I miss you terribly
I’m terrible at missing you
It’s terrible this missing you

how is it that the people who keep you from feeling lonely also make you feel the loneliest?

“It’s more than I could have wished / hoped / asked for, but it’s not what i wished / hoped / asked for” (and other thankful ingratitudes)

tension crowds the dirty streets and the
why can’t I why can’t I meet;
complacent on a Sunday afternoon,
complicit with the gloom

“If I’m a spider, I don’t want to be sprayed with Lysol, you know?”

Words words words,
my kingdom for a sword,
a bowl of stew, a pound of flesh,
and Tartarus.

Don’t look back he’s said to say,
or your love’s lost.

The breaking of Pandora’s jar,
and Eve’s garden’s sole delight,
are grains of salt on sands of time,
where Lot’s wife did turn for fright.

my very quick goodreads review: forgoes any sense of narrative structure to be “meta” / self aware, but only fictionally. I liked the style, but I could definitely understand not liking it–it gets confusing and muddle-ly in its way.

for example:

“Billy Dillon once asked me if I thought Inez would have left that night had Jack Lovett not been there. Since human behavior seems to me essentially circumstantial I have not much feeling for this kind of question. The answer of course is no, but the answer is irrelevant, because Jack Lovett was there.” p. 186 … or … “It occurs to me that Inez Victor’s behavior the night she flew to Hong Kong may not have been so circumstantial after all. // She had to have a passport with her, didn’t she? // What does that suggest? // You tell me.” p. 188

“When novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact.” p. 215

Lessons learned:
1. I always doubt my friends’ pronunciations, apparently just to be difficult.
2. I always forget movie titles and never give adequate descriptions but still manage to sound pretentious.
3. I always get songs my friends don’t like stuck in their heads.

yes, i’m the difficult friend.

“only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” Northanger Alley (Chapter 5) by Jane Austen

in Hebrew these are:

א (which has basically lost its original consonant sound)
ה
ו
י

The tendency of Hebrew (et al) to leave out the vowels—the clues to pronunciation—reminds me in a roundabout way of tonal languages. Someone once told me that in some cases people who speak extremely tonal languages can communicate at a distance with just the tone (whistling/drumming), without the actual word. To achieve communication this way, you obviously have to have a fairly good understanding of the language. Likewise, you have to have a decent background in Hebrew to be able to guess at the correct vowels every time (in my not decently backgrounded opinion). It’s pretty neat—like you’re communicating in code. (But I guess all language is really just code.)

i sometimes wonder whether my clumsiness is just a physical expression of a psychological fact: i am not very self-aware. yes, in the most basic sense i am, of course, self-aware. i am sentient; i am thinking therefore being. and on a deeper level i am overly self-aware—constant appraisal of future and past action or inaction. i obsess over myself (because i’m the world i know). however, on a further level, a different plane, i’m a stranger to myself. my friends will bring up some facial expression i make repeatedly or some odd, habitual pattern of speech, and it’s like looking in a mirror too long—i don’t see me in their words. there’s a chance i consistently pick friends who lie to me about me, but that seems unlikely, or, at the very least, another example of self-unawareness. and so i trip, stutter, as stub, while my flaws arrive like epiphanies from the mouths of people who don’t know me at all but know me better than i know myself.

“ankles aren’t sexy in america.”

can you see the clouds? they’re glorious today.
and work is slow in coming my way.
so i’m sitting here enjoying the view.
and have nothing better to do.
but rhyme
and spend my time
looking at the clouds.