the out there or the total here?

this line by rilke came up in my final review:
the heaviness, give it back to the weight of the earth.
they asked why'd you do it? what brought you to this?
it's a nice line.
i would speculate that most people can relate to heaviness. a humid walk on a southern night will make this apparent. when you think about not just the thickness of the air but the things that cause all the sounds around you--the flora, the bugs--it becomes recognizable that the stuff of our senses is mass-ive; massivley mass-ive. the tress are thick, the underbrush is heavy. it belongs to the earth. so give it back.

i didn't get around to writing my annual record this april. i've always called it Premay because May is a hinge in my life and has been since being in college. May is limbo. this year i had a job and school to think about until june but in truth after final review comes and goes everything else is frosting. nobody gets rid of the frosting so you could make it out of infused fish guts and with a little sugar you'd be alright. people eat frosting because it's fluffy and they think it's the cake of the cake. frosting is not the cake of the cake. anyhow, my intention here is not to use metaphors. rilke, i believe, wasn't writing metaphorically. aside from that, i resolved a few times this past semester to give up metaphors as a way of communication. muncey said it right, however, when she saw this as a mechanism to communicate the truth and not a strategy of avoidance. but you just can't count on others to get this all the time. this reminds me of a friend from high school who said that the only person you can count on for love is god. how true.

if it was the mid-90s and i lived in los angeles i would write here: "so cometh the point." seeing that this is the Hay and we're closing in on another decade that won't happen. get a garage for heaven's sakes, folks. put a guitar in it and draw evening tatooes on your arms and freak the fuck out. befriend the bums since, as dave hickey puts it, they might steal your television but they won't tell you the same story twice." a dream of eden is better than utopia. the quality of a work of art is the amount of sublimation we take out of it. these are all hickyisms. so is this: that crazy bitch in the audi drives you up on the curve...now you're conscious. you can taste your spit; you can think about your children; you can smell the grass...and when you do finally get to work you complain. to no end.

here are notes from a best man speech for andrew:
didn't like each other at firest (this is the way all such speeches begin)
disposition for the practice of dumbfoundedness
the cure
homemade coffee
the wagon
it became cluttered with the mechanisms of a low-rider's worldview
never a shotgun, always a slingshot
lives in a world of cuts on a cutting board,
tapwater,
curled book covers,
fumes,
elbows in relation to windows,
good hip-hop,
light,
sounds of being still
a mountain philosopher, as i explain it, whereas i am a valley philosopher
he just don't smell like vinegar
whereas others say cookie, cookie, cookie andrew says eat the void

and later that weekend, notes on things seen/felt in o'hare waiting for a flight back to boston:
do you like the person you are right now sitting waiting for a plane?
harvard has made for weakness, the hairs standing on the neck--survive.
where are the folks with the core (chicago? ann arbor? the west?)
i need to be a good man
am i eating the void? (the answer is yes)
i need to work from the ground
document the mundane
tell her she is silly
i'm pissed off by the former's lack of fortitude
also:
my hair in the sun at wednesday's pinup gave me the sense of the south (this shit shimmered like gasoline and it was bright brown and red and translucent)
in cambridge, mack talked to us with the lights off int he lounge and the door opened to sounds from outside where it was warm and the wind smelled like spring
was i hopped up on valium when andrew picked me up at o'hare? whatever the case, we had coffee waiting for flights at a diner by the airport
the next morning i walked between apartments with untied shoes and a hoody and boxers and the sun was too fucking bright to have my eyes open and it was bitterly, bitterly cold. (hickey: now you're conscious)
piss cloud in the backyard, search for gent's root beer, persEverance, drinks, stars outside, empty house that feels abandoned but it's the love nest instead, smell of cabin, cigarettes, Andrew pissing on the lawn, double-shot craving to supplement the ale, stories, stories, stories, stories, stories

and stories, and stories,

andrew was in the sacristy being quiet. i told him to stand straight so i could take his portrait.
and sparklers. the next morning i picked them up from the street.

and now back away from the notes. this is the conflict: the out there v. the total here.