is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Time! (it's waiting in the wings.)

I'm a bit behind in my writing. I hadn't noticed how slow-moving things had been here on this site until just now when I saw that I had written all of six entries in June. Well, that's just how writing goes. Sometimes a pony gets depressed, and sometimes a writer falls behind.

That is true not only when it comes to this diary-thing, but also every-writing-thing, lately. A lot has been going on, and there is plenty to write about. Time has been drawn out and compacted all at once, and the only thing that seems stable is that I'm not finishing what I write. A stable inconclusion! I've written a bunch of unfinished things (for the diary, but also for other things I'm supposed to be writing or, more likely, things I'm supposed already to have written).

I've been writing things about the phenomenology of feeling hot (not hot like a NY subway station in July but rather as in when someone brings sexy back, or never lets it leave in the first place), about love and eros and Sappho (a nice return to an old obsession), about bhangra dancing (worth doing!), about Nietzsche and Levinas, and Levinas and theories of the rule of law (all worth thinking about), and so on. But I am stalled before the finish line on so many things at once.

Usually I don't stall right there (here?). Usually I am Jill MIH TCB S--. I don't do much stalling in general. But, well, a lot is going on. Moving, and moving to and fro, and paying the bills between the end and the beginning of old and new jobs, and the all-encompassing "dealing with change"--all this takes its toll, and its time. And oh, did I mention that I'm in San Francisco now? I'm here for the next four weeks. The minute I felt settled in Brooklyn, I decided I should mix things up a bit, you know?

(Ha. Actually this is the only time this summer when I can be here in SF for enough time to get quality time with my friends and family, so here I am!... it's time!) ("Time! It's waiting in the wings, it speaks of senseless things, its script is you and me...." as David Bowie would have it... "the sniper in the brain, regurgitating drain, incestuous and vain, and many other last names...") (I do love that Bowie song, and not only because it also includes the line "Time, in quaaludes and red wine..." You should go listen to it now.)

Like any time, it's good to be in the Bay Area. And I think I'll get some work done in my cute little house-sit house in Oakland. But I miss Gus. And I'm dealing with some personal demons that one (aka "I") would think one would have somehow mastered by now, but no. They even seem like they ought to be written about, or thought about, but instead I'm falling into bad old patterns and barely noticing and thus forgetting to kick my own ass, instead avoiding doing anything constructive.

In any case, I will start working soon. And perhaps you'll even get to hear about bhangra dancing, etc. Sometimes avoiding constructive activity is part of the larger process of construction. One has to feel one's way along the outside of one's life even while one is stuck on the inside, all the while negotiating the hard choices between when to be self-gentle and when to be self-tough.

I tend toward the self-tough (you know this; I love Nietzsche, and Levinas). But there are these interesting (that adjective is too kind, but I'm too tired or lazy to search for one more precise) ways in which I can be too self-gentle when it comes to keeping myself from falling into bad old patterns of thought. Not philosophic thought but life-thought, more like emotional attunement to the world, etc. No one ever completely stops being a child, it seems. So I'm making my way through a rough patch right now. But it's not all bad, as you well know. I'm in San Francisco, with friends and family nearby, I've got a new job starting soon, and I've got a Gus. The rest I will work my way through, in that neverending way we call life. (Bowie concludes: "We should be on by now.")

In the meantime, I had a two-hour dinner last night with EVANY THOMAS! Man, that was a welcome space of time.

10:56 p.m. - July 11, 2007

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next

the latest

older than the latest

random entry

get your own

write to me