I’ve been tired in the evenings this week.  my back is better now.  the tiredness makes me feel as though I can work and that’s all.

my dad is still alive, and I think this will likely be the year he dies.  probably so.  just now I was thinking about how my stepmother will occasionally try to get me to talk about how I feel about something.  typically something related to my dad.  she will try to prompt me to talk about emotions every once in a while.  so just now I was trying to think of something I could say about how I feel about it.  but I don’t think I’m any witness to how I feel about it.  and presently the whole idea of feeling things about things is not something I can apprehend.  I feel in ideas about some things [dubious].  one idea is the unknown.  another idea is I don’t myself want to die until I am 70,000 years old, because I want to have many parties and listen to music and write, and also go outside when the weather is good.  I say those things.  this week I have consciously been trying to think of some particular way or ways to make use of the fact that he’s still alive.  I don’t have a lot of ideas about it.  even though I feel in ideas.  one idea is simply that I’ll keep on living but my father will not be alive any more.  I have the expectation that that will be surreal and I will at some point use the word surreal to describe it.  but most things will be the same or close to it.  so much of my life has not revolved around him.  I have the idea that it requires a certain amount of energy not knowing when he’ll die, so that when he dies perhaps I’ll recoup that energy.  I have that practical thought and other practical thoughts pertaining to his wife and also his mother possibly outliving him.  it occurred to me just now that he might want to outlive his mother simply so he can experience what it’s like to be alive when she’s not alive.  he may be curious about that.  of course I’m curious about him not being alive and I suppose also about my mother at some point not being alive.  I think about pain itself and how many people die in pain.  it makes perfect sense that that would be the case, since we die because things are failing and things often are painful when they are failing.  but I don’t dwell on that and I suppose I don’t even worry about it a great deal.  somewhat, but I don’t feel burdened by the thought of death being painful.  I have had this thought lately that death does not tend to fulfil any aesthetic purpose.  there is no reason to expect that when it happens, we’ll say “wow that was a good death.  that worked out about right.”  instead it will be like “wait a second, that was just an ordinary day in an ordinary week.  I’m not satisfied with it.”  it will just be like a bus ride that ends in a slightly quirky way.  like maybe the bus stops several feet before the usual stop because a car is double parked.  and you are daydreaming and barely snap out of it in time to get off the bus and you have to hurry a little and there is someone standing in the aisle that you have to nudge past but it’s no big deal.  slightly clumsy but you do get off the bus at the right stop and then in a few minutes you forget about that part of the day.  I do think I’ll miss him at times.  I think about the fact that he fills some kind of social purpose for me even though he’s a parent.  so it may be much like if someone leaves your city.   I expect there to be some surprising dimensions to the experience.  perhaps I don’t make many sustained efforts to think about it just because I expect there’s not any use in that, as it will likely be different.  also, it’s not as if I think it’s something that I need to prepare for.  I don’t think there’s any advantage to be gained from trying to prepare.  I don’t think there’s any advantage to be gained from a concerted effort to think about how I feel about it.  I don’t feel like there’s any work we have to do.  I don’t feel like there is some big emotional talk we’re supposed to have to serve as a culmination of our relationship.  what’s to talk about.  I really can’t think of anything.  we don’t have some kind of long-simmering passive aggressive feud or such.  I can’t believe I’m still 37.  I swear I feel like I’ve been 37 so long it is starting to weird me out.   I really feel like I’ve been 37 for about 4 years.  if my stepmother asks me how I feel about something, I will talk about being 37 for a long time.  was I really 36 just last summer.  it is 2012.

the super bowl was fun.  madona’s thing was trippy.  gothy and even doomy at the end when things blackened and she sunk into presumably the underworld.  I was way into it.

that was an amazing game, if I remember right.  I actually had a feeling afterwards that I don’t usually get after a super bowl.  I felt like I wanted to watch it again to better understand it.  like it was performance art.  the game started with that safety and ended, in some sense, with bradshaw falling uncontestedly and in slow motion on his ass in the end zone while defensive linemen loomed in eerily relaxed postures in the background.  I can almost imagine I remember how it all looked.  it would be cool to have a poster of how I remember that moment.  I’m sure there are a lot of “photos” out there, just a browser tab away.  yet I don’t go looking.  I like the idea of a poster, not simply a photo.  something shot from near the goal post with bradshaw in the moment of landing on his bum, perhaps with the linemen somewhat blurry behind him.  the strangeness of that moment did I think not receive enough attention in the press.    I feel like people have essentially ignored the utter strangeness of it as surely as they more or less ignored madonna’s lip-syncing.  it seems we passed from a moment when lip-syncing was controversial and even embarrassing, such as when milli vanilli, such, and when that one girl was caught on saturday night live I think, several years ago.  yet lip-syncing goes back to the golden age of hollywood film, when many leading actors and actresses did not sing their songs.  and no one found madonna’s obvious lip-syncing to be any cause for reflection.  supposing she lip-synced the national anthem.  people would be quite weirded out by that, but not as weirded out if, say, eli manning lip-synced his post-game mvp acceptance speech, or if tom brady lip-synced some of his line calls.  it would be utterly disturbing to people if the players lip-synced their trash talking or pre-game motivational speeches.  yet when madonna does it, it’s ok.  because she is in her 50s and there is something unseemly about criticizing the mother of jesus when she is a good enough sport to sort of dance around when she’s in her 50s.  what if the broncos made it to the super bowl.  I suppose there’s little chance the broadcasters would have made a joke like “hey isn’t madona tim tebow’s mother?”  almost no chance whatsoever of that happening, I would say.  I suppose it’s possible she paid that MIA person to give the middle finger just to ensure that her lip-syncing would not be in the news much.

not incapacitating.

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prolly the giants I think.  the pass rush.

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slept pretty good lately.

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finished the dust

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drywall: it slows down because of k/ontract and because it’s gotten a bit boring.  the home improvement tasks tend to get boring a little bit before they’re done.  dontcha know.  oh, but it’s so close to being sandable.  I’m just going to march up there and do a bit more.

meanwhile the k/ontract somehow morphed from XX weeks to IX weeks, roman numerically speaking.  though I think it will likely get extended.  but the shortening of the committed portion makes it a slightly greater psychological challenge to “throw caution to the wind” and hire paid help to do things to my home such as drywall, carpentry, etc.  what’s frustrating is that I suspect in the innards of the cu/stomer there is someone somewhere who decided I would be more “motivated” if the commitment were shorter.  though I have no solid basis for that suspicion.  let me tell you, tho I “understand” the thinking, I hate it when I feel like someone is trying to bolster my motivation.  feel like saying to them, I would change careers if I weren’t motivated.  I would do something else.  I am not trapped in this enterprise.  (Arnold is just using me to get to the houseplant.)

I do write poetry sometimes since the k/ontract started.  though I realize I’m obsessed with the notion that I am really just a poetry fake.  sometimes I celebrate the notion by telling people things like “my goal is to be counted as a poet for as long as I can while producing the minimum poetic output necessary to achieve that status.”  my celebration of that notion is transparently an attempt to dispel my anxiety.  this is why I have emotional problems and yank my back out then drink beer.  at least I’m “thoughtful”.  I do make some obvious concessions to punctuation like parenthesis and, increasingly, quotation marks.  laughter is a kind of punctuation mark.  as is ..

no end of data structures, that’s for sure.

admit I do ponder the end of days as the jar winds down.  as in, what will it be like, when hopefully I am somewhat old, and reach a point where I know I have perhaps 2 1/2 days left above ground, will I try to ration out my life force to get an extra 1/2.  I don’t think so.  if anything I’ll go for 2 even.

so it is with the jar.  but these vessels have  a way of containing more than they contain.

trying to wait out this coffee brew a bit longer.  I’ve had trouble making coffee the last couple of days.  it’s been weak.  it might just be this new kind of coffee I got.  or, I don’t know.  maybe I just need to put more coffee in.  thanks.

just remembered, something.  helping someone move at 10:30ish.  just a few heavy items.  it will be amusing.

coffee much better this time.  neck somewhat tight but much improved.

well I’ll be!

I’ve been drinking beer lately.  I have had a sore back and neck and beer has helped with those sorts of emotional problems in the past, so.

the neck is a new one.  I’ve never had a sore neck.

it all gets a little better every day.  it was dreadful a few days ago.

something about my bike did it.  bike and backpack.  I don’t understand.  I guess the backpack made me change my head position just a little bit.  it’s also possible it’s just something that only took a split second to happen.  a little tear somewhere.

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erserf

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happy springtime

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delux mixed nuts in order of fave to least:  walnut/pecan, … , brazil nut

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only five

actually my neck does hurt.  I think it’s because of how my backpack was positioned during biking.

I started co/ntract.

writing poetry.  reinstatement of income leads directly to more writing.  that’s typical.  it won’t be possible to write my master work until I am making at least $500,000/yr.  I hope to buy a second house nearby with a carriage house where I can keep a small catamaran.

the k/ontract became more solid.  I start Monda/y.

of course I think about the fact that it’s the day.  it’s a saturday.  it’s going to be nice out.  it already is.  I took the trash out.