Wax cast

2/12
I've got a wet rattlecough robbing me of sleep lately, as if I'm trying to get something out but can't. Sometimes words get stuck to my inner throatlining like the spikeball seeds we threw at each other as children did to sweaters. The cooperation of my stomach and lungs, tightening and, so, pushing up against disease is valiant, even heroic-- and in this grey time futile and impotent.

Winter is as it tends to be, lined with trees reaching feebly up like bronchi on burnt trachea fishing in lungfluid. I wonder about the relationship of snow and nicotine tar, about duality and sameness and irony and death. The panic of falling through a frozen laketop giving softly to the sad cold synapse failure of alcohol.

2/15
I have this recurring dream in which I'm in a play but don't know any of the lines I'm supposed to deliver. Last night I was watching the show and using the bathroom during intermission (after wandering accidentally into the ladies' room and running into a very unexpected Ramaperson). Then I was told to go onstage and was expected to take the role of a sort of scripted stage manager. There was a halfwall upstage that I could hide behind momentarily and glance at the script, but never for long enough to glean any lines. At some point a man rode by on a horse, said something, and delivered me a large fish. At another there was a giant green snake.

I wonder now, recollecting as I sit in a class that demands "what does it mean?" what business I had in this dreamspace. We take on different roles daily, momentarily, different masks for different performances. I'm painfully aware and, it seems, concerned less with how I am than how I appear to be. The great irony is the near universality and therefore nullification of any validity, any truth, to this obsession.

And then the words, how I can never seem to hook the right ones. The cottonmouth feeling of wordlessness and, so, silence. Improvisation as a method-- in dream a viable approach when in waking life I'm bound by this repeated cerebral assessment of possibilities and opposing vantages, forever in rehearsal.

It doesn't seem enough anymore to ask "who am I?" so much as "where am I under all this?"

The internet

it's blowing up!

Numerology

Something about winter makes me seize up with anxiety. I get worked up and then worked up about being worked up and then worked up worrying if my behavior is working someone else up. It's no way to be. Totally unnecessary but it feels inescapable.

The bullshit numerology books says I would do well to live near the ocean.

I want a sunny home that lets the light in, somewhere warm to build those four walls and adobe slabs.

WOO!