NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND 20 YEAR OLD

Happy Thanksgiving. Lacking creative impulse, but desiring to put something on my blog, I just pulled out one of my old journals from college and started typing some of the more interesting lines. Lots of references to classical works, so I assume this was in the Fall of 2001 when I took some classes on Dante and Homer. After the 9/11 attacks, so I was pretty bummered the entire year. In 2001, I was 20 old years and much more serious than I am now. I hope I'm a better writer, too. Anyways, here's to memory.

The Trojan War is regenerative. No afterlife is hinted in the Iliad. Dark Mist. Nothingness. In war, the process of living is stalled. Hades exists in the aftermath.

In the Odyssey, Hell is the deteoriation of society. Odysseus mourns the afterimages of used-up men. The dead know the past and future, but cannot know the present. A circular concept of time.

Human features are shaped by inertia and force. There is a mix of both qualities in the features of James and Harriet. Theirs is a life lived long. I don't know whether it is by ignorance, innocence, or creativity that country people's houses eviscerate the lives of their tenants-cozy and full of icons like a lady chapel

All this education has turned me inward to self-attention.

My computer came back to life today.

Sooner or later, memories of my ex-girlfriend, something I read in the paper about a winning Megabucks lottery ticket being sold from a small convenience store in New Jersey. Something about the memories of my ex-girlfriend, the lottery story, what my grandmother once said mixing in my head with a layman's knowledge of Sartre in my head giving a notion about the futility of even the purest intentions and soon I'm sitting on the stoop sobbing to myself just because.

I concede that the old downtown was gutted out before I was born. There is very little I can confess to sharing with my mother's memories as a child from the same town. Memories of Saturday afternoons on the street.

Without zoning laws or people resigning to be told what the can do with their damn land, the storefront face of the South seems malleable and messy as quicksilver. A Civil War battlefield can become a Wal-Mart, as quickly as a tanning salon can become a Living Gospel Assembly church.

I feel my worst quality is that I draw away from people I love while also needing them near.

If I was any more mundane and boring as I feel I am now, I would become tangible only in the form of pre-packaged lozenges sold in blister strips of ten at Walgreens.

I'm becoming unreasonably blameful at my family for being so grounded. I have plenty of room to fulfill my own Abe Lincoln-forged myth of rising above my rusticated roots. I don't know why, but I think about Abe Lincoln more than I think about anything else.

The Krystal commercials encourage you to take home a sackful of hamburgers today. I just drank a sackful of beers.