10.14.2003
The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels our unconscious feeling in the face of our universe: it is an insistence on familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

10.10.2003
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. -HC

10.09.2003
Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction. -Jean Baudrillard

10.07.2003
Disturbing, vivid dream: L and P have driven us to a rural area to pick up tickets to a college football game and everywhere there are giant chickens running amok, so many that it's impossible to avoid hitting them with the car. We arrive at a ramshackle house where a suspicious-looking man tells L that he had already emailed the tickets to her, but L says she never got them because I've been accessing her computer and deleting stuff on her hard drive. I laugh and tell L that that's absurd, that I don't have the desire or wherewithal to hack into her computer. L gets angry and shouts, "You've been doing it for 12 years!" I say, "Dad knows I wouldn't do this!" L whispers, "Dad's dead."

9.30.2003
Some things take a while to come to fruition. In this case, several decades. The other night I went into the studio and finally finished a song that's followed me around for a good chunk of my life. It's called "True."

9.29.2003
No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable. Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior and, especially, through its savage moods. The sadder, sleepier, slower and less volitile depressions are more intuitively and more easily taken in stride. A quiet melancholy is neither threatening nor beyond extraordinary comprehension; an angry, violent, vexatious despair is both.

9.26.2003
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It has now become clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.

9.24.2003
Married people promise to love each other eternally. That is easy to do, but it does not mean very much either; for if it ends in time, surely, it will end in eternity. Therefore, of the people involved, instead of saying "forever," say: till Easter, or, until next June 1, then there might be some sense in what they say; for then both would have said something, and something they might be able to keep.

9.22.2003
The neurotic, no matter whether productive or obstructed, suffers fundamentally from the fact that he cannot or will not accept himself, his own individuality, his own personality. He criticizes himself to excess, which means that he makes too great demands on himself and his completeness, so that failing to attain leads only to more self-criticism. Not that the artist does not criticize himself, but by accepting his personality he not only fulfils that for which the neurotic is striving, but goes far beyond it.

9.17.2003
You see, I want a lot. / Perhaps I want everything / the darkness that comes with every infinite fall / and the shivering blaze of every step up. -Rilke

9.15.2003
I believe you can go to the place you've been hurt or threatened to be destroyed, or pieces of you have been destroyed, mangled, treated as if they are of no value. You can get to your outrage, your absolute determination to retaliate for vengeance, and you can understand how you feel that because of something done to you. But deeper than that, it's like an undertow of the ocean. It's like an undertow current. There's something that you contact that's much bigger than what you did to me or what I'm going to do to you. And you get caught in that; you're in something that's outside yourself. The personal explanation is not enough. In the larger, psychological explanation - archetypal pattern of energy, unconscious instincts of hate and cannibalism - even that isn't enough. That's involved, too. It's as if you have a spell cast over you. But you feel you're caught in what the New Testament calls "principalities and powers." It's a power that catches you, and you are not enough by yourself to defeat it.

9.12.2003



And I, tiny being
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss.
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose with the wind.
-Neruda

9.11.2003
Homer: I wish God were alive to see this.

9.9.2003
Farewell, Warren. I'll keep you in my heart for awhile.

9.8.2003
It's a warm, end-of-summer night and I lay on my bed and listen to the sound of Bruce Springsteen echo through the Fenway.

9.4.2003
We are the only ones who know what wakes us up and what puts us to sleep.

8.29.2003
An act of suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls a trigger or jumps. Of a reporter who killed herself I was told that she lost her daughter five years before, that she had changed greatly since and that the experience had "undermined" her. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in the man's heart. That is where it must be sought.

8.27.2003
In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. -Oscar Wilde

8.25.2003
I found another song written by my grandfather, Jack Mahoney. It's a little number called "Kentucky Days," and it goes something like this.

8.20.2003
Recently, I found this little nugget in a press release: "Keith Harmon, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is managing director of the media practice on the West Coast." During my tour at the Los Angeles Times, I had the displeasure of working alongside Keith, who was (and likely still is) a mean-spirited, two-faced, manipulative prick. But is he a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist? Well, he was located in the same newsroom as the actual recipients, so if proximity counts then I suppose you could say he is. Which makes me one as well. From now on, I'm Eliot Wilder: three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

8.18.2003
Two women are walking ahead of me on the street and one declares, loudly, to the other, "Every day I pray to God to forgive me for all my sins because I'm afraid that if I ask for forgiveness for just one bad thing I might forget another." The other shouts, "Amen, sister." I think, How about not doing all those the bad things to begin with?

8.15.2003
In my next life, this will be my job.

8.13.2003
As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come. The future stands firm ... but we move in infinite space.

8.12.2003
What's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows him around?

8.11.2003




Today would've been my father's 82nd birthday.

8.7.2003
When you are sick you find yourself in a new field of perception where you make a harvest of interpretations that then provides you with your daily bread, your only food.

8.6.2003
In the suburbs, I'm the stranger; I feel exposed. Only in a crowded diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.

8.5.2003
Their tastes and opinions were identical. Often whichever of them was listening would cry, "So do I!" And the other in his turn would chime in, "So do I!" Then their interminable laments against Fate: "Why were the heavens against us! If we had met ..." "Oh! If I had been younger!" she sighed. "No! If I had been older." And they imagined a life of nothing but love, fecund enough to fill the vastest solitude, exceeding all joys, defying all sorrows, whose hours would have melted away in the a perpetual exchange of confidences and which have become something shining and lofty, like the shimmering of stars. -Flaubert, "The Sentimental Education"

7.25.2003
The thing most feared in secret always happens. All it takes is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy when I thought of it. It takes humility not pride. All this is sickening. No words. An act. I won't write anymore. -Cesare Pavese

7.24.2003
Mr. Burns: Just remember, Homer: There's no muscle stronger than the human heart.
Homer: What about the weener? I saw a man on the TV lift a paint can with his.

7.21.2003
An artist does not live a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his work if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings. Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a man tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

7.18.2003
If we live from day to day without self-examination, we remain unaware of the dangers we may pose to the world and ourselves. But if we look into the mirror, we just might observe a rapacious face. Perhaps the face will even show subtle traces of hatred and savagery beneath the surface. And maybe most of us look a little bit like Hitler, that ever-present ghost. All right then, we may say in response to the mirror, we are vile, we know it. Everyone is. That's the way people are. Of course we're like Hitler, and we're sick of lacerating ourselves about it. This self-pitying response to the unflattering news that we're not quite good means that we've decided, if that's how things are, that we'll accept evil; we'll no longer make any effort to oppose it. But it is utterly ridiculous to say people are vile. Everyone knows that elements of goodness exist, that it can grow, or that it can die, and there's something particularly disingenuous and cheap about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it's already over.

7.17.2003
If we are committed to comfort at any cost, as soon as we come up against the least edge of pain, we're going to run; we'll never know what's beyond that particular barrier or wall or fearful thing. -Pema Chodron

7.16.2003
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. -Nietzsche

7.11.2003
I suppose it's only human nature to want to return to the places and the people of our past. But, as is often the case, we wind up discovering that those places and the people don't exist anymore, and perhaps never existed.

7.10.2003
What I need most to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place - for that would be history - but in the order in which they first became significant for me.

7.9.2003
It's always our decision who we are.

7.8.2003
Nattie in a box.

7.7.2003
I watched the night sky thown into convulsions of colored light with the calm of someone for whom the whole unmerited pain of the human world had receded and diffused itself - as pain does when it goes on too long, spreading from a specific member to flood a whole area of the body or the mind.

7.1.2003
It is not the literal past that rules us, but images of the past.

6.30.2003
"Stupid Flanders with his misleading silhouette!"

6.27.2003
True art, when it happens to us, challenges the I that we are.

6.26.2003
It is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. -Rilke

6.23.2003
Are people continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features - the temporal flicker of old silent film?

6.20.2003
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

6.19.2003
Maybe what we're really afraid of is thinking about a kind of existence that we've lost, which if we were to remember would make us give up everything.

6.18.2003
Part of me refuses to accept the notion of fate, mostly because I find it difficult to believe that our lives matter so much that they've been scripted in advance. Another part of me says, fuck that shit.

6.13.2003
After food and shelter, the thing we need the most to sustain us is meaning. We want our lives to resonate, to have purpose, to be about something. So we make up a religion or we fall in love or we say that 13 is an unlucky number. Because we want to believe that we have a place in the universe and that this life we are living isn't for nowt. The problem is, it isn't so much about what we believe but what we do with what we believe, and that's where all the trouble begins.