Wednesday, November 20, 2002

a failed coup

Yes, it is four something o' clock on a Wednesday afternoon, I have tons of work to do, and I am completely smashed. I have just lost Scrabble by nineteen or so points to Jamie.

At around one, Jamie asked me if I wanted to play Scrabble and I was feeling game, feeling sharp, feeling like Jamie's winning streak could come to an end this afternoon, that the feeling was right. Jamie is the Scrabble Queen. She has not yet lost Scrabble to anyone she has played with in our house. She possesses the Scrabble skills, kicks our asses every time, and triumphs with strategic placement of Q's and Z's on triple letter scores, putting her big words down, saving them for the double word scores. And, it is really a little outrageous how she always wins by so many points - I thought the game was based on luck, determined by what letters you had available to you and what letters were on the board to build off of, but I now see that there is a Scrabble way of thinking, sort of like Chess, where you have to visualize the board really well and what plays will happen if you put a word where someone can build off it and get double, or god forbid, triple points.

And well, I was in the Scrabble mindset today, going head to head with Jamie, and for a brief span of the game was winning!, I would be ahead by a few points or down by just one or two, and it seemed so close, so close - to the day, to the moment where Jamie would no longer be undefeated, where I would have beat Jamie in Scrabble - but we were also drinking wine as we were playing. Or, at least I was. And as I consumed more wine, practically the entire bottle, my Scrabble mindset was drowned in the aromatic white wine being guzzled into my system. And I really think that this is why I lost, that if I had stayed sober, or not gotten as drunk, than right now I would be gloating that I defeated Jamie Seerman - that she was not the queen of Scrabble.

And yeah, life is good these days, this today especially. I turned in two papers this week, both of which, before writing put me in extreme states, set me off into extreme crises of confidence - where I did not want to write the paper just hours before it was due, where I seriously weighed the option of just not writing it and dropping out of school. But I did it, did both of them, and turned them in. And now, I am just insanely behind in my readings for class, have a Blake presentation that I am supposed to present this Friday. Yikes!!!! And well, life is not so bleak as it was a week ago. It is never that bleak I am realizing.

There is a boy, his name is Sean, and I like him, and that adds a certain glow to the act of living in these days, makes me happy, makes me think that the world is, that everything is so right-on, to quote my roommate, the one who likes to say right-on, the Scrabble Queen. I have a cat. I will soon be switiching jobs. I masturbate frequently and life is generally good.

And I came to the library to read Tolstoy, to sober up a little bit and get some goddamned motherfucking work done, to read that wacky Russian realist, and I found a passage that I underlined a couple days ago when I was having this dread of life, of schoolwork, when it was all seeming like entirelly too much to be handled now, to ever be.

"There was no answer, except life's usual answer to the most complex and insoluble questions. The answer is this: live from day to day; in other words, forget. But as he could not find forgetfulness in sleep, at least not until bed-time, nor return to the music sung by the little decanter-women, he must therefore lose himself in the dream of life." (16)

And yeah, that is from page 16, I am probably 10 pages further than that, but am so much further than that passage, than Stiva's world-view then, light-years beyond it, and we are supposed to be at around page 300 or so. I am so so behind with regards to the pages, bu you know, whatever. I am going to read, I am going to correct this situation. But yeah, that passage no longer has the same appeal with me - I no longer identify with it. I want to go swim in pools yesterday. I want to go home and masturbate and not read, and fall asleep into a drunken comfortableness. And maybe I will. Maybe. This world's a wild one, as Cat Stevens would have said before he converted to whatever his name is now.

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