Category: Journal

Something old

I have a whiteboard in my sitting room. At the top it says “What do you want?”. For a long time, the only other thing on the board was “rest”. Over time, I found myself more and more able to rest. my insomnia has passed, perhaps for a season, perhaps for longer, and I am able to get a good night’s sleep. Then, after considering it for a long time before putting it up, Saturday morning I put the word “write” on the board.

Later that day, as I was walking someplace else with yard tools on my mind, I passed a yard sale and I saw a typewriter of a style that … very much appeals to me. I was able to purchase it with the last of the cash in my wallet at the time, $14. It works, and with a replacement ribbon, should be a wonderful tool. I have already written a page or two on it. It feels good.

It is an old Remington Portable Model 5.

Standing stolidly in the rain

Last night it rained. I was hanging out with a friend who gets very excited by the rain and who had a very good time just running around in the rain for a couple of hours while I stayed indoors and dry, watching HBO original series with my new stuffed monkey, Edison. At one point, she got me up and dragged me out into the rain. As a general rule, I like the rain.

Or maybe I like the idea of the rain. I don’t seem to like riding my bicycle in the rain, or immediately after a hard rain on an overcast day. Being soaking wet and freezing cold for nine hours at work isn’t what I put at the top of my list of things to do. The things in my backpack tend to agree. Still, I like the smell of rain, and I certainly appreciated the sub-100 degree weather this morning on the bike ride in. Sometimes I like to watch the rain fall, but not usually from under it. Usually from someplace dry and warm. I like what rain does; living in a barren, dead wasteland only has a little appeal to me. Still, I like blue skies.

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Gluttony and Finch

I am easily swayed by food. Like, even when I’m not hungry OR bored, or even being advertised to intentionally, the idea of food gets into my head and is immediately attached to desire. Easily accepted desire in most cases. It occurred to me that it might be easier for me in quite a few ways to just grow fat into the clothes I already have. I wouldn’t have to think about what I eat or about buying new clothes, and after a while, I wouldn’t have to worry about feeling like I’m swimming in the clothes I do have.

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Paper is as much a site as this

I have been struggling lately. I have been writing in other places. Writing in paper places. I have been writing the things I have been thinking, as I seem to do here. Trying to see what I’m thinking, I think. Trying not to say too much about something that involves someone that I know reads this thing. Does that form of censorship (though it does not stop me from writing) defeat the purpose of this place? Don’t I want this place to be where I can come to write anything? How do other people feel about their lives being an open book to the world, as seen through my interpretation of it, my part in it? Is it even safe to have meaningful, emotional relationships with people, knowing that I will want to write everything about it here, knowing that they will be reading what I put here? Is it just a matter of being more honest than is expected, or is it overstepping the “understood” boundaries of privacy?

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