EVERYTHING AND ENDINGS

At times I think I've had a rough year. I quit a job that I loved because I was forced to be self interested. My love left me for other cities and state funded educations. My best friends stopped talking to me. The oil light in my car turned on. I could not concentrate hard enough to do yoga. All of my art fell lazy and unmotivated: to an audience of no one.

So I slept [10] - [12] hours every night... until I added it up and wrote this paragraph:


We used to talk about stamps and automobiles. He left me in the first quarter of the game while I was adding up all the hours I had slept and converting that into days. It was raining outside when I found out I was sad. I missed my grandmother. Although she was alive, she was waiting to die. For several months up until this moment, I had slept almost ten hours a night and the darkened sky made me lonely. I gave up drinking after I couldn’t forgive myself for all the sadness I had caused.

Here's the math:

2 extra hours of sleep a day x 7 days a week = 14 hours a week = an entire waking day of my life gone

considering all the healthy food, teas, coffee, reading, work, and exercise I tried with all of my heart and conscience to relieve this purposeful forfeit of a days worth of time.... it came down to only one thing: I was scared of people.

I could hide in Sherman's March and Bruno Shulz's the Street of Crocodiles. I could think about Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation and read Nicole Krauss's THE HISTORY OF LOVE or write quiet paragraphs and pray to the glowing saint while rearranging my bedroom with graph paper quotations of Dostoevevsky's Brothers Karamazov (that was called Brothers K by 3 people in one day.)

Or I could realize that reading about loving people isn't the same as loving people, and that loving people's work isn't the same as loving people...