I’m not sure what my experience is outside of writing. in writing things happen in words and the words are observable. outside of words it’s anyone’s guess. it’s not that I’m sure it isn’t anything outside of words.

nor can I just say I’m an alien. that involves a whole story with creatures and planets. it turns things into a diagram and a diagram is observable.

wow, not that this will read exactly right, but have I ever been more completely clueless as a person. things seem remarkably zero’d. I don’t even have a fragment left from the former paragraph that at one time had seemed a nice jumping off point. the jumping off point turns out to have been a peak.

things dont reverse. no one is a born again christian. though we know that people’s eyes roll back, that things were once primitive. I don’t know if anyone has adequately documented the more boring pain of that. what does it say that everything seems romantic, especially chores.

* * *

I wrote that around noon, and it felt like a defeated depressing thing to write. I walked down to the coffee place and got an iced. drank it on the way back. on F st, I thought, it’s just life. I wrote that same thought yesterday. it helped me a little to think that again, on F st.  It’s just life. yes, it’s just life.

and I’m not done with this, in any case. I’m a bit troubled by it somehow.  of course I always have a lot of that “what the hell am I” or “what the hell is this” feeling in my writings here. that’s what I write about mainly. I think? but I’ve had even more of that in the last day or two or three. in my brains, I mean. I guess I shouldn’t assume that’s bad, even if it’s a little troubling at times. I just feel like presently I’m especially lacking in any sense of fixed self-identity or purpose, even for me.

stepping back, I have to think this is pretty interesting, these recent posts. I have to wonder what this looks like. it’s pretty amusing to think about that. it’s not boston terrier-amusing.

yeah, I think this is explainable. and I’ve been thinking a little about explainability.

explainability. I was thinking about that on F st. I was thinking about how I keep having thoughts about how un-curious she is about my writing. but then I remembered she was asking me about a poem I wrote and of course I just said something lame. I mean she asked a kind of open-ended question about how it happened, how something like that happens. and I was a little nervous about the question, I suppose, and dispatched with the answer somewhat quickly. I made a motion in the air with my finger like I was writing the lines down the page, and I said well I write that then that then that, down the page. and that’s perfectly accurate, or pretty accurate, as a description of the writing process, but surely I could have given a better answer.

so that is an example of a situation where I attribute something (uncuriousness) to someone else, but really it was in my control at one point.  it was my bad, in other words. because I answered in a way that didn’t serve as much of an answer and that closed off the discussion.

it’s also an example of me treating something that’s explainable as if it’s not explainable. I mean I acted like the poem was unexplainable, but really there were things I could have explained about the process or my mentality, or something.

one thing I notice a lot lately that I like about doing writing are those instances where I delete 2 1/2 sentences from what I’ve written and suddenly it becomes intelligent. of course that’s an old thing. but still. it’s like sliding down a slide when something becomes intelligent that way.  and I really mean to invest the intelligence in the writing itself.  I mean, yeah, it’s a process by which I come to understand things (hopefully), but it’s also a process of watching the writing itself become intelligent about something.  I guess it’s a thin distinction but not a exactly a non-distinction.

I say “I guess” sometimes and I worry a little about it seeming too intentionally colloquial but I can’t always think of another way to make it clear that the sentence expresses an idea that I only had since writing the previous sentence. or maybe I had it 1-2 sentences ago. and I really am guessing to some extent. writing a sentence is like making a guess about how things might be, presently. sometimes after I write the sentence, I take the “I guess” off the front, but sometimes not.

I asked yesterday if all her north carolina friends were like her. she didn’t hesitate to say yes to that. then she said something like “you think I’m unique but really I’m not.” there was no fishing for affirmation there. it was really just something she meant.

what she meant is that I’m entertained by her Raleigh-ness. not just her Raleigh-ness but also something that must be, I think, particular to some segment of life in Raleigh. something pretty urban, I think, and greatly at ease but non-naive. rough in a way. I don’t quite know. but she meant to say that it was just something endemic to where she comes from, socially, and I regard it as individually hers only because I’m seeing her out of that context. but I think that can be said of anyone. of course we’re informed by where we come from and people we’ve been surrounded by in prior locations, and of course we seem like more of an individualized manifestation of those things when we’re removed from that context. I told her I would notice differences between her and her north carolina friends, and she immediately agreed with that.