[re: Eliot Spitzer: a friend of mine said it the best-- politics is Hollywood for uglier people.]

There is a little vertical line flashing at me from the screen and with each equally timed flicker, I fall further and further from sense.

Creative writing exercises. If I get the little mindworms and mindwords out, perhaps it’ll give me more room to think and concentrate.

—

Comfort eating doesn’t have to be nutritionally unhealthy, but as the fruit and crackers and various snacks disappear from the room in the course of one day, one wonders what kind of mental void is frantically seeking to be filled.

—

She, unnoticed, flips the tarot cards of her mind idly during lecture. Plenty of better things to be thinking about. Like lecture. But here, a card, she finds that graduate student so heartwrenchingly dashing because of his resemblance to a man who no longer remembers her. Shouldn’t think about such things. Perhaps lecture. But there, a flip, she is unsatisfied with her lives despite all indications and suggestions to let things unfold as they will. She has to force herself to take note. Notes in lecture. Yet here, crossed, there is a little scrap labeled “silly frivolous notions” wrapped in delicate green tissue paper and dismissive laughter with a faint faint note of hysteria. Unwrapped to reveal marks of superstition and premonitions from childhood, she thinks desperately that she will one day still spend the rest of her life with a man around four years older than her whose name begins with a J– or with no one at all, and not for at least the next nine years. The no-one-at-all is far more likely. She does not want to remember this, and shuffles the scrap back into her deck.

—

Force to be reckoned with, swishing and clicking down the marble stairs of a lofty building, untouchable, untouched, still trying miserably to build a mental fortress that is quickly deteriorating. There is no reason to kick the self down yourself. In the end, a stable sense of self-worth is all one has and one needs this to build upon. If no one else assigns a worth to you, there is no reason for you not to.

—

It is when he loses the ability to rub salt into wounds that he will feel completely helpless. In the meantime, still having control over something provides him with a malicious source of amusement; dolls and marionettes dancing helplessly in nets.

—

I slid outside my building and saw the clustered leaves of tulips springing from the bare soil.

—

Three months’ worth of bottles, paper, boxes, and various recyclables tumbled down the chute, and though I felt the satisfaction of recycling so much, I grimly hoped my roommate would appreciate my having to take all of her shit out myself because she now chooses not to live in this room.

—

Do I claw at my skin and hair to make myself feel better or worse?

—

Scraping of metal against metal, and a not-pristine but well-loved pan escapes the red-hot racks of the oven. It is an art and a science, such a calculating thing but only made real when substantiated with whimsy. Such an innocuous thing could easily leave one burned, scarred, seared over the stove but it holds such gentle gifts made with such care.

Take one out; break it open, suppliant and unresisting. Fascination curls upwards in delicate tendrils. Do you hear the wisps of steam sighing? Is a child’s sunbeam illuminating them against a soft kitchen wall? Do you smell the spices, mixed in perfect counterpoint to sentiments and memories?

Can you taste the trying to forget?