Monk

Looking out the kitchen door this morning, I am surprised to see a group of leaves fluttering to the ground, as I realized that autumn is finally upon us. ... ... What time is it? 5:07?! Fuck!! Pop left for Kay's place for a stay-over, and I blew the whole afternoon on this wank session. Well, I don't want to complain. I don't want to feel bad about this anymore. I'd rather call it a good day, a sort of happy day. Why not? I cleared off a lot of stress and got in some good cardio exercise. The problem is I cannot help thinking how much better it would be with a woman. I imagine Sugar beneath me, blonde, twenty-two and naked, her arms around me, kissing me. It really brings out the emptiness of this wankery and of my life and how undesirable I am. On the other hand, it makes the thought of death seem sweet. One is not so horny for life and filled with desire and ambition. I know that it is all but over now. It's kind of peaceful, serene, almost zen-like. I just cannot help feeling a little sad about it. ... ... An orangey sky going into evening. Cloudy, too, though. Pop was right to say that it was looking like rain. The forecast was calling for a 40% chance of scattered storms at four, five in the morning, though I now see that has been delayed until tomorrow evening. Looking out the window, I wouldn't mind putting some money down on rain tonight. ... ... Sammy comes in for a bite to eat. I pet him and say, "Hey, baby!" and I add, "I wish you treated your sister better." Coco has always been the third cat out, as Ash and Sammy pair off together more. Coco is not eating, again. It's strange: she had been eating good for several days, seemingly back to her normal self. She is also staying in the house more now. She doesn't lie down by my feet or anything, but hides somewhere, very quietly. I half-fear that I will discover her one of these days behind a couch or dresser lying there cold and dead. ... She is now lying down close to me. She is perched on top of the couch-back, which is a location that used to be her regular spot, but which she has not come to in months. I sit back in my chair and look at her. Her eyes are open, and I cannot help thinking that she is scared. All I can do is say, "I love you." It's no help at all, just a prayer, but it's all I can do.

I had been running dry on dreams for a long time and was hoping to get one, and now I have - somewhat interesting, too. I was romantically paired with an old LJ pal, an unlikely one: Better Red, one of those Blurty friends, the theater girl, the anti-children super-atheist. In real life, or maybe I should say in our e-life, we never really reached the flirtation stage. However, she posted a picture or two, and was kind of hot, and we talked, and it was friendly.

I said that we were romantically paired, but that is putting it rather blithely. It's pretty clear that we were not sexual. I didn't touch her. On the other hand, it was as though we were married, or at least we were a very close couple in that kind of way - she was with me, and I was with her, living together, committed. It was clear that the relationship wasn't working, aside from the lack of sex. She seemed to be looking to make it in the music world rather than the theater world, and I confessed that I didn't really make it in her scene. She laughed, agreed, "If only you could at least like the music!" There wasn't anything holding the relationship together, except for my desire for her and my neediness, and apparently that is not enough. Though, we were friendly and talked easily with each other, with a fond note of intimacy, like that of a couple. Apparently, she had a history of just leaving her lovers and flying the coop without notice. I asked her for one favor: to at least let me know if, and when, she is leaving, not to just disappear on me. She agreed, kind of, smiling, laughing a little, saying that she would at least write to me.

Jazzy posted an interview question asking what do we like, dislike about LJ. I commented, "I miss the Brad days ... when the place was so busy and popular - and young, as we were also, at least a little younger. Now it kind of feels like a small old folks' home left to wither away in a forgotten cul-de-sac."

It's Saturday night! I was thinking about going back to making my weekly porn post. I have a couple of guys on my Friends List who post naked women, and at least one more old fellow who seemed to appreciate my offerings. I was going to go back to using the option to make a filtered post, just for those blokes. I didn't want to risk alienating the few old gals I got on my Friends List. However, I found myself struggling over what the regulatory limits might be on such porn posts. Are hard-ons and penetrations okay? How about those that are at least tinged with the sweet tang of misogyny and rape? I have never gotten in trouble before on LJ, but ... it's a risky proposition, and why risk it? There just doesn't seem much point in it.

"Every good book that is written against Life is still an enticement to live."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

I can't believe it took me twenty years to get to Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks". Since I first read and fell in love with "The Magic Mountain", back in the early nineties, I knew "Buddenbrooks" was around. Why didn't I rush to it in hot pursuit of another Magic Mountain? I am strange that way, I guess, among other ways. Perhaps I also thought that there was no way that it could live up to Magic Mountain, though how could I be so incurious as not to give it a shot, just in case?

Well, I finally got around to it, albeit as an old man now - at least I beat the deadline. When I first picked it up a few weeks ago and thought more seriously about how it is supposed to be about a bourgeois family in decline and decadence, it occurred to me that this might have served as an excellent prelude to Magic Mountain, and I was kicking myself for missing out all these years on reading these two novels together back-to-back. In an early chapter from Magic Mountain, it may be recalled, Mann gives the reader an idea of the prosperous merchant family background from which Hans Castorp came in the flatlands. It's a quick portrait, and we see little Castorp in awe of his great family, the great great great grandfather. It's actually one of the drier chapters. It's evident that Mann just feels obligated to color in that family background a little for readers who stray into Magic Mountain. Well, I was thinking Buddenbrooks promises to do a much better job of that, and it does!

However, it's not quite what I thought it would be. I love the novel: I feel it really picks up the game of drawing-room fiction from the likes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, taking us into the post-modern world of nihilism and despair. Yet, it's not really a Part One to Magic Mountain's Part Two. It doesn't really feel like a natural continuation. I still wish I tried Buddenbrooks at least ten years ago. I would have liked to have read it at least a couple of times by now. Nevertheless, I cannot say that I find it as enchanting as Magic Mountain. I doubt it will prove to be as compulsively rereadable as that intense study in illness and death that Magic Mountain is. Regardless, it is a great chapter of the Mann legacy to have finally gotten under my belt. These are his two landmark works that won him the Nobel Prize.

A couple of interesting scraps of dreaming ... The first one seems to have me back in college. I am in a crowded hallway with other young students. I have been staring at an attractive short-haired brunette. She gets annoyed. I cannot put together what we said, but it dealt directly with my ability to connect, especially with a lovely girl. Perhaps she was saying that there was no reason for me to be so weird, that I could just interact normally with her. I told her, with some passion and desperation, that she is saying that because the room is poorly lighted and dark, so that she is not seeing just how ugly I really am. This makes an impression on her. She seems to become my girlfriend. The scene jumps outside, and we are still together. The grounds are fairly crowded with students, as I seem to be walking her to her dorm. She says that she will be leaving for a few days, but that I shouldn't worry: we'll be getting back together. However, looking back on the dream, it is striking, perhaps telling, that we never really make contact, not even to hold hands, much less give each other a goodbye kiss at the end. It's like she is only acting as my girlfriend, but nothing is ever really going to happen, though my first impression of the dream was a good feeling.

In the second dream, Pop and I are eating at a restaurant. I seem to be eating roast beef. I am having a lot of trouble cutting the meat, and I end up cutting the fatty pad on one of my fingertips. I apply a napkin to the cut, keeping pressure on it, hoping that the cut is not deep enough that I will need to do more. I'm okay. Then the scene shifts, but in apparent continuation (just like the dream above, in seeming to have two distinctly separate parts but in continuation). We seem to have arrived home from our dinner. Pop tells me that he will be leaving in a few minutes to pick up mother from work, and he asks if I would like to go with him. I do. I am even a little eager. Maybe we will do something fun together. And that is the end of this dream.

The last dream presents an interesting family dynamic. Jack does not seem to be living with us, and mother, pop, and I seem to be enjoying a very good family life, like we are more than just family but also good friends who really like each other and like to do things together. With mother working, that would seem to mean more money to play with, too. One might note that I still don't seem to have a job of my own, but it is a dream, not a nightmare.

* * *

Next day.

Another more cutting interpretation of the second dream comes to mind. Mother is not here and working a job. She is dead, and Pop is saying that he is going to die soon and join her in one sense or another. He is asking me if I really want to kill myself and die too.

I dreamed that I was at Jack and Jill’s place. We had dinner together. I don’t recall seeing the kids there. It seemed to be a friendly occasion, as though we were perhaps trying to defrost the ice in our relations after all these years. It is also pretty clear that this is being driven by their pity for me, the way they look at me, like I'm somebody who has experienced some horror that they cannot even begin to imagine, like they realize how wretchedly lonely my life has been. And there was an awkwardness to it all. As we made our goodbyes and I was leaving them, I did not carry away the impression that we were really going to be friends, much less brothers again. It has been too many years and that possible world is lost to us for good.