JOURNAL "CURLING" 21OCT2022 (OPEN)

 Curling into you late at night, teeth gritted against thoughts of annihilation — a feeling of sickening nothingness, climbing up my brain stem from some deep part of me. I think it’s the same place that longs for your skin against mine, dry and hot. The amygdala? But it feels like my stomach, a roll in my intestines I’m sure feels nothing like death. It is a feeling I’ve had since I was little, looking at pictures of mummified humans in a DK book, their eyes sunken, skin variously treated; shriveling, flaking off like filo dough, treated with milk in the 1800s, moisturized by bog submersion (throat slit, features quite recognizable).

It’s no wonder my fingers fuzz over into horror when I write with the guidance of my stomach only, the best way to write, when it’s flowing chunky and hot from somewhere other than my conscious mind — not to knock the conscious, because writing with my whole knowledge of the craft is probably one of the biggest improvements I’ve made in the last few years; not relying on the mysticism I thought was necessary before, which mostly results in this sort of thing, jumbled and directionless. Leftover from reading other writers’ processes, where the rush of writing is often prioritized — or maybe it was me all along; dopamine junkie, chasing words over story. Who knows.

 But bodies, warm and wet inside. Bags of water, fundamentally. (The presence of limbs is typical, but not by any means guaranteed.) Donuts around our alimentary canal. A reduction: butchery of the presence of detail, tension, muscle, churning organs. Present arms! Present legs! Left face! An interdependent ecosystem, crawling in space, resistant to gravity, pressure, temperature — though dependent on a certain quantity of each. The cruelty is that we are not closed loop; intake / output is necessary, and feeding on the heat of entropy. Death is a brief coldness, before our energy is metabolized to heat by bacteria (mummies here present an exception). We live on the heat produced by disentanglement of order, just like the critters living in our guts by the billions or trillions. Whole worlds in our stomach, eyelashes, skin. Biological death the miniature apocalypse of a unique configuration of a whole ecology — followed by the bountiful rebirth that marks many end-times mythologies; a feast in the body-fall, supporting creatures much larger than we did when we ran our systems selfishly. Now beatles, worms, larvae, even rats — orders of magnitude larger than our earlier occupants — can live in plenty. Death is selflessness, in that way, among others.

Do I seem fixated?

I don’t mean to be. The intent here was to talk about romance. Instead, Romance; my quiet obsession with disarray and the waiting grave. Melodramatic much? Moving on. Still, even this is richness, thick with yellow adipose, dripping fluids, pumped against the pull of the earth by tireless muscle. (Lubdub.) This delicate resilience — we return to the desert with our tenuousness, occupying a narrowly survivable crust upon the earth, the thinnest slice of our atmosphere, in a thin slice of our sun’s surroundings. What a remarkable accident.

I don’t believe in much, but I believe in the unruly, the unlikely, the slightly fucked. The edges that don’t quite fit the narrative. This is probably one of the things I don’t like about writing stories and I do like about playing games, playing make-believe. It’s possible I live for the unpredictable; the thrill of response. Out-fielding and sex are alike in that regard. Still, my boy scout streak wants to be prepared. Semper Paratus in some ways the mantra of my childhood.

Scraps of military doctrine filtering in through the muggy Cape May sunlight. The kind of shit that’s intended to remake grown-ups; but what about when someone’s still being made? Can’t say, except from experience, which it’s hard to climb out of to get a better view. College has been a process of learning about myself by meeting other folks my age, mostly a process of coming to know that the things which I took especially for granted are the things that make me different.

While working on a play, I almost bring up looking for bodies by the river. I talk around it, I’m not sure why. I’m not sure what’s worse; to talk around it, or be explicit. Part of me kind of likes the “clout,” and that makes another part of me really embarrassed at my selfishness, because it’s not why I work recoveries. And the rest of me is trying to make the whole thing fit the narrative, but it’s unruly, unlikely, slightly fucked. For some reason I thought about corpses and virginity as oppositely proportionate to their real word patterns; I was surprised when I learned most people my age have had sex, and surprised when I realized most have probably not have helped move a dead body. This was something I have, for a long time, regarded almost as a rite of passage — at the very least as an inevitability. There’s a strange intimacy to being with corpses. The vulnerability of being with someone in a moment of disarray, beyond politeness or small-talk. Strangely like catching someone crying or hurt. Death, in that way, is just another state of being. Moving on.

Do I seem fixated to you?