In other news (and now it’s time to pay attention to my calligraphical duties again—though if “calli-graphy” means “beautiful writing,” maybe graphical duties are enough for me), today was the first Friday of the new phase of my relationship with Alicia. We’ve agreed that Fridays will be days dedicated entirely to us, to our communication and intimacy. In fact, this “day” was reduced to about an hour, as I predicted. Alicia says it’s something new to get used to and she still needs to adjust a few details (or, in her words, “grease the wheels a bit”; I think it’ll take a lot of grease). And so the situation remains the same: the circumstantial always displacing the essential; our existences endlessly revolving around stupid, pointless things; and life passing us by for other people to live, if they want to. Time to take my antidepressants.

December 15

And so it goes. I don’t know what else I can say. So it goes. (The title of a novel by Saul Bellow comes to mind: Dangling Man. I’m also dangling, in a way, not dangling in the sense of my feet not touching the floor, but in the sense of a dangling participle. A pause, uncertainty, reaching the end of one word without finding the right one to follow. You could also say “Man in Brackets,” though it would be more accurate to say that I’m a man located after the first bracket, wondering where the second one is. A temporary emergency phase, but one that’s extended and extended and never properly defined. It’s like going to a hotel for two or three days and then staying for months, years, living out of a suitcase or bag the whole time and not sorting anything out “until I’m settled somewhere.”)

This situation appears to be caused by the clash of two wills, Alicia’s and mine. If I were alone, the parenthesis would have been much shorter. But I have to wait for her, though waiting seems completely nonsensical by now because I know she’s never going to arrive. Maybe I do it out of curiosity, wanting to see what new tricks she comes up with, but whatever my reasons, I have no excuse for this interminable postponement of my own self, except laziness, except stupidity, except negligence (a word derived from a Latin verb meaning “to look at with indifference”) (and in-difference is the inability to differentiate; it refers to a scale of values that isn’t really there). (And so I look at myself indifferently, ascribing no value to anything within me, devalued in my own eyes.) How can I get out of this situation? I hope graphology can help me, since I’ve been forsaken by the gods.

The Discourse

December 15