David

12:58am: Sneezing metaphysically
I've come down with a cold. I should be grateful, I guess, that I haven't had one in over a year before this. But the very fact that so much time has gone by cold-free has made it that much nastier a surprise. I called out of work today for the first time in quite awhile, and I'm considering doing so tomorrow too, especially since I think I still have sick or vacation days left this year which I haven't used. Today Margot left for a trip to Gainesville for the weekend too. I last saw her this morning before she left for work. I think she comes back Monday, since the museum she works at is always closed Monday and she wouldn't have work. I have loaded up on chicken soup and tea and all that stuff and have already watched two movies tonight (Year One: awful, Away We Go: wonderful). Before I got sick I was going to maybe try and be social this weekend for once, and go places or call people once I was out of work. But that ain't happening anymore, of course. Instead I will cherish this true solitude, and make the best of this illness, which after all, is the closest a sober guy like me is ever going to get to being fucked up again. :-) I will sleep a lot, and probably read, and maybe write some more stupid shit on here, and generally revel in the hazy, feverish lucidity only the common cold can bring. It says something about the nature of both poetry and of illness that at the moment, I feel more than usually inclined to write poetry or something, but I don't see that really happening. Well, maybe. Anyway, I do like this enforced seclusion (similar to the way many enjoy being at home during a rainstorm) because it makes me feel less strange and pathological than voluntary seclusion. I only wish it didn't cost me a stuffed-up nose and all this achiness. I will probably go back to work on Sunday but I'm already afraid. Wednesday, in part because it was a holiday and thus busier than usual, was just an awful, aggravating day there, and even though it's much more the exception than the rule, I'm not sure I can face another day like that, at least not so soon. But being sick makes me irrationally doubt my capacity to do anything at all, I guess. Still, the doubt persists.

I am woozy with uncertainty. My brain feels heavy, asymmetrically heavy. My throat is dry with silence. I should go to sleep but something makes me not want to. Maybe I'll...just pass out...

3:06pm: I ended up dropping my two classes for the semester. On Tuesday, October 6th, a bunch of stuff was due in both classes and I just couldn't get up the energy and focus to work on them. (Some of it was catch-up work, as I had already fallen behind.) The prospect of continuing for another two months in such an agonizing manner, vainly trying to balance a full-time job with two classes I had to commute an hour each way to get to, was too much to bear. I'm sure many of you have handled a much heavier workload successfully, and I'm likely capable of it myself. I suppose the whole breakup thing immediately preceding the deadline didn't help. Anyway, after the customary weeklong period of self-loathing and radical doubt about my future subsided, I returned to my usual mixture of boyish cheerfulness and mild melancholy.

One useful consequence of my dropping these classes, besides the increased free time and dramatically reduced stress levels, is that I have the opportunity, during the rest of the semester, to fulfill my English degree's foreign language requirement. Allow me to explain. Several months ago I saw an academic advisor, who informed me that I only needed eight more courses to graduate, not including the two I was then about to enroll in. Of these, two had to be in a foreign language, which I had been unsure about before this. The only foreign language I've taken at all is Spanish, and the last time I took it was in 9th grade, when I got D's in Spanish III after acing Spanish I and II in middle school. This frustrating experience (I hated the teacher and the way the class was run) spoiled my interest in Spanish, and I have taken no other courses in it since. Until recently I had been unclear about whether I had to take a language in college, and I earned my A.A. degree without it, so I figured it was unnecessary. Now it turns out otherwise, but luckily I found out I can CLEP (College Level Examination Program) out of it. That is, I can pay around $100, take a computerized exam lasting 90 minutes or so, and with a high enough score, earn credit in lieu of taking the course. This is how I earned my credits for biology, college algebra, and for some lower level British literature course. Anyway, they have one for Spanish, and with a scaled score of 50 or above I get one credit, and with 63 or above, both required credits. A couple of weeks ago I bought a study guide for the exam, promptly began procrastinating, and in the last few days have begun actually reading it. Until today I thought the latest day I could take the exam this year was November 30th, but I just checked before starting this post and now, to my great relief, there are many more available dates up to December 23rd. So this gives me an opportunity I wouldn't have had if I had to worry about two classes this semester. I can spend my more ambitious hours studying Spanish, and the rest doing as I wish. More importantly, it will save me from having to mix in two semesters of Spanish with my English literary studies.

I could probably have gone into far less detail about all that than I did. Sorry.

Margot and I have been getting along very well, without any fights or complications to speak of. We are still very physically and emotionally intimate, and altogether relaxed around one another. We still even sleep in the same bed sometimes. But now the pressures that come with an official relationship are gone. As friends we've become closer than ever, and I hope to always have her friendship. In many ways little has changed, yet in other ways the only changes have been positive ones, at least as I look at it. Still, I know things can't last in this form forever. Soon enough she will be going to graduate school in some other state, or possibly even in England, and this fact is an unpleasant reminder that, at the moment, she is the only close friend I have any regular, real-life contact with. All my other friends have by now drifted into the periphery of my life (or out of it entirely) for various reasons, and I find each case uniquely depressing to contemplate, though nonetheless I often do. What will I do when Margot leaves? That's a question I don't have an answer to right now. I don't care much for the idea of becoming an insane recluse who only talks to himself and his cats. I doubt that will happen though.

Work is the same as usual, more or less. However, recently I started coming in late a lot for my 7 am shifts (probably because I've found I still like to stay up late and not get enough sleep to get up that early), so my manager and I agreed to change my hours from 7-3 to 8-4. It's already proving to be a better arrangement. I can stay up later and not come in the next day drowsily hating the world, and getting out an hour later makes no difference to me.

The weekend before Halloween, Margot's friends Nova and Michelle, from Gainesville, were in town. They stayed with us and we had a lot of fun. Thursday, the night they arrived, they had a girls' night out, but Friday, after an unusually shitty day at work, I decided I wanted to make up for it by cooking all of us an elaborate, multi-course meal. I stocked up on the necessary supplies and, with some help from the girls, especially Nova, I made a mostly successful meal. To start I made a kind of toasted bread appetizer by cutting up a loaf of French bread and topping it with sliced Havarti cheese and baking them in the oven. I also made a salad with hearts of romaine, spinach, sliced pears, honey-roasted peanuts, grated cheese, croutons, and bacon bits. I had bought a bag of fresh matchstick carrots, too, but I think I forgot to include them. I wish I would have gotten more of a variety of vegetables and other things to put on the salad, but it was well enough received that it didn't matter that much. At the same time I tried to make a smoothie blend, which was perhaps the least successful part of my endeavor. I bought a whole cantaloupe, some bananas, pears, and coconut milk, sliced them all, and blended them with some ice and a shot or two of this weird vanilla syrup I have, but the freezer happened to be low on ice, so the smoothies came out rather warm. And possibly because I didn't use any juice, they were a bit too thick. I think my basic idea was sound, but needs some refining. It was my first attempt at making smoothies on my own, so judging by that fact, they didn't come out too badly. Anyway, the main course was burgers. I used those frozen Bubba burgers one can find at the supermarket. I brushed them all over with A1 steak sauce, the sweet hickory variety (they make several different flavors, and I have a bottle of almost each one in my fridge since I make burgers a lot) and burger seasoning and cooked them in my George Foreman grill. Nova cut up an onion and sauteed it in a tangy barbecue sauce I have. When the burgers were done, I topped them with the onions and some crumbled bleu cheese. I somewhat undercooked the burgers, but not dangerously so, due to my paranoia about overcooking them (I've had a few disappointments in the past with that). But other than that they turned out excellently. For dessert I had planned to make some Jello instant French vanilla pudding and mix in some crushed-up chocolate chip meringue cookies, but we were all too full for that. I made said dessert only last night, which Margot and I enjoyed.

The next night we saw Venetian Snares, a.k.a. Aaron Funk, perform in West Palm Beach. I had only slight familiarity with him before this. Nova, however, came all the way down here from Gainesville that weekend largely to see him. He was amazing, in his virtuosic, brain-hammering way. Dino Felipe and Wisp opened, and I enjoyed both, but especially the former, who puts on a highly unusual show.

One day a couple of weeks ago I was down in Boca Raton and I discovered an excellent used book store, called Bookwise, in an area I'd never explored, just north of the FAU campus. It's much bigger and nicer than the place in my area, Book Exchange, and the selection is far better. I had recently gone to Book Exchange to clean out some old stuff I didn't need anymore, and of course bought a few things there as well, only paying a total of $6 for a bunch of books, but had to endure a seemingly endless monologue as I was being rung up, presumably by one of the store's proprietors. He told me all about various graphic novels, in unrelenting detail. I had little prior knowledge with which to respond, and even less interest. It was an off-putting experience, to say the least. Anyway, Bookwise actually had a section for literary biographies (as opposed to regular biographies), which I'd never before seen, and they had a section for general essays, literary theory, and criticism. Book Exchange had no section for general essays, and when I asked the guy, he had no idea what I was talking about. He kept saying "Essays about what?" and seemed to be under the impression that essays had to be about specific topics, so I should just look in those respective sections. To him it must have seemed exactly like the question we at Barnes & Noble (and elsewhere I'm sure) regularly get from the more especially retarded customers: "Where's nonfiction?" From Bookwise I bought a biography of Sherwood Anderson, a Viking Critical Edition of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which has lots of essays and reviews and other material on the book, William H. Gass's essay collection Habitations of the Word, and Belgian literary critic Georges Poulet's Studies in Human Time. The latter is a fascinating exploration, or reconstruction, of the supposed consciousnesses of classical French authors like Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Moliere, Racine, Rousseau, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Valery, and Proust, especially the way time functions in each author's consciousness. Included is an appendix featuring shorter treatments of American authors: Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot. I'm not aware of anyone before or since who has taken quite this approach to literary criticism. There may be something fallacious and ultimately untenable about it, in that it seems to identify an author's entire mental world with his public and private literary output, but it is also one with rich suggestive possibilities. At any rate it's made for good reading so far.

All that talk about food earlier has made me hungry. I'll supplement this with another post later, perhaps.

11:28pm: I have been holding up okay from the breakup, somewhat better than I expected. I have joked to others that I have been going through DABDA (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief from her book On Death and Dying, the stages being denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) on repeat, but that was more true the first couple of days than it is now. Given the way I habitually repress my true emotions, I'm sometimes not sure if I'm still in denial or if I'm already approaching acceptance. Either way, I have been trying my best not to dwell on it, and it has helped that things between Margot and me have still been very comfortable and friendly. I can only hope this will continue, and do my best to ensure it, since we live together and all. The couple of friends I've spoken to about it have been very supportive (and indeed, in one instance, rather comically supportive) and I thank them for it. I still have yet to tell some other friends who do not read this journal. I only told my mom about it Wednesday night.

I feel I cannot afford to dwell on it so much now, anyway, because at the moment I'm rather behind in school, and have a paper due in the 19th century American novel class on Tuesday (albeit only five pages). In the creative nonfiction class, a combination of my perennial procrastinating, my strenuous work schedule, and the slight misfortune of my having been assigned one of the earliest due dates for turning in an essay for workshopping, has resulted in my turning in a woefully short, hastily conceived, altogether embarrassing piece of work. If the revised and greatly expanded draft turns out to be worth anything, I may post it on here. Which reminds me, I have a small trove of critical essays and papers I wrote for my other classes in the past year, some of which may be worth exposing to the sublime indifference of the Internet. This would be more for archival purposes than anything else, though, since much of it is handwritten from essay tests and has not yet been typed up.

This past Tuesday was the turning point in what might otherwise have been quite a dismal trajectory. I decided around 11 am that I just needed a day off from everything, goddamnit, and so, determining it to be a relatively unimportant day in my classes, I skipped them. You see, the way my schedule is set up, each day involves either 8+ hours of work at the bookstore, or several hours in class and nearly two hours driving to campus and back. Combined with other necessities and responsibilities, this schedule has quickly made me feel rigidified, compressed. This is one reason I've been more reluctant to go to AA meetings lately. My free time is spare and precious, and it's not always a certainty I will feel any better after a meeting than before, though I sometimes do, and I surely benefitted more when I went more regularly.

Anyway, I had a glorious day playing hooky from school. I went to an AA meeting nearby at noon, which I hadn't done in a week or so, and upon returning I made a pizza and read the wonderful book Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction while cuddling with my cats. At about 4 pm I decided to go to the beach, where I alternately went in the water and read Moby Dick (I know, a fitting environment to read it in), which I'm about half done with but am supposed to have finished a week ago. The weather was perfect, warm but not overly hot, and the water was just right. After feeling how hospitable the water temperature was, I dove right in, and swam aimlessly with the tide. Sometimes I simply drifted on my back and I could hear, with my submerged ears, the sparlking clink of scattered seashells surging through the heaving waves. These waves were a little larger than I expected, or maybe it was just that I hadn't been to the beach in awhile. Joyously I let them flop me onto the shore and pummel and drag me back into the all-receiving sea. It was the first time in recent memory that I have been able to just let go, let go of everything. For the time being I was reconciled to life again.

Around 6 pm I suppose the magic began to wear off, and I grew restless and considered leaving soon. I was hastened in my decision by the obnoxious arrival of several young surfer-fucks, whose slack-jawed speech patterns heralded the mental vacuity with which I would soon be surrounded if I did not make my exit soon. But I was not upset, and I did not begrudge them their existence, merely deeming it best that I took my own existence elsewhere. By this time, at any rate, there was little daylight left to be enjoyed. The beach would always be there another day. I resolved to go more often, and go some way toward correcting my landlubberly standoffishness toward the sea.

I was going to work on some school stuff tonight but instead I wrote this. For now, this might be more important. Tomorrow I work 7-3 and I'll have the rest of the day to get other pressing things done, or at least started. And for me, starting anything is well over half the battle.

10:20pm: Disintegration
Eight months into my first ever relationship, with Margot, I have just been dumped. But since we just signed a one-year lease until next September, we're still going to live together as friends. We get along well enough as friends and roommates. But she will take the other room, which has been vacant since my old roommate Chris moved out in July. She also still has her dad's house nearby, which is where she has gone for tonight. By now we have two cats (my black cat Wednesday, about a year and a half of age, and Luanne, or Lulu, around four months of age) and Margot's albino hedgehog, Macaroon. Margot had been living with me since March or April. We built a whole beautiful life together. Now that is going to be different. It is going to be replaced by a lukewarm, courteous, sexless friendship, and we will have our separate lives and loves. We will continue to switch over each other's laundry and we will still laugh together over the cats. But eventually other people and things will eclipse the afterglow of our love and there will be no question when it comes time to renew the lease again or not. Next year or the year after she might be going away for a graduate program in art conservation and now the once-looming problem of a long-distance relationship has been made a moot issue.

I still have a job at Barnes and Noble, but since mid-June it has been full time instead of part time, and I usually come in at 7 or 8 am instead of in the afternoon. I am now responsible for what is called frontlist, which means I shelve all the new product that comes in, with the exception of bargain, kids, teen, music, DVD, and gift, which are handled by others. I was offered this position when the previous person, Kelsey, left. The management unanimously decided I was the best one for the job. Last weekend I received a performance review and found out my raise would only be from $7.75 an hour to $8.00 an hour, which I imagine is the sort of raise everyone gets by default anyway. I was insulted and dismayed but it seems I don't have anywhere else to go for now, and the job is comfortable for me, so I'm staying. I work 40 hours a week, five days a week, and my two days off, Tuesday and Thursday, I go to school in Boca Raton, about 35 miles south, from 2:00 to 5:20 pm. I'm taking two courses: American Novel 19th century, where we are currently wrapping up with Moby Dick, and Creative Writing Nonfiction, which is an interesting course I nevertheless don't feel like describing right now. Being as busy as I am, I have found it tough to keep up with school this semester, but I'm trying. It may be a close call but I refuse to drop classes like I've done in the past.

I am still sober but seldom attend AA meetings anymore. For the past few months I haven't had a sponsor, and have made no attempt to get a new one. I have more or less detached myself from the social groups I went around with in AA. I have no friends to speak of in the area, and few others in any other areas. A few weeks ago it became apparent that Margot comprised almost my entire social life. It's not that I didn't want other friends, but I began to find it harder and harder to relate to people other than her on a more than superficial basis. As things suddenly are now, I have never within recent memory been so alone.

But, I have a lot of great books still unread. I have a lot of writing still unwritten. And now a lot of new tears, still unshed.

2:40pm: Those who know me well know of my affinity for all things sweet, particularly sodas. I had until recently thought myself something of a connoisseur in this regard, but today I was humbled and delighted to find what has quickly proven itself to be my new favorite blog, and an all-around great site: http://www.weirdsodareview.com/

Also, I have successfully quit smoking, cold turkey, for nearly two months now. I got a promotion at my job at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago, too. More on this and other stuff later.

4:00am: It's a bird! It's a plane! It's an update!
Well, it's been awhile. Where could I possibly begin? It's safe to say I've entered what might be called the second major phase of my new sober life which began in late November of 2007. I still sort of wanted to do that recap of 2008, but by this time it seems so far into the year as to render that almost irrelevant. But not quite. What will follow in this improvised sketch is an account of, roughly, the past year and a half of my life. Regrettably, I feel I am not the raconteur I once was (or, more optimistically viewed, perhaps I am merely out of practice). Nor can I hope, with my relatively untroubled emotional landscape (which I don't always find to be a desirable thing, in case that sounds smug), to approach the poetic intensity I once prided myself on. Instead I will settle for the imperfection of being informative and, I hope, not too dry.

As I've rehearsed numerous times by now, in the fall of 2007 my life had reached what I thought to be a dead end. Suicidal, heartbroken, guilt-ridden, frenziedly resentful, and hopelessly drug-addicted, I had run my life into the ground. I wanted nothing more than to give up and waste away alone and defeated, or else die as soon as possible. Such a tragic end had the appeal of a perverse kind of dignity, the allure of a Pyrrhic victory. Of course, that is not what happened. One might say the world turned out to have other plans, or alternately, some faint ember of hope within prevented a total surrender. Whatever it was, soon I was to see that things were about to change. I entered a treatment center (that is, a rehab) in the West Palm Beach area (65 miles or so north of my native Hollywood) on November 23rd and stayed for two months. I still have many vivid memories from that time, but I wrote relatively little during my stay there, despite the encouragement we were given to journal daily about our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The first couple of weeks were rough for various reasons, most notably a severe, agonizing and debilitating allergic reaction I had to a medication I was briefly put on. But after that, I generally enjoyed my time in rehab, strange though it sounds to say. I could expand much more on this part but it would really require an entry all its own, and I'm starting to get tired, so I'll refrain.

In late January 2008 I completed treatment, entered the center's affiliated halfway house, and began working at the nearby Barnes and Noble, where I still work to this day. The particulars of my various living situations at that time have already been discussed in an entry from August, and even if one doesn't recall them (likely the case), they are of little interest now, so I'll skip them. That summer, as I also discussed elsewhere, I resumed my pursuit of an English degree at Florida Atlantic University. Since then I have been successful, though I've been moving at a far from ambitious pace. In the summer I received an A and a B+ in my two classes, and in the fall, an A in my single class, though I found it necessary to drop another one I was taking at the time, to my chagrin. Similarly, with the spring semester winding down, and naught but two research papers (due the 27th and 30th of April, respectively) on which to exercise my powers of procrastination before turning them in to an admiring and sympathetic professor, I can reasonably hope to get two more A's, but have had to drop another class due to its insanely demanding workload, among other things.

In April 2008, a bizarre set of circumstances led to me going to a strip club for my first time, accompanied by Christian (my sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous since December 2007), his two other sponsees, and my longtime friend Travis, and getting my first lap dance, before attempting to see the punk rock band The Dwarves, only to find out the show was canceled due to the band being stuck in bad weather en route. Also that month, I placed second in an adult spelling bee held in a Fort Lauderdale mall, vanquished by crossword puzzle champion, former Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestant, and fellow Scrabble expert Trip Payne. He won $1,000 and I won $100.

In June I made a serious attempt to quit smoking cigarettes (which I've now done for just over 6 years) and made it for 11 days without one. I used Allen Carr's excellent book The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, and all seemed so hopeful, but I had a failure of nerve or something of the sort, and the imperious desire that night for a single cigarette quickly brought me back to my standard half pack per day. I have a vague plan to quit at the end of this month, when the semester ends. We'll see how that goes.

In July I participated in the 2008 National Scrabble Championship in Orlando, where I finished 15-13, 38th place out of 100 or so in the top division. I stayed with my close friends Justin and Christina. That trip was mostly fun, though often exhausting, and I got a bit depressed when I started to tank in the tournament, but I was so rusty that it was only to be expected. I have not entered another tournament since. I don't rule out the possibility entirely, but my interest in Scrabble over the years has dwindled considerably, and it seems senseless to try to revive it. I'm content to leave it in the periphery of my life.

In August I finally moved into my own apartment with my friend Chris, with whom I went to treatment. At the same time I acquired Justin and Christina's young black cat, Wednesday (named after Wednesday Addams), who is a perpetual delight and comfort. Our living situation since then has been fairly harmonious, and luckily I live very close to the places I frequent the most: work, school, A.A. meetings, the library, the video store, etc.

In October I had the rare good fortune to see both Gwar (October 2nd) and Buckethead (October 26th). I had seen Gwar before, in 2004, but never Buckethead. For those who are into this sort of thing, these are experiences not to be missed.

At the end of January I met a girl named Margot online, who lives in the area. We quickly hit it off, met up for the first time, went to the big Palm Beach County Fair (or whatever exactly it's officially called), and had a blast, and since then we've been dating. It's only been two and a half months but it feels like so much longer. We're ridiculously in love! While I had some doubts at first, further acquaintance revealed us to be perfectly matched for each other. She is 22, with a bachelor's in art history from the University of Florida, hoping to pursue a career in art conservation or something related. She works, for now, at the Flagler Museum in West Palm Beach. She is an amazing cook and is versatile and talented in countless ways. She's sweet and doting, shares my sense of humor, appreciates and puts up with my chronic punning, insatiable sweet tooth, childish obsessions, and other idiosyncrasies, and is generally a dream come true. I have already introduced her to most of my close friends and to my immediate family, and they all approve. I will try and get some pictures of us up soon.

That's about all I have in me for now. Though I'm subject to stress, tedium, and melancholy like anyone else, my life is good overall, and I'm grateful.

3:40am: So much has been happening in my life lately that even though I have the occasional urge to record it, I'm at a loss for where or how to begin. And I'm so busy with various obligations and engagements most of the time that I seldom even think to try. But soon I should have a bit of a respite from the whirlwind, wherein I may recount to you all (and in a sense, myself) the more noteworthy developments in my inner and outer life. It would probably help matters if I were less inclined to spend almost all my free time with mere trifles and distractions, but then again sanity seems to require such moments of, so to speak, a lower density of being. For now, though, I'm going to sleep. I hope you are all well, and that those of you who are not so well may look forward to better times ahead.

3:52am: Concerning the retrospective shoddiness of one's early writings
I was just now skimming through some of the entries I had saved in my Memories under the category "essays," and it struck me with embarrassing clarity how few of them could actually be called essays. Therefore I have deleted many of these entries from the Memories altogether (though not from my journal itself, as much as I'd like to with some of them). It's not just that almost none of them attained to the length required to make the leap, strictly speaking, from a fragment or the like to a proper essay. With enough compression, with as few wasted words as possible, I believe an essay could be something surprisingly short. No, it's not only that. It's the astounding lack of substance and coherence these writings displayed, the superficial toying with ideas, the pretension to be dealing with matters of great import and profundity, the wallowing in self-involved sentimentality, the clumsy and ponderous proclamations, the inevitable pompousness that resulted even when I was most self-conscious about coming off that way.

I suppose it all originates from some fundamental impatience and insecurity, which I still struggle with today. But at the time, I secretly thought a lot of it was great, even if outwardly I was self-deprecating about it. Now, looking over this material, I can't help but cringe. It's the same feeling one gets when one first hears his voice played back to him after being recorded: is this what I really sound like? How does anyone actually take me seriously? What if no one even does? Why even speak at all, knowing what I sound like to other people?

Yet, what keeps me from going totally mad as I acknowledge this is the fact that in this literary trash heap of mine that grows only more putrid with time, there have been a few diamonds. Even if they only seem so to me, I value and cherish them for that. I have said things here and there which, I feel, will essentially and forever define part of who I am. My more youthful extravagances and misfires will fade away with the work of that great sculptor, time, and what remains will be the solid core of something like an identity. I hope that what I write and create in the future will in turn make my current endeavors seem like garbage, for that is just what they are, from some higher perspective. Life humbles. The further along we go, the more we come to perceive just how arrogant and foolhardy we were in former days, and how everything we said and did then was a product of that. The trick is to forgive ourselves all the same.

10:43pm: My first submission to Hot Chicks With Douchebags!
Tonight I sent my very first photo to Hot Chicks With Douchebags. Here it is:

I sent the following message to the webmaster to introduce the photo and make its case for inclusion and discussion on the site:

Esteemed Douchebag1,

I humbly submit the attached photo for your scrutiny and that of our fellow baghunters. I found it on the matching site OKCupid, amongst the photos of the most recent (and by far the hottest, in case it sounds like I'm bragging) girl to browse my profile. It's unfortunate she lives well over 100 miles from me, but one can always dream!

I fear it does not meet the standards of egregious heinousness so abundantly displayed on the site. But one may argue that subtle douchery is every bit as insidious, if not more so, than its nauseating, over-the-top variants. Note the wraparound sunglasses, faux goatees, and, on the leftdouche, the blank "too cool to be photographed" stare. The photo may not win any awards, but the hott, one must admit, is of top quality. I would sit in bumper to bumper traffic on I-95 in 102 degree weather for 8 hours with the AC broken, the windows stuck shut, and the radio unable to access anything but Finnish yodeling stations just for the chance to be blinded momentarily by the glisten of Frozen Lemonade Hott's perspiring forehead in the sweltering Floridian sun some enchanted afternoon.

Yours truly,

Marcel Doucheamp (aka David)

11:17pm: Today was a very good day. At work I ran into a girl I know in AA who's part of my social circle in the program, and she made me promise to come to our home group meeting tonight. So I came and shared what had been going on with me and everyone was just glad to see me back. I had been attending meetings erratically (I didn't go to any for 5 days after New Year's Day) and hadn't talked to my sponsor in two weeks but I'm back in it now, and it feels right. Everything looks like it's going to be okay and I feel like I can handle anything. I'm not afraid of other people or of my own life anymore. I discovered I do have friends and support. I'm ready to move forward with whatever the hell it is I'm doing! :-)

2:59am: Well, yesterday (the 12th) I turned 25. Ain't that some shit. Far from being a happy milestone due to it being a round number and all that, it only serves to underscore how unaccomplished and lost I still feel. There has always been divergent opinion concerning whether I seem to be the right age or not. In some ways I'm much older than 25, and in others, much younger. But who is ever the age he'd like to be? When do we ever fit in our own shoes?

And can I get a do-over for the last 5 or 6 years? They were just a practice swing, really!

11:03pm: Sisyphus watch
I ordered this last week from Unemployed Philosophers Guild and it came today. Joy!

3:37pm: In a depression economy of the soul, the most precious commodity is sleep.

4:29am: New user picture
Since I don't have a digital camera, photos of me other than family ones are rare. However, I thought it was time to have a newer picture here than the one of me at the National Scrabble Championship in August 2002. The picture you now see was taken last month at a gig my friend Chuck's band Fire Zuave was playing. They had a box of random props and such, and the bass player donned this flamboyant blue wig while they were practicing. Later this wig was placed on my head and the photo was taken. In the course of composing this entry, I finally bothered to figure out how to embed a picture in a post after 6 1/2 years of LJ use! Ta da!

1:49am: As the new year opens I find myself at an impasse. I had a long talk with my AA sponsor Christian tonight, who has noticed that I "seem to want to do things differently." For most of this year I consistently went to a meeting every day, sometimes two, with the odd exception here and there. And I did the work (i. e. the Twelve Steps) with dogged willingness and only the usual amount of hesitancy. But a few months ago that changed. I got to the ninth step, about making amends to people I've harmed (as I listed in the eighth step) and after making rather easy amends with a couple of close friends of mine, have not made any since. Although part of this step is accomplished simply by staying sober, living better, and treating others better, I've been reluctant to make formal amends to anyone else. In some cases it would only recall old hurts and so be truly unwarranted (the step contains the proviso "except when to do so would injure them or others"), but certainly not all of them. I simply dislike the awkwardness that such amends would often entail, and find them on some level superfluous, but I admit that may be cowardice on my part. Perhaps equally as importantly, I haven't stayed committed to going to meetings daily (they last an hour apiece and are quite plentiful and conveniently located and timed in my area). I've often missed a day, sometimes two in a row, for no better reason than oversleeping into the afternoon, followed by having to go to work shortly after getting up. Nor have I lately bothered to call my sponsor every day when I'm not going to see him (which is often, both inside and outside of meetings), even though I had firmly established this required habit long ago.

Christian's comment that I earlier mentioned was not meant to be accusatory, though I thought so at first until he elaborated. He went on to suggest that I might find a different sponsor if I wasn't willing to do what he was doing on a daily basis, and pointed out that he himself had not attended meetings daily for the first six years of his sobriety (in March he'll have seven) until he switched, in early 2008, to a sponsor who happened to require it. He said he wouldn't take it personally, and that we'd still be friends, and recalled what someone once told him, that sometimes switching sponsors is the best thing one can do for one's growth in recovery. The conversation ended with his instruction to give it all some serious thought and let him know.

My issues, however, might go beyond all of this. While I do indeed have trouble these days going to a meeting daily, it's largely to do with the fact that I've started to see AA (especially my level of commitment to it in the past year) as less than completely necessary in my life, or even as a hindrance, a setback to further growth at this stage. In some undeniable respects, it is a cult, although in my opinion a cult with more advantages than disadvantages. Some days it feels like an utter waste of time. Other days I'm very glad to have it. But ultimately, I still don't feel connected to AA in an essential way any more than I feel connected to anything else, nor am I sure I care to be. AA is a bizarre creature, thoroughly misunderstood by the public and often caricatured, derided, or ridiculed as a result. And I'm tired of having yet another quirk about me that people are going to latch onto and inevitably misunderstand, pigeonhole me for, and ultimately identify me with. (Scrabble is a gross offender in this respect, having come to occupy such a marginal place in my life that I disdain to bring it up at all in conversation, and regret that anyone knows about it, though it's one of the only things I can come close to calling an accomplishment.) Anyway, with few exceptions (like my beloved, though humble and meager-paying bookstore job) I don't feel quite connected to anything in this world, but rather like a stranger: intriguing to some, odd to many, negligible to most. Sometimes I like that and sometimes I don't. I'm still ambivalent about how possible and desirable it is to be a "lone wolf." On one hand it incites me to go where others normally wouldn't go; on the other hand I often end up chasing my own tail. Now has never been a more painful, yet necessary time to admit it: even after everything I've learned and experienced and overcome, I am still lonely, frightened, and confused. Yet I remain hopeful for what lies ahead this year. It may be even busier than 2008 was (which I promise to document soon). And so, I wish all of you a good new year.

12:02am: Going to work tonight made me feel better, though I slept until almost 3 pm right before, and thus wasted the rest of the day. I saw next week's schedule, set in accordance with the three classes I'm taking this semester, and it filled me with masochistic glee. As has been the case most every week for the last few months, I'm working five days. But the hours are a little longer, meaning more money, which I desperately need. Of my three school days, I also work during two of them. Saturday is my only day off from both work or school. (Future weeks might have slightly fewer hours, or another day off, but I should be plenty occupied with those classes either way.)

I think I was getting into a funk over the last few weeks because I didn't have much to do. I mostly just slept or killed time when not working. My dad likes to say "The more you do, the more you can do." and while seemingly paradoxical, it's easily found to be true. I like to be busy, to have to be somewhere, or else I feel bored and useless, since my phone doesn't exactly ring incessantly with social prospects to fill in the gaps. But I still wish I had hobbies other than reading and watching movies to do in my spare time. As for writing, I haven't had any ideas for anything in a long time. I have seldom felt less creative than I do now, which is probably part of why I feel so incapable of real exuberance these days. I need to set aside some time one day to just write whatever for hours. One drawback of becoming relatively sane is that inspiration has gotten much harder to come by. (Pessoa says that the basis of lyrical genius is hysteria.) Anyway, I'm looking forward to this interminable year being over, and to stepping into higher gear soon.

4:17am: Sometime this year (probably in the summer or fall), the strange euphoria of being sober (after having been, let's say, emphatically the opposite for so long) wore off. That euphoria, I learned, is referred to as the "pink cloud" experienced by many in early recovery. Ever since then, while I've remained sober, I've become less and less happy. Or just bored. I'm still capable of having a good time, so it's not as though I've sunk into the abject kind of depression I was so prone to in the past. But at the end of the day, my life feels empty. That wouldn't be so bad if I at least made others happy, but I don't even see much evidence of that. In a word, then, I feel utterly useless.

Why am I living in Palm Beach Gardens? Because I went to treatment in the area and somehow settled here, of course, where I now work and go to school as well. Why have I been working at the same silly bookstore for almost a year? I lack the imagination and determination to try anything different, and it's just easy and comfortable, even though the pay sucks. Why am I going to school, and why English? I guess school is just "what one does" at this time of life, and English is among the subjects which disgust me least. Why do I still go to AA meetings almost every day? I guess it's part of what people who want to stay sober do, once they've been introduced to all that stuff. But why do I care so much about staying sober? It's a matter of life or death for people like me, I suppose. But what I am preserving most often seems to be a strange and solitary life, the feeling of which has never left me all these years no matter what I've done. Somewhere in Rudiger Safranski's biography of Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, he observes that his subject never seemed to feel life as a warmth, that rather he felt it as "a cold current on which he himself was carried," or something very close to that. For me that hits the nail on the head. Life for me is a phenomenon, an abstraction, to which I feel at most partially, precariously connected. I love and hate things, yes, but in an indifferent sort of way (if that makes sense). Essentially I don't want anything. I try my best to adapt, to fit in or stand out as the case may be, but that's as involved as I let myself get, or even feel able to. In a deeper sense I never really know what to do, but do things anyway, out of a kind of timidity. I can't even say if I'm posing this as a problem to be solved or just a fact to be accepted, but I do get a nagging feeling there's something I'm not living up to, that I "know better."

A morbid joke of sorts occurred to me recently. It's said that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Drugs, then, might be called a temporary solution to a permanent problem (life itself). I've seen through that temporary solution for what it is, that is, not really a solution at all, and so no longer a viable option. But the problem remains...

12:08am: Careless and messy bookstore customers hereby invited to eat shit and die!
Note to anyone who goes to bookstores, even ones other than Barnes and Noble, because I'm fair-minded: please, please, please put things back where you found them, instead of just throwing them haphazardly wherever you are when you lose interest in them. If you don't have a good guess as to where something goes, give it to one of us booksellers, or leave it at the information desk. We may not be immediately thrilled to be presented with more things to put away, but we do appreciate the consideration. Anything is better than what most customers seem to do. My tenuous faith in the goodness of human nature goes the way of Bambi's mother on nights like this. Tonight my store was easily the messiest I'd seen it in months! I normally keep a cool head when cleaning up and helping customers, but tonight I was ready to stab every customer in sight with a box-cutter! The slush (industry slang for loose, stray, out of place merchandise) tonight just kept multiplying and mutating like some kind of surreal nightmare.

To the unrepentant slobs who disgrace our fine establishment: We're watching you. We know your slovenly ways. If we ever catch you in the acts of blatant disregard you leave such endearing and regular evidence of...well, let's just say that soon the True Crime section will begin to contain cheesy, sensationalistic books documenting your gruesome, unenviable fate. You have been warned.

3:18am: This is exactly what I've been dealing with lately, at intervals
Earlier tonight someone posted this on literaryquotes:

"Have you ever in your life had hours, or days, or even weeks when all your ordinary activities provoked a rather agonizing discomfort, and when everything you usually consider important and worthwhile seemed silly and worthless? When you didn't know what to do or where to turn? When you vaguely felt that somewhere, sometime, a desire transcending the sphere of earthly pleasure might be fulfilled, and you grew silent about everything around you the way a child brought up too strictly dares not express himself at all? When the spirit filled your heart with longing for an unknown something hovering everywhere you went, in transparent shapes that fled from closer scrutiny like an ephemeral dream? When you crept around with sad looks like a forlorn lover, and all the things you saw people doing in life's gay, colorful tumult incited neither sorrow nor joy, as if you no longer belonged to this world?"

- E.T.A. Hoffmann, "The Golden Pot"

1:11am: Tomorrow at noon I'm speaking for the first time ever at an AA meeting. My roommate, who's been chairing the meeting lately, asked me tonight if I would, and of course I couldn't say no, even though I've been in a bit of a funk the last few days. Back in June I was asked to speak for the Family Weekend event at the treatment center I went to, and I did fairly well. But I'm still pretty nervous, as I'm not a natural public speaker, and don't share often during the discussion part of meetings. So, wish me luck.

As if that weren't enough, tomorrow afternoon, from about 4 to 8, I'll be attending and probably speaking (though less formally, and alongside other alumni) at the Christmas party my treatment center is organizing for the current clients and "alumni" (which would be people like me, who have stayed sober and involved in recovery). It's a potluck affair, so I'm going to make some sort of side dish of vegetables to bring. I also donated $25 for the gift packages all the clients will be receiving. Last year mine included stuff like a box of chocolates, a medallion with the Serenity Prayer ("God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change..."), coffee beans, cookies, shower gel, popcorn, etc. It should be kinda fun, I guess, though I still often feel frightened and claustrophobic at party-type events like this.

Actually, scratch that. I am not looking forward to either of these two things tomorrow at all. I have been feeling distinctly ill at ease lately, whether by myself or with others, and I don't know why. As hectic as work has predictably been, I'm more comfortable there than anywhere else lately, even though many days it's this big looming chunk of time that interrupts whatever I wanted to do and leaves me too tired to do much else afterward, yet not tired enough to go right to sleep. So I while away a few hours in mild anxiety or tedium, doing little that feels productive besides maybe reading, and by the time I'm tired enough for sleep, it's obscenely late. Then I struggle to get up the next day for work or an AA meeting (most often at noon, pathetically enough), hitting snooze repeatedly, and the cycle continues. On my days off from work I somehow manage to get little or nothing done but not really relax or have fun to offset the lack of productivity. (I never seem to "get it right" when I have a day off and can do almost anything I like!) I'm hoping taking three classes starting next month will force me into a stricter, more lasting routine and, paradoxically, enable me to get more done with less free time, which has often been the case with me. As much as I dislike being that sort of person, I think I thrive on structure. I'm just still not very good at making my own, and since that's chronically haywire, I perpetually feel as though my life is slipping away, not lived nearly as it could or should be.

Well, I guess I sort of answered my own question, didn't I?

All sorts of other interesting (well, to me) things have been going on lately, however, which I'll talk about later, perhaps.

1:23am: Hot Chicks with Douchebags
A few months back I stumbled upon a hilarious book at my store: Hot Chicks With Douchebags, by Jay Louis. Soon I discovered it is based on a wonderful blog of the same name, at http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com. The book, and the blog, constitute a painstaking, indeed withering scrutiny of a phenomenon that is in some ways age-old and yet in other ways uniquely, dismayingly modern, indicative of pervasive moral and cultural decay. The author replies to a certain query thus:

"As Baudrillard notes, the spectacle of the digital age has untethered identity by supplanting the real with simulacra.

Our notion of the self fractures into spectral masks of pixelated projection. This primal projection of the psyche predates our technological simulation, as Lacan notes. Seeing ourselves through the eyes of the "other" simply finds amplification in the Facebook/MySpace image race. Our swirling feedback loop of projections upon projections becomes a funhouse mirror of refracted and fractured identities, always rooted in notions of identity, but given room to overwhelm in the media age.

As such, these images become extensions of our corporeal touch. We rescramble spatiality to form kinetic sub-space where we reform as culturally coded and branded entertainment specters. This form of cultural currency [is] as potent as anything Bourdieu described within the social spheres. A radical alterity of self through the prism of the Apple/PC proto-gender binary.

In short, douchebags may be temporarily orange. But boobies are forever."

Mr. Louis, or Douchebag1 as he calls himself on his site, brings a formidable erudition to bear on examining and understanding the amusing, yet revolting and undeniably real phenomenon which is his blog's namesake. I have become a daily visitor to the site, which reliably provides me with uplifting laughter and edification, even if these are ultimately based, at least in part, on a kind of ressentiment. Visitors are encouraged to send photos of "hottie/douchey commingling" for comment, discussion, and voting. Having followed the ostensible custom of creating a punning user name based on the unique terminology used in the blog's discourse (most often involving variants of the word "douche," of course), I have just registered the name Marcel Doucheamp (a play on 20th century French Dadaist/Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp) on Google's Blogger in order to leave the following comment on the most recent post, which summarizes the results of the 2008 Douchie Awards:

"I followed the 2008 Douchies even more avidly than I did the U.S. presidential election. I was pleased to see Metaphysical Hooligan get the top prize, though the first time I saw him, I have to admit it made me want to go back in time and kill the infant version of myself, so as never to have existed to see him in the first place. Keep up the good work. It is both noble and necessary.

On another note, the seed of a theory occurred to me today, concerning the moral nature of douchery: I venture that it is at an extreme end of a spectrum of masculine performativity, the other end being something like unabashed geekiness or dorkiness. Along Aristotelian lines, then, douchiness would be a vicious excess of something of which dorkwaddery would be a vicious deficiency, with virtue lying somewhere in the middle, an authentic, self-aware, yet unpretentious coolness. Or something like that. It is merely a hypothesis at this point, and not an assertion. Thoughts, anyone?"

I'd like to echo that question to LiveJournal, but mainly I write all this to promote awareness and appreciation of the excellent site that has become part of my daily internet routine.

2:35am: Intermission...possible?
So my class (literary theory) is finally over. Today (well, early Tuesday evening) I submitted for my final exam essay what is easily one of the shoddiest pieces of scholarship I've ever had the dishonor of writing. We were assigned to analyze and discuss an Elizabeth Bishop poem, drawing on our reading of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" while at the same time displaying our mastery of these authors' theories (in the former case, mine was shaky and in the latter case, nearly nonexistent). Perhaps as some kind of karmic retribution, I was afflicted with a tremendous, agonizing headache as I brought the wretched paper to a hasty conclusion. But in my defense, I work 25-30 hours a week at Barnes and Noble these days, plus I go to an AA meeting once a day, and we only had a week to write it. The other exam, also a take-home essay affair, was on the other hand something I put a lot of heart and energy into, but since I procrastinated, I didn't finish it. I turned it in a day late, but what I did write had enough merit, at least in my opinion and that of my professor, that I still got a C+ (and would've been a B+ if not for being late). I had started the semester with two classes, but dropped the other one (a class entirely on Chaucer) out of a combination of getting sick for awhile, disliking the professor's personality and approach, being rather lukewarm about the material (The Canterbury Tales in Middle English with marginal glosses in Modern English!), general stress, and, I suppose, a hearty dose of laziness.

Now I have about a month without school, my longest break since the six months between my entry into rehab last November and my resumption of classes this May. Now I finally feel free to do lots of the silly things I felt too stressed and guilty to do before, such as write an account of my past year, tie up some other loose ends (literary and otherwise), and generally just relax for awhile. Then in early January I plan to take three classes, though I may drop one if it turns out to suck or if the increased workload would be too much for my schedule. That is all rather ghastly to think about at the moment, however. For now I'm looking forward to a few weeks of comparative respite. Work could get wacky with the holidays approaching and me being in retail and all, but I'm so fucking awesome at that job now that I'd even welcome some excitement there. With the economy the way it is, it will likely be subdued anyway. And speaking of that...sometimes the truth is stranger than The Onion.

6:38am: Some very good news
Well, I think I just made my first real friends in this area that aren't also in goddamned recovery. One of them I ended up talking to outside his house about intellectual and existential sorts of things for a good 4 to 5 hours. I'm tremendously relieved and feel much less alone. And because of certain resources these friends have, I may now have far more creative outlets than I ever did. I'm gonna have an interesting time getting through today on what little sleep I'll be able to get now, but it was more than worth it. I was really about to go something like mad with the cycle of lonely, monotonous duty and empty leisure my life has started to become. I'd been staying just content enough to be able to say I'm not unhappy, but it was a discontent kind of content, if that makes any sense. These new friends have offered me a place to be creative and to be listened to, while at the same time engaging me with their own creative work and their open hearts. I am being purposely vague right now but I will give a fuller account of this later when I'm not exhausted.

1:52pm: Obligatory holiday post
Happy Valentine's Day!

12:36am: Interests collage
apperception posted a cool interests collage thing that I decided to do too. It came up with pictures for each of my 150 listed LJ interests, and I got to click through some choices of what picture would represent what interest. Some were far from ideal, especially for the more abstract ones, such as "paradox" or "solipsism." But it still ended up pretty cool. It goes in the same order as the interests as they're listed in my profile, which is alphabetical: ( My Interests Collage! )