march 1st. march kicked off with a day where the weather was perfect. just being outside when it's seventy degrees is cause for joy. initially,
i planned to go on an all-day nature trail walk, but i couldn't do that if i wanted to be home for the lamplight broadcast. so i contented myself
with finally trying out my new boots. i waded around in a creek & explored a few places i couldn't get to before. there was definitely
a feeling of childlike wonder, an "out of bounds" feeling, in seeing a certain patch of the creek from the other side. i got a close
look at some strange growths from a tree, which protrude out from the ground up to a significant distance away from it

when i woke up, sweet pea was "lying down" in the dumbest pose ever

the john maus episode didn't go out over the air for some reason, which was disappointing. this issue seems to target precisely the
episodes that i tend to feel more enthused about. but i listened along with the people who tuned in on youtube, & it was ok, i guess

after nightfall the temperature was still nice, so i went on a chilly night walk while on call with my friend. i paced around a desolate industrial
nothing while he read me a short story by tao lin (suburban teenage wasteland blues). we listened to the fall by gorillaz. i walked to the nature
trail, approached the point at which the patches of orange streetlight drop off into pure darkness - saw how close i could approach before i got
too anxious & turned back. i had ambitious plans for this walk, but it got far chillier than i expected, so i went home. we watched spongebob

-

march 2nd. a fun day - unusually social, plus more walking & sun exposure than i've gotten over the past two months, i'd bet. i had to get the photos
that were due for my photography class the following day - three which capture different senses of motion: stop action, blur motion, & panning

as i walked toward the planned subject of my photos, i heard a mockingbird in a small tree. i stopped & stared,
trying to find it. a faculty member stopped, asked if i could see it, & said that it shows up on campus every year

at the location, i quickly realized that my phone's camera wasn't configurable enough for the task. i thought i was doomed. but i decided to go on a walk
to an electronics store, listening to spirit they're gone, spirit they've vanished. i saw lots of geese. when i got to the store, i quickly realized i wasn't
going to spend any less than three hundred dollars on a camera. so i set off back home to retrieve my camcorder & determine if it was up to the task

before i got home, i had the very fortunate idea to stop by the communications department, locate
the girl in charge of renting equipment, & find out if she had a dslr available. i was in luck!

i stood at a roadside, just photographing people in their cars as they drove by. the instructor said this was an okay
way to approach the assignment. i've always felt very odd about photographing or filming people, but i went through
with this regardless. two of the photos, on closer inspection, had a driver or passenger looking straight at me

i went to the gym & stood on a balcony, photographing three guys playing basketball, trying
to get a good still of one of them making a throw. i don't think they even noticed me

most of the photos came out pretty terribly. it was only over the course of the day that i really got a handle on
the camera's settings. the main thing ruining my life was that i didn't realize the shutter speed was controlled by
a physical dial rather than a software setting - &, from there, my total lack of consideration for aperture width

i went back to the roadside, got acceptable blur motion & panning photos, but i still wasn't satisfied about "stop
action." i went back to the gym, asked a girl if it'd be okay if i tried to shoot a good picture of her making a throw.
she agreed, & i took a lot of photos, but this proved to be a very difficult activity to capture in a satisfying way

i put out a call for help on facebook, & old C, the girl i'm somewhat acquainted with but who i haven't spent time with
since 2021, maybe 2020, answered. we met up, & i had her jump off of a bench about eleven times as i tried to get
a picture of her in mid-air. i got a pretty good one where she had her arms crossed with a stern expression. she
gave me a ride home, where i wrote this entry up to this point, then edited the pictures & turned them in

i called my friend. as we listened to a nitzer ebb song, i playfully punched at my webcam
but accidentally gouged my left fingernail into my right hand. it bled, & as late as
march thirty-first i could still see a darkened patch where the scab had been

i reattempted last night's walk & ended up walking a little over eight miles while on call with my friend. across town & back
in the dead of night! at one point a passed me on a motorbike, then a few minutes later drove back & pulled up next to me.
i instinctively hopped away over a ditch of water to maintain my distance. he just asked me if i was okay, so i nodded,
& he drove away. i continued on, physical anxiety filling my core, spreading to my fingertips, & draining out

i got too close to a car dealership & provoked the automated voice which says "YOU ARE TRESPASSING
ON PRIVATE PROPERTY! YOUR ACTIONS ARE BEING RECORDED!" over multiple loudspeakers

while i was all the way across town, a guy on a skateboard waved, said "hi, alex!" & asked if i was doing okay. i waved &
nodded. i couldn't quite recognize him, but i think he may have been the sound guy at the coffee shop's open mic nights

i got home, ate two macaroni & cheese tv dinners, & quickly fell asleep

-

march 3rd. i found out that, when the maus episode didn't play, the instructor noticed & quickly pushed it back
to seven pm so that it'd still go out... i could have heard it still!!! but i missed it, because i didn't know. miffed

my photo teacher pulled up a photo of a cow on the projector & mooed. he's a cool guy. i thought i was going to return the camera & walk
out to the nature trail, but when i got home i became overwhelmed with exhaustion & lied in bed for a long time, eventually falling asleep

-

march 4th. i woke up around four pm. i intended to try to walk out to the nature trail again, even though it was a bit late &
i wouldn't have a great wealth of time. i set out in my boots, hoping to find shallow parts of the creek to wade around in.
i made it to the main part of the trail right at sundown, so i had to turn back & walk home through some suburbs

-

march 5th. i saw the first ant in my room of the season. the struggle begins. i witnessed the first thunderstorm too

-

march 6th. i put together the ween episode

-

march 7th. in the early morning i established a tenuous tendency of
eating very hot peppers as a means of cancelling out very bad thoughts

i returned the camera, then wrote & recorded the magnetic fields episode. i got a shot, while having been awake for
about twenty-three hours. i couldn't believe i was getting a shot while being as tired as i was. microsleeping in
the waiting room, wobbly & fighting down anxiety that possesses more sway when i'm in such a state

-

march 8th. i asked my radio instructor if he could temporarily extend the show's slot by an hour,
so that the maus episode could be replayed today, then the tmbg episode could play. he agreed!

-

march 9th. after class, i took the trolley downtown & finally mailed two books & a cd to my pal. i got a papercut on my right index finger from
a cardboard envelope! then i spent a while at the coffee shop. when i got home, the maus episode was airing again! then the tmbg one! i'm not really
sure why. maybe when the instructor was programming the alternate time slot he accidentally set it to apply every day, & also forgot to remove it.
well, it was nice to hear them again. i watched the movie killjoy with my friend. two itchy bumps appeared on my right hand for seemingly no reason

-

march 11th. when my alarm went off, i got out of bed & lumbered out of my room in a completely miserable, braindead state, absent
mentally but having successfully relayed to my body all the morning actions that it was to do autonomously one after another.
my dad informed me that there had been a downpour of snow overnight & classes were cancelled. i went back to sleep

-

march 13th. i went out & got a half hour of sun exposure. i opened my bedroom
window & heard birds & smelled fresh air in my home. i generally felt good all day

prior to opening the window, i have to take all of my tea boxes off the sill & haphazardly pile them on my bed. prior to doing
this, i wrote down the order of boxes so as to not disrupt the continuity of the autistic tea box random shuffling process

-

march 14th. i put together the playlist for episode twenty. i'm excited about it. i spent a while agonizing over the
sequencing & the way the songs were grouped. it tormented me a bit, but that shows that i care about this one!

-

march 16th. i checked out the dslr again & asked C if she'd like to help with another photo assignment. she joined me at dusk in a sunny field
so i could take some pictures that featured directional lighting. she showed up in a pepe the frog t-shirt, but i could tell that it at least wasn't
a weird 4chan-type pepe invocation as much as one by the sort of girl who plays a ukulele & makes jokes about pizza rolls. the session went
smoothly, except for when i kneeled to get the silhouette photo & had my knee land smack dab in goose waste. she gave me a ride home

that night, i bought two small gas station confections called "baby bundts." it was the worst packaged treat
i've ever had. i threw them both away after a single bite. they literally smelled bad! acrid, like vinegar,
a stench i viscerally could not even tolerate. i could hardly believe that i had found such a thing

i ordered an lp of the wirtschaftswunder self-titled

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march 17th. in the early morning, i watched donnie darko with my friend

today it was like heaven outside. after my photography midterm, i walked out to the campus nature trail with the dslr, listening to distortion by
the magnetic fields. i spent a while watching a groundhog dig a burrow just a few feet away from me. it didn't seem to care much about my presence.
i took many photos of it. i walked to a book store in search of a copy of vonnegut's mother night on my friend's emphatic recommendation. i cut
through the mall, photographed some child art that was on display. i reached the book store, found the book, read it as i walked back to the
college to refill my water bottle & type all of this. then i set off again for the nature trail - the main one, not the campus one

i had a very serene time at the nature trail, taking photos, mostly of the creek. there was something very satisfying about it. whenever i lowered
the camera after taking a picture, i felt a sense of connection to my surroundings that i typically lack. a kind of thing someone once suggested
i restore by taking mushrooms. i considered buying my own dslr. i stayed on the trail until it got dark & took some photos with flash

as i walked home through the usual suburb, i stopped by the same pear cactus that i mentioned in my entry for september 22nd, 2021. there,
i described getting my finger pricked a bit harshly by one of its spines. tonight this cactus would subject me to a new brand of violence

i kneeled by the cactus & pried off one of its spines, avoiding being pricked by any of them. i inspected the spine.
i noted that around the base, only visible once it had been extracted, was a tuft of what appeared in the dim light
to be seeds akin to those of a dandelion. i rolled this tuft in my fingers, sat the spine down, & continued on

i quickly noticed an intermittent pain in my fingertip when i touched my phone screen. i turned on my phone flashlight & looked. three
of my fingertips were in a sorry state. the tuft had not been a tuft of seeds but of tiny, sharp needles which had embedded in my skin

in addition to the plainly visible needles, i also saw benign specks of reflective nothing-in-particular & thought these were
also structures from the cactus, perhaps hundreds of microscopic needles riddling my fingertips like asbestos. this was
not the case, but i was understandably very worried. i was also not entirely confident that there was anything in
my finger at all, that i might just be making this up in my head. i wasn't inclined to test it, though

well, i set off for a gas station to see what could be done. as i walked, i did some research on my phone & discovered that the spines were real,
were called "glochids." i also read that you could dry glue on them & peel it off to efficiently extract them. i arrived at the gas station &
phoned my dad, asking if we had any glue at home. we didn't. he suggested phoning my brother & asking him to take me to the store

i stood outside using my tweezers to pluck out all the more obvious ones. they're truly awful things. they are barbed, & when extracting each
one you can feel it tugging on the skin. when all the obvious ones were gone, i went in & rinsed my hand under very hot water... this seemed to
completely remedy the issue, so i just proceeded home. it was a pretty night, sort of humid in a way that made all the streetlights seem to glow

-

march 18th. i woke up, thought about how i didn't know the time, decided to see how
long i could maintain that. it's a very fragile state when you engage with technology

my phone was a lost cause - you're not permitted to turn the screen on without paying the price of knowing the time. maybe if you closed your
eyes while unlocking it, then placed some kind of sheath over the top of the phone to obscure the clock. my laptop was workable because i sat
a little cat figurine on it, blocking the clock from my view. as i left my room, i had to avert my eyes from the stove clock in the kitchen

messaging any of my friends on discord was a no-go, because of the timestamp by each message. i think it could be done if i purposefully blurred
my vision when i look at the program, like i do when i'm looking at chapter demarcations & page numbers near the end of a book that i haven't
finished yet. i guess from here i could think about open-source operating systems & all that, but i won't for the time being. i quickly
spoiled the exercise for myself a bit by seeing that two queued songs had posted on my blog, establishing that it is after six pm

i think this type of exercise is just aimless pattering around within two insulating layers of privilege: living
with a parent who expects little of me, & being a student on spring break. if i were actually working to
pay rent for myself, my very survival would be contingent on my consistent observance of the time

later, i noticed something had changed with neocities. other people can immediately see the changes i make, but
it takes about twenty-five minutes for them to show up for me, regardless of what i do. this totally kneecapped
the "centered paragraphs" formatting i'd been doing for the past two years, & i decided to abandon it

;)

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march 20th. i listened to the new album by bladee & ecco2k, was very thrilled by it

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march 21st. my pal & i listened - for a second time - through the entire four hour album of jake
tobin & ben varian talking into a tape recorder about the food they're eating during a three week tour

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march 22nd. i watched fear & loathing in las vegas with my friend. i became incapacitated with hysterical
laughter from playing the star wars episode one theme & spamming discord bot commands that rewind it two
seconds, & holding my mic by my dog slurping milk. the magnetic fields episode of lamplight didn't debut on air

-

march 24th. for the first time, an episode of my show wound up being about
a minute short of fifty-nine minutes, so i made an outro to fill the dead space

-

march 25th. i burned three candles. i accidentally went so long without
burning them that they took me back to when i was burning my candles

-

march 26th. i managed to get half an hour of sun again.
i timed the half hour by listening to crest a second time

-

march 27th. my bangs have been slowly receding up my forehead as the consequence of recurrent events where
i identify some new "issue" which i am convinced can be remedied by trimming a certain area. i end up creating
a discrepancy in length, & have to trim the rest to make it even again. the next day i identify some new "flaw"

this has gotten bad enough to give me a feeling of anxiety & dread this morning. i feel like i lack the self-control to let them grow back
to their normal length. i decided to cover the mirror in my bedroom with a towel so that i could stop being intermittently spurred to think
about it. i felt helpless. i eventually calmed down, & having the mirror covered began to make me sad, so i uncovered it. i was fine

i e-mailed my instructor, asking if we could do another week of doubled up lamplight episodes, this time with nineteen & twenty

-

march 28th. during class, my instructor told me he'd held off on airing the next episode
because of spring break. so the following week would simply be episode nineteen in isolation

-

march 29th. i opened the front door of my own accord & found the mailman standing right outside with the wirtschaftswunder lp.
it was wrapped in a recent issue of a german newpaper. it came with a lyrics sheet. today the weather was beautiful. i took the
screen out of my window, to minimize the sense of disconnection from the outside. i walked around reading mother night a lot.
i accompanied my neighbors' tiny black dog on a walk which strayed a fair distance from home. they didn't know i was out there
with it. episode nineteen aired as my dad cooked mexican food. i transcribed all the wirtschaftswunder lyrics on genius

-

march 30th. another photography day. i had to take three pictures that each displayed a different one of six composition techniques.
i roamed the campus in aimless search of opportunities to employ them. it was sort of a bleak task. the nice person in the food,
court L, was excited by the camera & asked what model it was. they told me they had been a photography major in the past

eventually i met up with C again at the library. she was a big help as always, & we got all three photos done. i'm enjoying these meetings.
we spent a while looking at books about caves, mining, & printmaking. i found a book of works by Toulouse-Lautrec, which was great

she's obsessed with caves & minerals lately. this began when she found a huge chunk of calcite in a river. she had taken it to the
museum, hoping it was worth something, but they told her it was worthless. the rock was in the back seat of her car. we met
a classmate of hers, & he laughed a lot when she showed him a photo of the rock in the seat, with the seatbelt fastened

right before we left, we noticed a display which invited
students to make blackout poetry. i made one & she
made two. it was very fun. she drove me home

-

march 31st. i woke up with six long, stinging scratches down my calf... i had done this. i had woken up briefly during the night & taken my socks
off. then i scratched my calves, because that always feels very good after taking socks off. i guess my nails must be pretty sharp! i didn't even
notice as i left the scratches, for some reason, but for the rest of my sleep i'd occasionally wake up a bit & have a dim awareness of the pain

i received a third letter from my friend

i used ublock to strip down tumblr's functionality a bit more. now nothing comes up when i press
the z & c keys at the same time. hopefully this will extinguish my tendency of making text posts

april 1st. i didn't have that great of a day. there were food trucks on campus, & i ordered a pizza.
i had to stand by the truck waiting on that pizza for about half an hour, & over the course of it i
began to have a sort of breakdown for unrelated reasons. i began quietly crying at one point

after i finally got the pizza, i brought it to the student center & ate it. i used an absurd amount of napkins,
since the pizza was so greasy & i am, as often stated, unreasonably averse to getting oil on myself

i walked home. i was very sad. as i walked, a series of bittersweet & playful songs came into my head. i later
appropriated this as part of the playlist for the next lamplight episode, the rest being an extension of the same feeling

i got home, lied in bed for about half an hour, unable to relax. i could feel my pulse in my head & my stomach, i could think nothing but unbearably
bad thoughts. i tried to hide away in happy imaginary affection but simply wouldn't work. i imagined leaving the apartment, running to a nearby field,
& cathartically yelling & thrashing around. the fantasy involuntarily translated to about five violent thrashes in my bed before i knew what i was doing

i got up, left the apartment, went on a long walk that started with me openly & loudly crying behind some neighbor's
backyard but had me feeling a lot better by the end. i walked to the "little library" & took out the sole remaining
right-wing (or, to state the more particular offense, partisan) propaganda book, & cathartically tore it to shreds

i walked backwards along the driveway of a church, telling myself somewhat histrionically that once i turned the corner & went behind the
church, i would fade away & not have to worry anymore. this didn't happen. i banged my head lightly against the beige corrugated metal
exterior of the building. in the distance i saw a very tall pole that i had never noticed before, & walked about a mile towards it

when i got home the fourth episode of my show from last semester was on the radio for some reason

-

april 3rd. i went to an event at a local park. food trucks & an inane cover band trapped in the nineties, playing a setlist that felt very goofy
or very bleak, depending on my mood from minute to minute. spice girls, third eye blind, & so on. i brought the camera & took lots of
photos. many of them were of sidewalk chalk art by children. there were mayflies everywhere, everywhere, just everywhere.
if i stopped walking for a second they'd start to fly up & brush against my legs. it drove me a bit crazy a few times

after the event i simply wandered away, to the far edge of the park, through some suburbs, to downtown, taking more photos along the
way. my night ended at the same old bar, where i ordered a blt - or rather, the bar's idea of a blt. bacon bits between two pieces of
bread, a plate of lettuce & tomatoes to add at my discretion, & a small cup of mayonnaise. i simply ate this like a perverse salad

a man said, loudly, about the programming that was being played: "yer playin'
women's basketball?! hauhauhauhau!!!" & i acutely felt my condition of
being alive on a planet extensively populated by cartoon characters

i went home & put together much of episode twenty-one. i listened to two
albums with my friend - r. stevie moore's glad music & xiu xiu's forget

-

april 4th. the browser history on the computer in the recording room looked like this. if i knew who this was i'd reach out to them, just have them send
me their weekly playlists & send batches of mp3s back... i e-mailed the instructor saying maybe he should advise against getting them that way, at
least while using that pc. at home i hypnotically drew a picture while listening to current 93's in a foreign town, in a foreign land through earbuds

-

april 5th. i went to the nature trail. it was hot out. i brought the camera & took a bunch of photos. i found my first
painted rock in years. i felt persistently detached from my surroundings, unfortunately. i got very hungry & thirsty &
hot, & had to flee to a gas station & ask my brother for a ride home. i made it home in time to catch episode twenty

during the broadcast, i noticed that my succulent, which i had stupidly left sitting out on a table on the back porch, wasn't there. i rushed
outside, filled with earnest concern. it had been very windy, & its little pot had been blown off the table. it was still rooted in its mass
of dirt, but it was lying sideways outside the pot. i put it back in the pot & brought it inside. one side of it was a bit discolored in places,
& there were some brown, scabbed patches on some of the leaves. my theory is that the force of its impact with the ground may have
messed up its vascular system on one side of the central stem - or maybe it was a condition it acquired lying sideways in the
sun like that. i felt a tiny bit heartbroken by this. its condition seemed to only worsen over the coming weeks

as i type this on the twenty-second, it seems like it very well may be recovering. a few days ago, one of its leaves was totally brown, dead,
& deflated, but now i don't... see that one? so maybe they can fully heal from that state, or... well, i don't know, that's my only guess!

some parts of the plant are still discolored, but... well, as i said, i thought its stem had been sort
of broken & that it was just gonna slowly die, but it looks better than i thought it would by now

-

april 7th. my photography teacher didn't show up to class. he didn't feel well & only sent us the e-mail once we were
already there. someone put a scarf on the lion statue whose mouth i always put candy bars in. i put a candy bar in its mouth

-

april 8th. the candy bar was still in the lion's mouth after my morning class but not when i returned to that building in the
afternoon. i ordered three samples of perfume & spent about two hours making the corresponding changes to the spreadsheet

-

april 9th. somewhere around this time i started slowly eating the six candy canes that had been hanging from my shelf since around christmas

-

april 10th. i dozed off next to all my tea boxes on my bed without rolling over & disturbing them. yippee yahoo

-

april 11th. odd day. a former army guy in my class casually recounted a story of being savagely dehumanized with an air of "heheh, yeah,
that's just how they do it in the ol' boot camp!" while everyone stared with blank acceptance the way people do in a college classroom. i
spent about four hours in the recording room agonizing over pronunciation & mouth clicks & perfection. when it was finally done i walked
home in an odd mental state, mumbling to myself about things i yearned for, et cetera. got home, lied in bed under a blanket for a while
with thoughts swarming my head, fueling a brimming need to write. finally i got drunk for the sole purpose of eliciting a capacity
to write without any filter & wound up with about three thousand two hundred words to show for it

-

april 12th. i received a letter & a bookmark in the mail from my pal

-

april 14th. shortly after i woke, i had a really good opportunity for a photo, a dove outside my window perched on the satellite dish framed by white
flowers, but i wasn't quick enough. that sort of thing is really bad on my brain, i can't deal with even mundane permanent losses of anything that
could be beautiful, it makes me want to cry. i have to force myself not to think about what i could have photographed, it's the same feeling
as if i took a plate i've had in my kitchen since i was young & just threw it into a wall. i would've photographed it if i just hadn't
had to waste time making the aperture wider. this also happened recently with a cat sleeping on roxy's grave

i went to the library & checked out the catcher in the rye & sherwood anderson's winesburg, ohio. i met up with C again to take photos. she had
an ear infection. this time we needed three photos incorporating flash in various ways - direct flash, fill flash, & ghosting. the first was easy,
taken in a darkened classroom while she stood at the podium. there was a large curtain at the back of the classroom. we moved it & found
a whiteboard. she drew something inane that involved devil horns & i drew the apple i always draw. we moved the curtain back

the fill flash & ghosting proved more difficult. we drove to the duck pond & i took a lackluster fill flash shot, then we drove to
a nearby park where she could swing on a swing set, perhaps providing the sufficient motion needed for a photo with ghosting

there were three kids there with a bubble machine that they had purchased for three dollars. bubbles blew to & fro.
they were thrilled. C conversed with them a bit, & one of them said that her current "obsession" is "clowncore"

she drove me home. during the drive she mentioned an open mic night at a local bar in a few hours. before i got out of
her car there was a very good song playing on the radio. i committed several lyrics to memory so that i could search
them, but wound up forgetting them, or even quite what the song sounded like. everything but how good it was

only the direct flash turned out to be usable, so i got my dad to pose for a fill flash & used my ceiling fan for the ghosting

i poured some of a perfume sample onto my wrists - the one that is labeled #2 in the "bon bon trio." i asked my brother
for a ride to the open mic. the open mic is a bit absent from my memory. it was sort of a non-event. i certainly
recall rapping, guitars, & singing, but i can't recall when it all ended, just that it did at some point

i ordered a small pizza, ate it as i read to about halfway through the
penultimate chapter of mother night. i asked my brother for a ride home

before i got in my brother's car, i wanted to go over to a guy & ask him what he was writing & drawing on his piece of paper. i would have felt
intrusive, though. i was thinking about times when i've randomly felt a desperate inclination to talk to a random stranger in a bar or somewhere,
& not gone through with it. this wasn't a desperate inclination, though. just mild curiosity. but i was imagining if he felt that desperate
inclination to talk to me. i wasn't really assuming or hoping for this, just thinking about how other people might experience the inexplicable
desperation & so any person i randomly talk to has a chance of being a realization of wanting to talk to me so much

on the drive home we passed an abandoned building that trucks used to stop at, a place meant primarily for trucks to back up to & have
stuff loaded or unloaded. so it's elevated as a whole to the height of a semi trailer. all the garage doors are missing, so you can see
right through, & there are support columns that are kind of entrancing, & i watched the parallax of those columns as the car passed

i thought about how i didn't have to automatically regard the building as a symbol for abandonment, or defunctness, or listless
bureaucratic management of interchangeable truck-loading facilities, that i could take it purely visually, as something like
an odd nocturnal stage someone could dance on. i think that represents all the granular ways a person can let their
perspective become corrupted. the processing of a truck building or a million other sights

-

april 15th. in the early morning, i finished mother night

i printed a paper that said "I taped this paper to this wall. -The Person Who Taped This Paper To This Wall" & taped it to a small,
obscure wall in the library. i thought it was playful but sort of corny. i went through with it regardless though. i also printed out
the first three chapters of the society of the spectacle as separate sheafs of stapled paper simply because the exercise interested me

on my way home i passed two young children standing outside the business & computer science building. they
had a baby bunny, & they let me pet it. when i got home, the perfume samples had arrived. i smelled them

i wasn't crazy about villa nellcote. i expected it to be a particularly good one, i think because i expected it to smell particularly like
vanilla, for no better reason than the unconscious comparison of the word "villa" to "vanilla." i think i additionally misremembered
it as having vanilla when, looking again, it has none. regardless of all that: it's like... a person who's just gotten out of the
shower. it feels adjacent to the scent of some masculine-marketed body wash. nothing surprising about it

the first sample i ordered was la stanza delle bambole, chosen pretty much at random, & i think it was a very fortuitous choice, probably
an enduring favorite, anything i might order would be measured against the magic of that one. in fact the standard set by that one is
why it's a bit disappointing to blindly order some other samples & find myself reminded of body wash, or fruity pebbles

-

april 16th. there happened to be boxes of cereal in the apartment, as opposed to bags. seeing them really
caught me off guard & hit me in a very nostalgic way... you could say i was "reminded of fruity pebbles"

i went to an event consisting of short talks given by various people in the community who were either: involved in local humanitarian efforts
(many of them had participated in the emergency cold weather shelter that my dad was involved with), or homeless themselves. these
talks were interspersed with live music. there was also pottery sold on a pay-what-you-want basis, & a silent auction was held for
a painting. before i left, i poured live in colours on my wrists. it had a much softer feeling when it was actually on my skin

i was there to help with recording the whole thing, & i was assisted by none other than my sister J, who i have only met
& briefly introduced myself to once in my life. i can't say we talked all that much, & most of our talk was about the
task at hand, which was ultimately a very simple one. but it was interesting to interact with her, i suppose

i overheard a lady at a table saying "there was blood all over the fuckin... speculum." i absent-mindedly sipped my coffee while
it was still hot & burned a whole side of my tongue. i spilled a bunch of coins out of my wallet & a guy picked them all up for me

we heard from D, President of the redacted geographic location Socialist Rifle Association. he talked about all the ways in which he was
transformed by reading anarchist theory & by becoming involved in mutual aid. he talked about "solidarity over charity" & what this really
meant beyond its potential reduction to a quip. he talked about ineffectiveness of charities, describing even the most well-intended ones
as mere band-aids. he talked about the unacceptability of hierarchies & stressed that everything should be horizontal. i thought that
last point was sort of ironic since he was the President of anything, but it was a nice speech nonetheless. maybe he thinks
hierarchies with respect to mutual aid are worse than hierarchies in the socialist rifle association

my dad was going to do a magic trick at some point, but he claimed to have suddenly gotten very sick with some kind
of stomach bug, & he took off early. based on the way he was acting, though, i personally suspect that this was
a lie to cover him inexplicably having gotten wasted. before he left, he & J & i took a group photo

we heard from a guy named L who had become homeless when his parents kicked him out of his house by threatening
him with a twelve gauge shotgun when he was fourteen, solely because he was diagnosed with autism. he dresses like
a 1950s greaser, & he acknowledged this & explained why. it was related to his grandfather who had been murdered

J, a guy who had been involved at the shelter, saw me pacing & said hi to me, asked how i was doing.
as part of the "security" team, J had consistently worn a dinosaur onesie because the absurdity
of it had a tendency to dissipate tensions between people who were fixing to get in a fight

i told J that i i kind of wanted to try going up & talking, but i figured i wouldn't have
enough time. he said i could just say whatever i had to say to him & his friend M. so i did

the sentiments i had in mind were not new but i just wanted to try to voice & reinforce this perspective of how in our acclimation to living in urban &
suburban environments we risk becoming numb to how unforgivably inhumane it is that the surface of the planet is meant to be habitable, but, as privately
owned land expands & endlessly produces structures which could potentially function as basic shelter, how when you look around all you can even see
is shelter, all this proliferation is is a propagation of security cameras, alarm systems, inhospitability & abject desolation continuously staking claim
to more & more of the surface of the earth. how suburban development is the optimistic proliferation of “homes” on its face but really just
the laying down of more concrete that no one can sleep on, how a world is only blanketed with homes if people's doors are open, or else those
homes are prisons which all life is compactly locked into, leaving only a wasteland of dead streets on the outside. how no particular
homeowner or business owner seems to wholly deserve culpability since the system realistically incentivizes everyone to manage
their properties this way, but in aggregate the effect is deeply, deeply, abjectly, indescribably unforgivable

then he asked about my radio show, so i talked about that some. i tried to name some artists i'd played, & my head went totally blank.
i managed to say... animal collective, sun kil moon, ariel pink, john maus, & yellow magic orchestra, i believe. he knew animal collective

i had to gather my dad's things from up by the stage, but i had to spend a while
waiting for the current stretch of music to end because it was unbearably loud

during my ride home i watched the abandoned truck depot again, how the support columns danced with their parallax. i liked how the
3d space reduced to a very specific horizontal movement of vertical lines, thought about how one would go about reproducing it

to me, the two approaches of hand animation vs. designing a three-d rendering system represented a spectrum between the acts
of hewing out one's vision versus hewing out a system from which one's vision can emerge... the drawing instrument & the
sheets of paper are still a system, but the three-d render "feels" more like a system because it feels more abstract

& i saw something shared between this spectrum & the quality of honesty about one's true desires & how to attain them. honesty about
what systems one actually needs to engage with to consider a given pursuit accomplished. honesty about when any mediation is called for

-

april 19th. i cracked myself up by making cat noises, it's funny to me how disturbingly easy it is to
sound exactly like one. when lamplight aired i accidentally publicized my surname & university over
youtube purely because i had dragged the wrong mp3 into windows movie maker the night prior

-

april 21st. i went & saw inland empire at the local theater. it was my first time seeing it. the scene with all the dancers made me laugh because
people vanishing into thin air with no audio or visual effects to accompany it pretty much always makes me laugh. after i got home, i lied on the
floor under a blanket, letting sweet pea bite at me. she got very excited, so i opened the door & she ran laps. no people & no music & only the
simplicity of the interaction. it's like if you're in a room & all you can do is watch the dvd logo bounce, more wholesome though

i felt good that night, obscure & at peace, thoughts calm. blessed as always with the soft dim tan light from
the lamp in my room, which didn't have to be in the apartment... i don't even remember where it came from

-

april 22nd. i was really happy towards the start of the day. everything felt like a dream. i don't intend for the
past tense to imply any drastic fall in mood - maybe i didn't sustain the blissful feelings of early on, but it
was only a degree of exhaustion that set in over the course of the day, not any particular sadness

i took the trolley downtown, got a shot. on my way to the coffee shop i stopped & picked up six fallen magnolia petals,
carried them the rest of the way. i spent a little while at the coffee shop, which i haven't been to very often lately

i got stuck in the bar for a while, & spent that duration trying to draw it. i didn't think to
photograph this view for comparison while i was there. i'll try to remember to do that next time

my brother drove me to the pharmacy. i picked up a refill of medication. i put the magnolia petals in the paper bag that it came in.
i walked a couple miles home with a case of sparkling water in my backpack. when i got home i collapsed on the futon in the living
room with my eyes closed & let the latter twenty minutes of autechre's elyc6 0nset scrub my brain clean like steel wool

-

april 25th. as i walked home from the store i saw that a person's front yard was full of dandelions. i love
the crazy amounts of dandelions i've been seeing here & there. three times i picked a dandelion & walked
around a field swinging them around to disperse the seeds. i want there to be more of them

-

april 26th. the band Freshly Wrapped Candies finally responded to the e-mail i sent them five months
ago. they offered to mail me a dark side of the white christmas thriller lp as thanks for transcribing
their albums on genius, & provided a bunch of transcriptions for the parts i couldn't make out

-

april 27th. in the early morning, i finished the last of the candy canes

the door to the room where i record my shows was locked. while i was searching for anyone who could unlock it, i got sidetracked
ambling around in an auditorium & there i discovered four small spaces that might have been among the most obscure on campus.
it felt special to find them, intimate even. there are big curtains along the backs & sides of the room, & hidden at one edge
of each of these curtains are small crevices that one can slip into to manipulate the cords which move them

i found things in two of these crevices. the first had little tags from clothing littered everywhere, possibly from underwear.
there was also a small object that made me feel as if God wanted me to find it there. in the second crevice i found a printed
schedule for a local baseball season, & i infer from it being dated 2006 that in braving these depths i found an
honest-to-God mundane artifact that had been sitting in that spot for about sixteen years. & into my purse it went

i found a lady who unlocked the room, & i recorded my show. i went home. i got a ride to the coffee shop.
for my photo class, i needed three pictures by the end of the day - a "feature" (slice-of-life) photo,
a night photo, & a "personality portrait" (portrait displaying a person's hobbies & character)

i asked the employees at the coffee shop if they'd be comfortable with me trying to get a candid picture of
someone working the espresso machine. they said it was ok. a girl named L volunteered to brew a coffee
specifically for the photo. they invited me to step behind the counter so that i could frame it better

i had never been behind the counter before, so it was a bit of a strange experience. then, as i was framing the photo,
adjusting the shutter speed, waiting for the right moment, john maus' just wait til next year started playing on the
intercom. i thought this was unusual, & the confluence of the song with being behind the counter created a very odd
moment that stuck in my memory. J was there, & i said to her, "what the." & then i said, "i love this song."

previously i have referred to a certain girl as J, & i have referred to her girlfriend J, who works at the coffee shop, as
"J's friend," & then "J's girlfriend," to distinguish the two. from here on, though, i will just say "J" for both of them

also present at the coffee shop was C, a guy who is also in the photography class - who also had a radio show last semester,
& once played john maus & ariel pink's chart beep. i had never seen him there before. before he left, he came over & asked
me if i was there for the assignment. i said yes, & that i planned to wander main street in search of a night photo opportunity,
once the sun had fully set. he said he had the same idea. that C happened to be present for that odd confluence behind the
counter, & that he was downtown for the same reason as me, this all was titillating to my pattern recognition

i stayed in the coffee shop until about twenty minutes after close, reading stanislaw lem's highcastle.
then i went to the bar. the sun was almost down. in the bar, i encountered my photography teacher, &
we talked briefly. here i think the day irrevocably became an "odd day," if it hadn't been one before

i found a quarter & played a single round of skee ball. i scored one hundred & ninety points. i think i was cheated out of some points,
because the machine is buggy. about fifteen minutes later, i set off into the dark, just about fully expecting to encounter C out there
& perhaps collaborate with him on our photos in some way, what with my pattern recognition being titillated. this did not happen

the westminster quarters echoed from a church in the distance as i crossed the street to the parking ramp that i hoped my friend would chase me
around approximately forty-nine days hence. i went to the top & got two good photos, one being the one i ended up turning in. when i went back to
the first floor, a guy appeared & startled me so much that i hopped in the air. he apologized for ruining my shot, although i hadn't been taking a picture

i walked around for a while, taking some more photos, particularly of a large apartment building. i went to the bar. i ordered
an alcoholic drink. the bartender said she actually wasn't sure if she'd served me alcohol before, & asked to see my card.
i showed it to her. once i had the drink, i wondered if she saw any significance in my having crossed from being a
person who had never ordered alcohol from her to one who had, & the idea caused me a minor degree of worry

a drunk guy, Z if i remember correctly, said as he walked outside: "hey, i know you! ...i'm pretty sure i know you!
maybe not." when he came back inside, he asked if i had often sat in the back with my laptop. i nodded. he did
know me. later he came back & talked to me a bit about his imminent graduation from the college i attend

i asked my dad if he would like to help with the personality portrait when i got home. he agreed, & set up some stuff
to pose in front of. i drank the drink as i read some more of highcastle, then i went home. i took the photo of him

-

april 28th. during my walk home i stopped & spent a long time watching a group of six to eight groundhogs that lived under a shed near a radio
tower. when there had been no disturbances for a while, the adults would appear to stay behind the shed & keep watch while the babies dispersed from
the front & went exploring in the grass. when something spooked them, they would all dash back to safety. a robin flew by at knee height & startled me

i approached another groundhog huddled against the exterior of the alumni center, wondering where it would go
once i got close enough. it surprised me by vanishing straight down into the ground. it had been sitting on
top of a pipe that went straight down, & i guess it lived in there, or at least recognized it as shelter

i went into the university relations & marketing building for the first time, looked around. there was a bucket with chocolate coins in it,
& i ate one. there was a fair amount of interesting things in there, particularly this delight in the office of the community historian

i am in an "attention extensively consumed by identifying & acquiring albums that no one has uploaded to youtube yet" phase

-

april 29th. flying bugs that got in my room the night prior died on my windowsill & were taken apart by ants. i froze my laptop
for like twenty minutes trying to use a program to batch download all one thousand plus singles from tonetta's bandcamp

-

april 30th. i went to the nature trail. it was around a seven-hour outing. on my way there i spoke a bunch of thoughts into my phone's
sound recorder app, but in the end i am not sure if i want to post them. i smelled a lilac bush that i thought i had missed my chance to
smell, because a few weeks prior i had mistaken the flowers' appearance prior to blooming for that of already having bloomed & wilted

i got to the nature trail. i walked around an unpaved footpath meowing, just practicing realistic meows. i went from
meowing to throat singing. i photographed silkworms. i saw a wild turkey. i went back to the convenience store & got
two energy bars & a drink. i had to ask the cashier to open the bottle for me. i saw a large egg on the edge of a cliff

shortly after i got to the main part of the trail, a moment came which marked a fundamental turn in the day.
i realized that my sunglasses were missing. i had stupidly hung them from an exterior part of my purse. they
were a gift, & had sentimental value. my tranquility evaporated. i became very quietly upset & anxious

i turned back & began combing the whole trail - this meant both a majority of the paved portion as well as two separate unpaved branches.
i ended up combing the whole area twice. i was filled with an unshakable, single-minded need to reclaim them. i felt helpless. i am not
good with having to abruptly part with a sentimental belonging. i began to continuously mutter to myself quietly about my need to find
them, making pleas which eventually became words repeated over & over in a sort of trance. all i wanted was for the next moment
to be the one when my gaze landed on them. i picked two small flowers & placed them in my purse so that they stuck out

i considered that i could order a replica of them, & although this elicited uncertain feelings about leaning on the mass
production of an object to replace the sentimentality of the one that had actually been there for so long, i hoped that it
might ease the feeling like replacing the egg of a captive pigeon with a wooden fake so that it doesn't become depressed

eventually i found myself receding into comforting fantasies of physical affection, muttering the comforting statements of the
person i envisioned while scanning my eyes back & forth across the leaves almost blindly for a long time, & then it got dark
& i held both of my phones together with their flashlights on, eventually making it back to the paved path & walking along
holding the two phones to my nose, muttering loving things & hypnotically watching the grass at the edge of the
path endlessly scroll past my vision. my receded muttering persisted for the whole chilly walk home

i heard animals calling back & forth to each other pretty close by. they were odd calls, not quite like anything i'd heard before.
initially i thought they were owls, but then i felt like i would have believed if someone told me they were birds, ungulates, or
canids. it had a consistent rhythm - three to four escalating hoots that ended at an oo-ooo. a nasal, higher-pitched one joined
in also. i had a close encounter with a possum. i saw another, smaller egg in some grass. one of the little flowers in
my purse had disappeared, the other was mashed down among a round brush & other objects. i got home

may 1st. i teared up at a stuffed animal restoration video. i finished downloading one thousand two hundred singles from tonetta's bandcamp
page & put them on mega. i began drinking coffee every night & obsessively (yet slowly) reading a pair of essays that i had to read & have
essays written about by may sixth. for each twenty percent that i read of both essays i rewarded myself by uploading an album to youtube

i walked to the store for snacks & when i got home i got incredibly hot & lightheaded from low blood
sugar, far worse than i've ever had it. i scarfed down a lot of the sugary snacks i'd just picked up

-

may 2nd. i'm going to be honest with everyone, a crane fly bumped into my head & then careened right into my cup of coffee & i picked it out &
continued drinking it like nothing happened. i felt so angry with God for pulling that one on me that i wasn't going to let It have the satisfaction

the replacement sunglasses arrived but they have a noticeably more vibrant design which lets more light through the frames. this would be ok
if i hadn't been counting on them to be identical to the sentimental pair that i lost, so that i could look at them & receive an irrational sort
of comfort where i could suggest to myself that i hadn't lost them. the design will serve to remind me of losing them. it hurts a bit
because i thought i at least had an irrational sort of emotional fallback. i think i need to just do my best to not think about it

-

may 3rd. the last lamplight for the semester debuted. i thought i was going to produce fourteen episodes, but i wound up not having enough time.
i would have liked to have concluded the semester more ceremoniously, but, oh well... later i figured out how to make shepard tones in audacity

-

may 4th. i pictured a cartoon in my head as i listened to an album for the first time in a long time. g.a.w.'s g.a.w. spielt klassik gitarre

-

may 5th. i took my photography final. it was an unorthodox one. we met at the classroom, then the instructor said "go" & we had two hours to venture
out & find a feature photo. i immediately walked to the classroom next door & found my old "Interpersonal Communications" teacher & her class
celebrating the end of the semester with games & tacos. i took a picture of them & considered immediately walking back & turning this
in. i feel this would have been beautiful, if i could have been sure it'd have been a passing photo, but i didn't go through with it

i got a ride downtown & trekked around on foot, searching desperately through every shopfront for something worth photographing. turns out
not much happens in a place covered in stores, i guess. what happens is that people stand at cash registers waiting for people to buy things.
shortly before the deadline, i got desperate & simply hurried to the bar & got a photo of the bartender working the cash register

on the drive back to campus, we passed two people on a street corner with a bicycle & a cardboard sign asking for financial
help. i tried to get a photo of them, as an alternative for my submission. one of them noticed me & flipped me off, & the
photo is of them flipping me off. i really don't like that i did this, & it's not something that i would try to do again

i arrived back at the room late & found it empty, so i just went home, figuring that i failed but that it wouldn't ruin my
overall grade. i was permitted to turn it in two days late, though, so i guess the "two hours" deal was more of a formality

-

may 6th. i returned the dslr

-

may 8th. ants have been obsessed with the dresser that i keep my laptop on, & it's been making me cuckoo nutter balls cause i have no idea what they
would've found. well, i finally watched them very carefully walking down to the third drawer & into it. they were going down through all the clothes,
to the bottom, to the freaking bag of wrappers of strawberry candies i ate long ago. i put each wrapper back in the bag, then stuffed the bag in
the drawer cause i'm not good about throwing away mementos. they found their way into that lousy drawer, under all the clothes, just
for the atoms of sugar remaining on all the wrappers! i did some swabbing with vinegar to remove the scent trail

-

may 10th. in the early morning, i woke up with precordial catch & it took forever to go away. i had to spend a
while stuck in bed, breathing shallowly, hardly able to move... it never did go away, at least, not for the whole
time that i was awake, because i managed to painlessly roll onto my left side after a while & fall back asleep

-

may 11th. in the early morning, i called my friend & went on a walk around my neighborhood
that lasted several hours. i don't go on enough walks around my neighborhood anymore

after i slept, i took my final final. all we did was watch smoke signals with
drinks & snacks then write a short pass/fail response. i liked it. hello summer

i made a new friend - A. he lives in France. our interactions
sort of tapered off by around the end of the month, though

-

may 12th. around dusk, i walked to the library to return the two books i checked out. i forgot to read either of them
at all, unfortunately. from the upper floors of the library, across a dark unlit expanse, i could see the distant lights
of a ferris wheel. there was a little fair in the parking lot of the mall. after i left the library, a guy i had
seen there followed me about halfway across campus just to ask if i was ok. i'm not sure why

i impulsively extended my walk, a truly heavenly thing i am now free to do since it's summer & i'm not worried about
deadlines & free time. i walked down to the duck pond & along the dark nature trail. i wandered to the movie theater
parking lot where a dog ran at me, which made me yelp & raise my purse, ready to swing it around if need be

i meandered my way over to the little fair. i got a cherry funnel cake. i've never seen flavored variants of funnel
cakes before. they're just topped with that sort of standard issue pie filling. it made my mouth sting a bit, due
to a mild allergy. i passed a small cage full of hermit crabs in decorated shells, held as prizes for tossing
a ball into a bowl of water. i crouched by it & watched them crawl around. i felt melancholic [1] [2] [3]

i crossed the street directly into the dark graveyard & wandered around there a bit. i meandered over to the train tracks, at the far end of
which i saw, reflecting around a bend, the lights of a train that was parked out of sight. this was eerie to stand there & see. i went to
the park but left when i saw two people under the pavilion who i suspected may have been the people i tried to photograph on the fifth

i started walking home. the fair was closed now. as i passed the mall, i looked at the college's flagpole in
the distance & imagined a percussive "ping" sound growing quieter as it quickly darted to the flagpole

on the desolate paved path which approaches the college, i went through an endless mass grave of earthworms
who had become stranded on that path. so many dead, so many writhing helplessly. i did see one large one
escaping back into the grass, though. i think i also saw one of those burning lanterns crossing the sky

the song softly & tenderly (as it appears on daniel johnston's 1990) got stuck in my head when i passed a field that i had slowly walked into
in a trance while listening to that song, years ago. as i walked, i intermittently sang it to myself quietly, hardly noticing myself doing it

i reached the campus proper. as i passed the flagpole, i looked in the direction of the mall, faintly visible
across that dark unlit expanse, & imagined the pinging sound rapidly approaching & striking me in the head

i stopped by the gas station & bought a diet soda. as i walked back home through my neighborhood, a nearby car's alarm went off once
so loudly & shrilly that i shrieked & tensed up. my heart got fast. bristly anxiety drained through my limbs & out of my fingertips

-

may 15th. i asked my brother for a ride to the store to pick up a medication refill. when we got there, it turned out that i had called the wrong
clinic a day or two prior, so we had to drive all the way across town to that one. this wound up serendipitously putting me in the brief company
of a delightful woman named L, one of the pharmacists there. in her "hello" & "goodbye" she called me "honey" & "sweet pea," respectively

when she pulled up the information on her computer, she whispered quietly to herself, "why the fuck is it so expensive?" it was indeed
a hundred & twenty dollars & tends to run around that amount. she was vocally incensed about it for the rest of the transaction,
asking me if it always costed that much, telling me my insurance provider only paid forty dollars, muttering "ridiculous"

she asked me, "do you need any," & communicated "syringes" with an aggressive psycho-type
stabbing motion. i shook my head & exhaled forcefully, & she said, "do you like my... animation?"

-

may 16th. my friend sent me a leak of the new ariel pink album & i was briefly one of five people with access to it. i found out that the
reason there has been such a persistent presence of ants in my room is that they were able to break into my cute bag full of strawberry
candies & from there break into their wrappers :( they had been smuggling away atoms of these candies for weeks. i put the bag
in the freezer for a while to kill them all. then i transferred the candies into a bowl, shook all the dead ants out of
the bag, & put the candies back in. i'm still willing to eat them. it's not like they'll taste like ant

-

may 17th. the field is getting overgrown enough that i can't see the distant lights anymore. just mostly
darkness outside the sliding door. i recently rewatched an old video where it happened to be simply
knee-high tall grass, & that was very pretty. it's very pretty now, though, too. now, though, too

-

may 18th. i slept for twelve hours, by my teas. i was woken up at one point by an airplane. at one point
i think i came the closest i've ever been to full-on sleep paralysis, but i managed to tear myself out of it

it's not clear to me whether i am yanking myself out of imminent sleep paralysis or merely a particularly
"meta" sort of nightmare. it's like the story of my dream will shift to being in my room experiencing
sleep paralysis, & this makes it essentially a nightmare, but obviously not actual sleep paralysis

however, the dream also has me fighting desperately to move, & it "tells" me that if i can't force myself to move then i'll wake up with actual
sleep paralysis. the dream seems to have waking stakes. so i fight it desperately, & the successful act of moving is equal to waking with a yelp

-

may 19th. i went & saw everything everywhere all at once.
it was... nice. i'm conflicted on it, too much of the humor
felt like something you'd hear in a commercial

it had a very grand message about... taking a sense of angst about the infinite potential paths in life, & inverting it into a
sense that, because nothing in life "matters," one can use that lack of real gravity as a lease to act freely & without trepidation

after i left the theater, i walked towards downtown, just for somewhere to walk to. the sidewalk led along the side of a big bridge. i stopped in
the middle of this bridge & closed my eyes. i used my fingers like an abacus, counting to ten by tapping the fingers of my left hand on my
leg from thumb to pinkie, then pinkie to thumb, & then i would extend one finger of my right hand. i hoped to count to one hundred in this
way. i was trying to reestablish a sense of connection to my surroundings. i would periodically open my eyes & look around to
make sure no one was approaching. i made it to about sixty before a guy walked onto the bridge, so i carried on

-

may 21st. i made a spreadsheet to tally what percentage of earth's total land area presently falls under the u.s. bureau
of consular affairs' level four "do not travel" advisories. it was 20.6%, with Russia taking up 55.7% of that percentage

around this time, i sacrificed a whole packet of blueberry tea bags & a whole packet of black cherry to make a big pitcher of that
very good mix. it turned out too diluted, though. then my brother took the initiative to pour a sickening amount of sugar into it.
drinking a cup of it made me feel really odd about adding sugar to either of those flavors, so i don't plan to drink any more

blueberry tea for me feels like something pure of malign forces in the world that would selfishly cram everything full of
so much sugar that it just sickens you, just to try to maximize your odds of purchasing it. forces that want to spoil you
until life is so cozy as to be meaningless. ideally i would have gone without ever having tasted that tea with sugar added

-

may 22nd. i sent the musician Tommy Mandel an e-mail saying he should put his discography on bandcamp. he wrote back with some
questions about the platform. he seemed to think i was an official representative of the site & he had a very unfamiliar conception of
it, asking me if he'd need to mass produce cds or usb flash drives. i sent an e-mail back. he hasn't replied as of the twenty-eighth

i moved the chair that my lamp is on to the northwest corner of my room, to make the
room feel different. it was a relieving change. it is easy to forget to do things like that

-

may 25th. in one week, my friend will arrive by plane & we will spend the month of June together. i hit my breast on a door
frame & it made me fall to my knees. i cried out severely enough for my dad to come check on me, & i just said "i'm fine"

-

may 26th. i finally succeeded in staying up late enough to make my sleep cycle diurnal again. a guy came
& did something to our plumbing which produced a constant sort of ripping sound under the floor that was
heavenly to me in the same way as my upstairs neighbors vacuuming. i lied on the floor to be close to it

i've listened to one hundred & twenty-five lucy songs in the past week. they all make me want to gesture around
with my hands the way he does in his music videos, & now i want to do it when i listen to other musicians

-

may 27th. the sky was clear. i got a lot of sunlight. i got a close glimpse of a fox hopping across the field. i got a shot. i had to bring a new vial of
medication. in the waiting room, i sat with it tucked in the pit of my leg so that it would be maximally warm & un-viscuous when the time came.
i walked around the exterior of the retirement home in the sun, reading cosmicomics, & i felt happy. i said aloud various things around me that
i thought were happy, saying "x is happy." a squirrel, some doves on a roof under the sun, a grove of trees, & pine needles were some things
that were happy. my dad made both spaghetti & the discovery that sweet pea loves bell peppers & that they're very good for her

i stared at the possibly permanent calloused patches of my sedum adolphi & asserted to myself that they are part of its
normal functioning & do not impart anything positive or negative about it even if they are a product of my agency

-

may 28th. i got a lot of sunlight. it was beautiful outside. i walked around naming as many objects around me as i could. it was an
odd day, a threatening sense of emptiness hanging over me, a talking-aloud-to-myself about mundane things but there's a kind of
inarticulable desperation in the act itself, with a woozy low-blood-sugar walk to the store & back for snacks. i saw a deer right
outside my house, out in the field, tranquilly roaming around eating on plants. i almost dozed off in the living room to
classical music on the radio. i got woken up & went to my room to sleep. i cried a little shortly after settling into bed

-

may 29th. my sedum adolphi fell a third time. it was sitting perfectly stable on my windowsill but the wind
crashed in & blew it off. i put its pot in a cup so that it would be heavier. then i picked off one of its leaves
absent mindedly, without fully intending to. i felt like a section inside of me was dying in realtime

-

may 30th. i'll reiterate: the field by my house is becoming so overgrown that i can't see the distant buildings & groves of trees that have
been such familiar landmarks for over a decade. at night there is not a landscape dotted with lights anymore. my backyard is becoming
a small place instead of a vista. it feels like a fundamental shift in my surroundings & a kind of... narrowing of my psychic life

it was very very nice & windy out. i walked to the campus book store for a notebook. i planned for this to be a dedicated
notebook for writing notes & reminders about the happenings during my friend's stay over June. i'm not sure if there
will even be a June journal, because i think we are both in alignment with the idea of just living & not stressing about
recording everything & putting it out publicly & cursing it to find some of its value there... maybe June will be secret

the student center was unlocked, but dark & empty, filled with the pointless whine of a security system announcing some trivial
internal state that no one had any reason to come & diagnose. i hadn't realized that this was the span of summer where the
building would be entirely unstaffed. so i left on a longer walk to a department store. i read cosmicomics as i walked

as i walked along the little nature trail, i spoke aloud to myself about my desire to be alone in nature again, my acclimation to it. i
expressed how when my friend arrived we might be compelled to talk about "cultural objects," & i said how grimy they can make
me feel. there were some other things too, like how it feels like i can't acclimate myself to human-scale life because i mentally
push wide-scale realities like formation of the sun & the development of life into so many moments, underlying them

i noticed a girl standing at a pool of water, poking at little fish with a stick. i walked up behind her to get a
closer look at what she was doing. it didn't register to me that i was basically "sneaking up" on her. when she
turned, i accidentally startled her! i smiled, walked away, said "sorry!" ...i saw a raccoon cross the paved path

as i passed a big parking lot i stared up at the cloudy sky mouthing the word
"happy" over & over. or maybe i was actually saying it, i can't remember

i arrived at the store, bought a notebook, more hair ties, & wax cheeses. i ate a lot of the wax cheeses as i
walked home. it was happy. i passed a truck with a rubber ducky on its antenna. after i got home, i wrote
"Alex & J notebook" on the cover in sharpie. then i finished putting my april journal onto neocities

my closet rod fell down. this stressed me out. one of the rings that holds it at each side had apparently been slooowly deforming
from the weight & finally gave out. i took this as a sign to be grateful for having a lot of decorative cloths. i will try to find
other places for some of the sentimental clothes i never wear, & soon we will ask the landlord for a replacement ring

-

may 31st. i had a dream where i was getting more & more frustrated by an endless stream of inescapable nu metal & trying
to hit my head on my closet door in frustration, but the dream wouldn't let me. the feeling got so intense that i woke up in
an act of semi-consciously hitting my head into my pillow, growling in anger. i didn't like the way that that made me feel

i was awash with anxiety all day, filled with a terrible tension, terrible violent scenes flashing anxiously in my head
constantly. i think i underestimated the capacity of my paranoia. i just have to trust that everything will be ok. even
when the paranoia would subside, everything just felt odd & severe in some indescribable way. hot & severe & blank

i walked to the store for burritos. i had an umbrella. during my walk home i said "i don't need looove" in a sing-songy
rhythm over & over like a mantra. there was a kind of momentum to the repetition that i didn't want to break

june 1st. as i fell asleep in the early morning, some kind of incredibly nostalgic ancient interpretation of
eating oatmeal blew through my head & surprised me, then it was gone & i couldn't remember it again

my friend's flight came in around five pm. he'd been awake for a long time with no food. he went to the place where we would stay.
i got a very bad convenience store burrito that tasted like it was full of dog food. five birds congregated around my bird feeder

sweet pea played with a bird that seemed unable to fly, following it & sniffing at it as it hopped around. i thought this was very
delightful to see on some level but i did acknowledge that the bird was probably not physically okay. it hopped away into the tall grass

around eight, i walked to the store for some needle-nose tweezers, since they're really what you want in the event that you get a tick on
you. on my way there, a red sedan with wordless screams emanating from it passed a nearby intersection. i called 911 & told them
about it. this is somehow the second time in my life that i have called 911 to report a quickly appearing & disappearing sedan
with wordless screams emanating from it. the first time was right outside my apartment, maybe two years ago

while i was at the store, i realized my friend could wire me some money & i could get him a bunch
of provisional groceries! so we orchestrated that. i got frozen breakfast sandwiches & pizza bagel
bites, bagels & strawberry cream cheese, two boxes of granola bars, & some sugar cookies

my brother came & got me. we stopped by the apartment so i could pack up my laptop & some chargers, then
we set out for the place. when we got there, my dad got out & knocked on the door, & my friend opened it

at one point i considered ending this entry with approximately: "i walked through the
doorway, which was the veil of journal-secrecy." however, i later eased up on this
secrecy to some extent. i like that way of ending it, though, so i am noting it here

my friend had been tiredly listening to lucy while waiting for me. he brought thirteen dvds, nine books, & ten
perfume sample vials. we watched one of the dvds, which was a collection of the six piesek w kratke shorts

-

june 2nd. i typed a list of all the movies, books, & perfumes. i had forgotten to bring the "alex & j notebook," as well as my
toothbrush, unfortunately. as i stood in the bathroom, a farmhand knocked on the back door that is in it & startled me, causing
me to hop in the air. i read all the notes in the guestbook. in the early morning, i listened to music for airports, which
buried itself in the constant blare of the a/c that accompanied every moment of consciousness in there

i went out exploring & found a dead chicken in the yard that was missing its head. there were live chickens
roaming around too. i tried to feed one bits of a granola bar but they were too chewy for it. later i tried to
selectively feed them bits of a bagel, but they all caught on & started crowding around me. i tossed it
a distance away, uncertain whether i might get mobbed for it. they're more docile than that, though

i watched two black kittens climb down a little slanted ladder type thing to get out of a little elevated
coop they were in. there were dairy cows, & decorative bicycles along a fence, each fully painted
a different color. i swung in a hammock. i think this might be the night he watched me play spyro

-

june 3rd. chris haaga finally e-mailed me saying he'd shipped the dark side vinyl :) it was slated to arrive on the
ninth. i finished the book in praise of love. i went home for a day so i could sleep in my own bed, since we were
uncertain about how well i could sleep around someone else in an unfamiliar place. i walked back & forth in my
apartment, unable to focus on any tasks with my head enjoyably abuzz with the past day or two of experiences

as i fell asleep, a hypnagogic hallucination voice whispered to me, "then you press the x button to save a bird in that special place"

-

june 4th. in the afternoon, i walked to the store again so that my friend could paypal me a
hundred dollars & i could make a far more substantial grocery run. he sent me a list of requests

i got a bag of frozen corn for the hens, two cases each of blackberries & raspberries, a big bag of rice, two small tubs of butter,
a bottle of lemonade, peanut butter & jelly, two loaves of bread, another bag of bagels, a bag of baby carrots, five potatoes,
olive oil, aluminum foil, a bag each of apples & peaches, a carton of eggs, & two bottles of cranberry juice

he also said he'd be very glad to have some california rolls if i could find them. they weren't at the store, but
after my brother picked me up i asked him to stop at a nearby sushi place. at home, i packed my record player,
all of my records, a suitcase of clothes, & the little stuffed animal i got at that yard sale last year

the peaches in the bag were inappropriately crunchy until a day or two later

-

june 5th. in the morning, i discovered that it had rained overnight & that my vinyls had been placed at the exact spot on top of the
furnace over which a little water was prone to drip through. it only affected the one on top, which was my wirtschaftswunder self-titled.
it got some permanent cosmetic damage along one side of the sleeve, which disturbed me. we listened to all but two & a half of
the records. i gave the chickens lots of corn, holding a bowl of it & tossing it out across the grass for them to attack

i started laughing hysterically while lying in bed because i imagined someone having a stress dream that
was just an endless slideshow of still images of turtles with bloodcurdling screaming over it constantly

-

june 6th. i opened the bread maker & found that there had already been a loaf of bread in it the whole time. i pried it out. i had no idea
how old it might have been, but it didn't feel stale or seem moldy or anything. it tasted good, & i ate a lot of it with butter over the next
few days. my friend was unwilling to take the risk. i swung on the hammock & said "moo" to myself over & over. some of the chickens
began to follow me on sight because they knew i liked to hand out corn. i was able to call some of them by going "du-du-du-du-du," i
think. i put on four shirts because he was keeping it really cold in the little building. we listened to approximately one hundred &
twenty john maus songs in alphabetical order on my bluetooth speaker while he played fallout: new vegas. i fed the chickens
more corn, honing the "scattershot" throw that made it the most entertaining to watch them search it all out

-

june 7th. in the early morning, i ate a peach & found that they had become appropriately juicy & soft. i swung on the hammock, singing
all the pretty little horses to myself. i typed in this journal that i had typed a list of the things my friend brought, & deliberated on whether
reproducing the list would be "too much" with respect to appropriating my experiences into writing. the property owner, M, was out of town,
so all the chickens were locked up, but i smuggled them a whole peach that i was willing to sacrifice because it had had a small patch of
mold on it. they went crazy on it. i walked to the nearby creek, armed with my needle-nose tweezers. after i got back, i caught two seed
ticks crawling on my leg & killed them. while my friend was in the shower i put a bunch of smiley face stickers everywhere
(some of the stickers he had mailed me several months ago). i planned their placement carefully

-

june 8th. we watched most of la dolce vita, then night of the living dead, several episodes of dennis the menace, & he watched
all of andrei rublev but that one couldn't really hold my attention. he grabbed a fly out of the air with his hand & crushed it

i forget what day it was, but on some day, as i was either falling asleep or waking up, i caught one of my fingernails on part
of the bed & had my worst "yanking the nail in the opposite direction from the nail bed" experience thus far. it caused
a little "bruise" to form under the nail on the left side, which is still there as i write this on the eighteenth.
i hope it's not permanent. i did some reading, & it looks like it should go away after several months

-

june 9th. i woke up with a seed tick attached near my ankle & did away with it. outside, one of the cats walked past me with a mouse in its
mouth. i saw another one pounce on a little lizard & kill it. i walked a significant distance east along a road & back. it was a happy walk.
big sky & fields, tweeting birds & warmth. the loaf of bread from the bread maker had totally hardened. i trickled water on it
& microwaved it, & that made it edible again. this felt like an "unkind" thing to do to the bread, in some way

i went home for another night. when i got home, the vinyl from fwc had arrived! it came with a
handwritten note of thanks, too… that night, i washed all of my friend’s clothes, at his request

-

june 10th. i went to get my shot. it was my "annual," so i hoped all day that they wouldn't draw my blood. i went there & they drew my blood.
it wasn't that bad. after the nurse took my blood pressure, prior to the draw, she had said i was very calm. so it's hard to dispute that i
handled it well, i suppose. i went home. my dad cooked ribs & baked beans & other things, & wanted to send me back to my
friend with a container of food for each of us. i wrote a short review of everything everywhere all at once

i walked to the store for another grocery run. something in the woods smelled very sweet, unnaturally so. as i shopped, i listened
to an empty bliss beyond this world. i got cranberry juice, cran-apple juice, bananas, strawberries, celery, more bagels, more
cream cheese, razors, shaving cream, toothpaste, floss picks, & a pack of white tees. on the way home, i stopped
by the sushi restaurant again to get my friend another california roll, plus a philadelphia roll for myself

i headed back to my friend. there was a patch of road that smelled distinctly like semen, for some reason. as we drove, it seemed to resolve
into the smell of exploded fireworks. maybe these were just the smells of two adjacent patches of road, & the continuity was an illusion.
i brought the fwc lp, the thank-you card, several more articles of clothing, my "wooden egg" sunglasses, & my own blanket
(the "cheetah" one i've had since i was practically a baby.) i was very exhausted when i arrived back at the place

my second "song diary playlist" reached its conclusion, determined by the point at which
the description's five thousand character limit prevents me from listing the next song

-

june 11th. in the early morning, my friend tortured me by playing lots of cool songs on his phone & refusing to tell me any of the
names or artists, cursing them to be ephemeral. i really found it kind of distressing because i really do like establishing music &
pictures & so on during an experience that can take root in the memory of it & serve as a very unique & irreplaceable reminder
of the way that time felt. & it felt like setting up those kinds of markers & then just dashing them into nothingness

he called his friend K & spent a good while elaborately convincing him & his fiancee that he was stuck alone on a fishing boat in Alaska
for the next five months, eating nothing but rice & olive oil. i kept playing alarm sounds on my phone that he claimed would sound every time
someone flushed the toilet. then he called another friend & they terrorized a discord server that he had unwisely been given mod permissions in

i hadn't been writing in the "alex & J journal," except for a brief period on the thirty-first when
i thought our visit wouldn't actually happen, & appropriated the first two pages into a general
purpose journal. while my friend was in that call, though, i drew three pictures in it

we watched solaris but i couldn't pay attention very well & quietly
cried several times, always while there was a woman on screen

-

june 12th. in the early morning, my friend accidentally spilled drops of cranberry juice
on one of the beds & we had to figure that out. he scrubbed it out with hydrogen peroxide

after i slept, i spent all day looking at rateyourmusic & finding new arcane albums to download & tag & eventually upload. i must have
spent like twelve hours focused on that, i think. a wasp got into the kitchen & my friend killed it. it was the second wasp to get in

-

june 13th. in the early morning, while my friend was asleep, i went outside & called my friend B. we had a nice conversation. i jumped at
my own shadow. a cat ran into my peripheral vision & i yelped in fright. the sun began to rise & it was really pretty. as i was swinging on
the hammock in the dark, my phone died, terminating our conversation abruptly. i went inside to plug in my phone & to get on my laptop
& explain. i started playing tetris for a little while. i went back outside when the sun had risen a fair bit more & felt regretful that
i had gotten distracted by tetris instead of just lying on the hammock & watching the sunrise as something unbroken
& continuous. i swung in the hammock & said "it's sooo pretty... it's sooo pretty..." over & over

i typed the previous paragraph then went back out & swung vigorously on the hammock singing
phantasthma by ariel pink, which was stuck in my head because he says "what a fantastic morning!"

i went in & fell asleep after a little while, but not for long, because M had a cleaning lady named Nancy stop by
at nine am & she was at it for about half an hour. i decided to stay awake after that, so i didn't get much sleep

i decided to get forty minutes of sunlight for the day by setting a twenty minute timer on my phone, walking down
a nearby road until it went off, then walking back. this was an absolute ordeal, because the way back was agonizingly
hot & very humid. i was kind of a delirious wreck by the time i got back, & had to spend a bit of time recuperating

i swung vigorously on the hammock & sang normal song by perfume genius. i stayed up for a really
long time. practically all i did all day was listen to girlseeker & play tetris more. i'm not sure
why tetris became so alluring for me for a few days, but i got sick of it not too long after

while playing tetris, i'd tend to sit with my eyes bulging from imagining that i was unconsciously saying intrusive thoughts
out loud & not hearing it under the music that i was listening to through earbuds, & i pinched my lips shut with my fingers

i made a tumblr post that shot up to about six thousand notes. shortly after, i got
my first mean tumblr anon in a long while & wrote a five hundred word reply

-

june 15th. in the early morning, i called B again

the tap water started to smell strongly of chlorine. this disconcerted me, even though i reasoned that it was harmless
& made sense. i kept feeling like it was burning my throat a bit, but i couldn't tell if i was just imagining that

i went home for a little while. the floors of the bathroom & kitchen had been replaced with wood.
this was a pretty disorienting change in their character after nearly a decade of familiarity

i didn't sleep at home this time. i went to the store for more groceries. most of the lights there were off, switching on
& off randomly. at checkout, a lady asked me if i could spare some money because she was broke, trying to buy provisional
groceries & several jugs of water to drink because the plumbing in her house was messed up. i paid for everything she was
getting. it was only about twenty-five dollars, i think. the girl supervising the self-checkouts told her coworkers about this
& told me on my way out that it was very sweet. when i got back to my friend, i found a gift card in one of my shopping
bags. i think someone slipped it in because of what i did. i can't imagine how else it would have gotten there

-

june 17th. i added lots of pictures to my rym list of art. i compiled a music playlist themed around sweetness

there was a big, creepy spider lurking around the living room for a while. i finally managed to catch it under a whole frying
pan. i wasn't sure if i’d be able to find anything big enough to slide under it like a piece of paper, but i managed it by
unfolding an oatmeal box. then i found a big plastic platter in the kitchen that i could slide under that to make it
all easy to carry. it all came together perfectly. i carried it out into the dark & walked over to a light, wanting
to be sure when i lifted the pan that i had actually caught it. when i lifted the pan, it was not there

several minutes after i had gone back inside, it made a sudden reappearance, nearly crawling up onto my foot,
which made me jump & yelp. i caught it under the pan again. my friend then simply grabbed the pan & squashed it

i purchased an eighty-six dollar one-way bus ticket to Iowa City. i will depart on July first with about forty dollars to my name.
[it turns out i'll actually have nearly two hundred, fortunately.] it's one-way, but i'm not relocating there or anything. it just
wasn't the time feasible at to finance the return trip, so my pal's mom is going help with that over the course of the month

i felt deeply empty. i felt deeply empty because, although my stay in Iowa will probably be fun, i do
not feel like i am really in control anymore. or maybe i was just feeling depressive that afternoon

my dad found the thank-you card from chris h. in the back seat of the car. i'm glad that i didn't lose it!

this place is out in the middle of nowhere, & each grocery run entails asking my brother to drive out here & back twice, which i feel a bit
bad about. so i am trying to maximize the time between trips. it is making me self-conscious about how much i eat, which i didn't expect.
i am getting very hungry far more than usual, too, & i think it is because my breasts are developing far more significantly than they
have in the past three & a half years. my friend eats very little each day. i think our metabolisms differ in that i am generally
incapable of gaining body fat, so my body needs energy precisely when it needs it, it has no reserves

the tip of a headphone jack broke off inside of my friend's computer, somehow. so we would need to get it in to a repair shop

-

june 18th. i washed the dishes. i saw the most beautiful moment i think i've ever seen in the
billowing of clouds, an incredibly exquisite blending of blue & pink & grey, i fled inside for
a camera accidentally slamming the door loudly but couldn't find one before it had passed

this might be the day that my friend's replacement headphone cable arrived. but the delivery driver sent a picture
of the package on some wooden steps. these steps were on the side of the little building, but my friend thought
they were off somewhere else, & gave up on retrieving them, deciding to order another cable later on

-

june 19th. late at night my friend became very insistent that i call my dad for father's day, so i did. then my friend amusingly teased me
a lot about my not liking family guy & reading philosophy stuff, providing facetious reasons that the former was far better than the latter

-

june 20th. in the early morning i went out in the cool night by the fence by the chicken coop by the field surrounded by mostly darkness
with pinpoints of light like a distant orange streetlight, a nearby light pole, the bright moon that i couldn't quite focus on, the stars more
pronounced under less light pollution than usual, with a dog barking somewhere to the south, lonely-feeling, off in the distance
& echoing from far in the opposite direction. i was accompanied by a cat. i walked out slowly to the fence then turned
my head sluggishly from sight to sight as if in a daze, alone, wanting the moment shared, nocturnal remoteness

i redid my archive of tonetta's bandcamp from the ground up. in the early morning i called B again. a cow kept
making sounds that sounded pained, & each time a cow in an adjacent field would moo in reply. i went outside
& sat on the ground. a bunch of the chickens rushed over & crowded around me & pecked at me endlessly

this might be the morning when i found the package on the steps while my friend was asleep
& left the cable hanging from a little hook over the kitchen doorway before i fell asleep

i went home, again planning to be back the following day with lots of groceries. i also took my friend's laptop with me. i think
this is the day that i saw my closet rod had been fixed. i accidentally left my toothbrush behind, but i figured one day of not
brushing wouldn't kill me. i asked my brother to drop me off at a repair shop. we drove there & i handed the laptop in

the guy repeated my phone number a bit oddly, so after he printed the ticket i asked to see it, to make sure he'd
gotten it right. it wasn't even in the proper syntax of a phone number. i just said "ohh, n- no, no" quietly & wrote the
correct number underneath. when the guy looked & saw what he'd put down, he started laughing, sort of embarrassed

i exited the repair shop. i was starving, so i ambled over to a little mexican restaurant nearby
that i'd never been to. i gorged myself on a huge, delicious burrito. i waited there until the
repair shop was about to close, & headed back. the guy said they'd look at it tomorrow

i messaged my brother for a ride home. i told him i was at a nearby park & quickly walked there. when he pulled
up, i accidentally ran to the car across the drying asphalt of a small parking lot that was being refurbished

-

june 21st. the repair shop didn't call. i didn't have a toothbrush. i dozed off listening to the ordinary's conventional sound & felt good

-

june 22nd. the repair shop didn't call. it turned out we had a bunch of extra toothbrushes at my apartment. i was kinda stuck
in town until the shop called back. i also had to be back in town on the twenty-fourth anyway to get a shot. this felt like
a mess, like a lot of time being wasted. i considered collecting the laptop & having a friend of my dad's take a look at
it. my last long fingernail broke off. i'd somehow managed to lose all of them over the course of a week or two

-

june 23rd. i called the shop. it turned out they had tried to call me the day prior & tell me that the laptop was ready, but my
phone had been dead at the time. i went & retrieved it. the girl who returned it to me was really pretty & complimented
my nails. they were considerate enough to include the extracted headphone jack tip taped to the laptop's lid

i went on a big shopping trip, the last one i intended to make. the gift card that had appeared in one of my bags turned out to be good
for about twenty or thirty dollars. my brother & i stopped back at the apartment for a little while. i gave him a twenty dollar bill
because i wanted to compensate him for driving me to & from the place so much. he seemed kind of perturbed by that. both
him & my dad have a very visceral discomfort with things that feel even slightly... ritualized, or sentimental, i guess

i hurried back to my friend. his provisions were down to a bag of plain rice. a fine food, but he was down to it. i brought
my boots along. i also brought Silly along. Silly is a string puppet of the same design as the one in my youtube icon

-

june 24th. i headed back into town to get my shot. my dad came along & explained to me that he & i were losing our health
insurance soon & that i should ask how much my shots cost without it, & whether the clinic accepts medicaid. it turns out they
get funding that can cover my shots & help with paying for medication & all of that, so i’m okay with respect to that at least

at the clinic, i asked if it would be a smooth process to get my shot done at a clinic in Iowa, but it wouldn't. so they told me to be back the
morning before i leave, to "top me off," so to speak. i also learned that they plan to eventually take me off of spironolactone, because
after it gets my testosterone levels generally low then the estradiol will take over in suppressing them. i didn't know that

i headed back to my friend. my dad picked up a new pot for my sedum & sent me a picture of it

-

june 25th. in the early morning, a small toad got into the kitchen & i had to escort it out. then i walked to the creek in my boots so
i could walk around in the water a bit. there was a potent stench of death along part of the path that leads there. i had a tranquil
time, then headed back. my friend woke up & started ironically playing a clip from a tv show over & over, so i went back to
the creek. i saw lots of crawdads & big, fat, well-developed tadpoles. i covered my forearms & face in cool water. i went
back & fed the chickens the last few bites of a turkey & swiss wrap i'd gotten the day before. i went back into
the little building. i reread an old chatlog & it made me shed tears several times. it was a lethargic day

on that revisiting of the chatlog i committed to memory someone's love of being near the ocean, which i
guess i had glossed over prior. over the coming days i began to frequently imagine being near the ocean

-

june 26th. very shortly after waking, i walked to the creek & back again. my dad
repotted the sedum for me & sent a picture. i put my May journal onto neocities

-

june 27th. i put on my boots, went out for a walk, & called B. our call was long, but it had lots of flickers & dropouts because of my
remoteness. i set out for the creek again, but impulsively detoured to a huge hay field across the street. it was a heavenly place to be.
so empty. i traced its perimeter until at the far end i found a path to a second, smaller hay field. i traced its perimeter, passing a
ladder propped against a tree which led up to a little chair on which a hunter might stake out. i found a small, gorgeous path that
lead through dense lush trees on all sides. i followed this long path until i reached a gate. i turned & headed back to the
second field. i continued tracing its perimeter. it was around this time that my call with B dropped out entirely

this second field had an especially heavenly feeling, where it felt like the entire world was just this circle of earth bounded by trees
under a cloudless sky, & i was truly, peacefully alone. i found a strange path that was like a hole i had to jump down into. it quickly
led to a barbed wire fence, though. further along the perimeter i saw a coyote flee into the treeline. i found various places where i
could see a further stretch of the creek, but couldn't get to it because the shrubbery was denser than i preferred to trudge through

by this point the boots had become unbearably uncomfortable & i was becoming a hot, dehydrated wreck.
i finished tracing the second field, then finished tracing the main field. i got back to the property,
collapsed on the hammock as three chickens approached to greet me & peck at my legs

on the way back i investigated a nearby bridge over the creek & found a deer skeleton

a while after i'd gone back inside, i found a tick on my neck... if it had crawled
up to my scalp instead it would've been game over, i'd have never found it...

a little while after that, i heard a chicken idly going buk buk buk bugawk for the first time, having only heard
them cooing up to then. i went out & got most of the chickens to chase me at full speed simultaneously.
it made me laugh hysterically. i think that was the single most joyous moment of the whole month

around this day, i went to the coop & saw that someone had left a whole half of a watermelon for them. it
was just a rind by the time i discovered it. i'm sure it was just a rind not too long after they left it there

this might be the day when some random guy accidentally
opened the front door, probably thinking it was the tool shed

-

june 28th. a big spider with an egg sac got in. we were afraid that if we squashed it then its babies would swarm everywhere. my
friend had to catch it in a metal pot. my friend played the sopranos ps2 game & we laughed hysterically at a slot machine game
where, when you won a bunch of money, the money counter spent an absurdly long time ticking up at an unchanging rate

-

june 29th. our last full day in the little building surrounded by chickens. my bangs were just about back to normal length.
i wrote various experiences of mine in the guestbook, along with a little abstract drawing. we had to be out by three pm
the following day. around seven-thirty pm, we got a lot of our clothes & belongings packed up, divvied up the
food we'd each take. he gave me the piesek w kratke dvd & his (now infamous...) jacob's ladder toy

the spirit of the beehive. la chinoise. sitting ducks. a sign from god. superman & popeye: out to punch. benny & joon. scooby-doo,
where are you: the complete series. digging my own grave: the films of caveh zahedi. tales from the darkside: the complete
series. nicolas cage six-film collection. foetus: in excelsis corruptus deluxe. spongebob the first one hundred episodes

selected tweets. welcome to the monkey house. the yage letters redux. four novels of the 1960s. the
complete cosmicomics. kafka: the complete stories. a wrinkle in time. the tao te ching. flatland

villa nellcote. bon bon trio. bouquet ideale. be careful what you wish for. live
in colours. la stanza delle bambole. oud noir intense. the time... "versace
l'homme," "triumph & disaster deodorant," "prada sport luna rossa"

on the last shopping trip i had accidentally gotten a pack of muenster cheese instead of colby jack. my friend said he
didn't want it. late at night i decided to go crazy & see how it would feel to eat nearly the whole pack as one stack
of cheese. it was a bit much for me. i felt kind of bad because it could have been a lot of sandwiches. i dozed
off shortly after, serenely listening to the hypnotic song ne cherchez plus le by mecanique vegetale

-

june 30th. our last morning in the little building... i took pictures of the area, of the chickens, of the interior of the little building.
i put bon bon iii on my wrists. i went out to spend some time with the chickens & the cat. i swung in the hammock & stared at my
hands. the owner of the dairy cows came by in his truck. the cows mooed up a storm while he was around. he would repeatedly
shout & get responses from them. he drove off in the truck & came back on a four-by-four. the cat & i rendezvoused. it lazed
in my shadow on the driveway while i petted its head. four or five chickens surrounded me & pecked at me.
i knelt there, being pecked, & felt very equal to the animals all around me

on some level i also felt above some hypothetical person who had a totally cynical attitude towards animals. that didn't feel very equal.
i didn't know if i was living in that moment for myself or against some hypothetical person. i closed my eyes & repeated in my head, "let
go of all comparisons, let go of all comparisons," wanting to be innocent of constantly lurking notions of potential superiority. i'm not
sure if i managed to let go, but i did feel incredibly serene as i stood up & walked back towards the building to type these two paragraphs

i noticed my friend had put all the perfume vials in the piesek case for me. he got the remaining dishes washed & the beds
made. everything was packed up, cleaned up, put away, reset in the melancholic way that's done when it's time to vacate
a temporary living space & the ultimately transactional nature of having rented that space begins to assert its authority

my friend tried to find an uber. it took an hour & a half! he later told me that he tipped his driver sixty dollars for being
the one to finally drive out there. it took him away at around one-thirty, off to his second airbnb. why was he going to his
second airbnb? because there was... just sort of an arbitrary reality that he was going to stay in my city over the
month that i was off in Iowa. he left behind the big bag of rice, which he wanted me to bring over later

i was left alone in that little reset building for fifteen to twenty minutes. my brother arrived at
one-fifty-five. i packed everything into his car, went in, locked the front door, & left out the back,
as M requested. i think we did her whole checkout procedure perfectly, except for the a/c, which
i forgot to set to low. i took a long look at the kitchen before i stepped out the door for the last time

off we went, back to my apartment. i unpacked everything. around four, we drove to the second airbnb. it was a cozy little
upstairs apartment with weird caricature paintings on some of the walls, in a neighborhood with an "overgrown" "flavor"
not quite like any i've walked through before. i loved the way that the orange streetlights filtered in through the
blinds into stripes on the walls. from the outside, the place reminded me of where i lived in 2014

i decided to stay the night. a little coda to the month, it felt like. the plan was that i would wake
up at seven-thirty in the morning, he would call me an uber to the clinic, & we would part ways

i ate a bagel. i had to open lots of cupboards to find a plate for the bagel, & i started laughing at how many
i had opened. we watched the simpsons, & old videos he'd made, & lucy music videos, & the foetus live dvd.
we ordered boneless wings & a pizza & watched killer klowns from outer space, which i dozed off midway
through. i woke up. he tortured me for a little while with more ephemeral music. i fell asleep