“Days of nothing… that’s what it’s like, you work cases. Days like lost dogs.” - Nic Pizzolatto's True Detective
An edited compilation of Journal entries, starting (at the bottom of the page) from the late fall of 2023. For the sake of privacy these are heavily redacted and many entries are ommited.
Sunday, January 5
School is cancelled for the snow tomorrow. The suspicion keeps occurring to me that Plato was right about the whole Forms thing. I try not to get too hung up on the whole “metaphysical realm of eternal perfection that is real and exists” and consider the Forms to be purely ideological instead, which I feel has worked pretty well for me so far. The word itself, Forms, I feel is lacking in grandeur; its etymology is eidos, the Greek verb “to see” or “to perceive,” which ended up as the latin forma, which has a much more appropriate connotation I feel than English’s Form. The opening of Ovid’s Metamorphosis: ”In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora.” / /”My mind compels me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.” Contemporarily, a form is a paper I ask my mom to fill out for me in the DMV because I don’t know what my social security number is. I don’t know why I’m talking like I know anything about latin. I googled all this. Regardless and in lieu of a professional opinion, I think that the Realm of Forms is a boring and clunky title in English; when I stake my claim on the topic and reinterpret it as an ideological construct and not a metaphysical one (which I’m sure is a completely original and absolutely novel insight) I’m gonna use the Gnostic pleroma as a metaphor/pseudo-interchangeable term, the "fullness" of divine emanations, the Aeons, representing the totality of spiritual reality in contrast to the imperfect material world. Completely different mythologies, the Gnostic is more of a pantheon, yes, but Pleroma is more Greek and official-sounding, God dammit! If they sent me to the moon I’d stab it with a flag of my face and write “SJB WUZ HEER” with my foot in the stardust. I wonder a whole lot if you guys when tell when I’m joking. I sure can’t.
Friday, December 20
I talked for a long time with my dad’s shadow in the doorway. My mom has been the same person since I was born - quizas ella si se murio ese dia. Or maybe people never really change, at least not in the ways they think. When do you think it happens, that the flesh mold is filled with cement? Fifty? Twenty-five? Eighteen? Birth? Or death? “Some people have an inclination,” He told me, “to abandon their ego - in the Jungian sense - and join something greater.” A church, a choir. A band, an art school, a terrorist cell. I think that thing is God. I think Jung had it, and Jesus, and Muhammed, and Rumi, and Hemingway, and Steinbeck and Dostovesky and Camus and Chomsky and hopefully I can get it too, one day. At least I am already looking for You, God. I hope I can meet You in this world.
Thursday, December 12
Admitted defeat after driving up and down the same road three times before pulling into the DMV and asking to have my license reissued. Increasingly difficult to labor under the illusion of assimilation. The whole experience was so inane and ridiculous that I drove in circles on backgrounds for an hour and a half, half-singing, screaming;
I keep the wolf from the door but he calls me up
Calls me on the phone, tells me all the ways that he’s gonna
Mess me up, steal all my children if I don’t pay his ransom
And I’ll never see them again if I squeal to the cops
So I just go oooooo
Glance, don’t stare
Soon you’re being told to recognize your errors
But not, not me
I’m an island of such great complexity
Stress surrounds
The muddy peaceful center of this town
So tell me off
Monday, December 9
Played bingo at an old folk’s home for community service hours so they let me graduate with the right tassels on my hat. The lady sitting next to me was demented - she was younger than the rest, and made it explicitly clear to us that resented that fact; she joked about it with single jabs and punchlines that were followed by a breathless wheeze, like a laugh, but without sound, her face simply contorting like tree bark flaking to accommodate the horror of her own mortality being etched into her flesh by the rims of little cups of pills. Her blood might have been more opioids than... well, blood.
Monday, November 18
I don't like thinking. I'm not very good at it anymore.
Mon-Wed November, 11-14
This is a journal entry. Increasing difficulty telling dreams from reality. I see the same people, feel the same things - I stroked my book like it was a cat just to fee something under my fingertips. My dreams came and went in a vortex of TV static - visual snow, artifacts. This is another: The problem with AI, in my experience, is threefold. The first one I forgot, because I was supposed to be writing an essay on Frankenstein at the time I was thinking about it and I didn’t write the thought down. The second one is negation, it won’t say “no” to you, it doesn’t have the free will to go, “no, sir, I wouldn’t put it like that” - then again, neither do we. The third - and this one is my favorite - is hallucination, and I love it that they call it that, Machine Hallucinations. That’s my favorite thing, when something beautiful like that breaks the surface tension and enters the collective vocabulary. Machine Hallucination, for such a poetic phrase, is just when the thing lies to you because it doesn’t know what truth is. I’ve been meaning to write about Machine Hallucinations for a while, and oh, well, I guess now I have. Then again, for any kind of computation or sort of derivative function it’s top-notch.
Sometime in October
Looked up at the stars with Scout's leash in my hand, little pockets of ash / little pencil holes in the black tarp above us, keeping the air in, the light come through. My ears are ringing a pitch I’ve never heard.
Friday, September 27
Listened to Rachmaninoff on the way to school. The storm beat up on the car and the volume went above and under and through the rain and I felt the same thing happening to myself, slipping into lower states of consciousness, my mind’s eye with heavy lids. I thought about death the same way that I thought about life; something to do. We are always doing something.
Wednesday, August 7
Got caught in the rain on the tennis courts. It was like God picked up a river and set it down right on top of our heads, and like that was the way that he had wanted it all along, so beautiful and so right. These giant faucets opened up, just for a moment, and that incredible feeling broke out, the feeling of childhood, and the most holy sound in the world, of children laughing, and for a moment I was one of them, running to my bag, all responsibly and courtesy behind me on the spongy asphalt, and I thought it could not ever be that the world had hurt anyone.
Sunday, August 4
The summer rages on, even as it wanes. It is like it does not know that it is dead. Reading East of Eden and I’m getting a lot of out it. I hope that it helps me. The words will come back. I hope.
Tuesday, July 23
It's very strange to be prescribed trazodone. When there are thunderstorms, or fireworks, or veterinarians, we give Scout trazodone inside a spoonful of peanut butter. I take dog medicine to go to sleep.
What a world.
Wednesday, May 8
I lost a little bit of my thumb the other day, I broke a mug putting away the dishes and it bled and bled and bled and now I can feel ridges that mark the absence of flesh, the doctor burned it shut with chemicals that were like ice crawling in my capillaries, I shook and nearly screamed and little black spots shot across my eyes. They had to lay me down.
Thursday, March 14
Ms. J was outside her room, talking to someone, she turned to me as I was walking and she said, “Participation in life is optional for you, huh?” I turned and took a moment to rummage for something witty, and came back with “Presence, more like.” I thought it was pretty clever. We both chuckled. I left.
Leap Day '24
I showed K. and M. and A. the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Eagle in the sky. I drove home and parked and leaned against the car and cried when I looked up. Only one thought was really able to come out: “this is all that you have.” I feel the same way looking at the pictures above my bed. Two memories came to me, and I’d like to have them here: I was sick with something, I had a cold or I might’ve been faking it, I don’t remember - I was playing the piano in the living room and there was dandelion sunlight coming through the windows and I wrote down the names of birds I thought that I heard outside and my chest was warm and scout was with me and everything felt okay. I don't remember what year it was. The other: the first time that I drove without my parents I drove H. and A. and L. to a thrift shop and then to our old elementary school, which feels like less than a memory now, something subcutaneous, unconscious. I was happy there. When we all went back everything was smaller and made more sense and there were grownups inside and we left. I drove home after dropping everyone off, I listened to Weird Fishes and I cried a little bit.
February 2, Friday
We passed another school bus and the kids in it were flipping us off and sticking their heads out the window to yell, the driver hollered to sit them down. I studied some of the ones walking out when we parked, they had strange demeanors, practiced but not perfected. Thought-through but still early. The smell of corn dogs and curly fries was pungent in the whole school, through my frozen nostrils. There’s something foul and dirty in the air of the cafeteria. Like the exhale of a death-rattle. Like it’s been boiled, fried in pig grease, piss-battered. It’s an airborne, institutional taste.
January 24, Wednesday
I got to the school and there is a sparrow’s nest in the pines by the entrance. The high-pitched chirps are hatchlings.
January 20, Saturday
I looked at A. from across the room and something about the way her weight shifted, her legs fell, her smile moved, some kind of quality about her reminded me of a thing that I never had and I couldn’t place. The light sectioned off square crops of snow and the wind blew it around like dust. Something reminded me of Genesis. God's new, pure Earth.
January 11, Thursday
E.G said this to me: "I think that there is something in the American dream that is really squeezing your life out of you. I don’t know if it is this racial nightmare. Or if maybe there’s something in the water."
January 6, Saturday
The wristwatch I wear and my wall clock tick on the second at different seconds. I sat still long enough that I heard them slowly approach, stick together for a little while, and then fall away. I believe that this is the way that the whole world works.
January 5, Friday
Getting the ice off the car was like excavating a neanderthal from a glacier. On the drive back from school the ice had completely melted off the windshield and nothing was in the way of the sky. 18 degrees in the morning and 35 at 11. Thanked God (?) for the passage of the day. I took three sleeping pills and they rattled against my teeth.
January 4 and 5
Thursday, 4pm, talked with E.G. about America.We shared a deep frustration that fostered a connection I’m incredibly happy for. I was supposed to read a Labatut interview for her the previous week, and I read it just now in bed a few hours after the session. Labatut is reportedly approaching transcendence. He disregards the present. I feel like there are spiderwebs between my eyebrows.
January 4, Thursday
First day of the second semester… drifted to a stoplight and looked like an adult to the people next to me. Called with E.G (still don’t know what to call her. E? Mrs. ? Sra. ?) about America. It was an incredible conversation. She brought up a good book that I bought immediately. She was very angry. I am very angry. And there’s nothing to do. My mom cooked steak very rare and I’m worried that it had brain-eating amoebas in it.
December 5, Wednesday
I want out. There was a puddle of the stillest water I’d ever seen in my life, it had a perfect image of the bare trees in it, as if their branches were roots that reached into its reflection, and it had instead of Earth the blue of the sky and the spiderweb of clouds and light behind and through them. I believed that if I jumped in the puddle I might fall from the sky. The thing that I was most proud of for painting in Mrs. Wilson’s class was a - she gave us these magazines to use as palettes- I crumpled up one of the pallets she gave us in half and smeared it around and it made a cloud of every color there was and a figure like an ink blot test of a sparrow hatchling. That’s what I saw in it. When Mrs. Wilson saw it on the counter she asked whose trash it was. So I threw it away. My phone wallpaper has been since I saw it this graffiti in Milan: ET holding a revolver to his head.
November 29, Wednesday
A crowd has amassed around the fishtank. There is a yearling, belly-up, trapped under a rock.
November 28, Tuesday
If you look far enough into the sky you can see anything. I bet that tree roots grow the same direction as branches. And I think I would like to speak to a priest.
November 15, Wednesday
There’s forest fires out, makes what’s far look farther. Makes your clothes smell like smoke. The whole stretch of land from Lynchburg to Lexington is up in flames, apparently.
November 8, Wednesday
Had four hours of sleep. Thought about Harvard: meeting with my dad’s old professor; Nietzsche-style white-yellow mustache and beard, Freud-pattern baldness, earring. Greek paraphernalia around his room, gay wrestlers, portraits of men. Only my dad talked, it was the most nervous I’ve ever seen him. He couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t breathe, laughed too hard. He respected him very, very much (Kennedy was his name). “The last time we were like this, we went to civil war,” my APUSH teacher said.
November 7, Tuesday
Got off the subway and there was a zoo of people on their own pilgrimages up the escalator and the gated walkways, I couldn’t tell how I felt about it. Almost got lost- I followed my dad’s puffer jacket and gray head and I knew which one it was because it was my head, too, his hair swirls and his ears meet the same way mine do.
November 4 , Saturday
We took off at five hundred miles an hour and my headphones turned the screaming wind into a purr. I tried to get work done. I wanted to watch the grid fade- this expanse, over oil-colored ponds, a web around great big cracks in the earth like ravines in a marble. I want to go to space. I can see the dome if I look hard enough. I want to watch the atmosphere turn into a loose cloud, the entire place into stardust. I’m looking forward to Boston. By the time we have begun our final descent there is nothing outside but white. I can feel the blood gargling around in my skull, reaching my eardrums and bouncing back. There was a woman without eyes waiting for the metro. I thought about her for a very long time. Listened to a kid waiting for the orange line ask his sister to do him a favor and he’d owe her one, to cover for him until he got home because he got caught up taking to this girl from Minnesota and he missed his train. It was sweet. Read White Noise by Delillo, went back to circle that passage about the heat in the cities. My dad and I talked at the burger place in Harvard square since before eight to around ten without stopping. About the Jesuits, college, America, family, friends, farm loneliness.
November 3, Friday
After school: getting on a train to DC, spending the night, plane to Boston. Harvard visit. Until Tuesday. I’ll miss some school. Drove to school and parked, it was nice. Listened to Ravel and talked to myself. We read in LCI an article about male friendships and discussed. Joined the group of those girls who listen to me sometimes and they were all attentive when I talked and laughed at my jokes and seemed okay with me. The conversation moved to our classes, our schools, the elementary schools we went to -- the way we were brought up. They had theirs in common and mine was foreign - chapel, the lunchroom, blazers, rulers - and when we left I saw their group walking and I noticed how differently I was dressed. There was a certain peace on the train, I made it alone to Union Station, so dark and so tall, like an invisible night sky. The highway was a menagerie of light; strange shapes of an angular geometry. Artificial lines.
November 2, Thursday
It’s so cold. Red noses and wool sweaters and turtlenecks. I think I'm gonna die. The formal logic is the only thing on my mind, I asked Mr. M and he said he never studied it. He said that computer science is more of a language than a science.
November 1, Wednesday
It is an ungodly cold. I don’t think that hell is hot, I think it’s as cold as it is right now. It’s like God turned the lights off, not even the moon is out, just dark, at seven in the morning. School went by quick. GS, four classes in a blur. Didn’t take my headphones off once. Orthodontist scolded me. Went home. Went to a restaurant with my dad, I showed him the logic I’d been studying on my own on the yellow legal pads. We talked about Harvard. He told me I’d meet one of his professors on the visit, he set up a meeting and told a story about how, post-postgrad, the professor had him on a panel and flew him to São Paulo to present on something he didn’t really understand or care enough about to attempt to. He told me this story about a riot outside of our apartment in Caracas. Tear gas and everything reached the eleventh floor, my mom had us hidden in a bathroom with wet towels under the door. My dad was panicked and he flew back to Caracas, bailed on the presentation. Everything was fine when he got back. There was nothing at all to be done. I have the direct quote in my little red notebook. I looked in the mirror yesterday for too long and my face fell off. I can see behind it. Like the MRI machine they put me in. And I close my eyes in school sometimes and I can see past it, *“the long, bright dark.”* Forever. We passed the pile of bones outside the apartments on the other side of the hill. In September, it was a deer.
Halloween, Tuesday
For some reason, I ended up at a Halloween party, L.M's. It was nearly empty for the first hour, I talked to some higher-class type people, really nice, outgoing, well-read. They were gonna make it places. Then everyone else: at this party there was not a sense of sexuality but instead a perverted representation of it, teenagers three-quarters-naked, an excuse to be, in blood and ripped-up clothes, in the air with the smoke and the breath. I walked S. to a tire to sit on, she was worse off than I was. I put my head backwards on the headrest of Emely’s truck and watched the moon and trees go by upside down, like the sky was a river and the Earth its banks. Fell asleep on Henry’s floor. They said that after the homecoming parties, you walked around the school feeling connected with people you never knew, their faces and motions, you know, you would nod at them. They looked at each other differently. Certain things were agreed upon. That’s why I went. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t get it. Just anger, something near shame. I think it’s why I read Labatut too. He makes their minds apparent, knowable; things.