I feel worthless. Like a person of no merit. I want to overcome everything, but I feel as if a mountain of obstacles stands in the way of me realizing myself. Right now, I'm living with my parents for the summer. I have no job, I've studied very little, I feel as if I were in the midst of a process of deterioration.

I feel lonely. I don't always feel as if I had people to be with or see or talk to. The majority of my days thus far have been spent alone, I feel or fear. One night and plans didn't materialize. I was supposed to go to Boulder, but due to communication problems and poor planning on my part it didn't happen.

Poor planning is the beast that I want to exorcise from my life. I do little or nothing not because I have no desire to do anything, but because I don't plan to do anything. I just sit around. I don't apply myself. Or I apply myself to the sundry details of the moment: exercising, sleeping, meditating, yoga; I engage myself in a rigorous program of self improvement that oddly enough leaves me extremely unhappy.

The question lies there -- how do I do all the things I want to do and yet still involve myself fully and to satisfying measure in the world of the living? The answer is simple -- exercise with other people, go to yoga classes, meditate at a Buddhist monastery or go to synagogue. I need to begin thinking of the activities that I do and their social expression in the world around me.

The problem is that right now I'm in the doldrums, and though I can look far into the horizon with a telescope and see the joyous on the land, yet I decry myself because I cannot join them, and yet there is no wind and the vessel is still. And perhaps in my mind there is still some nagging doubt as to whether or not I want to land at all.

Tonight, I went out with Chris to see The Matrix: Reloaded. Okay, so the philosophy is heavy handed, and so it's all about the action -- still, it's an awesome movie, visually and in terms of structure. I love it; I would recommend it.

After that, Chris drove with me to pick up his boyfriend and get dinner. Then we went to Brit's appartment where we watched Moulin Rouge, which is a good movie.

And if this journal entry feels somewhat fabricated, somewhat lacking in usual insight, somewhat devoid of life and spirit, it's because I hesitate as too how closely I should pry into the lives of those I know and love, to what extent I should open up the carcass of their persons to the inspection of the great, big, wide world. It was a nervous night -- I could have done a lot of things better. Not made jokes about Colfax, for instance.

Chris and Brit seemed happy together at the end of the night. I didn't want to be there; I didn't want them to think I felt left out. I did, of course. So I lay there, on their couch, imagining myself consumed in the embraces of some lover. Some person who is out there right now, who perhaps longs for my embraces -- we won't know it until we have met and are happily settled together. I don't know -- this is ridiculously corny and sentimental. I know nothing about love. And yet I love everybody. And yet I long.

I had a dream about JD a couple of nights ago; I don't remember the details, except that we kissed. I doubt it means anything, except that I miss him. I miss Nick as well. No romantic interest there either, but I love them. I can't express it; whenever I'm with them I make so many horrible mistakes, I say so many awful things, yet my love is sincere. I don't know. Trying to squeeze into a suit that doesn't fit, maybe.

I don't know. It's hard to think about friends at 3:00 in the AM. Anyway, to love I say love. As for Brit, Christopher, Nick, JD, Tom, Mom, Dad, Lele, Mr. Bo Jangles (our new and adorable puppy), Val, Ben, Todd and all the others, I love you dearly. Yes, a meaningless word, yes a meaningless phrase, but worth something for the compensation I hope to give.

Oh, and there is a certain Dan that needs to be mentioned. He feels he should be included in this blog. So I am including you Dan, my first (and only) avid fan. Now I shall stop dropping names, for this is not the Catalogue of Ships and I am not Homer. Pedestrian writing. Ick.

I feel like a thousand miles tonight. It's always so long between posts, I really must be more prompt, more punctual, if this is going to be of any worth. A record of the days. Something of a cross between Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon.

Tonight I arrived home something like 12:15 or 12:20 after seeing with Val this wonderful British movie about decadent life, Bohemians, the escape from the under-scum of London society. That life and the liberation from it, the sexual undertones, some Baudelairian decadence, as I said, decadence, there it is. It felt like a visual representation of the "Picture of Dorian Gray". It was fantastic. "Quigman and I" or something like that. I can't remember. Two slumming actors go to the country, unwelcome advances by an older gentleman, giant joints, escape.

Other than that the day has been rather uneventful. I went and applied for jobs. I worked out. I practiced the flute. I just wrote an excellent poem. Not an excellent poem. The feeling was excellent, the poem, it was not quite distilled. I feel sometimes as if perhaps they were beakers, dripping, chemical experiences, after all Rimbaud's alchemy, and the feeling were condensed like a mist in the jar, just always can't quite trap it.

Endings; we are coming to the end of our age. Decadence has wasted its way over the world like fragments of exploding population for the last decade millenia and now we are to pay and things will be quite different. Everything will change. I imagine we will still have Shakespeare. But I am the last man looking over the broken shards of a dying age, like glass-blowing in the fire, and after that sand on the silent shores.

Imagine new ruins. I looked at all the books that are being published today at the bookstore, while I was looking to buy and convincing myself simultaneously not to a book of Biblical Hebrew understanding (there's the Jew in me) and I saw all these fiction titles being published. Hack authors. Everywhere out of control. How can we identify the important thinkers of our age? It is all decadence, all of these exploding pages, never has any generation had so many venues and yet so little to say. We prattle on beautifully like Lord Henry in that beautiful low baritone voice about immoralities and nothing. We lose the light.

How I long to see a sunrise. I want to go hiking, I want to look at cliffs and see the mists part, I want to look into all the running ravines and smoothing rivers and all the little dwelling cottage tents peeking through the cracks of the wide grass, the green lawns, the subtle flowers, and then an ocean of peering sky and the golden glow of sun.

Worthless rubbage.

So here I am in Denver. City of lights. Rural paradise. The world's own most fashionable quay. But pretensions aside.

A hard thing to say. I am going back to Reed next year. I am living at Reed next year. My life, my proposed propositions, canceled like that, in a flash, in an instant, signatures on a piece of paper, drops of blood, even the lightning movements of neural impulse are invalid. Still to God I turn my love. I shall go where I am wanted. What needs to be done will be done.

Now I'm not saying I neccessarily believe in fate, but I'm not saying that I neccessarily don't. There are advantages and disadvantages to believing in it. It isn't something that you can just jump into, I don't think; the difficulties must be studied, it must be understood. But can't I control, force, bend, push, mold the actions of life to my own advantage and guiding line? Emerson would say that my own personality is the source of constant change, that my genius will produce all unknown quantities and cast my life in the pattern of my shadow. Plato would ask us to look beyond. But I suppose we look away from the world. Not as if it were a glaring light, but rather to a glaring light. The world is insignificant, a little rock, a little moldy piece of clay. Sitting in the cold and darkness.

But it flourishes with life. I took a walk today. We must remember to stop and look at the flowers. JD and Nick were playing and are playing I'm sure endlessly with flowers all of this week and the last (will be and have). It has reminded me of the flowers. Reds that look wilted from afar reveal new streams of freshness up close, clothed again in the vivacity of all daring beauty. Life is daring, youth must be daring, for it is beauty that is doomed to die. I will not accept that my youth is something to though be cherished like some precious liquid dripping from the cracks between my fingertips. If it falls on the ground, it will stain my hands, the stain of fresh blood that not all the perfumes of Arabie can best and that not all the seas, the oceans, the pouring tumults of time can wash away. A whole generation is living with us, history is living with us, the oracles walk among us uttering the cross and monstrance from their lips, their motions, glowing eyes.

So I flourish here in beauty. It is not always easy -- beauty will not always reveal itself, in sometimes subtle ways rather than, clearly. The forms of the passionate flower rising to bursting in the fruits of the sun are no less wondrous than the dark lichens that crisscross in hebrew letters upon a fountain of aged moss in the cobwebs and darkness; and even cobwebs, that bespeak age, are they not the rebirth of life from muck? For the spider takes the fly, that most lowly and disgusting of creatures, at least to my mind, and changes it, transforms it, into the beautiful patterns of a web. A web that has evolved to catch the fly. And so is not the fly the muck of beauty in its own making? Ugliness is beauty in its purest form. Revulsion gives eternal birth to love.

It was strange to see my old teachers again today. When I enter that school, I feel trapped. I began to think in my mind, "Will I be happy? I will. I must be. But it is so hard. I have only to choose to be happy..." and on the game went like a tapering flame; but even in the midst of adverse circumstances it seems to me that sometimes the I, the inner sight and vision, that Celtic genius of calling the thing by its true name, still is unaffected by the bitter juice of roots and acrid, lives in its own life, sits in contemplation on the eternal throne of repose. Still, being there reminds me of who I was, and who I was is something I seek to escape. Therein lies my folly, hence my madness. Away. I shall return.

So life unwinds. All plans come apart. Symbolism takes on no and new meanings. Everything is failure. I am dust and decay. But I will not consign myself. I choose to be happy, even in the midst of adverse things. There is something to me that cannot be sorrow, and there is no sorrow that I should not derive into a joy. I declare that even in the pithy sadness of living there is an immensity to be gained.

I will stretch deep into to comingle with the world and she will yield for me her rich and inner secret treasures. Everything I want to absorb, all peoples and all places into a throbbing speck of light, the clearing of an impression, a mind continually liberated from the mist of fog to see vast peaks reflecting off of dazzling waters like the eastern lights. I go now, I leave my sojourn at Reed, the world is going to open up to me to yield her most delicate, her superlative, and I await, and I receive. Everything is reforged, reshaped, remade, everything is glowing hot and cooling in the whisper of the wind the deep of God is going to reveal itself to me and not in the simple and the pithy but in the elaborate and the complex, the rich with various levels of meaning, until the hearer and the speaker fuse in a new unity, not that singularity of thought that is driving towards simple ends, but the sudden realization I have spoken of that the ends of the world are perfectly consistent and compatible with the means to achieve them, that the act is infinitely richer than the product and yet the two are fused, that in a paradox life unfolds like the delicate tendrils of a flower revealed to the morning sunlight. And so I return.

My spiritual progress has been halted.

Yesterday I took a walk. When I went out I felt very lost, spiritually and emotionally, and then I proceeded to get myself physically lost as well. I walked over this large staircase / bridge -- just in the middle of nowhere, rising granite and steel. I crossed roads. I walked down dilapidated avenues full of dilapidated buildings. There was a tower, unfinished, rising like a sore into the sky. I wanted to climb, thought of the punishment for folly, falling. Wanted to climb like a romantic, like an errant youth, like the crazy boy formula for film who goes in and messes up everything. I continued walking. I saw people entering a building that said Soto-Zen on the side. Curious, I walked in. It was a Buddhist chapel. I meditated there, listened to an initiate with a young face, cheerful smile, shorn head speak about meditation. There was an older man there, of about fiftyish, the bearded husband variety, face wrinkled with smiles, and there was a rather abrupt woman. I asked about color coordination on the mat, and have you ever attained awakening? Paradoxes. The room had an altar with a statue of the Siddharta or the Buddha, I'm not sure which, and everything was symmetrical, gaping mouth above and a carton of soy-milk and ginger cookies. Here is the pagan altar. Prohibition against the worship of idols.

Then I walked home. It was what I'd always dreamed of -- the city, cars, little bars that were practically empty and didn't take up much space besides. It was night-time and few people were on the sidewalk, but everywhere there were restaurants, little houses promising souvenir-shops and expresso, a pattiserie with a cute waiter. I bought an apple that was in a stand outside of a Wild Oats. I went into Safeway and bought a loaf of bread. Then a homeless girl -- garrulous -- accosted me and asked me proudly with a chirpish confidence for money. I offered 37 cents and was ashamed, because it was her birthday. She demanded a dollar 37 so that she could go take her friends to a restaurant. Had she scraped up enough money elsewhere? She was dissatisfied. It wasn't enough. But I passed her, bought bread at safeway, was fully prepared to give her a dollar -- if there was the slightest scrap of truth in her account, it was fitting for her to enjoy herself, and I could provide that enjoyment. What good would the money do me? And if they buy drink, are they not happy? And by not contributing the means which we have readily disposable and available to their enjoyment which we do not need ourselves, are we not prolonging that misery? Is there not a moral obligation to give? Tzedakah is a Mitzvah. That doesn't mean good deed, it means commandment. I would have given it to her, too, but the bus-stop she had occupied was empty when I came back down the dark sidewalk.

I called Todd and explained to him my absence. I was supposed to call him at eight o'clock. The watching of movies was in order. He came and picked me up, nonetheless, at such a late hour, and we rented Igby Goes Down. It was okay. It was forgettable. Except for the character of Igby, his mother; one song and moment, "We live in a beautiful world..." it struck me. They kill her in the end. The mother. Senseless. I slept in a separate bed from Todd. But this morning...am I dating him? No. I don't think so, I don't know. Are we friends?

This hits me, it strikes me, a restless mind that wants, that grasps, that compares across ideals to ludicrousness. Overwriting there. Overwriting everywhere. I'm masking myself. I can't express what goes on around me. I see a lamp, but I want you to see it. It's slightly curved, art-deco, like an arm of glass reaching out into metal, growing up into a head, the covering of a large sombrero, protruding black nose. Is it the lamp? It isn't even a person. Merely an arm, formless, grotesque. Aside from the shape and beauty of words, I fear I can do nothing with them. "Words aren't very important sometimes," that was the answer to one of my questions at the Soto-Zen temple. There was a tape of a woman chanting verse, with caesuras and all other elaborations, blessed be the Buddha self. In the way of opposites, the Buddha mind is lost.

It bothers me how my words die. Words are slick, pointy, round pegs in square holes. They don't fit, they don't illuminate, they become an opaque darkness like ice that has to be cracked, broken through, by what? The nameless hands.

JD and Nick. The group. I'm so besotted with them, with that, if I could it would consume me. Every moment I would spend with them. If only to clutch and grasp. If only so they wouldn't slip through my fingertips. You hold an icicle close to yourself and it melts in the wet frame, warmth of your body. Icicles, droplets like tears falling on ice. The lake. Only in the creations of my imagination is the vision concise.

I am looking for God, if you name God whatever fills the insatiable pit of my hunger. No water, no fire, no ice, nothing can fill it. It yearns and it gapes, it wants to devour everything. It is the feminine -- it must be destroyed. In the revisioning of myself to masculine perfection, all desire must be eliminated, processed, closed off. The labia must be sealed -- it is a sign of the incomplete, the imperfect. Oh! Do I sew myself up? Am I to be the expression of ejaculation, always filling, always penetrating, never receiving? Life transfigures into sex.

Drama. I recreate myself as "le seul, le veuve, l'inconnue" and caught up in the cycles. Everything cycles and spirals back. These are heroin dreams, hallucinations, the kind of cold sweat spell created by too much injection. There was none. You needn't worry; but my imaginations, my hallucinations, the shadows that haunt me. God, where are you so ever very far away? O hear my voice.

Was exhausted today. After meeting Todd. Philosophy takes a lot out of you. I ate a brownie tonight. Gooey chocolatey goodness. Probably will keep me up. I wrote a poem called "Lines" about, appropriately enough, the line. No, it has nothing to do with Coca-Cola or otherwise. I like the way words sound. I'm actually keeping on the lookout for the shape, feel, and texture of words as I write. And double meanings. For that, we can thank Mallarmé. Whose work I picked up today as a replacement for a falling apart copy. In french. Cueilli something-something from apparition. Tournez la mouton. I don't know.

I have to write a french essay about Mallarmé at some point. He's been much on my mind. The more I think about him, the more I like him. The more I like him, the less I detest him. Sitting on the Peach's doorstep (incidentally hours before they showed up) trying to recall lines of his poetry.

Un-e-den-tel-le-s'a-b-o-lit
Dans-la-dou-te-du-jeu-suprême

I love that. Dou-te-du-jeu. The repetitive sounds. I could just say it over and over again.

Good news. I might have somewhere to live this summer. A friend has generously offered. We shall see. Pay and money and rent. Now for a job. But a place to live, this is a primary consideration. Even if it is in Selwood, rather farther from NE than I would have hoped. But a place is a place is a place. We must be grateful.

Well, these ramblings are done for the day. They have spun themselves and woven to a close. To all my love I bid goodnight.

Alex

Today I am scheduled to meet a philosopher. I have noticed that my life is now full of people who, if they are not themselves philosophers, at least espouse philosophy. I need to read. It is reading week, after all. Their Eyes Were Watching God. I think I can finish it. And there are many admirable qualities to Zora Neale Hurston's writing. A style, shall we say, almost biblical? Far from it. But maybe biblical in compass.

Speaking of which, I just finished my essay on St. Augustine. The important thing, folks, to take from the Confessions: there are three levels of literary experience. (1) Emotional Response (the lowest); (2) Intellectual Response; (3) Truth. We respond to a work first through emotional engagement, which is vulgar because it appeals to our emotions through manipulation of an existing status quo of values without turning our mind to those values or our relationship to them; next, we can turn upon the work intellectually, which encourages consideration of morality, philosophy, and existence; finally, however, there is a level of engagement with the work in which we choose to reject Virgil's pathetic Aeneid (all of it, all of it) for the higher truth and moral order present and exemplified in the Bible. My thesis concerning The Confessions. Applies to the real world? Yes. For are we to bend the world to our liking or accept it as it really is? Flee into the arms of poetry or fight and die? All statements in which their exists a grain of truth are valid, all the beautiful lies are inconceivable corruptions not to be protected under even Keat's famous dictum. Ad finibus.

Yesterday I took a walk to NE. Two hours. It was a gorgeous day. The sun was bright, the air was clear, cars flying everywhere, people, golden statues, a high school, the grassy leaves, sitting on the Peach's porch-step for an hour just trying to remember lines of Mallarmé. Rain. I recommend it.

And so I'm off for a busy day. Music, exercise, study, conversation, scintillating thought. If there is one thing I would desire in the coming days, it would be tender embraces. It has been so long since I've shared the warmth of bodies. I need to begin praying as well more frequently.