Sueyeun Juliette Lee
I was wondering when daylight savings was this year, and saw that it’s not for another few weeks.
The concept of saving daylight amuses me. Isn’t it an always-expenditure?The end of the world is purportedly in three years. The sun might send out a giant flare that eats our entire planet. After the poles switch polarity.
What is true about daylight.
What is true about day.
The advantages of measurement–may I one day have the tally.
The very most thing that you aren’t capable of extending. Where? A bumpy carapace under which you slowly erase what you had come to believe about yourself…
To. Approach it. A forelonging. I forelong this understanding. Capture it. I forelong the blank space of erasure. Meaningfully.
The urge, the motivation for it. There is little I desire in that there is little I lack. And under the stars, what sky. The force of it astounds me but I have become mountainous, swallowed by my meager “human profanity.”
Don’t tell me I encourage you. I swallow you. The world conspires to slurp you up, a stumpy pulp. My words were a token of their designs. Don’t buy them. They flower in the cavernous silence of your total failure.
I saw Tristin Lowe’s “Big Mocha Dick” at the Fabric Workshop a few weeks ago. You can see one photo of it here.
I don’t want to really describe it, since I don’t think I’d do it justice, but the effect it had on me was stunning. Maybe because I wasn’t expecting to see it, I’m not sure…but I was filled with a real sadness. I felt like I was personally witnessing an extinction. I have a theory about this–I think it had to do with its immense size, and its whiteness. It wasn’t a gleaming industrial white, but that soft natural white of hemp. The fact that you could see various filaments of fibers in the felt impressed on me its made-ness, how it was crafted out of something else that had a life in the world previously.
The days of true prophets might have ended, but the terrifying mortal exhaustion that loomed over them and motivated their calls still hovers in our atmosphere. Does it wear the outline of a beached whale?
I’ve been so happy. My housemates came down with me to spend a long weekend at my mom and stepdad’s place, I saw my sister’s brilliant show at the DC fringe, and just wrapped up a party celebrating her successes.
And yet, one thing I’ve struggled with lately is memory loss. I know there are things I’ve forgotten, and there are many things that I experience regularly that I know will disappear to me in a short period. I remember things said to me, but not by whom. I remember some events, but not who was there. Maybe on some fundamental level I recognize that, as humans, we are transients. If I have ever forgotten you, forgive me. And know I love you as dearly as my own self.
I know that I won’t remember most of the details from this trip. But I’ll remember something of my state of my mind, such as my peace and happiness. For those of you who filled it, thank you.
Writing this, I know I”ll lose it. I’ll have only this minor record.
Is this how one feels–at the very end?
And what else has been lost to us all– to mankind, in our totality?
Aren’t those the fragments we wash up against daily? Some thoughts feel like my own, and others feel thought for me.
I’m with my friend Tim this morning on a study hall date. We get together once a week and do dissertation-y type work. He’s up against a tight deadline, and I’m up against my poor work habits. I’m also full of poundcake, which doesn’t help the brain. Boo.
Lovely Stan put up a post with some of the poems that were shared at my book release. I LOVE the poems. And not just because they were written for me. Check it out here.
There was an article in the New York Times online today about how widows tend to be better at maintaining relationships and therefore don’t feel the need to remarry. It’s kind of a sad statement on masculinity that men are far more likely to kill themselves. But, talking with my significant other and other guy friends I have, this is not a phenomenon limited to old age. Many of my male friends seem fairly emotionally isolated, though they have friends.
If I didn’t have friends, I think I’d be a very strange person. I’d probably talk to myself a lot.
The buzz buzz around Michael Jackson’s death isn’t going to stop any time soon. I’ve been fascinated for a long while with how celebrity works to transform simple mortals into these global gods of the public sphere. It’s easy to forget the psychological toll for those folks, even as we wait to see when they’ll a) drop a baby, b) shave their head, c) be arrested for something else, d) etc. The isolation these people must feel in their delusional bubbles is probably stifling. I’m no celebrity, and I have a hard enough time sleeping in the dark by myself sometimes! So sad.
My thoughts mostly circulate around Kim Jong-Il in this regard, and what will happen when he finally passes on. I can’t help but think of his political maneuverings as these distraught love letters, these efforts to reach out to us for some human contact. It probably sounds crazy, but not much crazier perhaps than what’s really at work behind these missile tests and posturing.
Who can withstand that sort of judgement?
I was biking up Cecil B with my friends Caro and Stan when this woman shouted at us–“Michael Jackson’s dead!”
We didn’t know what to think. I sat with Caro on the bus for 45 minutes as we headed up to Germantown. Some people were talking about it in front of us. We were exhausted and sweaty. It turned out to be true. So long, Michael! Some people seem like they’ll never die, but keep going on and on into a strange eternity.
Thinking: chicken wings. No no.
About to read: Race and the Avant Garde by Timothy Yu. Waiting for Chris and Melanie to show up. Concocted some sangria with cinnamon sticks and vanilla bean.
Foot status: heels still hurt. Grrrrr.
silentbroadcast 
