It would change meter every bar, and the meters would be very odd and often compound. But the orchestra would simply hold one chord for the entire duration, each bar tied to the next.

So while the orchestra holds one long chord, the conductor is waving his arms in all sorts of difficult and constantly changing patterns.

But I will not compose it.

It is not a good novel. But it is a completed novel.

I knew that it was awful about 1/3 of the way through. The question remains: why did I finish it?

Sometimes just being done with something is more important than the something.

I should have been an architect, should have been a doctor, should have gone to graduate school. I should have broken up with her sooner. I should have never broken up with her. I should have never tried cocaine or cigarettes. I shouldn’t have cut myself with that Buck knife back then. I should have worn more suits. I shouldn’t have left New York. I should have never gone to New York. I should have said the other thing.

But I didn’t. I didn’t. Because I cannot wear a suit. Because I did not say the other thing. Because everything was what it had to be, in some sense.

I think about being late for the plane, the plane, so much, all the time. If I am three hours late for the plane or if I barely miss the plane – which one seems to hurt more? The answer is obvious. Why? Because you feel like you could have made it. But you couldn’t, because you didn’t.

I want to be Spinozan about the whole situation. His logic I get, I do. But it doesn’t really make it any easier, the way you can know pain is a chemical but still feel the hurt.

Inevitability, mind you, is not the same as a “reason.” Things happen for a “reason” only in the sense that something came before that thing. But there aren’t any “reasons” such that you should feel particularly comforted by them.

You want to say: I could have been someone. But of course that makes no sense.

I don’t believe in that shit; still I hope. And I hope. And I hope.

I miss Portland. Some days so much my heart hurts. I miss people with tattoos and I miss microbrews and sushi and live music and boutique groceries and the smell of weed wafting from a bedroom window on NE Alberta Street on a Thursday afternoon.

But it is hard not to see the earnestness here, the way people here love the simple things, the way they aren’t too cynical to admit how wonderful it is to pass a holiday afternoon ice skating and sipping homemade hot cocoa, and not fall into a sort of limerence with this place.

There’s a feeling that all you’d need to be happy here is someone to love you and a decent truck with four wheel drive.

Two things happened today:

1) We went to the Kennedy Space Center, by my request. We spent the day hearing all about how 40 years ago we went to the fucking Moon, how we made the longest runway in the world with one long pour, how 400,000 people in the 60s and early 70s worked together to achieve the greatest thing that man has ever done.

2) Back at the hotel bar, I ordered a vodka martini (not my usual drink), and the bartender made it with Triple Sec instead of Vermouth and put a lime in it.

I wish it was the sixties I wish we could be happy

I have to try to remember that I have not failed because I have not made everything that there is. If I can make one tiny neat, one day, that is enough.

Or is it?

To regret is to have learned something about life. It hurts to learn things about life, for most of the truths to learn are painful ones. One might be wont to say then that it could be regrettable to not regret, and then we would find ourselves in a difficult regress, where regret might become its opposite. Maybe there is comfort in that, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way.

Regret is a sort of epistemological torture device. Because you want to think that if you’d done this differently or that differently, then you’d be happier now, or at least less miserable. But there’s no way to know, is there. You can see the rooms next to your memories, those rooms are well lit. But the rooms next to those rooms are a little dimmer, and the rooms next to those dimmer still, until eventually there is darkness. But even if you could see the whole thing clearly, even if you could know all the possible outcomes of all the possible choices, still there would be nothing to be done. Oh, but to wallow, yes. It is a sort of pleasurable pain, like tonguing a loose tooth.

The pragmatic thing to do in life is to focus one’s mental efforts on the future, on what is not yet, the idea ostensibly being that if one does this then one’s future memories need not be so painful or regrettable. And isn’t that the rub. That it is and will always be about memory, for memory is all there really is.

My nephew, he is three, told me not to talk to him, because there was something weird in his brain. “How is the weird thing in your brain?” I asked. “Not good,” he said. I told him I had something weird in my brain, too. “How is the weird thing in your brain?” he asked me. “Not good either,” I said.

Welcome to the family.

It was wonderful.

The days are harder than the nights. It gets easier as it gets dark. The night is less lonely, for some reason. Maybe because at night is when one is expected to be alone, or more alone. The day is when you are supposed to be out in society, doing things with people. Maybe because the animals are out at night. I can hear the owls and the geese. They comfort me. Because of this, the hours I keep have gotten progressively stranger, and I am now basically nocturnal.

I am producing a lot of creative stuff, which was the point of this. But it is hard. I have to fight it. It has become less of an inspired thing and more of a way to distract myself from the loneliness, a way to pass the time until it is completely dark and I start to feel better.

I am thankful for my cat, for he is my only companion. I don’t know what I’d do without him. And I am thankful for the radio. I am thankful for voices coming to me over a magical box. I talk back to them sometimes.

Most of all I miss laughing. It is much harder to laugh by yourself than it is to laugh with other people. Company is for laughing.

Then again, I am also getting used to it. Maybe that is dangerous. Sometimes I take a sip of tea, breathe in my solitude and I remember how scary it can be, to be with others, sometimes.