invito lectore

I'm not sure why I've stopped writing my blog. At first sign of the slow-down, I raided my own past and stole posts from less bloggy (and more social) spaces, migrating them slowly over to this, "the blog" that was to be my means of expression. The space that was to serve as the anonymous locus of my meandering mind, the poetic wrecks of my love life unfurling, the beginning of my fictionalized autobiography, even. I've let it go silent.

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false coincidences, tumors and imaginary dogs

I do not teach what I want to teach; not often. This is due to a certain positionality, not to my own desire. Perhaps it is my own desire that put me in this position, but that is no matter. I developed a class on memory after several months of deteriorating memory, with no intentional or causal desire therein. I was not obsessed with the memory lapses and losses; I affectionately called them collectively "the tumor", and I went about the world constructing the idea of a little marble-shaped pebble in my brain, pressing down on something and causing things to go awry. Of course, I knew better; this was the way to describe it that attributed absolutely no meaning to it--who can be expected to control a tumor that suddenly springs into the brain, like a lazy cheerleader springing to pert attention with a smiling bob of the head?

Vapid tumor--what can be done? I treated the whole situation more like a sitcom than anything else, and the occasional stroke of anxiety was treated to the same derision, even offered up under the "absentminded professor" stereotype for general amusement. I stayed away from all analytic postures towards my memory question (while I poured over such postures in relation to the memory question). It was someone else who pointed out to me the odd coincidence of me researching and teaching a class on memory after months of having shilled my deadpan brain tumor through its paces. Why yes, how odd, now that you point it out. (Oh, come now, it was better than denying any coincidence at all, herr dr. at my head).

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insomniac stream of consciousness--addressed

This is an older writing from elseblog -- just posting here to keep my fragments tidy.
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The damn pills don't work. We are just talking. What are we talking about?
Hard to recount. Do we start over every day, a blank slate that some good
pupil has washed clean with turpentine and aloe? Noxious fumes
never penetrate, they envelop; they soothe. They bring false comfort,
like suicide. But all comfort appears false.
Will I remember that in your arms? Hard to recall.

I still believe in comfort, and sorrow, and sparking flint.
I am softsoftsoft...I am a box of kindling heavy with dewdrops.
There is no satisfaction in finding a twig that won't snap underfoot.
Who doesn't cry out when broken? A smoldering fire is no joy for
eyes used to firecrackers. My bending is supple, unyielding, insufferable.
You can break your neck on it if you don't watch out.
There is no narrative trace, no guiding thread,
Ariadne would order us both shot.
We don't deserve a labyrinth if we are only climbing out of our own skins.
There are questions one should bother to dream--bulls don't just show up on your doorstep.

No one decides, although one may pretend otherwise midway. Who holds the log book, recording all these dank comings and goings? But we're not writing a book. There is neither truth nor lie here. Worse, there's no fiction in our fiction. There is no address between us, there is only the approach. An eternal approach