FRIDAY 500 JANUARY 13, 2012

            I am nervous to be here because I am young. These are my in-between times – the spot between the ribs. Today my father told me he was thinking of putting the house on the market. This statement worried me. I grew up in this house (I am noticing the presence of others makes me more nervous – can they hear what I am writing?). If my parents moved I do not know where I would call home, and it is because of this that I say I still feel young. What is my home but the long driveway and the banging heaters and the smell of dog everywhere – the church steeple that you can see rising over the roofs from the backyard (the steeple I thought, when I was younger, was god’s way of watching me).

            I was once afraid of the bathroom on the basement – too-narrow doorway, bare bulb, blue tile, yellow light everywhere that made my eyes feel thick and full as if coated with vegetable oil and dropped in a hot pan to dry a thick coat of crunchy fat – that is not what eyeballs are for.

            This place I am in now is not a home. It is a house, surely, and perhaps was once a home to an old woman (I imagine) of similar stature and girth to the, what, this sitting room? All green plush carpet, green with too much blue hue, so thick you can draw shapes in it with your feet as you comb it over itself. A chandelier with one bulb out, and places for candles – can you imagine a flame burning in a place such as this? Winter outside and candles in the chandeliers – sounds quaint but I imagine it was very cold.

            Funny that a block away from here homeless persons wander Colfax Avenue looking for change and recyclable cans and heroin and meth and crack and whatever else it is that is able to turn a man into a leech, sucking away on a life and for what? To feel good. We are creatures of pleasure and nothing else. Thoughts of home make me feel good and thoughts of losing home make me feel bad; that is what it boils down to. Thoughts of being young make me worried but thoughts of being old make me even more worried (because the older I get the more likely is the death of my parents, the onslaught of electrical and student loan bills, the clamor of the mechanisms of an adult life outringing the joyful shouts of a life well lived).

            I am afraid of many things all at once, including but not limited to: being a shell; being guilty of so many little things as to merit punishment fitting of the guilt for one big thing; losing the people I love to illness or vice; vice; illness (particularly of the unexpected sort); trying so hard to do the right thing but having the whole mess wrong all along; all this talk of things; dying without having really done anything – as in any thing (see previous item on list); collapsing, of the falling-in-on-oneself variety – walls of paper blown over in the wind of a passing train; vomiting – specifically vomiting so violently as to induce a state of panic in which I proceed to curse myself for drinking so many Jagerbombs, for being friends with people who like Jagerbombs, and for admiring the artwork on the Jagermeister bottle in an un-ironic kind of way (even though crosses and deer are way overdone everywhere – like that song on the radio that goes like “now you’re just somebody I used to know” that I originally very much admired but now feel immensely depressed by for reasons both of content and frequency); breaking rules; not breaking enough rules; the thoughts that come in my head pertaining to death that I never expect and never really mean (“I kind of just want to die,” – always, it’s always that phrase – “I kind of just want to die,” though upon even just a moment’s critical reflection I realize the falseness of the statement); bookshelves full of unread books; forgotten names; limp handshakes; always being the youngest one in a crowd (though admittedly I do take a smug sense of pride away from the experience of being surrounded by persons much older than myself); my favorite shoes falling apart; being hungry and not really having anything to eat even though there are plenty of full boxes and jars in the pantry; being pulled over by a gruff policeman; not knowing what to say –

            “This is my most sad and sparkling thing ever happened to me.” That is what I have to say about that.