Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. . .

You've heard my complaints, read them again and again. And yet, and yet, certain things I must unburden my mind of: the new knowledge that the most conclusive results come from the smallest tests, and, totally unrelated, the double invagination of the chiasmus. Brought to you by Derrida, this -- a kiss on a dear red lip of rhetoric.

Poked, I get up again, to persevere purposelessly, to snatch days from the calendar, though truly only robbing myself in doing so, until one day when my thumbs are tied upon my chest and I rest,

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. . .

but it will be a quiet realization and one that will occur too late.

Right now, goddamn-you's still seem too gentle.

Bad French

If, as I write this entry on a laptop actually on my lap, zapping a future generation from my gonads, I were to tell you that people are utterly predictable, what would you say? You disagree? Let me assure you, then, that your disagreement is informed strictly by certain inherited, and perhaps cherished, biases of yours. You are not being completely honest with yourself. You're instantiating what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed meconaissance -- strategic misrecognition or avoidance of truths undeniably before us, a conspiracy of the intentionally, wilfully purblind in the interest of keeping greased the wheels of social intercourse. A thousand little lies shape your day, which would be quite different were those lies to become truths.

I, for instance, know precisely why my ex-wife left me -- though I will not disclose the reason why to you, cher lecteur (Extend to me a little meconaissance, won't you?). I thought about it at length today, as I have thousands of times before, and with each time the reasons grow increasingly undeniable. Now, the funny thing is, knowledge of the truth rarely comes with the sparing of your feelings. Hence the need for meconnaisance in the first place: feelings are of paramount importance, especially now. You draw more flies with honey than vinegar, after all.

You will, however, enjoy a certain flinty grace if you are able to be honest with yourself and are unwilling to settle for explanations -- typically rationalizations -- born of meconaissance. This grace comes in the form of a certain obduracy which allows you for a moment to regard the universe not as the medium of beneficent Providence, but rather as the indifferent void it truly is. This grace allows you to say with bitterness, but without self-pity, "I will be alive for a time and I will not be alive for a far greater time; my complaints, therefore, truly are just the 'sound and fury' of which Shakespeare's Macbeth speaks."

Certain Things

There are certain things, I think, one will never throw out. Not mementos. These are too ostentatious, meant more for others than oneself -- Here's the the train we took to Budapest! -- too pregnant with their place of origin or of purchase. No, the things I have in mind are far most humble, far more unassuming than mementos. Aides de memoire would perhaps would be a better term. Though even that does not quite signify, because unlike aides de memoire these things are accidentally talismanic, lacking the intentional investment enjoyed by things one keeps to remember.

The things I am speaking of are things most frequently found in the bottom of drawers, at the back of file cabinets, inside books or jacket pockets. Unlike a deliberately regarded aides de memoire, these things are more surprising. They strike one, not unpleasantly, but always with some poignancy, prompting him to remember events he had forgotten. One picks up this thing, usually in the course of tidying up, regards it, loses himself in the associations it evokes, and return it to its hiding place, forgetting, unless of course he stop to record this experience -- in a blog for instance -- moments later that he had even encountered the item.

Returned to its obscurity, it waits. Until some time later, perhaps years later, one find it again, and this time remembers not only the forgotten memory with which it is associated, but also the memory of having remembered this memory before.

These things, then, are the parts of one that recede from the light of active memory. They remind one that he is aging and that he is reaching a point in his existence where he will have more memories than he will make. They are signposts on the road to his long home, and, though he neglects these humble things most of the time, he know dimly that he needs to discover them again and again. For they offer to conjure the ghosts of pleasures and sorrows which become his only consolation.

Fear

I fear people who smile with their mouths open; they always look as if they're about to bite you and seem pained at having to do so.

I fear people who measure one's humanity by focusing exclusively on externalities. The fat, mutilated, maimed and crippled are to them strangely somehow beyond suffering in their suffering. Only the beautiful can know heartache, can know pain -- the pain of an esophagus burned by acid vomit, the pain of breast-implant surgery recovery, the pain of taxed but chiseled muscles marshaled against gravity in some mindless fuck of physics to engender more beef, more shapes unnatural in their shapeliness.

I fear people who see others as nothing more than animate beige stains against the snow globe of their awareness, whose puling is maddening in its pointlessness, whose complaints cannot be real complaints because they're not his complaints.

I fear people.

An Afternoon Spent with the In-laws

Oh, how they come at you with smiles hard as drill bits,
to look you over, the soft white curiosity you are --
all cotton, khaki and slender fingers that they when greeting you
clasp with blunt rough hands, making you feel
as if your hand is caught in coral.

They ask with small interest what you do, but you are speechless,
transfixed by the reflection of yourself in the dirty paneled mirror
that shows you to yourself in this very moment,
and you hear more the thoughts of you you imagine they’re thinking
than the words they’re speaking.

Thus you leave them with the impression that you,
already rather faggotty, do nothing but compose poetry indolently
while their poor daughtergranddaughter buries her promise behind a time-clock
in order to keep hearth and home together; though the fireplace, you remind them,
is strictly ornamental and you do teach to earn a wage most of the year.

You do go two months without a paycheck in the summer unless you can hustle,
scrape some work together that will allow you to escape
the reproachful glare she greets you with each day at the end of her shift
until you wish you could just live in a sewer and drink monsoon humidity

but you must have that new couch,
new media cabinet —
must in short live
as a tenured professor
though you’re still just a grad student.

Prolegomena to a Valediction

It will be good to leave this place where summer, overstaying his welcome, squats to pick his ass on mountain peaks; where every dumpster diver is a veritable sage of Köenigsburg in his untidy regularity -- a device to synchronize watches by.

It will be good to leave this place, without sadness, but with a measure of bitterness. May scandal and humiliation crawl about this town all they want, and wriggle their maggoty being upon it until it sags back into the cooked gray crust it was before the red man, before the white man -- long before the degenerate, run off from towns which wrested order and civility from cold mud and deep forests, turned his eye to it with designs for a blasted paradise, an oasis of low life, loose change and looser morals.

This town seethes with criminality; it ripples with shoulders slumping in defeat.

Another Whore in the Brothel of the Cash Nexus

Embarrassing.

I posted a resumé on monster.com last night. What insipid, and, what's worse, dishonest writing it requires of one. One must trumpet every trivial procedure in language that makes it seem such expert, recondite stuff. Wretched.

Here is an example, culled from my resumé:

I wish to secure part-time employment as a copy or content editor. I have six years of relevant experience, and my command of written English is regarded highly by professionals in my field. I believe that my skill and experience would prove useful to any private or public interest for whom written communication is essential.

So self-important, yet so supplicatory. Yes, reader, your humble E. is sinking quickly in to that modern Slough of Despond: the job market.