Something last night had me thinking about how I can tend to go about relatively detached from reality, I can't think of what it was though. As an example: my great aunt died, and at the time I thought about how it might have been good for her, even as it was not good for my grandparents. But a year later I had forgotten, and almost asked if Aunt Jean would be coming over for Christmas dinner.

���� Agh, I can't think of what that was.

���� There had been an ad yesterday on the radio for a haunted house -- of course the scariest in all the land -- and an electric chair was mentioned as one of its features. To my mind there's hardly anything more awful than a state deciding on a case-by-case basis whether people live or die, but I have to admit a sort of love for our brutal history and the particular moments in which cultures have undertaken drastic, horrifying, and absurd practices in the accomplishment of "civilization." Part of my fascination comes from a sort of God-taunting iconoclasm (which makes me sound more adventurous than I am), and part of it from a belief that humanity has an unalienable right to be a dirty animal -- a right that must be honored before any consideration of its potential for enlightenment.
���� But I've gotten off-topic. Capital punishment in modern America disgusts and disappoints me beyond all else -- institutions can and should be superior to individuals, since our greatest strength is social, collective and cumulative. We live in a world that acknowledges this and seeks to develop it. If our society were purely pragmatic or purely dogmatic, death could as reasonably be the social consequence of a heinous, citizen-harming crime as it might the natural consequence of hang-gliding on a windy mountainside. But it isn't. Western civilization is philosophical, which my best intuition suggests demands a capital punishment in permanent suspension.

���� Crap. It occurred to me yesterday how to say less instructively, some thought I was having. I don't remember what that was, so there's a good chance I've been obnoxious at some point today.

���� I was heading for the subway this morning and I had a flash of dream-feeling -- a kind of brain-flavor that's common in my nightmares. Simultaneously related to the interior shape of my mouth and some distinct, specific fear. An implicit/ever-present horror that I'm forced to accept. Some kind of domination.

���� I've been doing a decent job of putting Becky angst on hold. Every time I think of stuff we've said and plans we've had and the feelings those things represented -- and not that long ago -- and how despite obvious plan changes there's not really any reason to think it's all been invalidated... every time I get enraged at how it seems to have been been invalidated anyway, and I think of all those moments of alignment, and the 7 years of coming and going and freezing and warming and the persistent belief -- the almost religious belief/knowledge that I thought was possibility and turned out just to be love... all that and things like for a stupid example, Animal Crossing letters -- how they're just frozen there forever in the Bun City post office, saying things that may now be hardly more real than the electron configurations they're printed on -- and I wish I'd gone back and ravaged the place, like

����Dear Olivia,
����accept this fact: your gameboy will remain
����at Kabuki's house until the end of fucking
����time. And get used to the weeds. And you
����can have all that crap in my basement. Oh
����wait, come to think of it, you have no reason
����to ever move or speak again.
����love, Chris

����But that's not, in the end, satisfying -- it's skewed to begin with, plus nothing's satisfying... So when that sort of feeling has been popping up, I've been ignoring it. Love doesn't have to be an issue every day of the year. And skydiving doesn't have to represent a horrific disrepect, and the judicial branch snuffing some dudes need not be a denial of our maker. It's all just ideas. Maybe we can look at them again in 2005.




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