First full week of solitude in the house. I’m alternately enjoying and not-enjoying the peace and quiet. It’s lonely at night, and there is something incomplete about waking up alone in the bed. Cooking and eating alone is a drag. I don’t think I’d adapt well to a single life. I hope I never have to try.

Meanwhile, the sitting experiment is a moderate success. I have sat every morning except one, for about a half-hour each time, trying to clear my mind and find time to not have to be flooded with thoughts and plans and fears and worries and hopes and all that rackety junk that sloshes around in my head 24/7. It’s not easy getting the torrent to slow down, but I hope that I can get better at this over time. From what I’ve read, nothing succeeds like persistence. And I’m willing to be persistent.

Just spent an hour or more (um, can’t tell) writing a short story. Or maybe it’s not a short one. I’m not done yet. If experience is any guide, I’ll look at it tomorrow and think what a piece of crap. But there is something in me trying to get out, for the past few months. I’ve been feeling really artistically stirred up, like there is something I need to start expressing: some way of translating all of my mixed-up feelings about where we are and where we’re going, and all I see in popular culture are images of stupid marching into retarded oblivion or despair and inability to think of anything but murder or self-murder. Like humanity is having the mother of all third-act problems and can’t think through to a happy ending. The gun in the first act is going to go off in the third, as Aimee said; not only that but a bunch of guns not in the first act are going to go off, along with some rockets and missiles and maybe some nukes too. Stick around. It’s going to be fuckin awesome. Fuckin shock ‘n’ awesome.

Colour me Pollyanna, but I see many positive futures forking out ahead, and either choice or happenstance will steer us down some pathway that is better than where we’re locked into these days. I mean, what more can we hope for the way things are currently set up? More stuff? Bigger stuff? Louder stuff? And all the while, less meaning, less connection, less point to any of it? Please please please tell me that I’m not a complete freak outsider weirdo for wanting things to get back on the human scale. Is anyone out there actually digging on this, in any sense more interesting than just spacing out on the everythingness and full-on availability and bright shiny gimmeness of the world we built for ourselves?

Like that scene in Dawn of the Dead. Q: Why do they come here? A: This place (the shopping mall) had meaning to them.

All zombed out.

All I want is to be able to look back and see that non-material things have gotten better, even in the context of a materially harder life. We bought convenience at too high a price. Non money down, 72 months interest-free, but time is up.

So this will be my dream, and maybe I’ll find a way to express it in the form of stories. Stories about people grappling with a world which is going in reverse in some ways, and of course forward in others. I’m not going to be more ambitious than that, but if I write for myself then something good will come of it, even if it’s too idiosyncratic and boring for most people. I want to tell stories of hope and decency, but without being sentimental (the eternal disclaimer)… maybe I should reclaim sentimentality for all the sentimentalists out there who have nowhere to turn for quality entertainment with that maudlin touch to get you through the day. But sentimental with a tough core.

Whatever that means.

And – - – publish it! ~~~