Wednesday, February 15, 2023
In which the wordage used is the appropriate wordage
I was totally unable to sleep last night. My legs, and then my hands and scalp, became unbearably itchy once I got into bed. I went and got the ice pack from the freezer, which sometimes helps to assuage the discomfort. Yet sleep did not come. I am resolved to quit Benadryl, which I have been known to load up on during desperate nights like these. The more seasoned among you have already been briefed about the calculi lodged in my submandibular gland, disrupting the flow of saliva and causing unsightly and sometimes painful distension under my lower left-side jaw when I eat. I stroke the small hard perfect orb in my neck with one finger as I sleeplessly consider my next word. I learned upon researching this condition, formally known as sialolithiasis, that it can be caused by sustained antihistamine use, due to the dehydrating effect of the medicine. Around 6:00 a.m. I get up to make coffee. I hear the ecstatic morning calls of sparrows outside the window as I finish typing this paragraph.
I dismantle the heavy blockade of curtains, partially pictured in my previous entry, which strains itself from dusk until dawn to prevent the intrusion of the hell-light. The hell-light is the gruesome hot-white LED streetlight across from my second-story bay window, which Keith Bray of the failing Brooklyn Borough Commission assures me via email, in language that approximates the donkey’s loud harsh cry, after which he is named, is fine:
The wattage used for subject location’s luminaire is the appropriate wattage used by the Division of Street Lighting for applications as subject location. Lighting luminaire is needed to provide recommended lighting levels conforming to the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA). Field survey confirmed proper installation of subject luminaire.
Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep, but I have lost the desire to keep writing.
My girlfriend’s smile upon waking is a better sight than can possibly be described.
I encourage her to provide me with a tablet of dextroamphetamine so that I can be at least slightly productive today, asking, “Don’t you want to support the arts?” “I will support the arts, in a few minutes,” she says as the sunrise appears from behind the horizon.
The futility of replacing a dehydrating antihistamine with a dehydrating amphetamine is not necessarily lost on me. But who cares?
Shall we discuss aporia? Why not, it’s already 9:12 a.m.
Aporia is “an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.” In rhetoric, “the expression of doubt.” Via late Latin from Greek, from aporos ‘impassable,’ from a- ‘without’ + poros ‘passage.’ Don’t bother opening your Dictionary app, I’ve just copied it out.
But let’s go to Merriam-Webster. “An expression of real or pretended doubt or uncertainty especially for rhetorical effect;” “a logical impasse or contradiction.” Especially “a radical contradiction in the import of a text or theory that is seen in deconstruction as inevitable.” Stay tuned to find out whether I cut this paragraph.
At 9:40 a.m. I pace around the room knowing I have no one to blame but myself.
I spend an hour and a half searching the room for my girlfriend’s cheap flavored nicotine vapes which I was sure she left all over the place but which now that I want them I simply cannot find. I must have hidden some of them when I thought naively that she was ever going to quit. But where?
“Gotta Serve Somebody” is playing as the album begins for the third or fourth time this morning. During “Precious Angel” I change to “Running” by Kate Bollinger and listen to it twenty-five times.
Laundry’s done. Or the wash cycle, anyway.
I look up a note I remember writing, abandoning for a moment an open file with the heading “Notes on Mogging,” otherwise empty:
The washing machine of the universe is in the stage of the wash known as the “spin cycle.” Where it passes more rapidly through the same repetitions, perhaps thinking to itself as it spins that it is not being repetitive at all, for though it has cycled this way before, it has not before done so at such a rapid pace.
From around October 31, 2022. I like it but have always felt it has something wrong about it. Not just that a washing machine doesn’t think. (For it will.)
I prepare to enjoy an orange which I slice with a mighty knife. Perhaps soon I will brew more coffee.
Perhaps soon I will stand up from my chair. Perhaps soon I will take a walk in the sun.
“After so much planning, consciousness becomes something you are happy to see flicker off,” I wrote on December 23, 2022, around 3:10 a.m., lying sleepless on my mother’s fold-down Wayfair couch with a twin-sized Army cot mattress thrown atop it and my bare feet elevated on the couch’s hard right-angled armrests, loaded on Benadryl. At 4:01 a.m. the same morning, I emailed myself a message, still one of the latest in a 196-message e-mail thread strictly “to” and “from” myself, dating back to June 2018, with the subject line “The Disappearing World”:
it's God speaking through me. I really believe that. The words are gifts from God. And i'm just happy when I receive them.
So I can relax. I have faith. It will happen when it happens. There's no great demand for more mediocre writing in the world. I do not need to force it. I don't want to.
After my first post here, on the morning of February 10, my old friend the writer John Moran, having already purchased a paid monthly subscription to this diary, before I had even set up Stripe (or really knew that it existed), Venmoed me in the amount of $16.75, with the note:
one hour of phone dictating whatever god says
I can’t find the tweet now but I saw one that said something like, “People who post from unfinished projects are thirsty.” Well, it’s true.
I take a small sip of water as I admire the orderly rows of cars double-parked below my window for street cleaning, with only a single delinquent vehicle on the road, parked just behind vanishing point. “Dat Dere” plays, by Rickie Lee Jones.
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