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The sermon for Feb. 23, 2003 is: hypochondracula 10:33 a.m. My god, my god, why are you teasing me? There are teenagers outside my window, around three or four hundred thousand of them, and they have erected one of those bouncy-things in the street and are now jumping about madly sloshing Stoli Ice on each other's Ralph Lauren Polos and howling along with Sir Mixalot. It's Sunday, children! I'm hungover. Yes, I like big butts and I cannot lie, other fellows may deny; but there's a time and place for this kind of thing, and that time and place is 10 years ago and on a oil derrick in the North Atlantic ocean. Ah, let it go. The human soul is marked by its appetites for noise and exultation; I will not make further complaint. Besides, nobody would hear me. ...I put my speakers to the window and played some Venetian Snares, �-ziq's "Umer Bile Tracks, Vol. 1," the soundtrack to "Superfly," and Smokey and Miho playing Baden Powell's "Canto do Caboeto Pedrea Preta," hee. A gaggle of Filipino girls beneath my window, alike with hennaed hair and Missy Elliot bonnets, deride my musical tastes with a variety of hip-hop epithets and giggles; every time one swears, her hand flies to her mouth and she looks around furtively for her omniscient parents. I put on DJ Rupture's "Minesweeper Suite" and the crowd responds with loud cries of execration. Ah, well. I open myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Valerie has disappeared. Since there aren't any calls from her work, I assume that she's either there or that she quit a while ago. I could come up with alternate theories, but it's so fucking noisy right now, I can't think. Stephanie called me last night, and we actually talked for a surprisingly long time. We didn't discuss the future of NASA, diplomatic alternatives to the US's relentless scratching for an Iraqi casus belli, the fate of the Mary Celeste, nor anything else of world import; we just chatted, stringing non-sequiturs together in that thrilling way drunks string things, useless for social reform, but so redemptive for my spirit. I've been hesitant and afraid for the past few weeks; Valerie's bewildering resentment and spiteful works of love has been sapping the already lousy manufacture of my well-being. Just to talk to a friendly voice, my god! Just having someone respond when I speak � it reassures the doubts I've been having whether or not I exist. Huh. Closing my windows has made a remarkable impact on the amount of noise here. I should like to go out into the world, past the teenagers, past the cars, past the crumbling highways and ruins of Esso stations. I would like to discover the vastness of space, the feeling of no boundaries and no walls, I would like to find a flat, quiet, empty part of the world impossible to park a car within; I would like to go there and forget everything, these anxieties that knot my sinews together, these longings that fuel my flailing lungs so that I can endlessly sigh. Or, to put it more succinctly, Take me out tonight I wish, I wish I could just move; but I'm too hungover, oy. I wish, I wish I could travel. There's a boy in Winston-Salem, NC, who likes my poetry and knows things; I should like to go there. ...errata: I started this entry intending to respond to floodtide's lifesaving letter to me; reading that entry, and its effect upon me, reminded me of For Esm� with Love and Squalor, especially in how a sweet, simple note, simply acknowledging another being, returns feeling to a person numbed to being alive. I was going to make reference to this, viz. "Thank you, floodtide, for making my f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact," or somehting like that. For a moment I thought, Me so clever. Then I wondered, Why am I so referential and obscure? Not that Salinger is so rarefied; but what kind of economy is expressed in the metonymic barter of emotion when one endlessly borrows quotations? Well, my head hurts too much for me to ponder this much longer; so, as a vague gesture of apology and appeasement, I will cite what I consciously remember making reference to in this entry and the last one. Gamers among you who aren't in line to jump in the street-jumpy-thingy along with blink-182 can puzzle out what the hell I'm talking about. Oy, my head. Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress." e.e. cummings. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Save A Prayer, by Duran Duran. Gerard Manley Hopkins, "To A Young Child." David Lynch's The Elephant Man. Todesfuge, by Paul Celan. [in re uglykatey's request for further reading: Einstein, Rosen, Podolsky. A paradox, 1935. T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton," esp. the line "in the stillness, the dancing." And, umm, the classic movie "Gleaming The Cube."] L'�tranger by Albert Camus. Fernando Pessoa/Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disquietude. The Teletubbies. "There's a light that never goes out," The Smiths and Dylan Thomas. And finally, a quote from Franz Kafka that informs everything I write: "the happiness of being with people."
 
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