I’m not a big margin-writer. I would like to be since I do tend to get really immersed into whatever I’m reading. Also I tend to have a really bad memory, and I think if I were more interactive with what I was reading I would be able to remember plots better. For instance, for 1Q84 which I just read last year, I totally forget the ending. I remember that I loved 2/3 of the book, that I loved the prose and how it flowed. I also remember how much I disliked the last 1/3 of the book and can’t remember exactly the mechanics of how Aomame got back into the “real” world.

The Millions posted an essay by Dustin Illingworth about writing in the margins of books.

Our culture is less than forbearing in matters of extra-textual scribbling, its very presence analogous to vandalism or, perhaps worse, the intellectual’s vague sedition; our training, therefore, begins early. For a child overly fond of the library, the rituals of card and stamp and due date quickly (and, for some, permanently) accord the book a kind of material sanctity: to write in one would be akin to relieving oneself in the narthex.

That could be why I don’t annotate much, that as a child I was told it was vandalism because I was reading from textbooks and library books. As I have been reading books from the library a lot recently, I’ve seen others scribble in books. Maybe I’ll have to start doing this and say fuck it. I’ve noticed that a lot of people who have read the books I have read are pretty prudish. I wonder what people will think of me.

Alternately, who hasn’t succumbed to the delicious voyeurism of a stranger’s scrawlings? In following along with the previous reader’s checks and brackets, their snarks and synopses, their tangents and revelations, we read a text doubly, illumined by the spectral presence of past engagement. Used bookstores are graveyards of casual epiphanies, awaiting the resurrective animism of fresh consciousness. And whether we are of like mind with the erstwhile owner or we find ourselves adversaries in interpretation, it is a literary haunting the seductive power of which depends on the worth of its abandoned concealments.

Maybe I will start doing this in library books, too!

Towards the end of Henry and June, Anaïs Nin shares a love letter from Henry Miller in August 1932. In it he writes:

When you return I am going to give you one literary fuck fest — that means fucking and talking and talking and fucking. Anaïs, I am going to open your very groins. God forgive me if this letter is ever opened by mistake. I can’t help it. I want you. I love you. You’re food and drink to me, the whole bloody machinery as it were.

Isn’t that sweet? He continues later on,

I love you as you are. I love your loins, the golden pallor, the slope of your buttocks, the warmth inside you, the juices of you. Anaïs, I love your so much, so much!

If a guy every writes anything like this to me, I would just cry and be putty in his arms. I got really jealous reading this. I also get really jealous when I see friends receiving dirty pictures on their phones.

Oh romance. Où est le mien?

Tony Pierce wrote one of the most depressing things ever the other day. After Halloween he rightly admonished UCSB kids for allowing the police trample over their right to party. Apparently some yahoos up there didn’t agree with Tony, so he amended his thoughts thusly:

they say things skip a generation. maybe thats the case for IV too. maybe these kids really do want to study, but they dont want to learn. we wanted to learn. we wanted to live. we wanted to date a different girl every day for a week. we wanted to ingest one different thing a night every day for a month. we wanted to see Janes Addiction and then be them. We wanted to see the Grateful Dead and then be hippies.

we wanted to start newspapers and make poetry books and fight anyone and everyone and dance and kiss and dance and kiss and dance.

these kids want to graduate.

I think about my younger cousins who are just starting college now and wonder what’s wrong with their sense of fun and adventure. Tony unfortunately hits the nail on the head, and it really depresses me.

The last time I was at Rancho Los Amigos rehab center was probably around 1987 or 1988 when Wheelchair Cousin was there to rehab after getting hit by a car and left paralyzed from her waist down at the age of two years old. Fast forward about 30 years, and there I was again today. Wheelchair had skin flap surgery on Thursday and is bedridden for two months to recover. At first I thought she was going to have the surgery and then be released home to recuperate. But no. She’s in a special bed at Rancho for eight weeks. Sometimes as well meaning as medicine is, there is some barbarism to it.

A couple of months ago, I requested the new Mark Z. Danielewski book The Familiar Vol. 2: Into the Forest from the library. I had already read the first volume of the series, and I figured I would get to the front of the line of those wanting to read volume 2. Mission accomplished. I picked up the book today.

Now that I have it, I’m wondering if I really want to read it. Anyone who knows Danielewski knows he loves his text art, he loves multiple narratives, he loves patois and vernacular. Sometimes it works brilliantly as it did with House of Leaves. But in the first volume, it was up and down and pretty painful to read at times. Am I going to put myself through that again?

Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve opened it up and read a little, but I’m still ambivalent. I’m going to give it the weekend, and if I still feel the same way I’ll return it so that other folks who want to read it can.

All is not lost though. I also borrowed Al Jourgensen’s memoirs Ministry: The Lost Gospels According To…

You cannot quench a woman’s strength with laws, curse it with solitude or abandon. It must be dealt with. It is the woman’s revolution, the flower of revolt and injustice. The men who lost their power as primitives are the prey of this woman. It is a kind of vengeance. There is something in it of the cutting of Samson’s hair. The nature of woman has not suffered the damages the man has in his struggle to suppress nature. She has not been as exposed to the social poisons. She has been relatively sheltered. Her power is unspent, new. – Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin 1939-1947, Sept. 28, 1943, p.200.

I’ve always said that Houston was a shithole of a city, and now that Houstonians yesterday repealed Houston Equal Rights Ordinance more people will see how true this is. Fuck Houston. Every queerby should just high tail it out of that shittown and let the breeders try and fend for themselves.

Let’s file this under the Jimmy-Needs-To-Get-Laid folder.

I am in the middle of what looks like a fort in a forest. Maybe it’s a tree house? But it can’t be since we’re not elevated. It’s more like a fort that is dug into the ground with a vehicle ramp made of logs to the right of the building that came right down to the bottom of the fort.

Somehow I got the sense that the fort was under attack, and right when I sensed that a jeep came down the ramp. I sat against the opposite wall trying to futilely get away when out popped Pedro Martinez walking towards me like a villain in a movie. I look away from him when all of the sudden he was standing over me with his dick hanging out of his pants.

He was taunting me waggling his dick in front of my face. It seemed like he wanted to emasculate me, so I did what came naturally to me. I grabbed his dick and started sucking on it. Pedro moaned and moaned but never got completely hard. Nothing is worse than sucking on an eternally flaccid dick. Instead of sucking him off, I finished him off by hand aiming his dick towards my mouth. And only one thing entered my mind:

HOLY SHIT! PEDRO MARTINEZ’S CUM HAS GONE BAD!!!!!

It was not good. I’ve tasted many different sorts of cum in my life, but never had I tasted anything so foul. It was like eating Korean fermented soy bean soup that has been left out a week too long.

So I kissed Pedro to force him to taste his own cum. He just kept grinning and saying what a good job I did.

Then I woke up.

What does this mean?

Un garçon precieux, absolutely looks like a glass figurine: too precious to handle, too precious to fully love without abandon. He’s a skinny Korean boy with nerd glasses wearing an unbuttoned white dress shirt exposing wife-beater underneath, slim fit dark blue jeans. He’s the kind of boy you are compelled to look at, and not necessarily in a sexual way.

But he walks by and the whiff of his cologne turns Glass Boy into something much more odious. That peppery musky scent took him from un objet d’art to just wanting to go up to him and punching him in the face, to tying him up and ravaging his asshole while spitting on him. I guess it would be an understatement to call it an abrupt turn of emotions.

Last night quite a few people were hyped up to watch the third Republican presidential debate. A lot of people talk about being compelled by the horrific car wreck nature of it. Frankly, that’s a stupid excuse. Most of these assholes would have watched it even if it were two librarians on quaaludes.

I really hate politics. It brings out the basest of our human tendencies, and each time I think about “the issues” the worst of my pessimism rises to the surface. I find Republicans to be ignorant and greedy with a dash of sociopathy on top. Democrats are conniving and scheming and they have no shame in selling their lovely Nana down the river for a few more shekels. I don’t think we would be any better with Bernie Sanders as president than with Hillary or Trump or Jeb or Rand.

So I didn’t watch the debate. I didn’t want to watch it. If I wanted to spend three hours watching a bunch of cunts, I would have been born a heterosexual.

And here is what gets me. The first chance to vote on any of these assholes is on February 1 which is the Iowa caucus. This damn election already feels too long, yet we are 3 months away from anyone making any significant vote to narrow this field down. AND we are over a year away from the presidential election proper.

If there is any time for these doomsday cults to actually be correct, I am hoping that they are soon. I don’t know if I can take another year of this.

J’apprends le français, mais je ne sais pas pourquoi. Peut-être que je veux être agaçant? Quand même, français est très difficile.

Yes. That is annoying what I just wrote, but because I’m learning French I suppose I should put it to some use. I know it looks like something a high school freshman writes after his or her first semester in French, but I guess I am a little like that right now. Genders of things are difficult — it’s not like in Spanish where for the most part nouns that end in -a are feminine and nouns that end in -o are masculine. Also understanding French speech is difficult.

The other day there was a solicitor in front the of the entrance at Ralphs, and I decided I was just going to speak French to try and deflect them. What a brilliant way to put my newfound learning to use! Perdon.

“Je suis aussi de France,” the guy said to my horror. Fuck. The first time I use this lie, and I get caught. I’m sure there is some fucking moral to this, but I’m not here for morality.

“Je n’ai pas temps maintenant. Perdon,” I said back to him and just walked away. I realized I should have said les temps, but I was happy that I got it somewhat right.