12.19.2003
Music reaches where the rays of the sun cannot.

12.18.2003
The essence of man is anguish, the conciousness of his own frailty, from which all fears are born, even the fear of death.

12.16.2003
I know that I am wrong, that we cannot give ourselves completely. Otherwise, we could not create. But there are no limits to loving, and what does it matter to me if I hold things badly if I can embrace everything?

12.12.2003
In middle age, people start to feel desperate about coming to terms with unfulfilled dreams before it's too late. The Germans have a term for this: torschlusspanik, the panic that strikes because of the closing of the gates, the closing down of possibilities.

12.10.2003
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. -Joan Didion

12.4.2003
Boris: What if there is no God? What if we're just a bunch of absurd people who are running around with no rhyme or reason?
Sonia: But if there is no God, then life has no meaning. Why go on living? Why not just commit suicide?
Boris: Well, let's not get hysterical! I could be wrong. I'd hate to blow my brains out and then read in the papers they found something.

12.3.2003
You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the sea's double rocks, and now you inhabit a foreign land. -Medea

12.2.2003
Silence is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.

12.1.2003
We were all young once, even my mom and dad.

11.26.2003
"When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle."

11.21.2003
When I was a kid I lived next to a giant embankment of ivy, and like a black hole - or, in this case, a green hole - anything that accidentally landed in it would disappear, never to be retrieved. What a prescient metaphor for what my life has become.

11.17.2003
Michael: You know, Miles, I don't like you. I'm not kidding. I mean it. I really don't like you.
Miles: I'm a little hazy on what it is you expect me to do with this information.
Michael: I'm just being honest.
Miles: Am I suppose to be hurt or something?
Michael: I'm just telling you the truth.
Miles: No, you said you were being honest, not truthful. You told me your opinion, you didn't give me any facts. And your opinion, as such, has no weight. No significance. No relevance. But I do find the "fact" that you think I should care what your opinion is of me rather pathetic. Sorry if that insults you. I'm just being honest.

11.14.2003
Hank Hill: Do you know what's not cool, Bobby? Hell.

11.12.2003
"I like to work with what's hidden and what's not," she says. "It's about the terrain where femininity and independence merge."

11.10.2003
Boris: I feel a void at the center of my being.
Doctor: What kind of void?
Boris: An empty void.
Doctor: An empty void?
Boris: I felt a full void a month ago, but it was just something I ate.

11.5.2003
On Monday I went to the studio, and seven hours later Dave Westner and I had bashed out a song of mine called "Hard Won." I can't think of anything that more clearly expresses my current state of mind. Turn it up.

11.4.2003
All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates. Which means that all men are homosexuals.

11.2.2003
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary and toward this our development will move gradually that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. -Rilke

10.24.2003
I overheard two guys that work at a local record store having a good laugh over Elliott Smith stabbing himself to death. Yep, stabbing yourself to death - a real knee slapper, that.

10.22.2003
His seemingly indifferent and apathetic eyes take in more than before. The days and nights bleached out by boredom and dimunition are more visible on the faces of others - in their measured gestures, in their silly and furtive little jokes. Just as before, he neglects to notice the minute changes in products, prices and jargon - the mute subtexts of everyday life, the gray fog into which more and more of them are vanishing. In short, he accommodates himself into his generation, rejects the tragic, trivializes everything. The hours are accounted for conscientiously, the rare moments of idleness open up into a chaotic void in which he feels stupid and finds it difficult to make any move at all.

10.21.2003
Nattie likes: laying on your stuff, sticking her head in bags, earwax, sitting in the tub, biting your leg, shredding paper, the "bug" corner, sniffing the floor, the string toy, playing with her imaginary "friends," hanging upside down under the chair like a little monkey, curling up in the shoe box, rubbing, looking under the refrigerator, the little yellow comb, staring at you without blinking, yawning, being petted and, of course, sleeping and pooping. Nattie dislikes: big clomping boots, thunder, vacuum cleaners, the kindness of strangers, picking her up, when you walk away, anything that happens suddenly, being petted too much, outside, the vet. Now you know.

10.20.2003
"Do you know," Napolean once said to Fontanes, "what astounds me most about the world? The impotence of force to establish anything. There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind. In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind."

10.15.2003
My father passed away two years ago to the day. When I returned to Boston from San Diego after the funeral a song fell out of me. That song is "My Story." It could be your story, too.