So much mental chatter. I wonder what I am doing, I wonder what I want to be doing, I wonder what I want to want to be doing. This is a mid-life crisis unmoored from the props and set-dressing of good old' fashioned heterosexuality. Where does the panic go when it doesn’t have a red porsche or a secretary to lose itself in? I’m just supposed to be afraid of death and look at course options at the Berkeley extension and wonder if it’s too late to get a bachelor’s in Celtic studies on my own? Look at metalworking residencies at the Penland school of craft and know I could afford it but am maybe still too scared of that kind of confirmation of insipidity this late in life? What fun.

There’s a moment before each time we go out now where I briefly… I dunno, full body panic. I look in the mirror and am like… what? Why would this go to that party? This is an old person. I don’t feel old, the I that sits behind my eyes, the I that cannot shut up inside not for one goddamn minute, the I that is excited by birds and learning languages and the Book of Taliesin. But the him in front of me looks tired. Looks like he has not, cannot, and will not never develop a commanding set of pecs. Destined to be… sort of soft, shapeless… forever? The him in front of me is graying at an alarming rate, the him in front of me has eyelids that are beginning to wander, the him in front of me has to shave his fucking earlobes three times a week. Doomed to be further and further afield from one another, I’m afraid. Doomed to be further and further afield from one another = I’m afraid. What! fun!

We are about to leave for a birthday double header, first to Adam’s then to Ted’s, I try to pick and earring and think… an earring? Do you think you are 12? I look in the mirror and it becomes this funhouse mirror, from the front, fine, and I start to turn and begin to see… my sister? an old man? Have I always been this… deep? My head looks like it goes too far back? When did these wrinkles on my neck appear? Am I shaped like a trapezoid? It goes on. I push past it. We go to the parties and its fine. Or is it. Who knows. I’m haunted by this thing I read where a woman says she always asks “how do other people perceive you?” in job interviews because it’s the make or break question: self-awareness is a key component in wanting to work with someone. “But it’s IMPOSSIBLE to actually know that” I think. And boy do I think. “I cannot actually stop thinking,” I think.

I’m drawing a lot of shit lately, little graphic explorations. Trying to have something for a show in September. I read blurb in a course description about the opportunity collage gives to expand past the limitations of printing capabilities and have a huge epiphany, suddenly invigorated. But then I realize it’s a revelation I actually had months ago, I just never did anything with it. Worried this is what it’ll be forever. Breakthroughs un-acted upon. John and I have this big, knock down drag out emotional come to jesus. Not directed at each other, just both of us losing it at all of it. I tell him that I've been fixated on this lyric from Fever Ray’s song “Kandy” — “what if I die with a song inside?” And I realize that’s what all of this is — the realization that life is probably more than half way over and that if I don’t start drawing now, really drawing, really making, really doing, then I simply will find myself at the end of the track. The I desperate, the me expiring, and time. is. up.

What fun!

Here are the books I read in July.