a sticky and blurry morning. i dreamed of a friend i haven’t heard from in a while. the air outside smells of the woodsmoke floating in from canada and the wildfires all around. our burning world. feverishly razed by the rich so they can turn their billions into trillions. 

on the drive in i thought and continue to think about plath’s journals. will this book trigger another crises of confidence in me? the last time that happened was when i read sebald’s novels and didn’t write for almost a year. i suppose i am psychically stronger now, but this is different. not only are these journals completely unedited and transcribed directly from her handwritten pages, not only were they written presumably for herself with no thought of them ever being read by others let alone published for the world, not only were they written (in these beginning pages that i’ve read) when she was eighteen— despite all that they are so beautiful, introspective and honest and poetic and deeply thoughtful and so often i’ve felt that i’ve been reading my own thoughts, and how on earth can someone be this good at writing so early in their life? i begin to wonder, yet again, if i am and will always be simply mediocre

something about these pages (plath’s) fills me with a warm unease. they are so familiar, so intimate. perhaps some of it is her tendency to write in the second person. but i think that is only a small part. it is strange and powerful to read thoughts so like my own from another person in another time. i feel some foreboding, not for her, whose tragic end i of course know already, but for myself and what might change within me by the end of this book. but also, somehow, this feeling is tinged with anticipation… 

after work i go to the salon near my house for a haircut. the usual stylist is busy, so her colleague waves me over to his chair. i follow without a thought, my mind elsewhere. snip snip, buzz buzz, clip clip. it is some minutes before i think that this is perhaps the first time i’ve had my hair cut by a man (excluding of course my father, who would buzz our hair short) and i wonder why it is that those who cut hair seem always to be women. but perhaps it’s only that ive never been able to grow a beard, and don’t go to a barber, which are generally men… how odd, all of it, the gendering of jobs that have nothing to do with sex.