All Alone on a Sunday Morning

Here's the new journal.  I have years of online journals elsewhere, but I'm sure they've all gone to website afterlife by now - buried somewhere undignified in some database somewhere that is simultaneously nowhere.  It's the great technological abyss; when you stare into it, it stares back at you, and armed with pop-up ads, spam, and a million flashing ads for internet porn and dating services.  I decided that this is new-me, yet again.  Like Madonna with less imagination, I hereby reinvent myself for the abyss to archive - evidence I was here and that I had anything at all to say.  I realize as a college professor that this is far more rare and interesting than I previously thought.  So many people, and by people, I mean quite curmudgeonly those who are ten or more years younger than I, who don't read, don't think, and certainly never compose complete sentences except under duress and the threat of a red pen.  Even though the red pen has also gone a similar direction since no one cares about grammar or the English language anymore, I persevere, and if the Revolution comes, I'll be the one not armed with a gun, but with a pen (or a nifty mac laptop...you get the idea).  Thusly, I will rule the world some day as the last brain standing.  Ha.  It is the middle of the night.  I am dismayed at kids my daughter's age, who do homework - if they have any to speak of - plugged into an iPod, text messaging friends with pointless empty messages at 15 cents a pop, all whilst watching the television in such perpetuity that she sings along to all the commercial jingles as if quoting Shakespeare.  My students, who are considerably older, are no better.  Most of them have the attention span of a gnat, and can scarcely go ten minutes without a cursory check of the cell phone and at least one opening of a laptop.  Guh.

It's the middle of the night and I can't sleep because my heart keeps skipping a beat.  That sounds like the start of a song or a poem, but instead it's the truth.  I can feel my pulse beat strong and then gasp and thud back into gear every minute or so; usually the only people my age with this problem are meth-heads and coke addicts.  Who said caffeine is harmless?  I feel strung out like a junkie, stretched thin (metaphorically) like silly putty pulled to the point just before the weight of the tendril breaks and it falls silently into two pieces.  But my pieces now are many, and I desperately want to be mushed back together and shoved into a two-part breakaway plastic egg, and who said postmodern fractured humanity no longer exists just because we're all tired of hearing about it?

I just finished reading a book (gasp) that has nothing at all do with my dissertation.  This alone is its own marvel.  I love Douglas Coupland and I have since I encountered Generation X before it was a hipster's shelf requirement or a buzz word.  Eleanor Rigby is one I hadn't read and frankly didn't know existed until I found it on a bargain shelf in hardback version at Barnes & Noble over the summer.  Naturally, I buy books all the time and stockpile them into corners of my office until every flat surface is supporting an untidy and heaping pile of books.  Some things in my office are even supported by the books, which amuses me further and incites deep sighs from Jamison and the rolling of eyes of my daughter.  But often I have no idea when I'll get to read them, if ever, yet they are there, waiting for the day when I can once more read for pleasure.  I remember specifically that this book was one of a pile acquired during the week that must not be named (save once, it was 'doctoral comps' ... but we shall never speak its name henceforth) and Jamison only laughed at me when I told him I purchased fiction and it had been written anytime after 1650.  Ha.  I still want to cry when I think about the story - but in a good way.

2:30 a.m. now, and I can't remember the last time I witnessed the clock ticking at this hour.  Reading fiction makes me want to write fiction; I often long for the days when as a naive undergraduate I whiled away many an hour and sometimes into the wee ones working my way through the psyche of someone else, trying to understand his/her story, and how I always seemed to locate time to stare into the eyes of photos until I could reach into my head and snatch that one word - that only word - that will do but that I can't seem to say just yet.  Last time that happened, I was writing about Charles I's Eikon Basilike and the concept of tyranny; the word I couldn't find was "reconciled" so I had to get up and do the dishes until it came to me.  Somehow that lacks the romanticism of pondering over whether my manic-depressive and histrionic pathological liar is erudite or perspicacious.  Or perhaps just a dilettante?  Being a writer is cool; being a scholar - whether or not it suits me and I am good at it - is akin to being in a famous rock band and only being responsible for hitting the triangle during one moment of one song.  Whether or not you're playing Wimbledon, it still feels like you're sidelined.

And speaking of sidelines, I think it's time to force my brain to take the bench.