Again, you’re talking about sh!t you seem to want

Again, you’re talking about sh!t you seem to want—seem to think you want—but you can’t have.

Why do that? Why not feel good—count your blessings: steady job, sick days, decent money, wife and dog and this farm (though M said yesterday that having our own place would be nice because we wouldn’t get lectured about filling the washing machine too full).

You’re acting this morning like there are problems, but there are no problems—yes, I’m sick, but still.

I guess I gotta stay awake ’til I’ve talked to [colleague]—that’s another hour and 15 from now.

And so, you are awake and alive and every morning you sit down and write and once you’ve written about the previous day, you’re not sure how to write—what else to write. You have not gotten in depth into anything today—which could be the cold tiring me out, but this happens other times, too. Maybe you don’t have any real questions left? That’d be sad—and I’m sure it’s not true. Yes, I’ve learned a lot as an adult, but it’s hubris to think you know enough. I don’t even mean I know all there is in the world. I mean, I know enough about myself and for myself, my job, how to do it. But that’s also bullsh!t, of course.

Just because you can’t get traction on a new thread of thought, that doesn’t mean much about the availability of ideas.

But it’s also OK to admit that, today, this morning, you don’t have a lot of questions. That’s OK. Who said you’d have to have ideas every morning?

Poor Aunt Chris, driving 90 miles each way to work—that would get old, I’d think.

Or maybe I’d rather just fall asleep.

And maybe it’s OK if everything—OK that everything—is the way it is just now. You don’t have to stake out critical territory—the way I wrote yesterday about the movie When in Rome being OK as a commercial work, that whatever that particular work is, it doesn’t really define the space of what’s possible in art or what art is.

Everything is still open. Looking at the media, at its broad self-similarity, you’d think there weren’t that many options left, that the realm of what’s acceptable was narrow—but not so!

Wow, I’m tired–falling asleep here as I write. Must stay awake to give [colleague] the plans.

I could eat breakfast, I guess.

[From journal of Mon., 8 Feb. 2010, Journal 122, page 262-3]