and there are times when the panic is so overwhelming that the sheerness of it cannot be contained, can barely be comprehended, how to keep on top of it, this struggle to get a hold of it at least, a foot hold, a toe hold, some sort of purchase, it always runs away from me for one reason or another, some thing, some series of things, always an excuse, never getting ahead of it, never even getting close enough to imagine an end to it, exhausting, exhausted, i never catch up, i no longer dream it, i can only hope from time to time to break the surface, catch a gulp of air and pray that i do not drown in the short run.

through catastrophe comes change, whether you want it or not. either you choose to change or live with the changes that other people will impose on you. and they will. look at today’s date, 9/11. everything changed six years ago. writing became utterly meaningless in the face of cracked fate, brutal determination and sanctified hopelessness.
i was re-orientated and re-directed. i was horrified and struck bone scared. i was already bitter with graduate school and this was the tipping point. i was done with it. i decided after the towers fell that the world was going mad and there was no way i could write my way through it. but i could live, i could provide, and i chose that, i chose to leave the world, and start some other life that i could keep manageable and safe.
here we are six years later. i do not feel any safer, with one child and yet another on the way. but i’m writing again. and it matters. it matters for me to be in the world like this, with the world like this, because the world has continued to be this way. it wasn’t the world that had changed, it was me finding a new fear that i could not, and did not want to, understand.
and here i am now, finding myself yet anew, as if with a different set of eyes, back at it again, back to the grind, because the grind fucking matters. it was always a problem with scale, always too worried about the scale of it. instead of focusing on the work. it’s the work that does the work, whether it’s only on myself or the random hit from amsterdam. it doesn’t matter.
just get the work done, no matter the cost, the scale, or even the fear, especially in the face of fear.

after the fall, after the break down, after the deconstruction, after we go about the business of taking everything apart that’s been handed down to us and found offensive, which is everything, what do we do? what is there left?
we cannot, after all, live only in rubble. we would be covered in soot. we wouldn’t be able to breathe because of all the dust. we would cut our feet. our palms would bleed. our children would starve. our old would be forgotten, history lost. we eventually would need to build. and in building anything, some fundamental principles would need to be applied or no structure will hold, nothing will withstand our weight. there will be no comfort or shelter.
in other words, in order to be safe, we would have to come up with some sort of code to live by. the question then becomes, how much of it will be borrowed from the generations before? how much of it will be driven by biology? how much of it will be made straight out of thin air?
then, of course, we return to the beginning, after all that, after all this, how do we withhold what we’ve made, how do we maintain in the world we sought to destroy and make anew? how do we avoid all the traps and idiot nonsense that comprises both the margin and the center? how do we go about living as our own and only?

this after thinking about LaChappelle’s Rize, the reality show about tattoo artists in “L.A. Ink”, and my ambivalence to my own culture

all this journal writing and copying journal notes from the past and i completely forgot the done stuff, the reading stuff, the stuff i was proud of, the stuff i would read at readings. dear sweet lord, how did i forget to put in any of that?