12.12

keep rereading the first chapter of the secret history the last few days because i love how richard papen talks about growing up in a family that just wasn't a vibe...i get him. long passage incoming

I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose.

Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.

The dazzle of this fictive childhood—full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents—has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket and the squashed old football I contributed to neighborhood games; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know. I did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read—Tom Swift, the Tolkien books—but also to watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school.

I honestly can’t remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching “The Wonderful World of Disney” on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day—early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong—but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn’t pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

...

I don’t think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me. Though I now suspect, given the circumstances and my disposition, I would’ve been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that my unhappiness was indigenous to that place. Perhaps a part of it was. While to a certain extent Milton is right—the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth—it is nonetheless clear that Plano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city. In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules. Then I would walk like a zombie to the parking lot and drive to the baseball field, where I wouldn’t even get out of the car, just sit with my hands on the steering wheel and stare at the Cyclone fence and the yellowed winter grass until the sun went down and it was too dark for me to see.

12.11

having a cough for 3+ weeks is eroding my sense of self. it's completely squashing my creativity, i want to bring a poem for the reading tomorrow but i have nothing. does anyone have a "weird but true" trick for eliminating a productive cough for good...accepting old wives' tales, fables, superstitions, something that worked once and never again.....hit my mf line

12.10

okay not a joke i think i purchased a cursed item from the antique store...it's a postcard with strange artwork on the front, it's kind of neutral milk hotel-esque with a lion and a woman with her face obscured. printed on the back it says:

Dear

My favorite memory of us is

and then it has the national guard logo in the bottom right corner. gabe and i took turns holding it and laughing because it's just so bizarre. but the energy of it is weird. when i picked it out i had to sit down in the stall for a bit because my head felt swimmy. then in line i started feeling really nauseous so i ran to the bathroom and threw up. something just didn't feel right. and then i had the postcard in my room that night and i couldn't fall asleep until 2:30am and slept terribly. i've taken it out of my room but i'm still not sleeping well. i try not to give this stuff too much power bc my religious ocd makes me obsess over superstitions and energies but i'm feeling really weird about it all. i think i'm just gonna silently return it to the antique store. but my anxious brain is saying i don't want to drive with it in the car because i don't trust it. which i know is crazy but i heard this episode of Otherworld where someone had a cursed doll in the car and they suddenly heard the sound of chains clanking loudly and then they crashed into a pole that wasn't there before. but i will feel like a real tweaker if i walk my ass 43 minutes to the hill antique mall. please advise

ok im realizing i drove home with it in the first place so it's fine but i will be returning it for sure

12.8

i will not be at pinball tonight i’m sorry y’all

have you ever thought about how the theme of st. louis is world’s fair and france? and distantly, (formerly?) unsinkable beer empire. i bought a bud light tshirt this weekend and it had 00 on the back like it’s a uniform. which, to me, is a simulacrum of truth

12.4

watching fear factor. which is making me crave beast games season 2. last season when the contestants had their family come for moral support i asked my roommate “would you visit me on Beast Island?” and she laughed and said no. which i couldn’t decide if that was a slight or a woke take. would you judge me if i had to go to beast island rq

12.3

need to sort out my journals for this year my naming conventions are confusing

stuck in my head: we carry the flame, we fight for the gospel