J.R. in Revision

lol Indeed it does seem that I *have* lost the ability to write. 

Again. 

    I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.
    Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.
    Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over year.

6. A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. "I shall be yours," she told him, "when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window." But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

This is not about love. 'Cause I am not in love. In fact I can't stop falling out...

Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

Elizabeth Wurtzel

"But something went wrong—terribly wrong. The calm I had during those years was like a dormant illness or an allergy that doesn’t emerge until later in life, or something you don’t see coming because it’s coming from within: You are making yourself ill. I became seasick with contentment. It was nauseating daily, and I couldn’t still myself against a funny feeling that there had to be more to life than waking up every day beside the same person. To say I was bored would be to misunderstand boredom: I did not need to take up table tennis or ballroom dancing—I needed a sense that this wasn’t the end of the story. The idea of foreverwith any single person, even someone great whom I loved so much like Gregg, really did seem like what death actually is: a permanent stop. Love did not open up the world like a generous door, as it should to anyone getting married; instead it was the steel clamp of the iron maiden, shutting me behind its front metal hinge to asphyxiate slowly, and then suddenly. Every day would be the same, forever: The body, the conversation, it would never change—isn’t that the rhythm of prison?"

- Elizabeth Wurzel

Kirstens2

It surprises me when someone has a picture of me in their apartment.

She has more than a couple of me in display. But I loved her before I knew that.

And the first time I went to her apartment, it wasn't planned. So there was no quick dressing up of the place unless she was psychic of supposedly spontaneous things. I stopped in after dropping them off after an all-night party to bring in the new year. As we chatted and drank the cocktail she quickly fixed, and while fussing at her for trying to clean up because it didn't matter, I did the customary peruse through her bookshelves, the setup of her workstation, the pictures of family on the refrigerator... and then I saw me.

The fridge picture was of the group of us. All four, smiling, chests in various form of cleavagry, the composition and the subjects were slightly unfocused because the picturetaker was also more than a little buzzed. I like that picture. Very much. I've posted it here before. But I've always wanted to wallpaper my own home with my favorited pictures of times with friends. Just never got around to it... There's another picture of us in her bedroom. Just the two of us.