There are ways of living that don’t involve the constant application of new therapies or courses of action. You’re not going to iterate yourself out of this mess. There’s no terminus but the one, no one to collect the branches, no fruit borne on the anaphora of every day of every breath. Leave the binary states, the living and not living, the you wish and you don’t, for the millenarians—these are n-ary times and still counting. There are variations to outwit us all. The waters of March mark the end of summer in Brazil.

Here is Chicago. Now, exactly as twenty-five years ago, the buildings are heavy and squarish and set down far apart and at random like monuments on a great windy plain. And the Lake. The Lake in New Orleans is a backwater glimmering away in a pleasant lowland. Not here. Here the Lake is the North itself: a perilous place from which the spirit winds come pouring forth all roused up and crying out alarm.

From The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. To be elsewhere!

What a collapse it seems that words like “client” and “meeting” have lost their strangeness. Criminy.

I was walking home this weekend and a strange man made eye contact with me as he was walking past. ”Fucha! Fucha! Fucha!” he said to me while holding my gaze as if to get something important through my thick, numb skull.

My neighbor saw this happen and said to me, “I don’t know what’s going on with him, he’s fucking crazy, man.” I asked her if she knew what “fucha” might mean and she said “I don’t know, some Mexican shit.” It is Mexican slang, the internet tells me, and it can mean either “wow!” or “ugh!” depending on the context. Maybe he meant both, and maybe that’s just what I bring to bear on the world: surprise and disgust on alternating footfalls. The rhythm of life! Ugh! Wow! Ugh! Wow! Fucha! Fucha! Fucha!

Today is a day for this song.

My sleep last night was interrupted by a nightmare that consisted only of someone trying to kill me and me trying to escape. This went on for the duration of my dream as a sensation alone without a visual aspect, my unconscious mind not even doing me the dignity of projecting an obscured face for me to nearly glimpse before waking.

Apprehensions of threats as disquieting as they are irresolute have been with me in spades for all my days. To fight them I have learned that it is necessary to adopt the following strategy: eat a lot, sleep enough, pay no heed to cruel masters, and love what you love.