to sweet pea, reading the wikipedia page about
tulip mania. it was part of a tabbed-browsing careen through wikipedia that involved destructive tornadoes, beanie
babies, mcdonald's, & offshore accounts. i felt profoundly cozy, just really really normal. later in the
day though it sort of gave way to a more standard background level of dissociation

some of my neighbors got chickens. i saw them in their backyard as i walked to the store. in the
early morning, i even heard one of them go, ah... how would i transcribe the sound...?
"cock a doodle doo," i suppose, would be the closest approximation...

july 26th. i felt like gumby's horse, a bug eyed animal thinking vinyl record crackle. i cashed a twenty-two dollar check
that i received from the college in early june. they had leftover money from the student covid funds, & distributed it
sort of thinly. i got a shot. i went to the coffee shop. i happily watched a lady sitting outside let her small dog on
her lap lick something out of a small cup. i showed J's friend my googly glasses. she said they were goofy. i got
to do the "shake head no" thing again. on the chalkboard, i sort-of replicated two pictures that were across from
it in the little hallway. my brother was drunk, & the cab company had two & a half hour wait time. so i ended
up stuck there for a while, having been awake a very long time. i took a nap on the couch in the back room

july 27th. as i started to wake up in the morning, i had a notion in my head about... i guess
what "speaking in tongues" is. if i was with another person & we wanted to try to intuitively express
ourselves without distorting aspects of a shared language, & just improvised gibberish. i wasn't nearly
awake enough to really be thinking about this, it was just there very automatically & intuitively.
& i remember quietly saying a couple of things. they must have been very sincere

july 28th. i drank an uncomfortable amount of sweet tea because i had been finding
the presence of the jug in the fridge to be really annoying, & it was around one
percent of the height of the jug. but it was still a fair amount of tea

july 29th. i watched a squirrel fish a cracker out of an empty flower pot & slowly eat it. i
was real close because it couldn't see me through the sliding glass door. then it found another
one & ran away with it. later i ran into my dad as he was leaving the gas station. right before
he left he said loudly to the cashier, "be good to my daughter!" for no apparent reason...

i bought a fifty dollar record player, & a hard drive to back up my
music collection. will anything else happen before july is through?

july 30th. i woke up an hour or two before sunrise. i went a long time without turning on my phone or laptop screens
at all. i ate a bowl of oatmeal & an avocado, then jogged around the block as the sun rose. this all felt refreshing & good

then it was... friday night! around six pm, i took a trolley downtown. i decided i was going to stand aimlessly in a bar, to see if
anyone exists, to see if whoever exists would be there. i wanted to try to make it a weekend routine, just to invite chance, anything

i noticed on some level that the landscape around the trolley stop was making me feel like a child. then it hit me:
two large trees by the sidewalk had been removed at some point. their absence was deeply refreshing, so delightful

so then i arrived at the coffee shop. i ate a salad. i sat there for two hours until close. & then i went to the bar.
& i sat in there for a while. & it seemed that if anyone existed, they weren't there. which is my frivolous way of
saying the place was packed, & everyone seemed as uniformly alien as ever. so i messaged my brother for a ride home

right before he arrived, i stepped outside & ran into J & her friend, these two people i am so keen on maybe attempting friendship
with, or at least making myself sufficiently present that they may attempt friendship with me. so i hastily called off the ride.
my brother had already driven across town, had pulled up a short distance away. i apologized. it was embarrassing

J & her friend went inside. here i began doing what i had been tentatively planning to do from the start: i ordered two drinks with
vodka in them & drank them fairly quickly. it was my hope that this would give me the faculties just to go up & say "hi," to just
see if they were interested in talking to any significant degree... i noted to myself, uncomfortably, that my aspiration of
friendship already feels unbalanced, like i'm privately placing too much friend-want on them for how little i know them

as i ordered the second drink, J came up & asked how things had been. i told her various things about
my trip to iowa, about traveling alone. i told her i liked the Flaming Lips song that had started
playing (race for the prize). she told me she had seen them live once, that live music by
artists you really love is everything. then she went back to talking with her friend

i sat down nearby, thoroughly drunk, spinning around on a stool, reading yet more of introduction to capital,
of all the things to do. i found that i was still petrified of going up & trying to interact. i couldn't do it

my head began to fill with deeply hopeless & dismal thoughts about social isolation & birth sex. everything began to
feel purgatorial, endless. i would shuffle around unsteadily, stare blankly at nothing, feel like i was in a nightmare

sometimes when i go in public & see people whose occupation of their bodies seem so effortless
things peel away, i feel like: every one of the structures that comprise my psyche are built
around the central irresolvable tension of not wanting to be the sex that i am. it is not
going to get better. all my relief actually comes in social isolation & fantasy

at certain times i just feel like i am here in the world to report internal experiences that will
be read by people who are indifferent or appreciative of the sex that they are & it will benefit
them in that they will have a basis for comparison so as to appreciate being indifferent
or appreciative of the sex that they are. that's "the reason" for things to be
existing in this kind of setup. i do type other stuff too though

thinking hurts. everyone in my city i entertain the possibility of connecting with, it always seems the
same. nevermind no it doesn't. i'll still type the proceeding wrong sentences to show what i was thinking
though. "playing it safe" seems like the molecular basis of every expression, everyone talks like they're
in a tv show, everyone feels ruined. i think societal structures are procedurally ruining as many people
as possible, i don't think people are like this. it doesn't matter because i'm not interested in pursuing
a socially articulated life in my body. desiring a social life is just a habit i slip into because
it's more superficially appealing while the big hourglass drains

i wandered outside & plucked a leaf off of a small tree, hardly noticing as i did it. i walked around
rubbing it with my fingers. i went inside, sat down, sat it on the table with my bags. looking at
it made me emotional. typing this now, i think... that i might have left it somewhere

J & her friend left. eventually i called a cab. it took quite a long time for it to arrive. right before it did,
someone tapped me on the shoulder. a girl asked if i needed anywhere to sit. i shook my head. she said
okay, but i was free to sit next to her if need be. so i sat next to her. she introduced herself. she was S

S was very attentive toward me. she asked how i'm doing. i told her i was pretty sad. she asked what was going
on. i wasn't going to get into existential despair around birth sex but i stammered about not having had any
friends in so long, about J & her friend, how i couldn't even speak to them. she seemed to think it
was some kind of tentative polyamory thing, & i had to explain clearly that it wasn't

trying to recollect what all was said... as we talked, i ignored phone calls from the cab company. she said she was
from arkansas, that this city was an "in-between place," that she came from a conservative family & being queer here
was easier but not as empowering as in a big city. she would reiterate the positive qualities of living in a bigger city,
saying "it doesn't end here." she was very consoling, kept reaffirming things to me. she gave me her phone number.
she empathetically touched my arm. she platonically held my hand for several minutes. it had been three
weeks since anyone had done that. it felt like it had been longer than three weeks. i suppose
it had been unknowably long if you took into account the platonic aspect

she offered me a ride home with her roommate, but i was too skittish about getting into a car with her so
soon after meeting. in fact, it came perfectly naturally to lightly suspect that the attention & hand-holding
had been a love bombing thing so she could human traffic me. so i told her i'd just call a cab. her roommate
arrived. they waited with me on the curb for about half an hour until the cab arrived. there were rowdy
people & loud motorcycles all around. i said goodbye & got in the cab. the dna remix of tom's
diner played during the drive. i thanked her for the company in a text message, said
how it'd been three weeks since i'd really spoken with anyone

i got home & typed most of this, then dozed off. then i woke up & typed this:

i typed all of this, felt asleep to some degree, relived some
of this things described, though i han't atuall typed
on of this that it wa a memory i made up?

too drowzy comd back & review tomorrow

then i dozed off again

july 31st. when i woke up, S had texted me "Of course! No problem!"

the hard drive arrived... i backed up all of my music. two hundred & ninety seven gigabytes of mp3s, cozy & safe... a storm
blew through. once it was gone, i went on a walk to the store. it turned out to be a pretty scary walk, though. lightning
kept arcing across the sky theatrically. & i left my phone at home, so i couldn't message my brother...

august 1st. my brother & i went to subway. i accidentally told the cashier that i was with the lady behind me in
line. i thought she was asking about my brother... so i paid for that lady's sub, which i would've been happy to
do. but i didn't realize what was going on so i took it with me... the record player arrived. the first album
i played on it was kakashi. i spent all day spinning that album, wee tam & the big huge, & duck stab

august 3rd. it was a very tolerable temperature out. i bought a chocolate bar, which turned into soup in its wrapper as i
sat on a bench in the middle of a nearby apartment complex, reading maniac magee. i'm rereading a wrinkle in time too

august 5th. in the early morning i watched the first twenty minutes or so of stop making sense, which i have never seen...

later, after i had slept, i noticed a tick on sweet pea's ear. i had to yank it off. then i walked to the store for
cherries, blueberries, babybel cheeses, shampoo, conditioner, & parasite repellent for sweet pea. on the way,
i stopped at a soccer game with food trucks & got a slice of cheesecake drizzled with caramel. i sat on a marble
bench by a pond & ate it. it was very hard, i could hardly dig the spoon in half an inch. it was nice, though

so then i arrived, bought all those things, & set off back home. on the way back, i found a chuck e. cheese "play pass" card on the
sidewalk & took it. then i stopped in a gas station for fruit juice. as i left, an incredibly scraggly old guy said "hon? you have
a nice day," then when i looked back he made a wet kiss sound at me... when i got home, my dad gave me an early
birthday present. i think he knocked it outta the park with this one. then i gorged myself on cherries

august 6th. i received an early birthday present in the mail from that one guy... stanislaw lem's highcastle. the straps on the
bag my dad got me are very weird & dangly, so i took them off. i decided to walk around with it affixed to my purse's strap by my
water bottle. i filled it with dozens & dozens of strawberry hard candies. all i ate today were blueberries, cherries, & babybel cheeses

august 7th. i made a spreadsheet about a compilation that was released in 2017 for a japanese band that made
experimental children's music in the 80s. it has the compilation's tracklist & the tracklists of all the original
releases, with the tracks color coded to show which sections of the compilation are sourced from what, &
which songs are exclusive to it. i also uploaded the first disc of the compilation to youtube. more forthcoming

i went to a local cinema & opportunistically saw The Green Knight. it was pretty interesting. then there was a free outdoor concert
featuring some punk bands. it was kind of nice. but unpleasantly loud, as they always are. made my left ear crinkle like plastic wrap,
as they always do. i sat on the patio, where it was the most tolerable. there was a weird cardboard cutout of a guy up by the stage [1] [2]

i ran into drunken C & her drunken friends. they invited me to sit with them. i dragged a stool with metal legs over,
& it shrieked against the patio. i think i did this quickly enough that it wasn't grating, but slowly enough that it
brought out the humor of the action. they complimented my nails & my skirt. i sat there silently, swiveling my
head to stare dumbly at whoever was talking, even after the music began to drown them out entirely

eventually they went to stand up near the stage, so i retired to the lobby. there were about thirty small, simple,
framed drawings of tombstones featuring pithy eulogies for Earth, in reference to climate change. inspired
by Vonnegut! i read more of intro to capital. i idly played the piano, trying to channel music for airports

intro to capital was driving me crazy, because there's a point where he randomly switches from saying the value of
a capitalistically produced commodity is c + v + s (constant capital, variable capital, surplus value) to c + v + m, & as
far as i can tell he never defines m or addresses this change at all. m. was i forgetting when he talked about m?!?! then
my friend helped me figure it out. it was "mehrwert," he changed the abbreviation to the german word for surplus value...

i had a tofu banh mi sandwich, a slice of vegan chocolate cake, & the best gummy bears i've ever had.
the way their citrusiness would manifest, it was like eating air freshener. as i walked around,
i had to keep ducking under the breeze of a fan so it wouldn't mess up my bangs

i rode home, excited to move the lamp in my room to a small table

august 9th. i... tried & failed to get a shot. the clinic closed earlier than i thought it would. regardless, i still went
to the coffee shop. when i got there, "alex was not here" & a nice drawing were already on the chalkboard. i wrote
"yes i was :(" but forgot to take a picture of it. i had one of the august specials: a s'mores latte. i got it free as
an early birthday thing. it was kind of flavorless though. i tried to order a decaf espresso con panna but they
just made me a decaf cortado. i slammed it for no reason. just to feel alive i guess! i also had a banana smoothie

neither of these selections were of my own volition, really. i've been trying everything on the menu
by periodically sending... initially the whole menu, to a discord channel, & ordering whatever the
first thing someone types is. then i remove that thing from the selection the next time i do it

the coffee shop closed. i sat in the bar yet again. i sat in the back room, mostly reading intro to capital again. i got through
about thirty pages. i'm on chapter eleven of twelve now. soon this classic refrain will disappear from the diary entries

a girl on roller skates named M asked what i was reading. i showed her the cover. she asked if it was a novel. i struggled
with succinctly summarizing it, but did stammer that it's, like... karl marx's... description of how... capitalism functions.
she said that was really deep stuff, & then said, "karl, wha- is it karl 'marx?' i'll have to remember that"

august 10th. i received a second package of early birthday gifts from that one guy... an opportunistically purchased cd of
vektroid's shader complete &, truly the entree of this package, a guh guh guh guh gorgeous translucent red songs vinyl...

august 12th. i ate a microwave pot pie with sixty-eight grams of fat in it, as a humble invitation to my body to retain absolutely any of it

august 13th. i tried & failed to get a shot, again. i would have to go back at nine in the morning the following
day. then i went to a thrift store. i saw a cute sign, a doll, a jewel case of face paint (inspiration taken from the
gerogerigerogige, no doubt), penguin shoes, buddy mugs, a wonderful old cd player, a cute hangman board,
clothespins, an ornate book, some cute teacups. holding a toy story vhs case broke my heart

i got a fabric, a freaky toy dog, & a small mug with cute illustrations. i also got a speck of dust debilitatingly
stuck in my eye for an unreasonable amount of time. i had to just sit on the floor in the store until that resolved.
i also got very hungry. i wandered over to the park with my excessively heavy backpack & purse. the leaves were
starting to change. everything felt oddly cozy & unusual as i shook from hunger & stared at trees covered in
cicada shells. there was something intoxicating about the hunger pangs at that moment, sort of mind-altering

i shambled a considerable distance over to the coffee shop, probably burning at least one hundred & thirty six grams
of fat. when i arrived, i got a mixed berry smoothie & two turkey spinach wraps. then i noticed they had the black
bean hummus wraps, which i would have gotten instead! drat. a girl gave me a chocolate & peanut butter
shake in a jar, saying she "just used it for pictures." i used it for that picture but i drank it too

august 15th. i turned twenty-three years old. i ordered a vinyl of tanoshii ongaku's yappari from japan for about forty
dollars... i promise never to pay such an absurd price for physical media ever again. or at least to keep it to a "once a year"
type rate. i listened to les rallizes denudes' '77 live for the first time, specifically because it was released on my birthday
(seven years before i was born). i made myself throw away the cardboard box my record player came in. i spent a little while
restructuring my rym ratings, anchoring them by a more positive standard for 4/5 which used specifically the magnetic fields'
distant plastic trees as its model. my dad & brother made steaks & baked beans. my dad got me a shirt & a pair of shorts.
they constitute an okay outfit but i feel like it makes me look like a frat boy with rich parents. i walked to
the store for a bottle of coffee & a guy did the actual "weuu woo" whistle at me

august 16th. i finally got a shot. i went to the coffee shop. the wifi password had
been erased from the chalkboard, & i redid it. a de facto employee, really.
there was a poetry night. i went up & read my story story again

august 17th. my first day of classes for the semester. oral communication, interpersonal communication, video
production. i sat in a classic type of chair. i felt at home back in the student center. i got a free lunch because i
left my wallet in the book store, & the cashier at the food court took pity on me after i frantically dug through
my purse & didn't find it. then i recovered the wallet. really juked her. i ran one & 2/3 miles on an
elliptical treadmill. i'm going to start doing that every day again! then i got home & passed out

august 18th. i attended my first radio practicum class, learned i'll actually be on the radio during the semester, producing
& airing fourteen shows even. it's kind of crazy to me that i can just, take this class that expects me to ultimately curate
& mix fourteen hours of music. i mean, i can absolutely do that!!! but it's crazy that that's the aim! it's not even
a class that teaches how to do it. you'd think i had bypassed prerequisites, but i don't think i did

august 22nd. at about three in the morning, i noticed that the youtube channel that i've been uploading music to for several
years had been deleted for a perceived terms of service violation. so that... made my face burn. i submitted an appeal request

that night, i figured i would have to wait until monday, tuesday, or wednesday to get
the appeal looked at, & the waiting was getting to me. i had this to say about it:

years of interesting finds no one else had uploaded... the ten hours of content i'd uploaded
from the 365 days project, & i was just getting started on that. if it ends up rejected,
there goes a bunch of the motivation to keep sifting through that

plus numerous playlists i'd spent hours & hours deliberating on. my favorite songs list, favorite lyrics
list, the two "songs i've been posting" lists that are like special music diaries which strongly evoke
various spans of time. the tracklists of those two aren't backed up anywhere. my special "laundromat"
list which maybe i could reconstruct from memory, but its tracklist is not backed up anywhere
either... i would private all the videos if i could just have access to the playlists

just like to sit in my house & find music to share. not having the most fulfilling time overall but that is
something i like to do. no though, it gets threatened with obliteration out of nowhere. if the appeal is denied,
i don't know. i will just crumple up & drain of color a bit, & forget some things, & proceed with life

the channel was soon restored, though! so i calmed down

august 23rd. after feeling pretty negative all day, i lied down & tried to just empty my mind of thoughts for about five
minutes, then fell asleep listening to tracey trance - fountain 1 & felt better than i had in weeks. so that's all i had to do,
i guess... i kept having dreams where i'd click "stop after current" in foobar2000 to make the song stop looping,
but it'd keep influencing the dream from my laptop in real life, & i'd think "why isn't it working..."

august 24th. i was dying for a little while because, at the end of my Interpersonal Communications class, a girl with uniquely
appealing fashion sense, who had walked in to say hi to a friend there, said she really liked my blouse. that felt good, but i was too
caught off guard to return the compliment... it really bothered me for a while, maybe because i had just been awake for a pretty long time

then i noticed that she actually happened to be in the room that my next class would be at in forty minutes.
so i just waited around & figured i'd see if it would seem unintrusively feasible & non-weird to
return the compliment then. did i not genuinely have the excuse of this coincidence?

well, as i sat there i began to feel acutely aware that approaching strangers without some very strictly utilitarian
reason tends to make me feel like a sexual predator for no reason, & that that is a large part of why i don't have
any friends here. so i started to feel pretty sad. when the class ended i saw her leave the building a bit
too quickly for me to have said anything, even if i had felt capable of it, so that was that

i walked around campus for a little while, listening to cherry tomato on repeat. then, in the administrative building, i ran
into M, one of my old friends from 2017. a different M from the girl with the roller skates. we hadn't seen each other in
over a year, i believe. we talked for a little while, until the other old friend arrived & they headed off to that friend's class

i walked home. i indulged a common ritual of stopping & cooling off in the convenience store's "beer cave." after
i set back out, the heat began to feel so intolerable that i messaged my brother, asking for a ride home
from the store. i walked back to wait in the beer cave until he arrived. i got home & passed out

august 25th. was this on the twenty-fifth? it was around this time. my dad showed me some body
wash that he bought with me in mind, which had fairly explicit feminine branding as opposed to the
ones that are already there. he couldn't bring himself to say out loud that that was why, though,
even though it clearly was. so he just said that "it seems... less... abrasive, i don't know"

it's weird, because reaffirming one's identity through the gendered branding of their shampoo is insane but here
it's still being used as like, a channel to communicate genuine acceptance? so it's like... well okay, sure, i guess

august 26th. i went to my classes. the chef in the cafeteria finally said that she loves that i draw a smiley face on my meal
ticket every single day, after actual years of me doing it. that thrilled me. i saw the girl with the fashion sense again. i guess
on each day that i have a one pm class in that building, she does too. i am just going to internally drop that matter,
though. but i felt very despondent again, about feeling incapable of approaching anyone

still: my friend? acquaintance? E has her own dorm now instead of living on the far edge of town. i visited E's dorm
for the first time. she is in a big new building that i've been passively spectating the construction of for about
a year. i arrived at about four. we didn't talk much, we never do. but i brought my record player, showed her
all my records. i had had to hurry into the building because it was hot enough outside to warp them if they
were exposed for long enough. we quietly listened to wee tam while she did stuff on her phone

then we went & got dinner at the dining hall. i had two slices of pizza & a small bowl of ice cream. while we were eating,
i opened the tumblr app & remembered that i had logged out of it. "good. good me," i thought. then we went back & watched
the first several episodes of Inuyasha. at about seven-forty i had had my fill of Inuyasha & decided i'd message my brother
for a ride home at eight. i spent the last twenty minutes just clicking through endless netflix shows without watching
anything because i wasn't sure what else to do. it started feeling kind of bleak after a while

august 28th. in the early morning, i finished intro to capital

after i slept, i made an rym list of the songs that have made me cry. then i went to a pride festival. it was not super
big, but regardless i don't think i had ever been to one of its scale. it was a very pleasing event to witness, with tons
of cool people all around. two or three complimented my dress or said i was pretty. an old lady asked my name &
for a hug. so i gave her one. a girl walked up and asked if i'm the girl who does the music, the digi-music
at the open mics. celebration by kool & the gang played on big speakers & the kick drum felt good

still, though, i did stare around fearfully & think exactly what i tend to think. which is: "even in a society that was perfectly
egalitarian along all possible lines of difference between people the existence of sexual dimorphism & lack of choice in it
would be an intolerable oppression imposed by nobody, i can't take it i can't take it i can't take it i can't take it i can't ta

i truly revel in seeing expressions of happy progressive stuff & thinking & saying things in response that by comparison are just deeply
inconvenient in their simultaneous idealism & accompanying depression in light of how fundamentally infeasible they are. it rocks

okay, maybe i was just feeling depressed that day. after the festivities on the street finished, & everyone moved indoors, i sat in
a very loud & crowded bar, on my laptop, feeling super out of it. there was a drag show in the back. sometimes i sit at a little
table next to the double doors that lead to that back room, & when i happen to do that on the night that there is a show, people
tend to assume i'm the one taking tickets or checking ids or what-have-you. i spoke briefly with J's friend. M, not my 2017
friend, the one who had been in roller skates, sat across from me & spoke with me again, briefly. it seemed like she
was trying to calm herself down from intense anxiety that she was experiencing over how many people there were

i walked around the block in the dark, photographed a building, photographed statues

there is also: "i could participate in the feeling of solidarity fostered by this pride festival
but only on the condition that i roleplay as a person," which i am not interested in doing

august 29th. i went to the coffee shop. there was a second day of pride festivities, but they were at a park. i figured it'd
have been too hot out. i brought my record player, & used earbuds to listen to some of the records that they keep sitting as
decoration in the front room. i imagined the baristas clueless as i sped toward the shop, thinking "ah ha ha ha i'm gonna
play the decorative records! it'll be a delightful subversion of how like they are actual records but disassociated from
their original purpose for the sake of inertly playing into the established appearance of a coffee shop ahahaha ha!"

these were the records i listened to:
side a of tal farlow's the tal farlow album
side a of a split featuring supermarket all-stars & injury
side a of huey lewis & the news
side b of the paul desmond quintet's desmond
side a of bud shank & bob brookmeyer
most of side a of bud shank & three trombones

there was a finale drag show at the bar, & i spectated it from a room over while i downloaded music. a lot of people attended.
later, as my brother drove me home, he told me that there had been a plumbing issue & sewage had started coming out
of our bathroom sink & flooding into the kitchen a bit. so that was something the folks had had to deal with

august 30th. i got a shot. my yappari vinyl arrived! i was relieved that i got it directly from the mailman, as i had had no
idea what day it would show up, & if he had just set it on the porch while i was off somewhere & it was ninety-five
degrees out... the thing would have warped! well, i gave it some spins. it's the 2018 reissue, & i discovered
that each side has an appended track that i thought was exclusive to the hyokkori compilation

i went to the convenience store. as a really gnarly-looking sweaty guy left, he muttered something to a lady. i didn't hear
what he muttered, but i did hear her reply "no, i'm married," & see the cashier give a funny look in their direction

a plumber came & fixed our sink. i think it will take me a while to feel cozy in our bathroom again. it
was pretty bad in there. i threw away my toothbrush & deputized the travel toothbrush in my backpack

august 31st. i watched a mama cat & her five kittens playfully explore the backyard. the black & white one stalked
a bird, then charged at it, but couldn't catch it. i also found out that there is a cat lounge in town. i went to class. for
lunch, i asked my brother to drive me home so i could microwave some slices of pizza. i haven't really had the money
to get stuff to eat for about a week. my grant money is taking its sweet time to arrive. as i waited for him to arrive,
i stood in the sun & crushed pine needles & smelled them, seeking to reject the impulse to stand just inside
the building like someone drably waiting at a metro station to be taken to their desk job

later, still hungry, i barely managed to buy some hummus & crackers, & a... stick of beef. in the cafeteria,
i ran into both of the folks from 2017. they're both attending classes now. i sat by them for a little bit.
i told jokes that make them laugh. that's why i was so close with them in 2017. that's part of why
they live in this city, even. we're kind of distant now, though. M took a picture of me, then
made it sing that fortnite song. so a picture of me has now sang that fortnite song

i recorded all my spoken bumpers for the first radio show, then sat by a big third-floor window with a beautiful view
& painstakingly put everything together in Audacity as the sun set. this whole process took three or four hours

September

september 1st. a discord server for my college sprang into existence. i quickly secured an administrator role & got a bunch
of infrastructure set up for it, spent a while spectating it. the person who shows up in anime cosplay every day was there
& i finally got to tell them how much i appreciate that they do that. also found out they're a plural system, which
spurred me to think about what i think about that. M from 2017 is there too (she left shortly after)

i tried to go to the little nature trail on campus but there were signs warning of live animal traps, saying to
not leave the trail & keep pets close on their leashes. someone in the server said i shouldn't go in.
he claimed that they're beaver traps & that one had split a snapping turtle in half. so i left

week three, i'm already making my radio instructor read the lyrics to real
death by mount eerie so i can get word on whether it'd be acceptable to play

september 2nd. my dad gave me a hundred dollars, so i got a big lunch of mozzarella cheese sticks, chicken tenders, & takis.
the video production instructor took us to the broadcast room & let us mess with all sorts of equipment. i left the three big
cameras aimed precisely at a painting of a dog way over to the left of the stage. i went to the coffee shop & sat in the back
while an art show took place. an elderly couple played traditional ozark & celtic folk music, which i thought was
fantastic. they had six cds & two tapes for sale. i got one cd & both tapes for sixteen dollars total

september 3rd. i am pretty sure my brother ate magic mushrooms this night. why is the gambling addicted metalhead
obsessed with bigfoot & ancient aliens the one eating the magic mushrooms in this household... i think they would make
my brain awesome. cruel world... (or maybe i am wrong & they would just make me have psychosis forever)

september 4th. i composed the playlist & outline for my second radio show, which will be themed around songs that have or have had the
capacity to make me cry. i also decided on a theme for the third show: a Japanese artist spotlight to commemorate this Japan semester

september 5th. the four am felt in need of spontaneously exiting the apartment & sprinting in the
direction of the nearest major street without the burden of a purse or a phone or what-have-you

well, i certainly did all i needed to do. although i'd like people to fully understand, it was naturally all too spontaneous
& freeform to bother reasonably committing to text, i tried to make it artistic like a performance for myself, i kept
telling myself to keep the energy going, you simply would have had to have been there to know the flavor

it was cooler than i expected, humid yes but not balmy, & the clouds were low so that they were wonderfully lit up

running, stopping & feeling my body burningly push oxygen into less supplied areas, dancing down the middle of empty streets, spinning as i run,
skipping, stomping, windmilling arms & falling & lying on the asphalt parking lot behind the church & thinking about how easy it is to break the
routines & patterns at every second as this mindset begins to truly take me then taking off down the next street, petting a cat, ranting to myself,
topics too freeform to recapture, about everything i felt free from in that mindset, performativity, gender expression, routine, yelling & whooping,
taking in the acoustics of my echoes & making quips at my surroundings, speaking to people i pretend are camping in the dark trees, yelling at an
asphalt factory, moment to moment to moment, no plan, loudly singing Job's Tears & Puppies by The Incredible String Band in a purposefully
strained, cracking, croaking voice, walking deep into an alley then filling with inexplicable dread & laughing giddily as i sprint out for my life

then skipping into the depths of the dark graveyard beatboxing loudly & aggressively, then loudly telling all the graves that i'm
finally here to perform for them with my sporadic dances or by being a funny weirdo, either is applicable & i start punching through
imaginary brick walls that i pretend are between me & the park, making explosion sounds, asserting that i'm punching through a billion
walls, cycling through improvised mantras, growling, improvising the most frivolous & childish statements, trying to think of the
freest thing i can do in each moment, repetitive motions & noises, kicking objects, the urge to write growing, my only tether
home, the tension of the leash stretching, the release of description, trying to keep a growing paragraph together in my head
as i go & go, punching the air going blau blau blau blau, lying on the sidewalk & seeing a city upside down for the first
time in so long, dazzled by the validity of a perspective where i'm only clinging to the underside of the world,
poised to grab onto the powerlines if i fall off. stopping at the sink of a park pavilion to cover
my arms & face in water & rub my slickened forearms together as i walk

on a picnic table someone had carefully written a long list of the first names of all the people in this city who had ever betrayed them, who they
had once considered friends. meanwhile, on another table, there was one of those hearts with two names, John & Becca, but it was beautiful, solid
red shading with glitter, like an acrylic sort of thing, with a dark thick border, with lovingly rendered letters in overlapping green & orange.
this shook me, & i didn't want to forget to write it down, so i spent a lot of the walk/run home repeating "lovingly rendered" out loud, over
& over, lovingly rendered, lovingly rendered, lovingly rendered, lovingly rendered, sometimes switching to just lovingly, lovingly, lovingly,
lovingly. as i pass all the graves again i yell that my mantra tonight is "lovingly rendered," that i hope their tombstones were all lovingly
rendered but if they were mass manufactured because their loved ones didn't have the resources to make them themselves then at least they
still had something & the orders for their gravestones were at least still lovingly rendered by their loved ones who had worked for money
to afford them, & with the age of these graves maybe the ones who paid for their tombstones are even dead now, & who paid for those
peoples' tombstones, did anyone pay for their own? neither John nor Becca, whoever they are, has any idea that any of this
happens. breaking barriers alone, "breaking alone," i say, breaking alone breaking alone breaking alone

september 6th. every muscle in my body is scolding me now for all the running & activity at four am on the fifth. none of the after
effects manifested during my last waking period, but now if i cough or sneeze it hurts all throughout my torso. my dad showed me that
if you rotate the tab on a can of soda over the hole before you open it, it opens with an absurdly loud pop like a gun going off

i ate a pork chop while i automatically played out an imaginary argument in my head that involved person A asking person B
why they can't just live in real life for five seconds, person B acerbically saying "real life just sucks" & person A calling that the
most pathetic defeatist statement it's possible to make & saying, "you know what, i'm gonna take what you just said at face
value, so you can either recant it or give me any reason not to go get a gun & blow my head off right this second"

i tried to type out as many memories from 2017 as i could dredge up, & kept doing this on occasion for at least a week after

september 7th. i saw two of the most adorable, social stinkpot turtles in the world. in a tank in the science building. i went to the coffee
shop & advertised my radio show on the chalkboard. i also sort of humiliated myself on the online & began to wonder if i have been
experiencing hypomania for a little while. i had been constantly feeling sort of wide-eyed, like i am giving off sparks, grave, severe,
critical of everything around me, feeling like i need to be turning cranks to radically & positively change the world every second

birdhouse in your soul & kiss me, son of god were played on the intercom in the bar & that really excited me.
during the car ride home i felt sad & frail as though i were an illustration on crumpled newspaper that had
gotten soggy & made the ink blur. then i got home & felt better. my grant check also arrived

september 8th. i recorded the spoken parts of my second show & put it together

september 9th. my oral communication teacher talked about "ethical absolutism," which is like "it's never okay to lie, even
in extraneous situations," but he said it's like, when anyone asks you how their coat looks, you stick to one fixed response
e.g. always saying that you don't like the coat, even if you do. i am pretty sure that is not a thing that anyone does

i performed the routine action of "tightening my standards regarding 'bitterness' or 'hopelessness' or 'pessimism' & sanitizing the last
x pages of my blog of anything that strikes me in any of these ways when considered under that new light, because i'm sorta
mentally entangled with my tumblr so doing things like this has symbolic significance to me even if it is silly"

september 10th. the first episode of my show aired! my dad, my brother, & i sat in the living room & listened to it

september 11th. i made the playlist for my third show & wrote out most of the outline for it.
i had an ok body image night (looked in mirror & thought "i look like birth of venus painting")

september 12th. i finished the outline for my third show. i unconsciously ate the last square
of a chocolate bar & threw away the wrapper then got really confused about where i'd placed my
chocolate. i noticed a teeming yellow jacket nest above the pack porch & informed my dad of that

i figured out why my neocities has over 40,000 views... they're largely my own, as i obsessively refresh a page
to check every little edit i make to the html, which means like... several views for nearly every single line
break on the site, haha. it's good that that statistic is clouded in noise. total negation of the. you
know. quantified-attention reward stuff that expressing oneself on neocities ideally negates

september 13th. my dad knocked the nest to the ground with a broom, then hurried inside & shut the sliding glass door. about twelve
yellow jackets flew into the window over & over, trying to kill him. after a while it started to creep him out & he shut the curtain.
all day, there was a yellow jacket crawling around between my bedroom window & the screen. i am not sure how it got in there

september 15th. i took the trolley to the coffee shop to edit my show together there instead of by that big third floor window. this
kind of made me actually sad, quickly marring a prospective ritual. i rationalized it by telling myself there is value in exploring both
the positive & negative sides of my relationship to prospective rituals. J's friend said my bunny balloons shirt is "so cute"

at the bar, i played some skee ball on my own. i scored 220, then 230, then 250, then 300, which is two thirds of
the maximum score. on that last try, i got two balls in the fifty-point hole, which i've never got one into before...

september 16th. crossing paths again, failing to deliver the lousy looming compliment that has accumulated the state of being
a nexus of something. walking around for a little while, walking off the peculiar agitation that makes me question whether
to frame the situation as a crush (it'd be the first in a pretty long time, i think.) returning to the cafeteria, eating cheese
sticks while i turn & look out the window incessantly without really thinking about it, tenuously anticipating
another chance at simply pushing through the life-ruling shyness, one i might not waste. "eventually,
at least by the end of the semester," i tell myself, it's not a very harsh deadline

i opened my bedroom window to see if the yellow jacket had starved to death
or if it would immediately escape into my room. it had starved to death

september 17th. my second show broadcasted. i went to a karaoke night(!!!) in the back room of the coffee shop, an
hour after they usually close. the taxi that brought me there had a yellow smiley face hanging from the rear view mirror

the back room is now repurposed at that time as a "speakeasy," & an extension of the adjacent business, which is owned by the same
person. i have never been in that adjacent place, so getting to the back room had the exciting aspects of exploring a building i've
never been in before, & getting to come out of the employee door in the back room, which i have peered through curiously at times

i sat in there for a while. there weren't many people. just three elderly people, really. two old women took turns singing old country love
songs. which was charming in its own right, but i craved the presence of a greater amount of people, somewhat. so i left, walked to the bar

it was very crowded. it was late. i saw a lady in a ween shirt & a ween dress. i scored 230 at skee ball. i sat alone in the empty back room
with my eyes closed, enclosing myself as much as i could in an idealized romantic fantasy where i also wasn't male. i walked around outside
& listened to addendum by john maus some. i walked to the top level of a parking garage & walked on the parking stops along the perimeter

it was just a dehydrated, frail, too-heavy-backpack, eyes darting, din of overlapping voices, desperate yearning night. my hands & the
space around my eyes felt like ash. i sat on a bench on a sidewalk. a girl asked me if i was okay. i nodded. she asked if i was sure.
i nodded. one hundred percent? i nodded. she nodded & continued on. it was nice of her to ask. i don't think i was being all that
honest, but i hardly processed what was happening until it was over with. what would i have said to her, though? as i passed the
nightclub, a bouncer also asked me if i was okay, said he'd seen me ambling around. i nodded. he asked if i was sure. i nodded

september 18th. cat lounge day. taxi cab to kitty cats. i arrived at three pm. a sign on the door informed me that they had been booked for a
private party, & wouldn't be open to walk-ins until 4:30. so i was stuck in ninety-degree heat, in a black long-sleeve shirt. there was basically
nowhere else to walk to, either. i walked along the sidewalk by a school, singing birdhouse in your soul. i noticed that a building that i had
had some childhood memories in was gone without a trace. the trace was simply a big square of grassless dirt. so that was that

i walked back, sat in the shade of the cat lounge for a while, just grooming myself or sitting with my eyes
closed. finally, the time came. i went in & saw lots of cats. they charge five dollars for half an hour. the
lounge doubles as an adoption center, & they have homed one hundred & forty-one cats since march

after my time was up, i ordered a sandwich, some chips, & a pink lemonade. the cup that the cashier got for the lemonade had a pumpkin
drawn on it. this meant that i got a coupon for another free thirty minutes. so i ate my sandwich, drank my lemonade, & redeemed the
coupon. i saw lots of cats. one of them liked to chew on my fingernails. this time i got a real situation going with a dangly
toy, with two or free of them chasing it around some elevated platforms. some real circus lion tamer stuff. at one point
a cat got a hold of the dangly toy's stick, & the dangly bit dangled from the elevated platform. so i batted at it

when my time was up again, i hoofed it to the mall to look at some records. i stopped in a restaurant to rest & charge my phone. there, i saw
one of the familiar cashiers from the convenience store near my house. as a customer! how was that possible? my whole world really shattered

as i approached the mall, i thought, for no reason, "i'm gonna find a john maus love is real vinyl there," not actually believing
that in the slightest, just mushing a random arbitrary potentiality around in my head. then, well, i went in & found
a john maus love is real vinyl. i really flipped my lid over that. i felt like i'd willed it into existence

i also got some cute, cheap, used records. carnival of the animals, narrated by irina baronova, & my first record, from the "my
first golden record library." on my way home, i saw Buddy on an atm. i fell asleep listening to side a of carnival of the animals

september 19th. i put together the playlist for my fourth show. i noted how putting effort into a playlist can be so draining.
the clusters of feeling that form, sometimes glued together with perfect transitions & fluctuations in energy, sometimes criss-
crossed by them, necessitating compromises for the sake of flow or the sudden inclusion of a truly needed song. becoming
infatuated with certain sequences & trying to preserve them. difficult & amorphous decisions. transitions so perfect
that they can't possibly come apart & become a bolus that must be worked with, causing some difficulty

september 20th. it stormed & i got another tiny benign zap through my laptop. i developed a sore throat. when i drank water, some of
the affected tissues would touch in a particular way that was not even painful per se but sensorily repulsive to where it almost made me
nauseous & i had a lot of trouble pushing past it. so i became dehydrated to the point of not really being able to think or function
well. i couldn't tell if i was generally sick in addition to the sore throat or if it was just the dehydration. well, that's life on
the rock. also yes the incidental repulsion to water did make me skim the wikipedia page for rabies, just to be sure

september 21st. i napped two hours after being awake for about twenty-four, then couldn't seem to get back to sleep. i still
had trouble drinking water. it was the first chilly day of the season. during a walk i looked at pretty sunrise clouds & rattled
off adjectives i vowed the day would have. a good, long, well-fed, caffeinated, confident, naturalistic day, is what
i said. well, i ended up just walking to the bank to make a withdrawal, then going home & passing out

september 22nd. my sore throat had largely subsided, but the discomfort with drinking water remained a bit, so
i continued to be severely dehydrated throughout the day. i got out of bed, walked into my living room singing
the magnetic fields - absolutely cuckoo, looked out the window, turned around, saw this, & yelped

i went to my radio class. my instructor keeps reiterating how much he loves my show. he says i'm doing an amazing job,
that i sound great, that i have a real skill, that his wife remarked how good my voice sounds on air, that he's never
encountered any of the artists i'm airing & appreciates that i'm putting out stuff people aren't usually hearing

i vowed to try get out to the nature trail for the first time in a while. the temperature was very nice & i supposed
it could be my last shot at all the greenness before fall starts to really take hold. i tried out walking around
with white gloves on. my fingertips got stuck to the velcro of my wallet & mangled a tiny bit

well, i walked to the nature trail. i revisited the small hill where i had experienced that... whatever it was.
peak, excitation, frenzy. as i walked, i used my phone to record myself rambling about stuff. i saw deer. i saw
maybe turkeys, maybe vultures, maybe turkey vultures, walking along through tall grass. i spent most of the
day meandering around. the severe dehydration put a damper on everything but it was nice nonetheless

as i was on my way out of the trail, the sun well into setting, i passed a guy walking what was possibly a rottweiler. he held the
rottweiler at the edge of the path so it wouldn't bother me. he asked how i was doing. i tried to answer but, not thinking clearly,
i just turned, made a quiet sound, kept walking, then took out my earbuds, then turned around as if to answer, although we
had already significantly passed one another by that point. we looked at one another briefly, then kept walking

as i walked, i couldn't shake the feeling that i was supposed to have spoken to him. so i turned & started walking
the way he had gone. we did cross paths again. he asked my name. i told him. he was L. he asked how long i have
lived here. i said my whole life of twenty-three years. he asked if i like it. i said i don't have much basis for
comparison, but i recently visited iowa city & loved it. he thought i should have his phone number, so i took it

it was sort of an anxious exchange, no one in sight, surrounded by trees, it getting fairly dark. often when i speak to people i can't tell if i'm
simply standing there or being held there by a socially manifested glue on my soles. or if, by continuing to stand there, not excusing
myself & walking away, not terminating the interaction, it is me who is holding the other person there after a certain point

i fear he may just turn out to be some weird horndog, someone like all the other people, the kind of guy whose
tinder bio is something like "6'1 cause apparently that matters. :) Dad bod. Just looking for someone to vibe w"

but, regardless of the existence of weird horndogs, no one ever stops & says i should have their phone number. so, well, maybe
we will be friends. i have to observe the possibility. if i ever start consistently letting go of that possibility with every
stranger, there won't be any hope. you just have to keep inviting potential until it finally rears its stupid head

by the time i reached the street, my vision was dim abstract shapes. i figured it would be pitch black by the time i got to the
secondary section of the trail, accessed by crossing the street, so i traipsed through a dark neighborhood instead. i tried
to touch a needle on a cactus in someone's yard but my hand strayed & i got my index finger pricked pretty bad

outside a gas station, a nutty old guy, a guy with immense old coot vibes, a real "pull my finger" type beat, said "Hey! Anybody ever
tole you your beautiful!" a woman associated with him exited the store, chuckled, & said "Now, you leave the pretty ladies alone!"

september 23rd. L texted me the sentences "Do want too see me naked" & "IId love too show you." oh
well. at the very least, now i have some experiential data. very limited data, but data nonetheless on how
someone who types like this might carry themselves face-to-face. just a memory i can reference if need be

my water bottle fell & made full unbridled contact with the floor of a public restroom. oh well

i put together the fourth episode of my show

i began my third cycle of progesterone, which is the cycle where i am
going to put a lot of focus into evaluating whether it makes me feel insane

september 25th. very intense & peculiar lethargy today, defined by energy with nowhere to go, desire to magically manifest fully-formed
music, desire to magically condense myself into an object that is a verbatim representation of me, generally "output, transmit, express,
escape," to swap consciousnesses & channel surf human lives, to omnisciently know all lives instead of be burdened with sculpting
out the perspective of one. to synthesize all concepts relevant to me into their once-&-for-all expression, instantly, for free. all
these wants while feeling muted, dull, brown, like an undisturbed attic. i've felt incapable of making music for over a year

there is really no describing how tonight feels, i think. i don't seem to be feeling this way for any particular reason. i simply don't feel
right. a hard-to-articulate sensation somewhere adjacent to fatigue & hunger while being neither. like an all-pervasive rubberiness. shambling.
i feel like nothing, not in a "low status" way but a smooth blankness way. dazed. tending to any of my homework or routines is out of the
question. i am distinctly unsure what i need or want overall. i feel like i don't need or want anything, which you would think is peaceful,
but it's not quite... the fullness that i truly believe could occupy every second, but has occupied a considerable minority of the past
189,341,556+, is almost too much to bear. it seems like it would be incredibly simple to change at any moment, but i must
be a testament to how a little a process' simplicity can act as a guarantee of its occurrence

tonight isn't doing progesterone any favors with respect to my evaluation of whether taking it
makes me feel totally wacky. but we've still got eleven days to see if it's just a coincidence!

september 28th. i walked around the dormitories at night. i haven't been around there in a while, even though they're right nearby!
to the point that areas made me nostalgic. funny how simple things like walking to a certain easily accessible place will just drop
out of routine for a long while. i keep forgetting to just leave my apartment & walk aimlessly. i also went to the gas station. i
got two diet snapples & a coffee. as i was walking, i heard the sirens of emergency vehicles about a block away, & they made
a pack of coyotes somewhere out in a big field howl & squeal & yelp at one another. i went home & texted with a friend
i haven't talked with in a while. then i really talked to people with my voice for the first time in weeks

september 29th. in the early morning, i downloaded twenty-two current 93 releases

i noticed my copy of the complete cosmicomics was nowhere to be found! i figured i must i have set it down somewhere on campus &
walked away without noticing. i swept across three buildings & ultimately found it in the book store. then i recorded the interstitials
for the fifth episode of my show. that night, i decided to stop taking progesterone, treacherously choosing to opt out of
problems that may be being caused by a chemical that i would practically sell my soul to have endogenously

september 30th. i asked the cashier in the book store to break a twenty & got twenty-five back

today, i planned to visit the coffee shop & put together episode five there. there would be half an hour between the end of my last
class & the arrival of the trolley. as i walked toward the building that that class is in, i felt a strong conviction that i should spend
that half hour in the art building, that something would happen there, i would encounter someone or something important

i went in & bought three candy bars from a vending machine just to leave them in this lion statue's mouth. as i was taking that
picture, the girl with the fashion sense appeared behind me & asked if i was the one who put them there. i smiled & nodded. she
said "that's adorable, i love that." i was, again, too caught off guard to tell her i like the way she dresses but it didn't worry me
that time since... i had just made a creative & frivolous use of my physical surroundings & received positive feedback on it!

my video production class got out early, so i headed over to the art building, a little concerned that i would violate the prophecy by
going about an hour earlier than planned. well, i saw this & this & this & this & this & this & this & this & this & this & this. it all
changed my life insofar as my life now involved having seen them. nothing more radical than that, though. i realized something
incredibly shocking & unexpected: there wasn't a prophecy, it was just something i had thought to myself for no reason

i went & got lunch. she was sitting in the cafeteria. i happened to sit at a spot where i was meticulously obscured
by her backpack. which was fine by me: she was talking to someone, which precisely doubled my anxiety about the
idea of saying i like the way she dresses. also maybe that would have made it rude to. so no dice on that occasion

i stopped by the art building again at the "appointed time," just to give my fateful destiny another chance. nothing happened! the
trolley arrived. i forgot to check & see if the candy bars were still there before i got on. i didn't want them, but i wanted to know

i put together the show. i tried vanilla apple tea

October

october 1st. the fourth episode of my show broadcasted. in response to a john maus song that played, my sixty year old dad said "this
brings back memories i never had! haha, i know that's a strange thing to say" like you see in the comments under vaporwave
albums. so i'm beginning to think this is a sentiment that people are hardwired to respond to certain music with

october 2nd. i sort of mourned a situation like this which definitely passed through my head a day or two ago, one i considered
writing out, but i got distracted... now i can feel the gap where it should be, i can remember that there was something, but not
what... only how sweetly interpersonal & exuberant it was. i vaguely remember imagining being thrilled by what someone
was doing, that's all. it's sad that that little confluence of ideas is gone. it was probably not destined to ever
be an actual occurrence but now it's not even preserved as a hypothetical one, you know?

in the early morning i had a good four hour conversation with friend, involving my periodic urge to try to push past my intuitive object recognition
& see everything like a blobby landscape of undifferentiated matter that my evolutionary history has trained me to project discrete objects onto,
eventually she noted how absurd & whiplashy it was to compare this perspective to the idea of something like a bank loan, then leaned back in
her chair laughing in like, manic delight as we started framing a bank loan as an extremely complex pattern in the movement of atoms, making
up the truck that brings a guy to the bank & the tag of the billed hat that he's wearing & the dollar bills & the food the teller ate, with each
occurrence of the pattern being so different on the atomic level as to be unidentifiable but the difference absurdly gets smoothed
over by object recognition into identifiable things that are moving according to a consistent financial logic

a bunch of other stuff too like the rules of chess existing independently of chessboards & chess pieces, & people forming friend groups out of a desire
to constitute the identity of that group rather than because they like each other, & people performing every second of their lives, & feedback between
people imitating movies which then replicate or exaggerate people & the people then imitate the movies again, & people building their selves from
media in what is complete earnest as the world has primed them to understand earnest, & whether atoms are quantizable building blocks or
ultimately as smooth as can be, & how the greatest absurdity of all is how easy it is to slot into the silly madness of our intuitive
object recognition & instinct & humor & frivolity & to find things we enjoy in all the absurdity of the act of enjoying

that night in yet another display of something being wrong with me, i tried to establish a maximum of two tumblr posts per day, but
retroactively, going back & deleting them if necessary. so, you know, if there is three on the 24th i have to pick one. & some of
the days actually kind of stressed me out. like if i break up certain sequences, i'm breaking a little unique encapsulation
of a particular feeling or day, which i then won't be able to make whole again... i would simply like this to
stop, posts aren't important, get the concept of a post out of my head please & thank you

october 3rd. i decided on my sixth show's theme: songs sung & possibly composed exclusively by people who are now dead. i got
the playlist put together, planning to say something at the start of the show to the effect of "it's kind of a morbid theme, but this
station normally plays classical, so it's not really that great of a departure." the show will feature Susan Anway, Jhonn Balance,
Franco Battiato, LD Beghtol, David Bowie, Captain Beefheart, Ian Curtis, Patty Donahue, Daniel Johnston,
Sam Mehran, Genesis P-Orridge, Elliott Smith, Katrina Vasquez, & Frank Zappa

october 4th. i made a six minute video for class. it has a lot of footage of me running down
streets. i would like to share it but it shows too much where i live. i only showed four people

october 5th. i took a midterm & scored ninety-four percent. i got back a midterm i took last week. i scored ninety-four percent on that one
too. a girl came into the bathroom while i was obsessively brushing my hair & said it looks nice. i recorded the spoken parts for episode six

i saw this patch of a parking lot & again wondered why seeing an opening in the ground with a sharp edge affects me the way that it does. what
did i watch when i was young? i went to the coffee shop & the bar, felt very dissociated. i ordered a small chicken cordon bleu pizza & went home

i expected to just get home & relax, but i guess when i put my laptop in my backpack earlier, the cardboard packaging of an unopened
flash drive slid meticulously between the lid & the... base. which dislodged the corner of a loose rubber frame, around the edge of
the black plastic frame surrounding the screen, right around the interior edge of the lid. a frame i had never even noticed.
i couldn't get it to go back into its little groove. it became the only thing i could focus on

when i would put it back against the groove, there would be a bulge elsewhere in it. like the section of rubber was too long to properly fit
in the groove. but that is impossible because it was in the groove to start with. it just wouldn't go back. it was all i could think about!
eventually i decided to just pull the whole frame off. it came off easily along the left side of the monitor, & along the top until it ended
at the hook that fastens the laptop shut... it was unreasonably hard to remove along the bottom, until the tension caused it to just snap

so the rubber frame is now like a backwards C bordering only the right side of the monitor. i tried running a sharpie marker along
where it was, to blacken the light grey bits that highlighted the discrepancy. that didn't work, but i stopped noticing it after a while

october 6th. after radio class, the guy who is the only other person still showing up stopped me in the hall & asked about my show. he
is C. we talked a bit. i described each of the episodes. he said he'd try to catch the next one. later, i e-mailed him a link to the archive

i went to the coffee shop. J's girlfriend said i was extra tall today - or that she was extra short, she didn't have her boots on.
i put together episode six. making the radio show has greatly amplified my awareness of how i whistle a bit when i say S

october 7th. i went to the clinic for a shot. they took my height & weight again. this time, i got a glance at the
paper. i am five foot ten & weigh one hundred & twenty-nine pounds. my body weight index is classified
as "normal," however it would be classified as "underweight" if i weighed a single pound less

then i got the shot. then i had a short meeting with the nurse practitioner, to verify that everything is going okay. she
liked my nails. i asked her to drop the progesterone prescription because taking it makes me feel insane. so she did

then they dropped it on me during the visit that i was to have my blood drawn. so that was a hard
right turn. i figured i probably wasn't hydrated enough, so while the nurse was out of the room,
getting the kit, i chugged the whole bottle of water i had with me. then it happened

i felt the needle digging around in my left arm. that arm was having none of it, hardly any blood would come out. i mentioned to the
nurse that i thought that was a bit funny, since i was toying with a joke in my head, to the effect of "you're lucky i'm not feeling
stubborn or i might just stop sending blood to my arm." so then my right arm got jabbed. this time she got more than enough.
i noted that it's always good to have a surplus. the two nurses there love me. the nurse practitioner had affirmed that

walking to the coffee shop, a train blew its horn as i was walking on some train tracks, which made me squeal laugh & run away. it turned out
to be on an adjacent track, though. on a big bridge, i saw a praying mantis. then i'm pretty sure a guy in a passing white van did a kissy
noise at me. fortunately i win, though, since the internal tension produced by appropriating kisses as an expression of domineering
self interest rather than love will inevitably compel him to kill himself. except as an empathetic being i lose there because
one of my brethren was murdered by masculinity! i don't actually believe this will happen, i just type stuff

i stopped by the art gallery. no one had purchased the one hundred & fifty dollar framed photo of a guy fawkes mask on
a table, titled "revolution." as i walked, one of my band-aid cotton balls fell off. i was a little displeased by that. i wanted
to preserve the possibility of holding both of them out to someone & saying "can you guess how my day's going?"

i arrived at the coffee shop. a nonfunctional decorative clock there has said 9:14 since god knows when. the girl who gave me
that peanut butter shake in a jar a while back because she just wanted to take photos with it gave me another peanut butter
shake in a jar because she just wanted to take photos with it. i spent hours getting my september journal onto neocities

i drew this on the chalkboard. there was another art show in the back. the folk band returned. after the coffee shop
closed, i walked around looking for photos to take. i quietly talked to myself, said reassuring things, said i
was going to turn any corner & meet someone i would drive around in a car & listen to music with

october 9th. the fifth episode of my show aired. i walked to a store to pick up my medication. there were pomegranates there
so i bought some. i came home & spent about an hour in a pomegranate-eating trance, with my dad watching depressing
stand-up comedy clips that eked into my subconscious from the living room. i put together the playlist for episode
seven. it will feature animal collective, bladee, james ferraro, future bible heroes, kraftwerk, lights, stevhen
peters, ariel pink, red sea, slugbug, talking heads, tally hall, jake tobin, & ben varian

october 10th. there was a tornado watch, in october... from my perspective, it just stormed moderately hard, then the rest of
the night was clear but amazingly windy. i learned later a tornado apparently did touch down in my county, but it was an ef0

october 11th. i got a dental assessment done. on the ride over, someone in my city suggested over facebook chat that
maybe people on there "read my posts, fervently even, with great enjoyment, but fear reaching out to [me] because
they are in quite earned fear of [my] intelligence." it felt a little like life was setting a trap for me in the
form of a notion being presented where if i entertain it i start turning into a weird egotist

part of the assessment saw the nurse spraying cotton swabs with a very cold chemical, then pressing them briefly to various
teeth. it was unpleasant, except with the dead one, on which i felt nothing. she was very apologetic about the process

they want to open my tooth back up, fill it with a sterilizing chemical, seal it back up, leave it for several
weeks or months, then do the rest of the actual root canal. for this entire process, they will charge me
one thousand five hundred & sixty two dollars, not taking possible insurance coverage into account

after the assessment, i went to a nature trail that i don't get to visit very often. it is a nostalgic place

to get there, i had to travel along a short but perilous stretch of road, bordered by very steep grass & gravel & dirt.
the process of walking along it is this: run as fast as i can until a car appears at the bend in the distance, then
throw myself onto the steep incline & cling to it desperately as the car passes mere inches away

well, i made it there alive. i was very happy to be there. i hadn't had breakfast, so i was already a bit
hungry when i arrived, & by the time i left about three hours later i was kind of shaky. the latter part
of the excursion also involved some nervous running, so, you know, a fair amount of exertion

i looked at some outdoor installations meant to educate children. i raked a random pattern in a sandbox. i sat at the top of a dam with a big crawdad
that huddled against the "wall" at the top, letting water trickle over it. a second, smaller one, missing a claw & much of an antenna, slowly crawled
up the slope. eventually #1 began to crawl down & encountered #2, did something kind of violent, sent it tumbling down to a point along the edge of
the concrete. #1 crawled down to a bumpy rock surface with water gushing over it, adjacent to the dam, & met with a third about as big as itself. i
stepped down to get a closer look at them, but when i looked back up, they were both gone. i think i made them nervous & they leapt into the current

i walked around clutching my italo calvino book in front of my chest the whole time. i took lots of photos. i kept singing "living in
an abandoned firehouse with you." actually, the lyrical fixations started at the song "weeping" then progressed to the other one

i ran my hand along some moss on some big stone blocks that have been sitting as benches in a particular clearing maybe since before i was born.
i stared at an enormous boulder that's been in the middle of the river for at least as long. i thought about how i had seen these things when i was
very young, & how the last time i'd been there, maybe about a year ago, i hadn't known of the song i was singing. i also thought about how
the song was composed before i was born, albeit by less than a decade. the book i was clutching, too, by around three decades

a guy jogged by & saw me crouching to photograph some fungi eating a fallen tree, said "oh, i know! i saw some great ones yesterday
too!" ... on the other side of the river, i think i passed near a spot where a friend had said in 2017 that a mort garson song seemed
like it was comically making fun of how we were a tad lost in the woods... maybe half an hour prior, i passed a rock shelter
under which were some rocks that stuck out to me as ones we had sat on while i played duck stab from a bluetooth speaker

shortly before seven pm, i entered a very dangerous area which led up to some cliffs. being shaky from hunger, i turned back
before i reached them. on a big bridge, quite far from the start of the trail, i messaged my brother & asked him to pick me
up at a building at the start of the trail. it's quite a long drive, so i figured i could race back & meet him right on time

my phone was on the verge of dying & it actually got quite upsettingly dark, to the point i could barely
focus on the trail, just hurrying along with a coil song going in my ear. well, i did make it out,
made it to the building before my brother even. as i approached it, i saw a shooting star

october 13th. i went to my radio class. as usual, it was a very short meeting. i meant to ask the guy i e-mailed an
archive of my show to if he had seen that e-mail, but i was feeling sourcelessly anxious & it felt out of the question

i walked to the mall & got sushi. all day, i walked around clutching my italo calvino book in front of my chest. i got the usual philly rolls, &
tried a spicy tuna roll. i thought the spicy tuna one was ok. i walked out to the trolley stop. as it approached, i felt helpless, pinched in a quick
choice between another trolley ride to the coffee shop or to turn & trek to the nature trail off-the-cuff. i decided a trolley ride was justified,
since i had already packed my laptop that morning, so all the walking around in nature would be burdened with the additional weight

i got a blueberry tea. N showed up & sat with me. who is N? N is a guy in my city who i went to school with, although
i don't particularly remember his presence as a classmate. i recently learned that he has appreciatively kept up with my
online verbal output to some extent for about five years but has persistently felt too anxious about being socially
imposing to interact with me very much. so that is an interesting dynamic. we conversed for a little while.
it's been over two years, i believe, since i sat & talked with anyone in the coffee shop

i showed him the scar on my eyebrow. at one point he tried to reference Ted Kaczynski but accidentally said "John Krasinski." he also said he'd like
to scalp Jeff Bezos & fry his scalp on a frying pan like bacon. i did my best to express, in my difficulty stringing words together in realtime,
that i feel more invested in disliking the dynamics that make figures in positions like Bezos' an inevitability, rather than the particular
individuals who happen to fill those positions, even if they probably do have to be kind of inhuman & sociopathic to do so

the coffee shop closed & he drove off & i walked to the bar again & ordered a small pizza & typed this expecting nothing else to happen
for the rest of the night & necessitate me editing it to append the later events, & if this stands as the end of the entry then i was right

october 14th. in the early morning, i downloaded lots of lil ugly mane releases. i recorded
my interstitials for episode seven of the radio show & mostly put the episode together

october 15th. the fifth episode of my show aired

october 17th. i walked to the nature trail. i walked around clutching my italo calvino book in front of my chest, thought
a lot about therapy dogs at one point. on a bridge, i happened to briefly run into C from my radio class. he was with his
friend J, who was very outgoing & friendly. once i got home, i stayed up all night & all the way through the next day

october 18th. i put together the playlist for the next episode. episode eight will feature ariel pink, bill wurtz, bladee, chipmunks on
16 speed, christian ulvne, connie converse, delroy edwards & dean blunt, doug dalglish, five starcle men, freshly wrapped
candies, john maus, lou reed & john cale, nirvana (the uk band), the flying lizards, they might be giants, & xiu xiu

i went & spent time at the coffee shop to help keep me awake. i wrote the outline for episode eight. there was a poetry night, so i went up
& read three poems & a quotation, none by me, just ones i like. my heart was really going as i waited for my turn. arseny tarkovsky,
czeslaw milosz, rainer maria rilke, hermann hesse. after everyone was done, a girl came up & asked for the name of
mr. tarkovsky. i wrote it on a piece of paper, along with a direction to "life, life" by ryuichi sakamoto

when i got home, a nice sweater had arrived in the mail. as long as i don't take a picture of myself wearing it, i can
rest assured that i purchased it to enjoy wearing it & not to take a picture of myself wearing it. if i do take a picture
of myself wearing it, it can still be the case that i purchased it to enjoy wearing it & that taking the picture
was only incidental to that, but the room for doubt will be permanently introduced

october 19th. there were two weird sculptures in the student center. eventually someone put a face mask on the one in the chair. i played
bingo in the cafeteria. i didn't get a bingo. i might have finally taken my ultimate vengeance out on this wretched world but the girl with
the outfits appeared & said she really liked my sweater, that i always have the cutest outfits, & i finally told her that i really like
how she dresses in general. i was very elated. later, i recorded the interstitials for episode eight & put it together

october 20th. i ate a fruit roll-up & had conspiratorial thoughts about bits of it getting stuck to my teeth. i scheduled the first
phase of my root canal for november eighteenth. i walked to the store & bought sixteen different flavors of tea, intending to start my
old tea flavor combination spreadsheet over from scratch. on my way home, i saw a raccoon that seemed sick or injured, with a slow,
peculiar gait that wasn't really sufficient to keep away from me as i followed it. at times it would approach trees but seem to
lack the strength to climb them, so it would just cling to them & circle them to hide from me. later, doing some research,
i concluded that it very well might have been rabid & that i probably should have called animal control

october 21st. my interpersonal relations class was gross. the whole period was occupied by everyone
having to take a survey that was supposed to quantify us & categorize us into owls, turtles, teddy bears,
sharks, or foxes, with each representing a different style of approaching interpersonal conflict

i got a shot. they doubled my dosage. i went to the coffee shop & spent all day there. when i left at close, i realized a big festival
had been taking place the whole time, just a block over! so i only got to see the tail end of that. there was a band playing really
nice, funky rock music. my phone was dead, & i had left my charger at home. i was so desperate to take this photograph that
i ran back to the coffee shop & then to a bar asking the people behind the counters if there was a charger i could use

i walked to a theater & saw Hereditary

october 22nd. episode seven of my show aired

october 24th. there was a tornado watch all day. it was a big joke, though. some clouds blew past us energetically, & then the "watch"
lingered amid a clear sky for the rest of the day. i finally started work on getting the june 2003 material from the wfmu 365 days project
onto youtube... i've just been dilly dallying on that project ever since i uploaded the may 2003 section nearly nine months ago!

october 26th. i walked to the mall, went to the candle store, quickly found one that made if 2007 for
a moment. so that was a keeper. i spent eighty-three dollars on three candles. i didn't think they would
cost that much & i can't believe i went through with the transaction. i think i need to find a new supplier

outside the mall, i'm pretty sure i saw what's called a fire rainbow. the sky was blanketed with clouds, &
i could tell where the sun was behind them, but off to the left there was a patch that was very bright, like
another small sun behind it, & faintly, from right to left across the patch, was the color spectrum

on the way home, i bought a small cup of alcohol-infused gelatin because i've always thought that would be
a sensorily interesting thing to consume. it wasn't like i expected. maybe a little interesting, but not pleasant

i spent a while taking stock of one hour & fifty minutes of stray audio files that i made across 2020, which
are mostly not conventionally musical but at least sonically interesting, kind of, at times, hopefully. i'm
considering putting them all on youtube in two installments. maybe, maybe not... at the very least,
i now have them all consolidated & rendered as two continuous audio files

october 27th. in the early morning, i put together the playlist for episode nine. it will feature ariel pink,
bladee, born gold, crying, games, gigi d'agostino, jellyfish, john maus, klaatu, left at london, mayo
thompson, modest mouse, studio killers, sweet trip, the united states of america, & ween

later, i finally caught my classmate's radio show, or at least the latter half of it. he played "the eraser" by thom yorke,
"grind" by alice in chains, "there there" by radiohead, "i cannot fucking wait til morrissey dies" by jpegmafia,
"mermaid rave" by bill jobs, "chart beep" by ariel pink & john maus (!), & "post requisite" by flying lotus

october 28th. i randomly played an anne gillis track & sort of laughed giddily because it'd been a few months & i realized even
the tracks i hadn't been crazy about now felt like returning to an familiar place... particularly potent with how static & austere
her compositions are... i always have to make an effort to listen to new music, even if some of it seems mediocre in the
moment. the investment made in using the sounds to sensorily signpost the period in time that i listen is so very worth it

october 29th. episode nine of my show was aired

october 30th. i was going to finally show off my Resident costume at a contest at a pet shelter, but i lost my
white gloves & my brother was too busy to drive me around & the cab company was fully booked all day. oh well.
for class, i filmed & edited a one-minute anti-littering PSA. i had to cover my bed in tree branches & leaves

i went to the gas station to get a cup of diet soda so that i could use the cup as a prop. i drank most of it as i walked home to gather up
my camera & tripod & lug them out to a nature trail. shortly into that walk home, as i hovered the straw between my lips to take a sip,
i stepped into a little dip in the dirt, like one of those ankle-twisting hazards. the jolt caused the straw to meticulously gouge
the border where my gum pressed against the back of one of my front teeth... a day later, that spot still felt a bit funny

November

november 1st. i put together the playlist for episode ten. it will feature akiko yano, anne gillis, depeche
mode, freshly wrapped candies, gary numan, kate bush, laurie anderson, negativland, spirocheta
pergoli, talking heads, tanoshii ongaku, the psychedelic furs, the residents, & the space lady

each month has a subtle & undramatic but still particular character.
i look forward to november 2021 revealing its character to me

november 2nd. in the early morning, i dozed off with my phone on my bed... consequently, when the alarm
went off, i sat up & shut it off while remaining wholly unconscious. i slept through my first two classes!

still, i did get to campus. i quickly wrote up the outline for episode ten, then got all the recording done. it was simultaneously
my quickest / easiest voice recording session, & my most energetic, while retaining good enunciation. a great day
on that front! then i went to the coffee shop & put it all together while drinking a peppermint shake

i did something incredibly heretical for this episode. i repeated the little introductory percussion loop, so that i could
have it play on its own a few times, speak over it, then have the synth come in right as i was done. i modified it!

november 3rd. my radio instructor said he particularly loves how i always open with a song,
rather than introducing the show right off the bat. he thinks it sounds really professional

i ran into my nice sociology teacher from semesters prior. she is a real blessing to the college, perhaps the best person my
schooling has put me in contact with. she seems to really like me as well, & earnestly adored some of my essays. there
is a definite crackling between us. today i settled on three classes to take next semester: globalization, language
& culture, & the next stage in the radio practicum courses. i think i will minor in sociology

i finally caught the entirety of an episode of my classmate's show. well, it turned out to be a rerun from last week... but at least i know
the first half of that episode now: "season of the witch," by donovan, "realiti," by grimes, "i'm god," by clams casino, "missile,"
by iamx, "1539 n. calvert," by jpegmafia, "100," by dean blunt, & "you weren't there anymore," by negative gemini

i bought ten more boxes of tea, eight of them being new flavors. i found green tea with pomegranate!
that excited me. it turned out to just be ok, though. i added their rows & columns to my tea spreadsheet

i put descriptions at the top of some pages on my site. things to at least orient a reader toward
what a page generally approaches. i watched a squirrel pilfer grains from a sack on my back porch

i broke out my big furry coat for the first time of the season, during a walk to the gas station
for vodka. then i went home & watched the movie Annette with two friends online. it was nice

november 4th. in the early morning, i had quite a restless sleep. i would have creepy false awakening
dreams every time i fell asleep. they would take place in my room, from the vantage point of my bed.
they would wake me up, then i would just fall back asleep & dream of being awake in bed again...

at one point today, i automatically read some messages in a very insufferable & familiar voice. not any particular
person's voice, but a common tone that i feel i just know. but then i took the time to stop & imagine the
words from a particular idealized face instead. & they felt completely different. welcoming

it was kind of jarring. further verification that, like anyone, i am living in a dream & it is possible to restructure that
dream very radically, to my incredible benefit. it's scary, how every aspect of my reality is open to diagnosis. how
much can hide in plain sight. how it's my responsibility to scrutinize every facet of my cognition & self so
very deeply, to root these kinds of things out, or i very well may not live all that great of a life

november 5th. i went outside & tried to open the door of my neighbor's car while she was idling
in the parking lot, talking with her friend... i thought she was my taxi driver! "i'm so sorry!" i said

the actual taxi driver said that i am longer-legged than most girls. he said to the other passenger that i was awfully
quiet back there, that he knows he looks i scary but i don't gotta be afraid of 'em... i felt like he had totally called
me, implicitly, on being skittish around an army camo guy in a pickup trick. he did seem polite, though

i got a shot. then i walked to a book store. i considered Animal Farm, didn't get it... i got two:
a Plato one, featuring Charmides, Symposium, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, & Phaedo;
The Marx-Engels Reader, by Robert Tucker, second edition

i walked to the coffee shop. i got a hummus wrap, a cinnamon bun, & a hibiscus tea, & i read an article about a woman who prolifically contests
poorly sourced Nazi-glorifying content on Wikipedia. the tea was good. i called a taxi & read a little bit of Charmides. the start of my radio
show began to approach, & i started to get awfully antsy. the taxi arrived about ten minutes before five, & i left in a great hurry

i realized during the ride that the timing would actually be a fun opportunity: i told the driver that if he tuned the radio to
the station, he'd hear me in a few minutes! so he did. when the show started, i made him chuckle by saying the intro
in tandem with myself... i got home & accidentally left my tea in the taxi. then i listened to my show

november 6th. i noticed that the new anne gillis album had dropped the day prior!!! i ordered an lp

november 7th. in the early morning, i poured some bottled starbucks from the gas station into a mug
& microwaved it so i could feel like i was enjoying a nice cup a joe. like some kind of... psychopath!

i recorded an "extemporaneous" five minute persuasive speech for my oral communications class. as
with the last speech, i had my laptop sitting behind the camera with windows movie maker serving
as a makeshift teleprompter. hopefully they won't clock my glances this time, either!

that night, i uploaded to youtube those two collections of audio files that i mentioned toward the end of the October journal. then
i set up a Vallesaab bandcamp where i uploaded strays 19/20 (the album from last year) & those two collections in album format

november 8th. i got a little over half of my october journal added to neocities. i put together the playlist for episode eleven. it will feature
baths, bladee, boards of canada, clarence clarity, crystal castles, dj shadow, graham kartna, john maus, purity ring, the avalanches,
the postal service, the residents, vektroid, & xiu xiu. i'm explicitly taking on more of an electronic bent than usual

time is moving very quickly lately. i feel barely conscious, as a product of constantly flitting between different minor tasks, or different things i'd
like to read that are relevant to mountain-sized interests, never committing to one, inhibited by the sense that it'd be a detriment to all the others,
this sense stemming from a greed to have them all resolved very promptly. i never mentally settle on any particular space to exist in & feel
consequently left in a void, like a ship repeatedly changing course to distant ports that surround it in a triangle shape. i set my pill timer
& forget to take the pill, fill a bottle with water & forget to drink it, note that the temperature outside is tolerable & that the trees are
gorgeous & that i should walk the neighborhood & look at them, & before i know it all the daylight hours have been swallowed

november 9th. there is lots of construction in the center of campus this semester. lots of stuff moving around & disappearing. you know,
when construction companies appear at a park or on campus & demolish comfortingly familiar landmarks for the sake of dicking around,
essentially? i mean, some of it is in the interest of ADA compliance, which is fine, of course. even a large, old, quite distinctive tree
they had to fell because it was pushing some sections of sidewalk up with its roots. the area looks very empty without it! so
be it, though, with respect to those measures, of course... but some of the other changes do seem quite random!

the temperature was very nice. the weather was like the platonic ideal of a November day, unless that ideal entails it being piss cold. so i went out
to the nature trail, to look at all the pretty changing leaves. it might have been my last time to get out there before they fall! some areas really
were stunning. the translucent yellow tinge all around me made me think of being frozen in amber. the photos i took were pathetic... which is ok,
but i felt it was the only outlet for my love for the leaves, periodically reducing them to photos that weren't adequate representations at all

i wandered around & sang the outro of the magnetic fields' haven't got a penny to myself a lot. also born gold's wrinklecarver. i saw a big mushroom

i had a short, casual exchange with a friend, where she asked me for a reinvitation to my discord server. she also said that being around me
& my art & my peers & taste was really good for her. i sat in a clearing (the one where i wholly became a child for several minutes earlier
in the year), got my laptop out of my backpack & used my phone as a hotspot so i could send the invite. i made a couple of inane
jokes. i didn't realize (when does anyone?) that this was the last time we would ever speak with one another

later, as i walked home in the dark, there was this moment that felt like a significant confluence of things... dysnystaxis by
sunn o))) & nurse with wound on a dark streetlight-lit suburban street, the sudden smell of burning leaves, two stray cats
watching me, one to my right, on a porch, the other in the distance, under a streetlight, then moving to cross the street

while thinking about the ingrained, repressed anxiety & fear around the very earth i was walking on... i am kept in the road with a sort
of anxiety & rigidness stemming from the ownership of each front & backyard by a homeowner. the knowledge that traveling in a
diagonal line across the neighborhood would come with the fear of being confronted, as i cut across properties, is a bit confining

as i walked home, i found my lost white gloves in the elastic side pouch of my backpack! i also passed
a solar powered, trailer-mounted security camera that was sitting by an intersection for some reason

when i got home, a very nice sweater had arrived in the mail. then i made a collage

november 10th. i wrote the script for episode eleven then recorded it. in it, i say to my radio listeners, "obey me, you dogs!"
i had a tough time recording because i was dehydrated. after, i walked to the store & bought two lightbulbs, a bag of wax
cheeses, & two cases of sparkling water. the lighbulbs turned out to be too tall... they stick out a bit over my lampshade

november 11th. i withdrew from my interpersonal communication class... my entire reason is a totally
inane blurry nothing of a one hundred & fifty point group assignment, which the whole class builds up to

over the course of the semester, she goes over a broad scattershot of topics like
self-disclosure, social penetration theory, conflict management styles, things like that

then she expects us to somehow synthesize all of that into a full-fledged forty-minute interactive workshop that we present to the class, which
aims to use our understanding of some concept, of our choosing, to teach the class some interpersonal skill, of our choosing, within a given
context, of our choosing. this is to come with a slideshow, an annotated bibliography featuring a minimum of six peer reviewed sources,
& a bound portfolio featuring a professionally formatted title page featuring a name & logo for our group, a table of contents, a
purpose statement, an agenda for the workshop, & a description of the interactive elements. at the end we all have to
evaluate the other members of the group & score them based on their degree of participation

this is an introductory class...

in my video production class, we had a guest speaker who covers local sports. i went to middle school & ninth grade with her!
naturally, she was unrecognizable, & when the instructor said her name i went "!!!". i had a tiny child crush on her once...

i went to the coffee shop. there was a big christmas tree in the front room. i got a hibiscus tea to make up for the one i lost
in the taxi. then i walked to a local theater to impulsively see a new biographical drama about Louis Wain, although i was
a bit nervous, cynically nervous, mind you, which is unconscionable & shameful, that it would essentially be a
high-budget metastasis of... imgur posts that say his cats gave him toxoplasma gondii or whatever

the movie theater had "truffled grapes," which are grapes covered in goat cheese & bits of crushed up pistachios. they were
really good. i've never had anything quite like them. i was the only one in the audience. or rather, i was the audience.
there was a preview for a documentary about Kurt Vonnegut! it looks amazing, i have to see it

the movie made me sob & tear up a bunch of times & the end made me cry

november 12th. my show didn't play on the radio, which i found deeply disheartening. it was an episode that i was excited about... i later
found out that the station had had their systems crash. today was also a type of day with just sitting on a rocking chair & staring, & feeling
very out of it - really feeling an inclination to just sit & stare, & a sense of detachment in line with that inclination. almost like a
state of zen - incapable of boredom, just being. but only almost, because it's like an insulation from a grievous lack of
something, or a rebelling of my cognition against a grievous lack - inhibiting itself in protest

november 13th. i licked mayonnaise off of a fidget spinner

november 14th. in the early morning, i listened to the first side of we're only in it for the money & really enjoyed it

i found out this afternoon that one of my friends died on the thirteenth. i don't think we were near as close as we could
have been. but she considered me a friend, & she was a beloved presence in the server i started, & a good friend of many
of my friends, & i liked her. here at twenty-three, i think she is the peerest of a peer that i have ever had pass away

i returned a bluetooth transmitter to a kohl's. i returned a set of lightbulbs to a target

late at night, i dropped to my knees sobbing in my bathroom with a bottle of mustard in my hand, which is good, because i think a capacity to cry over
my general condition & not just over any particular thing, is a sign of health, that i'm observing standards, even if i'm not living up to them. i say
"general condition" because it didn't feel like a direct response to my friend's death, but i can't rule out that it may have been a sublimation of it

november 15th. i went to the store & returned some lightbulbs that might have burned my house down, then bought some that won't
burn my house down. no one ever taught me about not burning my house down with lightbulbs. then i picked up an antibiotic, &
the sedative that i'll take shortly before my root canal, in three days. i find that kind of scary. i saw a young girl
lying on her stomach on the bottom "shelf" part of a cart that her mom was pushing

i had to have a seven-minute mini-documentary produced in less than twenty-four hours. i decided it'd be
about the construction on campus. the temperature was nice out, & i scampered around getting shots

it was fun. like a scavenger hunt. i think it helped break up my weird headspace. transversal. engaging. physical. the obligation of this
assignment has been weighing on me, but the shooting process reacquainted me with taking things as eustress instead of just stress

nearly every shot followed the same pattern, which i was just very fixated on: starting zoomed in on a single
element of a location, then zooming out to include something that i felt provided minor context or contrast to it

there's supposed to be an interview with someone. i never stood a chance of securing one, so i'll get a flat zero on that part of the rubric.
but, as a bit, i am going to interview a statue whose gaze has been fixed on the entire construction process. there will be a part
where i ask it a single question, then silently hold an invisible microphone up to its mouth for a whole twenty seconds

i ran into my nice sociology teacher. when i told her i was shooting something about the construction, she told me how she hates the new
brickwork at the entrance to the building she teaches in. she finds the visual contrast very harsh. she asked what classes i'll take
next semester. i mentioned her language & culture class, & she said it'd be nice to have me in one of her classes again

just a night of writing a script & recording voiceovers & editing now

november 16th. i sent a big letter to a stranger

i spent all day singing part of "dog breath in the year of the plague" to myself constantly, for an obscene number of hours. at least
twelve, i think! i played bingo in the cafeteria. i didn't get a bingo. in video class, everyone laughed at the humorous ending of
my mini-documentary. i cashed a check & received one-thousand two hundred dollars of student pandemic relief money

i put together the playlist for episode twelve. it will feature annie lennox, bjork, current 93, elliott smith, modest mouse,
neutral milk hotel, the flaming lips, the magnetic fields, they might be giants, ween, & my friend who passed away

november 17th. my radio instructor had a possible covid exposure, which cancelled class, which put me in the recording
room at three instead of four, which put me in earshot of the stage at the time that a girl started singing beautifully,
accompanied by a piano. i secretly recorded the performance from behind the door at the back of the stage...

i called a phone number on the chalkboard at the coffee shop & made small talk with a girl named J. no, not J or her girlfriend, J. a third J.
i told her about my show. apparently she writes her number on the chalkboard after every local lgbt meeting here, but i'm the first to call

i tried the grilled cheese with tomato soup. it was absurdly good! i also tried a tumeric cinnamon tea. it was good too

my dentist had me take a valium before i went to sleep. so i found out what taking valium feels like. it felt like nothing

november 18th. i went to go find out what taking triazolam feels like. we drove to the clinic. my dad
was going to wait in the lobby during the procedure, to watch over me. that was very nice of him

i was still nervous that i'd go in as one me, who'd take the sedative & remain mildly aware, & experience helpless pain
& discomfort... then, when the amnesia kicked in, i'd be a second me, who took the sedative & woke up a while
later, hunky dory... this would be great for the second me, but bad for the first me, who i was at that moment

there was not really anything i could do but go in & hope for the best

well, i took all the pills. i paced the lobby, now simply waiting to vanish. i was a bit worried, because i had stupidly put the
water in the cup with all the pills in it? & it turned the blue one into goop. i had to scoop it with my fingernail & eat
it. i didn't know which pill it had been. i shivered a lot. i couldn't tell if it was nerves or the air conditioning

i didn't fall asleep, but i did start to feel drunkish. drunk but more "springy," you could maybe say.
i began to feel quite slow. they led me into the operating room. is that the right term when it's dentistry?

well, i then proceeded to have a root canal done. i remember the procedure just fine. it wasn't that bad. it didn't
hurt very much, & there was no need for me not to remember it. maybe it's all a tad vague. it's toward the end of
the procedure that i start to lose everything. maybe a flicker of being told something about the root of my molar

in retrospect, i didn't even care as they stuck the syringe full of anesthetic in my mouth. & i
didn't even notice that i didn't care, i just didn't care. so i must have been fairly doped up

it's when i must have headed back into the lobby, left, & gotten in my brother's car, that i draw a blank. i don't remember
the drive home. the checkout process is lost! i don't even remember paying the dentist four hundred & fifty dollars

i do vaguely remember getting home & trying to test my ability to type, my general cognition, with these three discord messages:

typomg tst

fuzy wyzztws eb

fuzzy wuxxy wuz a bead buazzy wyxyh adno hair fuzzy wwuzzy wasnt vrtyfuzzu ead e=hd

these were me trying to type

typing test

fuzzy wuzzy was a bear fuzzy wuzzy had no hear fuzzy wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy was he

i'm really in love with the reality that this was my go-to thing in the super drugged-up state
i was in. i remember what a great struggle it was. i just couldn't get a grip on those keys

i think i vaguely remember crashing into the ground in my room while trying to walk & realizing how messed up i was, but it very well could have
been a dream. i remember asking the nurse if i could use the restroom & her leading me to one by the arm, but i think that was a dream too, actually

i woke up in bed without underwear on. i usually sleep with my underwear on. so i have no explanation for that. the tooth was
very achy, very tender to bite on with even the tiniest bit of pressure. i had my brother run me to the store for some painkillers

a cashier thought the target basket that a customer had been carrying her stuff around in was target-branded merchandise that she was trying to buy.
he was trying to scan it, & he had to ask her & have it affirmed that it wasn't something she was buying. it was a pleasingly dopey thing to witness

my dad gave me the info leaflet that the dentist gave me. they specifically noted to us that there was a chance the root area was deteriorated enough
that maybe it won't work. so it's my call on whether we do step two. they gave a date & time in december to call by if i want to cancel part two

november 19th. my show didn't play on the radio this week either... oh well. my lp of the new anne gillis album arrived, though

i put together the playlist for episode thirteen, the final episode of the semester. it will feature ariel pink, born
gold, david bowie, doug dalglish, genesis, john maus, laurie anderson, molly nilsson, the magnetic fields, & me

some people came & redid our bathroom ceiling to look like an office. i went to see kurt
vonnegut: unstuck in time. i thought it was really nice. i ate more truffled grapes

november 20th. i lost my tweezers, & i decided to call a late-night taxi to take me to a 24/7 store &
back, because evidently i really truly cannot know peace if i am unable to pull hairs out of my neck

the thing happened again where all of my phone calls get rerouted to at&t customer support so they can tell me about their dumb network shutdown
that i already know about & then manually turn my service back on... but their "systems were being updated," so they could not do that at the time.
a complicated web of circumstances simply to leave me stuck in my house thinking about hairs on my neck, to be sure. i felt quite defeated

november 21st. i established a new webpage that will ideally be the original location of thoughts
instead of where i relocate them to after they've been harmfully subjected to numerical grading

november 22nd. i got a shot. i went to the coffee shop. i intended to do homework. i didn't do any. i got a cardamom cinnamon tea. the
coffee shop closed. i went to the bar. i swung a metal ring hung from a string onto a metal hook forty times. i left. i left my tea there.
i had forgotten it. i hadn't drank that much of it. i hadn't taken my antibiotics all day because i'd forgotten them at home

november 23rd. i finished taking all my amoxicillin. good job alex

november 24th. i remembered that equalizers exist... i finally don't have to hear my laptop rattle garishly if i listen to a song that
prominently features frequencies from about three hundred & seventy-five to four hundred & fifteen hertz... it was so simple!

in the morning i spent a lot of time transcribing the lyrics to songs by Freshly Wrapped Candies & almost entirely filling out a section for them
on genius.com. i sent them an e-mail asking if they had anything in the way of official transcriptions for some of the songs. fingers crossed...

my molar doesn't feel tender at all anymore... it feels like a normal tooth again, for the first time in about six years!

my neighbors vacuumed above my room again. bliss & relief. one of the best sensory experiences present in my life

november 25th. i got the wonderful idea. to use a browser extension to remove the text post button from tumblr
while otherwise retaining full functionality. then i had the shattering realization that i can literally use it
to hide notes on all posts, that that door has been there for me to open from the very start

i wrote a poem. i called it "no one speaks." i kept trying to trim my bangs & they would literally
just fold between the scissor blades. well, that's ok, i just have that wily coyote lifestyle...

november 26th. i turn a box yellow on a spreadsheet. yellow means "in progress." it's the twenty-sixth, but the box is dated the twenty-fourth.
this is to indicate that the bottle of water i'm about to drink will retroactively be the "second" bottle that i was supposed to drink on the
twenty-fourth. with a spreadsheet for tracking whether i drink two bottles each day, i've established an inane "water backlog" for myself.
i have drank eighty-five percent of the amount of water that i should have by this point in the month. as i walk into my kitchen
with my water bottle, i mutter to myself, "i'm gonna drink a lot of water tonight. i love interfacing with systems"

i cackled as i additionally removed the reply button from tumblr, since it was a secondary note-viewing
button. i thought about all the gross dopaminergic elements that i could just blip off of websites

my radio show finally aired again! so i was finally free to resume doing online streams of it, starting december third

november 27th. i accidentally opened my blog in sidebar view while i had cosmetic filtering disabled (for a momentary
reasonable purpose, i promise!) & saw the note count of the top post, & made a quiet sound approaching startlement. it's
working... in the early morning, i put alot of time into whittling down the audio files for another "soundplay" collection

i went & filmed my dad doing stand-up comedy. he was opening for two rock bands. no audience showed up, so it
was just my dad just doing stand-up for the bands & a bartender & a sound guy & so on. i drank two small
alcoholic drinks called "fun dips." they taste like fun dip. i suspected that they had fun dip in them

november 28th. i paused pot head by daniel johnston & brushed my teeth because he said
"i wonder if you realize you forgot to brush your teeth" & he was right about me alex right then

i put together the playlist for an eventual episode fourteen. it will feature charles dodge, clara rockmore, david behrman, herbert eimert, holger
czukay, hugh le caine, jean-claude risset, karlheinz stockhausen, laurie spiegel, morton subotnick, paul lansky, raymond scott, & terry riley

i microwaved a tv dinner, put it in the freezer to cool, forgot about it, made ramen noodles, rediscovered the tv dinner basically re-frozen, decided
i'd eat it all, took the tv dinner out & put it in the microwave, put the noodles in the freezer to cool, ate the tv dinner, fell asleep, woke up, &
rediscovered the frozen noodles... rediscovering the noodles was the worst part because, as i was falling asleep, i thought i had eaten them,
as in, i think i fabricated a memory of eating them. there was also a fork stuck in them, so i couldn't microwave them. it took forty
minutes of occasionally pouring boiling water to get them edible again. they had lost all their seasoning...

i experienced a wave of laughing joy from remembering that nothing & no one will complete me or anyone so i can just feel at home in
my incompleteness. the switch was flipped that makes my room feel cozy & private instead of confining. hopefully i will maintain this

november 29th. well, something unanticipated swooped in. you know, a real thing with affect, instead of just the usual
"i'm sad for no reason, now i'm happy for no reason, now i'm sad for no reason," but suffice to say i cried, which i will
note is rare, & felt abjectly dislocated from my sense of self. it didn't take that long to calm down, though

a member of freshly wrapped candies wrote back to me! they explained how to find the lyrics to the one album that's transcribed
on their bandcamp, & said they'd probably get around to adding lyrics for the others. they said i could let them know if there
were any particular tracks or albums they were interested in. i sent them a list of the ones where i had uncertainties

i accidentally did something to my finger with the edge of a very sharp knife. it wasn't a cut! it was like i "knocked" the
edge against my finger. at the pressure for it to count as a tiny blunt impact... it didn't break the skin, but it left
a line. maybe broken capillaries under the skin. the line didn't take very long to disappear

november 30th. i briefly felt emotional over how the trees outside my window felt so forgiving of my stupid thoughts. all i have to
do is look at them & they say "ok, you can go back to appreciating us as trees now, just like you did before you went thinking
your stupid thoughts - before the first stupid thought you ever had, even. nothing has changed." i teared up over this

i wrote the outline for the final episode

as i walked to class, i passed a familiar tree which i had passed under perhaps hundreds of times
on walks to & from the store. unfortunately, the tree was now a pile of dirt next to a big
rectangular hole in the dirt, in which you could see a split-open electrical cable

the final for my video production class is a half-hour program of any nature that the whole class has to work together
to devise & produce. today i got to man the camera in the studio that was to pan around & zoom in & out. it was... very
zen, just examining these two people competitively building gingerbread houses, doing slow zooms & pans, gently
following the application of a line of frosting. etc. the teacher thought i did an amazing job. i felt good

then i drank a coffee & went & got all the spoken parts of the final episode recorded. i arrived
in the recording room to find someone googled "another word for dissemate" at 10:38 am

i took the trolley downtown. as i walked to the coffee shop, i stepped on a big grasshopper. an unavoidable
sort of thing... i didn't squash it, only its leg. i heard the crunch. at the coffee shop i got a grilled cheese
& a tumeric cinnamon tea. i had hoped to put together the final episode there but i was too tired

December

december 1st. it was unseasonably warm out, so i went for a walk. i ended up at the mall, ambled around there. i bought a magnetic fields cd, the
charm of the highway strip. as i left, two girls offered me a ride home because they said a guy in a truck had been following me across a parking
lot & staring at me weird about a minute prior. i instantly imagined them being part of a three-person abduction scheme where the truck
guy stalks me performatively so that the girls can show up & grab me. shows how trusting i am i guess! outside world is scary

december 2nd. with the last episode, i tried something different that i suspect i should've been doing the whole time...

part of my process is that the spoken bits inevitably push it over the limit of fifty-nine minutes, right? so i find how far it goes over, & divide that
duration by the number of spoken bits. then i introduce that amount of overlap between each spoken bit & the song before, with the song swooping
down to a very low volume when i start speaking. this typically compresses the show down to fifty-nine seconds, down to the millisecond

this time, though, instead of giving each song a uniform duration of overlap, the duration will scale to the length of the song.
this way anyone listening won't miss, say, only a tenth of one song, but a whole fourth of another. by the way i am cozily
occupying the assumption that i am doing the best out of all the students who have ever taken this practicum course

in the early morning, i noticed that my instructor had sent out an e-mail the morning prior, explaining that there would
be an optional class that day to reflect on the semester. this was a change of plans, with the prior understanding
being that there would be no more classes because he had to stay with his son, who was in covid isolation

i thought that was sad, but i accepted it, & didn't even consider attending on the first. i was about twelve hours late in
reading the e-mail, & it really hurt my heart to think about having missed that last class! i would've loved to have gone

i quickly picked out songs for episodes fifteen, sixteen, & seventeen, which will feature ariel pink, john maus, & kraftwerk. i collected two
hours of 00s & early 10s singles by carrie underwood & taylor swift & listened through them so as to psychically be in my mom's truck

it was another unseasonably warm day, so i went out to the nature trail. i wandered around in the woods. my feet took me to a cemetery. i was alive
though. a guy followed me around the cemetery in his truck. finally he got out & approached me at a distance, asked insistently if i was homeless,
if i needed any help or food, money, the like. i just repeatedly shook my head & gestured that i was ok. he drove off after that. his words,
for me, didn't entail an "oh he's just trying to be nice" moment because i have cynical paranoia & think everything is a lure

i vanished back into the woods & accidentally scared a wild turkey

december 3rd. a student's show played at five pm. not mine! not sure what the deal was. i'm a tad worried that they couldn't air
it because of the title of the song let's shoot up. i considered just saying "here's a song with a title i can't say, but the song itself is
fine," or something like that. or just garbling the recording of me saying it. i don't know why i didn't take either of these measures!

december 4th. i drank a lot of fruit teas

december 5th. i had kind of a bad night but in the middle there was playing with my dog & listening to molly nilsson's
solo paraiso summer songs ep as i curled up on my bed & sank into a genuine half-asleep bliss for no particular reason

december 6th. i debated whether to leave my tea mug sitting with orange fanta in it before i fell asleep (to dissolve the tea stains)
or if this would strip it of its character as a mug i've drank so much tea out of! ultimately, i didn't go through with it. the sim card of
my first phone, which i've had since mid-2015, got remotely deactivated or whatever. i guess it's over. they mailed me a new phone
for free a few days ago. i'll probably carry both phones around with me. i'll have to at least move all my music onto the new
phone, if i wanna walk around scrobblin' it. i added the november journal to neocities. i made a new friend

december 7th. someone showed me a songs-era john maus song that only became publicly known around the start of the year, so
the day was a win, truly, in the books as a green checkmark. i also received an early christmas gift. it was supposed to be
a christmas gift, but the box was a giveaway. not just a giveaway, practically an advertisement! it's an electric kettle

december 8th. i finally returned maniac magee, which was about an entire semester overdue. i had to pay a five dollar
fee. i tried to go get a shot but i had been awake a very long time & felt i was being put through a physiological
wringer. i aborted the plan while i was on the bus, stowed myself away in the coffee shop & got a ride home

december 9th. i woke up & immediately downed a bunch of a very sugary gingerbread shake that i had
ordered the night prior. then i got really shaky & sweaty & exhausted. not sure my body appreciated that

december 10th. after staying up through the night, i went on an overcast early morning bus
ride downtown, to get a shot. i'm almost never downtown in the early morning. it felt beautiful

i got rained on during my whole walk to the clinic, while laughing at cat meows pitch shifted to sing "beat it" by michael jackson, in a group
call with several people from a music community that i typically have a fleeting albeit consistent presence in. maybe i will try to integrate more

the theme songs for my life at this moment in time are "bad service" by ariel pink,
"s.o.s." by waterfall person, & "guinea pig way" (pitch corrected) by bonnie eenigenberg

i went to the coffee shop & got a hummus wrap & a cinnamon roll & a cardamom cinnamon tea, then went home. this morning
has an incredibly distinct flavor in my head. it feels like a divider separating a past from a present. i am in a new "stage"

i woke up to hear my show on "the waves" but they played the episode of songs that make me cry, from like ten weeks ago. so
i don't know what's going on over at the station anymore. & the natural consequence of this was lying in bed & some of
the songs, playing from the living room, making me sob a little & tear up. i think it's funny to read the situation like
the people working the radio station hate me & so naturally they played this because they wanted me to cry

that night, a nonexistent song title clearly appeared in one of my dreams, then i instantly woke up & wrote it down. it was: Vanilla Where You're
Going Ain't the Easy Way 4 U. it appeared in the form of a brief, abrupt vision of its last.fm page, immediately after which my eyes snapped open

december 11th. for about two hours i feel into this unusual non-sleepy state of intense
drowziness, where just lying with my eyes closed felt really good, & music felt like it was
coming from far away, & i needed this nine-song playlist. it was blissful & unconcerned

december 13th. i started formatting the society of the spectacle into a tidy google doc featuring the translation & annotations by ken knabb
in tandem with the translation by the publisher "black & red." i queued the last song from sun araw's belomancie for my daily album
posts, making it the first album to be eradicated from the list, if you don't count patricia taxxon's single-track winter beats

i received a package from my friend, containing a handwritten letter, a copy of kurt vonnegut's armageddon
in retrospect, & a case of m.i.a.'s arular which mistakenly contained a cd of outkast's aquemini

my dad has been obsessed with the jim carrey grinch for the past several weeks & had a grinch costume arrive in the mail

december 14th. i've been trying to listen through wee tam & the big huge for like three days now but every song is one that i want to play on repeat

december 15th. it was really windy all day yesterday & through the night & still today. the sound is really soothing. i feel so comfortably
myself recently. i think 2022 is going to be cool. i've been kind of socially retracted too, i feel. but it'll be ok. there's limescale in my kettle

december 16th. i stubbed three toes on my washing machine so bad i spent about a minute having blurred vision for the first time in my life

december 18th. we let our upstairs neighbors use our grill & they repaid us with a bunch of kebabs!

december 19th. i listened to a blues concept album about a leftist cat named buddy travelling the united states during the great depression

december 20th. i was going to go read some stuff at a poetry night but it was cancelled! but i made my friend a six & a half
hour playlist & he listened through the whole thing & actively updated a google doc with his thoughts on each
song... i listened & read along the whole way through, & he wrote about six thousand words total

december 21st. my pal hopped on a bus to come spend a week in town... i looked at wikimedia pictures of scarecrows

december 22nd. me & my dad & my brother drove out to the bus stop shortly after midnight, to
pick up my pal... but i had overestimated how early he would arrive. so we drove back home!

but then we drove out & obtained him. before we went out, i sprayed a room spray all over me that was
purchased during the july meetup, in the hopes of evoking that... association, for the fun of it. i am
not confident that it was used enough in july to create such an association though. oh well!

we arrived at the apartment. he immediately gave my dachsund treats to try to win her favor. i showed him my room. we went to sleep.
i slept restlessly. i dreamed of compiling a playlist of the things i dreamed as i went. i woke & found that the playlist didn't exist

we got up & walked to a convenience store for some snacks. pop tarts, orange juice, tea... then we walked around around
the college a bit. in the business building, i read a "snapple fact" & ostentatiously tossed the cap away & collapsed
to the tiled floor sobbing prostrate clutching my head like it had told me a dark unspeakable truth

in the biology building, he took a free copy of control of communicable disease in man

we walked to a mall. we got an ineffective "fidget spinner ball" & an absurd tiny plastic switchblade from gumball machines. we looked at cds. we
got harve rawson, phd's tales of the ozarks, the cinderella story ost in a modest mouse case (???), buddha records' "twentieth century time capsule,"
a ska compilation called skankin' 'round the world, the "Kohls Cares for Kids" Ultimate Holiday Collection, & a rock album by a local band

i got sushi & he got a fish sandwich. as we ate in the food court, a woman walked by in an utterly baffling hoodie with a scary
dark American flag (i couldn't tell if it was thin blue line) & a big graphic of a bullet, & it said "just the tip, i promise"

we went to a dollar tree & got all sorts of snacks & the like. some dvd finds he appreciated were vampire's kiss & absolute
beginners. we also got revolution 1917 & a book: king of the mississippi. the sink in the bathroom had an absurd
degree of water pressure, & i wondered fearfully what would happen if i turned the knobs all the way. we
got another puzzle. it looked like tacos instead of a pizza. then we got checked into the hotel

at some point, we lied on the bed & listened to music through the bluetooth speaker. i asked him to play the frolic by current 93. i lied
in a rigid posture as the song made me gently cry, & i felt a tear drip down the side of my face & into my ear canal. it was cold

for about ten minutes, i had a terrible distressing muscle spasm along the whole length of my leg below the kneecap

december 23rd. we took the trolley to a museum. we pet some cats that live there. one of them followed us around
a mining exhibit. we found a map of local antique shops, most of which i had been unaware of! we ambled
around a park. he filmed me running back & forth on a skateboard halfpipe & swinging on a swingset

we went to a coffee shop. i got a grilled cheese & tomato soup with a shake. he got a ham & cheese panini & a cherry italian cream
soda. we went to a book store. we got the tao te ching, & battle cry of freedom, the definitive historical book about the civil war,
& a book about the history of teddy bears, with lots of pictures of them. for dinner, we got a pizza & a pretzel at
a bar. we went back to the room, got drunk, worked on the puzzle that looked like tacos

we drunkenly talked about the 1977 french petition against age of consent laws. we talked about a lot of things
during each night's drunken period. lots of ranting. it's not worth trying to reconstruct it all here. i made
a ritual of drunkenly running down the hotel hallway & back on at least one floor each night

december 24th. we walked to a greenhouse & the power was out, so we couldn't get any of the coffee they serve there. then we went
to a thrift store. i found a wonderful red coat for only thirty dollars, perhaps a tenth of the price it originally goes for, based on my
research. we also got a cute-looking wooden back massager object, & a slab of glass with (perhaps artificial) flowers embedded in
it. then we went back to the greenhouse & he bought me a succulent. we walked to a restaurant & got buffalo chicken wraps
& a salad for dinner. we went back to the room, got drunk, worked on the puzzle that looked like tacos

december 25th. christmas! he gave me several cute pairs of socks. i gave him the eternal messenger arthur brown anthology.
we went to my apartment for a big dinner of roast, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, corn, rolls, & pie, courtesy of my dad. my dad
got me a blouse, a sweater, & a scented candle. my dad got my pal a hoodie & a hat. my pal & i banded together to get him three
old comedy vinyls. two happened to be great successes: one he had in his childhood, & it was a big inspiration for him; the
other he recently gave away, in... well, a giveaway. my dad organized a game of Password among the four of us, which
was actually quite fun. we just barely won when i got my pal to guess "bomb" by saying "Christgau." we
went back to the room, got drunk, worked on the puzzle that looked like tacos

december 26th. we went back to dollar tree & found dvds of dynamite warrior & believer. we found these
cds: chill in: india ii, the juliana theory's a small noise, & the chieftains feat. ry cooder's san patricio

we went to the mall & looked at clearance cds. we got a cd of ambient sound effects, "kids fun easter favorites," "timeless classics: best of
the classics," the beatles' 1, "the classic chillout album," music from & inspired by stuart little 2, "the white album" (a compilation of songs
ostensibly inspired by snow), klaus schulze's timewind, "music for romance," dan & kim christian's usa tour (featuring four accordionists), the
shoji tabuchi family's "wonder of christmas" show, & "three centuries of classical greatest hits." then we got some pretzel bites & lemonades

we went back to the room, listened to cds, got drunk, worked on the puzzle that looked like tacos.
late at night, or perhaps in the early morning of the twenty-seventh, we finished the taco puzzle!

december 27th. we went to an antique mall! we took lots of photos. one particular thing we saw was an lp of jean-jacques perrey &
harry breuer's the happy moog. we got a little original painting of a flapper girl (which came with a little stand), & a book of puzzles

as my brother was driving us back to the hotel, we got in a minor collision! a guy named Gary banged into the side of the car towards
the back. we had to pull over in a parking lot & it took he & my brother nearly half an hour to get all the insurance stuff sorted out

later, we wandered downtown a bit, got drinks at the coffee shop, went to the bar for dinner again. we went back to the
room & i did most of the work on the journal entries for the trip, at least up to this point. we packed up as much as
we could, which was melancholic, naturally. the establishment & disestablishment of a home, to an extent...

december 28th. we finished packing up & checked out of the hotel. my pal was to board his bus at about 1:45. we drove back to my apartment...
a small vial of perfume had arrived in the mail. i smelled it & poured some of it on my wrists & rubbed it on my forearms. i spent the next day or
two smelling my forearms a lot, after which i just picked up the vial & smelled it a lot. it has a peculiar smell. it is sweet but it also sort of makes
me think of death. i guess it would be easy to liken the sweet aspect to... a grandma. & the peculiar aspect, i would liken to a funeral home?

we spent a while hanging out in my room, taking some time to say our emotional goodbyes... we drove back out to the bus stop & waited
for a while... there was a girl sitting on the curb playing russian pop music on her phone & singing along. we learned that there was
a three-to-four hour delay in the route! by five pm, it still hadn't arrived, which precluded my pal being able to make any of his
bus connections. so, unexpectedly, relievingly, anticlimactically, we went back to my apartment to spend another night together

when we got home, some vinyls that he had ordered me had arrived... boduf songs'
the strait gait & gobble gobble's lawn knives / end of days. we got drunk

december 29th. he realized the night before how inadequate all of my blankets are, so we walked out to the store. we passed
through a mall & i recorded a jingle that i've been hearing play from a little carousel ride for practically my whole life

we passed the absurd gumball machine where he had gotten a little plastic switchblade. this time he got a little plastic assault rifle
that he had to put together. we passed a strange princess doll that sang you are my sunshine on endless loop & it almost made
me tear up. i recorded that too. we got a little plastic corgi from a gumball machine. i had hoped for a dachsund

we arrived at the store & got a very cozy blanket. he also got a pair of jeans to replace the ones he tore earlier. we got lunch at a sandwich
shop. we went home & i dozed for a long time under the cozy blanket. he got his trip home rescheduled to the thirty-first. we got drunk

december 30th. we went on the trolley & got lunch at a very cozy independent movie theater. i had thought i wouldn't get to show him that
place! i got a pulled pork grilled cheese with a fruit cup, & he got a tempeh blt with a side salad. then we wandered downtown, & wandered
around, through historic neighborhoods where he remarked that you could feel the suppurating poverty. we went to the coffee shop &
got a cherry drink. J's girlfriend really liked my red coat - she complimented me in an ostentatious but sincere way, as
though earnestly caught off guard. she said i looked so cute, & that i look great in red

we went home. we learned that there was now a blizzard along the bus route &
it had been cancelled entirely. so we would be spending new years together!

we wandered around the neighborhood & talked & remarked on our surroundings & i pointed out many things. when we
got home, my dad had made spaghetti. we listened to the stuart little two soundtrack. we lied in bed side-by-side
& listened to the beatles' 1 while he infodumped about each song. then we listened to sound effects cd

december 31st. he got his return trip rescheduled to the second. we went to a nature trail. we walked along the nature trail listening to stevhen
peters & slugbug then got lunch at the coffee shop. there were three different women in the back room of the coffee shop who i wanted to look
like. this flipped the lightswitch in my head that governs a feeling of fundamental ruination on account of being male, so i had to come home
& go catatonic under a blanket & cry for a good while. then, as per usual, i felt my mannerisms & values & personality begin to eke back in
despite that feeling fundamentally impossible & absurd given the condition of me being inherently corrupted beyond any recourse. the eking
is largely complete, & i expect the rest of the night to be fine, which i regard as an incredibly stupid reality given how abject
my feelings of ruination were, but i regard it as a reality all the same. i have mental illness

we bought more vodka & ate a pizza & listened to cds... he wants at least one mention of himself of himself as a "boyfriend" rather
than a "pal," although i typically don't care to refer to such things unless it is relevant to the anecdote. this is the mention