I bought ground venison tonight.
It was stupid expensive though, but it felt like the right thing to do. Still can’t find any goddamned elk though. This town doesn’t know what it’s missing. I also bought some lamb - which I’d never had before - and made that into a pretty awesome sauce with pasta. And bought a bottle of red table wine called Les Heretiques, named for the Cathars in France, a group of esoteric Christians massacred for what they believe in. Seemed only appropriate. Next time I should get some basil too.
My roomate loaned me four different Jack Kerouac books when I got back. I started The Subterraneans yesterday, the story of the breakup of Leo Percepied and Maridou Fox. I can’t say I’m thrilled about the subject matter, but there’s something I understand about Kerouac now that I didn’t before.
I just got a notice that my crazy internet phone number expires in seven days. Is this the end of my communication with the outside world? Am I supposed to renew it and carry on like nothing has happened? Should I get a new phone number? What should be the area code? I am swimming right now in a cold dark lake and it is night time. It is both peaceful and terrifying. Or maybe I am being marinated gently in chocolate stout for the time when I will be really ready. Maybe I am the elk meat this time.
I have debts to pay off I don’t understand how I got. But the urgency of money has worn off for me. Just a bunch of leaves in my pocket, and I have found a couple of good spots in the forest where they grow back slowly but surely.
I realize now I have no patience. I suspect I never did. Or maybe I am too hard on myself. All I can do now is sleep and write and eat. My writing consists mainly of failed attempts to resuscitate something that I don’t even know whether or not its dead or just sleeping. There is no way for me to get a pulse on it through my own obsessive recollections and no help seems to be forthcoming. Each person I talk to tells me different things which swirl in my mind and add to the morass already bubbling over for some weeks now. I swirl and dive under and have no way to end this. I’m about to cross the country alone again.
PS. Anybody in the Seattle area interested in a cross-country road trip? I need to get to a wedding by the 23rd of June in Fenton, MI but am now looking at rides out east via Craigslist. I could see myself spending a little time in Chicago as I know one or two people out there, and have family in Pittsburgh. I would pretty much like to leave ASAP - this week if possible as I can’t see myself sitting around here and stewing in my own juices forever. If anybody’s up for a little bit of mild adventuring and has a car and is willing to split gas and driving etc, drop me a line.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Sean Moriva’s Top Travel Tales
- To Doug on GNAT
- Time Travel Ticket - Go to the future for $19.95
- I think I just downloaded in my pants
- Sealing off sections of the country
10 Comments
If it’s any help the feeling of dread I’ve gotten from your site recently has faded.
Have you considered the possibility that you are a victim of some sort of spiritual attack? I’ve seen this kind of thing both on spiritually focused and political websites. Momentum builds and breakthroughs in understanding are made. Principalities and Powers are shaken and stirred and they strike back. The author/candidate/leaders of the movement take a number of courses but never the same one they were on before. Whatever was threatened by the progress is safe.
BTW stop having money and communiation problems, it’s contagious.
Well shit sucks right now but it sucks in a lot different way than it did before. So I don’t know if that’s consolation or progress or what…?
Interesting hypothesis and I wouldn’t totally count it out, I guess, except that I realize for my own mental health it’s kind of a tough road to go down to start considering that sort of thing. It leads to a serious bit of megalomania and paranoia - even if, or maybe especially if it is true.
Whatever happened though this past month is just inexplicable. I can’t wrap my mind around it based on the events that lead up to it. I mean I know it’s just human nature to have things go the way they go, but things just don’t make sense to me. It feels alien and impossible.
Okay I am renewing my phone number right now. I can’t just disappear off the face of the earth, I recognize. That’s no solution.
neither dead nor sleeping, just weak and scared
Peaks and troughs, man. Wrapping your mind around it sounds like a waste of energy. You don’t always have to grasp something in order to be affected by it. Just keep your eyes on the prize.
There is only one direction we are headed and that is towards the source. That is where we came from and that is where we are heading because there is no where else and no thing else. We don’t “need” anything else, we can’t have anything else, we are not anything else.
There is none beside YOU. You know who I am talking to and who I am. It has been there since the earliest time and will be there after time is done. (This is self-evident, all timekeeping devices and schemes are “in” it, they can’t escape their ontological boundary.)
In the face of THAT which speaks our words before we do, we must admit our explanations and narratives are not our own. We cannot really pretend otherwise, but it HURTS SO BAD not to… and then it doesn’t.
FWIW, I really feel for ya. Life seems to get scarier and crazier, wayyyyy past the point I thought it could, and it seems like things are going that way for many people I know right now. it’s enough to make you believe in astrology…
Back some years, it was as though the universe’s gears were designed from Genesis to bring me to where I am now. They turned and I praised God, and now they have not stopped turning… but what else did I expect anyway? To perch at the pinnacle of the cycle forever? That’s not just incorrect, it’s downright blasphemous, attributing permanence to anything other than the permanent.
But neither am I the blasphemer, there is only one who is powerful enough to speak against himself, no power other than the power could oppose the power.
what is it I want to say? It doesn’t matter. You will still hear it and I’m not the one who says it anyway.
Plotinus called him The Good.
Don’t I know it. I blame the moon, the unborn embryo-planet that feeds on the life and awareness and experiences of the living. She’s been awfully big and bright lately, and my own past experiences make me duck during full moons.
Tim, for what it’s worth, your most recent writings have been the most beautiful. You may be diving in the dark, but you’re pulling up treasures. I’ve already stolen little fragments to decorate IM/email profiles and the like. Like how high school students scribble quotes they like on their textbooks. Anyone else do that? I never quite outgrew it.
Fresh air sounds good. Leave it to Jack Kerouac to inspire an inexplicable ramble. Besides, with the flow of scenery rushing by, no one needs to struggle to understand anything. It’s a lot easier to just look.
New keyboard. Relearning how to type. Lotsa broken sentences ahoy.
You say megalomania and paranoia like they’re bad things.
If you swing by Chicago stop by and say hi.
Fenton?!? You say that like its a bad thing…
wait, wait! What I ment was: you are going to be damn near literally in my back yard!!!
I betcha the nearby well-stocked wine shop has plenty of Les Heretiques! (Did I mention how weird it was to have been reading in depth on the Cathers only to come here and find mention of them?)
…and there’s a place that has plenty of Elk nearby too!
See?
Things are lookin’ up!
this is a test of the emergency broadcast system…this is only a test….
it’s true that when you light your heart on fire, it burns away everything in your life that can’t stand the heat. and that while it’s burning away the dross, it hurts like hell…..and stinks like burnt shit…and that makes us want to put out the fire.
but don’t. the IYouniverse needs your flame.
here’s one that went into my email quotes:
p.s. i need me some of that Cathar[tic] wine.
them’s my peeps.
One Trackback
[...] The whole episode calls to mind comments left on my most recent post by Julia about the possibility of a “spiritual attack” having been levelled against me. As loathe as I am to seriously entertain such notions, the dream was quite remarkable and disturbing. Oh, and I nearly forgot: there was some subplot to the dream that one of the “cousins” I had killed had just found out that day that she was pregnant. [...]