May 5, 2020
I’ve nearly filled these 3 small journals. They weren’t cheap. I should buy larger, practical, ring-board notebooks. Their size puts me off in the same way I always stop reading Gravity’s Rainbow at the same paragraph after flipping through twenties pages and not seeing an end. I can only sustain effort if I feel the end in my collapsing nerve?
I walk with Renzi along the streets of his ideas, and we both begin to speak excited by our discoveries. Some blocks later, my feet have lost their place. I continue to speak unaware I’m alone. I turn into an alley, and my thoughts scuttle with the familiar rats – money, career, humiliation. From a distance everything approaches the same zero.
Fear of death kept me awake last night. Asbestosis. Teens and twenties spent helping my dad demo houses without a mask. Death arrives in less than a year after diagnosis. My daughter, my partner, they live when I fear death.
“I go out and drink whiskey until dawn in order to erase some fixed ideas that have always pursued me, ones that I prefer not to name.” Ricardo Piglia
