it is what it is (tautological, that is)
Oh dear christ I should not have had that pizza. (At least not so much of it). Ugh. Tonight was the night-- well, afternoon/evening, really, but it got dark while we were working-- we on the editorial board of the college art and lit magazine went through each and every one of the eighty-eight submissions we recieved this month and rejected seventy of them. Locked in a stuffy office, arguing, for five hours. (Of course we had to order pizza. And take a smoking break midway, even those of us who are normally nonsmokers. Even Rose, who occupies some unclear intermediate position between Boss Of Us When Gary Isn't There and Just Sort Of Helping Out, and who is this very wholesomely pretty, impeccably dressed, earnest woman who writes persona poems about pioneer women going mad from heavy metal poisoning and who I just generally never would have pegged as the pack-of-Newports-in-the-interior-coat-pocket type.) And Gracie's back from Ireland for this issue, and I like Gracie, but she's the kind of person who has very strong, very definite, very difficult-to-alter opinions and acts almost as though she's been insulted if you disagree with her. (When it comes to writing, anyway-- maybe she isn't like that at all about other art forms or politics or ethics or religion or social drama. I know her in a very limited context.) And Molly kept accidentally trashing things that the rest of us-- well, not me, because I didn't submit anything this go-round, but Max and Eliza and Gracie-- had written. (It's an anonymous judging process.) And I kept inturrupting and being fidgety and freely telling people when I thought they were wrong about things , like I do. And Max and Eliza were cool and funny and not remotely neurotic or difficult or exasperating, because you always want to have one or two co-workers like that.
February's warm this year. The river's greener than I've ever seen it, and the bamboo is yellow and leafy. It makes a slightly hollow sound when you hit it. There's an article in Time magazine about how we'll all be immortal cyborgs in the future. I don't think that any such thing is actually going to happen, but I've been wrong before, and isn't there plastic in my eyes anyway? I'm wearing clothes and paint. I'm wearing shoes like artificial hooves. I can type messages to people hundreds or thousands of miles distant, and I haven't died yet. These days, I begin to let go of caring what will happen in the world to come, in summer or in 2012. Who has ever guessed it right? Why bother guessing at all? I know that I'll step off the edge of what I know, that I'll do it again and again and again until I finally fail to land. I'm sorry, is that too dramatic? It sounds like cliffs, and maybe there are and will be cliffs in my life, but mostly these steps and edges are more like a really, really long staircase carved into the side of a cliff, stony and sedate. Incremental. I mean, I was always the type of kid who inched into the water with erosion-rivaling slowness instead of running headlong into the waves, but I'd end up so far out to sea that lifeguards actually came swimming up after to fetch me back and tell me not to be so careless. Anyway, it's February and it's warm and I am very capable of becoming infatuated (in certain ways, for certain reasons), though mercifully I'm able to keep this fact a secret most of the time. I don't want to freak anybody out more than I already do, not if I like them. Oh, all this. Julia (not me, a different Julia) and Jailhouse Tattoo Boy and I keep speculating as to whether things are poisonous. If the Huns invaded our campus, could we set the river on fire? Molly wishes they still sold clove cigarettes in the United States. Ella tried to get high by smoking banana peels one time, but it only gave her a headache. My roommate opines that she would not make good eating for cannibals. (I say I'd eat at least part of her if I were a cannibal, but I'd go to someone else for ribs.) Circe says Odysseus had no eye for detail, the conceited lunkhead, and was nothing at all like any of her spiky, sweet pigs, which she loves. And someone puts a wafer on my tongue,later, earlier, someone says, Take. This is not an order, it's an inevitability. My body takes the sunshine. My teeth close like a door. Cameras click. Swallow. Steal. I can't picture Hades except on a motorcycle, a smallish black one without chrome or much ornamentation (not that I know a great deal about bikes, mind). And someone says, will say, look how it pulses, the dark down there. Look how it moves like a chrysalis, like a heart. And they'll tell me not to be afraid. I won't be. I'll step off the edge and after that I don't know. The world will exhale, and its skin will smooth back over.
(This is my journal, and I'll be just as infuriatingly opaque as I care to be, thanks. Not to be snotty, it's just a relief after having to cohere all day.)