8:54 am
Haines asked for little pieces of me to insert into his dissertation. Asked. I say asked but it was more of an announcement closely followed by assumption. Wants to collect the things I say and contain them into his pages as his discoveries. How charming. Buck wants me to give him my Hamlet theory but I don’t put out for free.
8:51 am
Buck talking about drinking my paycheck again. His solemn duty to go on a bi-monthly bender courtesy me. Asked this morning if this is the day for my monthly bath. Told Haines I am the unclean bard. All Seattle is washed in the rain and if I could scrub my soul I’d be clean again. Again that inner bite of deceit. Hits the spot.
8:48 am
Milk delivery today. Old woman this time. A lowly form of an immortal delivering a message. Buck invited her in. Haines tried to impress her with his knowledge of working class movements in America and it was like he was speaking a foreign language. Haven’t paid the milk bill in a while, Haines made the woman wait so we could pay. Buck paid most of it, an oblation, said we’d owe the rest.
8:45 am
Buck spent morning talking like an old woman. Burned breakfast, we had to open the door to let the smoke out. Key in the lock, but Buck thought I had it. Made coffee too strong for Haines and no milk. Haines interested in the seventies feminist movenent now, Gloria Steinem teaching women how to piss standing up. Where you truss be circumspicious and look before you leak, dears. Treating everyone like God in drag. There is a restaurant in BC that prohibits men from peeing standing up. Told Haines that would not exist in or out of the Northwest.
8:42 am
Haines apologized for screaming in his sleep again. Buck told him what I said about web fiction which earned the distinction “clever” then suggested I ask Haines for money. Twice a month Buck has plans for my paycheck; wants to drink it later. Thinks it will be $700. He sang this all morning:
I brought his shaving bowl in from the balcony. This is the song my mind sang all morning, pushed around a bit by Buck’s bellowing:
8:36 am
Memory is more than ideas and sensations. Yes, Buck is right. Ok. I give him that. But it is also an experience, my experience and my memory of it is a feature of me with a logic internal only to me. What am I but memory? That’s it. Memory of the past that was and the past that never was (but might have been was). A growing, solid, massive, increasing expanding thing, and just over there, look there, the paltry and shapeless future. Small. I hope (not much) I fear (too much). I had hoped more but that is part of the past now too, lurching away. I remember my mother and here she is now, enormous. She fills my now. She’s right here, do you feel her filling the room? Of course you don’t. I do. Her things, her smells, her tap water before mass, her baked apple filled with brown sugar. You can’t smell it but I can.
8:30 am
Here’s what happened. And it happened, by the way, not by accident of matter or the motion or immovability of things in the space we occupied, but encased within one of the ineffably ridiculous number of possible ways in which it could have gone down. Buck had hold of my arm and I moved away from him and he asked so I finally told him look, do you remember what you said the day after my mother died? I came to your place and your mother asked who was in your room and you said O it is only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead. I don’t care that he sees death all day and night at the hospital and the blood and the smells and the bits of meaningless matter. What is dead, he said. Anybody’s death, what does it matter but the matter that he has to shovel away. I saw my mother die and I wouldn’t (couldn’t) humor her. End of story (that particular version). Cranly said the same, just kneel and think what you want. No. What does the Sound care? Look at it he said. Well look at it. It ebbs and it flows but it also swirls and eddies. It can be anywhere do anything move in all directions simultaneously. And when you look in infinite directions at its contact with dry (relatively) land, it is contained by nothing. No different in length than the coast of Britain. The Sound doesn’t have to care. It doesn’t have my problems.
8:24 am
Cranly once held my arm and told me that I am an excitable man. I have no fear of being alone, even without a friend who would be more true and more noble and more than a friend. It is Buck who wishes to excite me now (his arm Cranly’s arm) this time into borrowing money from Haines before kicking him out. Even said he’d call Seymour and we could call him out, kick his ass, but I don’t think so. Let him stay. Nothing wrong with him except at night.
8:09 am
Buck thinks he is a stand up guy, speaking without a filter about everything, bleeding me for money too He wants me to get some money out of Haines but I can’t stand the thought of bowing down to him. I will not serve. And if Buck thinks I’m a bit sinister for my beliefs so be it. Better friends than he have questioned my disbeliefs. My mother asked me to pray for her while she was dying but I still cannot pay a false homage even to the most logical and coherent of absurdities. That may shock Buck’s Aunt, but I will stick with my usual defenses. Cunning. Exile. And this time silence.
8:06 am
Looking out the window you’d think this would be a choice place to live but I’m sitting on lawn furniture right now and I sleep in a hammock. If Haines stays much longer then I am out of here. Gone. Where? Buck on and on this morning about the great mother sea, fist to fist as we sit by the sea. Our mother the ash grey sea. Just look at it. The ballbusting snotgreen sea. Terrifying. Calling me Kinch the knife but I am not the knife. I can’t be knife. My knife would be made out of the infinitely small, forever dividing within itself the closer you look before it could ever slice something so sinewy as life or thought or time. Somebody show me where Augustine says the now is a knife edge without thickness. So many quote him on that without specific attribution but where does he say this. Show me specifically where. Perhaps I am blind. It is what he believes though, that this now moment, this one, right here and not the one where your eyes were moving when I began this sentence about the now moment but this one now this one divides the past infinite and exploding multitudinous and infinite to nausea from the future singular one. But which one? To be or to be? That is the question.