8:02 AM – awake at 6:40, brenda the cat is walking on me. did i dream? it seems that i did, but i don’t remember. up, set the coffee brewing, pills. i mix up a protein shake for breakfast, along with: a cucumber from the garden and a slice of banana bread baked last night. the meatsticks have molded, i throw them away. i forget to take nuts. 

on the drive to work i pass a septic company with their lot full of portable toilets. a sea of outhouses in bright blue rows. the business of shit. someone has to do it. 

i’ve almost forgotten about this pain and sensitivity in my belly. it’s getting easier to ignore. 

ozzy osbourn has died. i somehow find it hard to care when these figments of the past finally depart. of course i have many fond memories of his music throughout my life, but the music still exists, unchanging. i can listen to it any time i want and it will sound exactly as it did back then. the art is preserved while its creator withers away and vanishes. there is something very distasteful to me about these rockstars in their 70s hobbling around on stage. it reeks of desperation, of delusion. a pathetic clinging. in any other context it would be a shameful cringing embarrassment for a 76 year old to dress and behave the same as they did in their twenties. 

i saw ozzy at one of the first ozzfests, and midway through the show he was unable to hit a high note (i forget which song) and threw the microphone down in frustration and left the stage. it took several minutes of cheering to bring him back out. that was twenty years ago, and i felt embarrassed for him then. why are you doing this to yourself? i thought. do you want to be remembered as an old man who can barely sing? do you want to overlay the frightening and visceral image of the prince of darkness biting the head off a bat, with this? 

i suppose the past is a powerful drug, especially for the old. one’s life is composed of more and more past, and less and less future, as time goes on. 

11:30 AM – i’m looking out my office window at the trees and blue sky, and below at a lone car, a bright red car like a splash of blood in the gray void of pavement and walls. there is an insect in here with me, bashing its head against the glass, trying to get out. it is a large cranefly, a creature that, as children, my siblings and i would call ‘floppy things.’ later, we heard them called ‘mosquito eaters,’ though they do not eat mosquitos, and are not predators at all. they live primarily on flower nectar. i wonder how this very common misconception (that craneflies eat mosquitos) came about. perhaps because they appear as a giant mosquito themselves. i watch the ‘floppy thing’ fly up and down, left and right, and press its thin legs and antennae all around, searching fanatically for a non-existent opening in the invisible wall. 

1 PM – anais nin says: Never have I seen as clearly as tonight that my diary-writing is a vice. I came home worn out by magnificent talks with Henry at the café; I glided into my bedroom, closed the curtains, threw a log into the fire, lit a cigarette, pulled the diary out of its last hiding place under my dressing table, threw it on the ivory silk quilt, and prepared for bed. I had the feeling that this is the way an opium smoker prepares for his opium pipe. For this is the moment when I relive my life in terms of a dream, a myth, an endless story.

can i become addicted to writing, as she seemed to be? it is one of few addictions i can think of that i’d pursue intentionally, if i knew a way to acquire it. 

i feel some sympathy with that cranefly buzzing next to me. like it, i know where i want to go, but not how to arrive. i can see the goal, right there, but whatever i do to fly toward it only amounts to banging my head against an invisible wall. how do i get out? how do i get out?

7PM – i return home and water some of the plants. i am given yet another zucchini as reward. then we head out the door again, a bit of shopping, then to the gym. thursdays are gym day, but due to this incarcerated hernia i am forbidden strenuous activity, and thus will miss out on this weekly strengthening. i drop S. at the gym, and drive across the street to the pub where i sit and type on my oh so convenient portable and foldable bluetooth keyboard. i order a beer (manny’s pale ale) and some onion rings–terribly unhealthy fare to compliment my unwilling avoidance of exercise. 

there is a live band here, singing repeatedly we all need the human touch. i’m certain i must have heard this rick springfield song many times before, but never until now did i parse the lyric. we all need the human touch, we all need the human touch… 

only just this evening, as I watered the squash, for some reason I found myself imagining what would become of a child who grew up with no human contact. in one of the many cruel and unregulated futures spread out before us, such experiments might be performed. a baby, spawned in a tube from egg and sperm, in an artificial incubator so as to avoid even the contact of the womb. then, raised in a blank sterile room, fed by machines, never seeing, hearing or smelling another living thing. how utterly broken would such a person be. how emotionally crippled for the sake of knowledge. because wouldn’t it be so temptingly interesting and useful to know which aspects of our behavior are learned from without and which are formed within us no matter what…  

1030 PM – a dinner of anaheim peppers, stuffed with chicken and air fried. evening pills, then, i sit once again in the quiet stillness of my office. i like to think that the pages of all these books absorb the sound and help cause this ringing in my ears. in peaceful moments like this, i wonder if i do need ‘the human touch’ after all. am i not happier alone, i sometimes wonder, aren’t i happier with books? but books are, after all, written by humans (for now) and thus, when they touch me, it is a human touch that they provide. i could not be happy without that touch. 

all i want to do is write and read, and read and write, and write about reading, and read about writing, and write about writing, and read about reading. but even though my passion for words (both mine and others’) seems only to grow with the years, i still often lose my grip on why. what is, i often find myself asking (or being asked, by some voice inside me..) the point? 

the point, the point. i have yet to find an answer beyond ‘it makes me happy.’ it feels good, it (hopefully) makes others feel good, or else feel something. 

but in the end, not everything must have a point. some things just are.