Journal Archives

I met this guy. He has a horse named Pride.

He tells me this and it was weird because his demeanor changed. I didn’t pick up on the social cues that were happening. Maybe he had a gay kid. Maybe the kids thought the horse was gay, so the family named it Pride. Whatever. It seemed to me there was some progressive ideology cropping up in Hardin, Co. and I was happy albeit a bit perplexed.

Later I realized the horse was white.

The dissonance I’m experiencing while writing these journals is as existential in nature as any I’ve ever felt. Existential angst.

My hands feel alien—that’s the physical sensation that precedes a seizure.

Typing through it and stringing together coherent thoughts, regardless of the noise in the room or in my mind, helps prevent a crisis.

I read a paper on Wittgenstein recently—on the ways Viennese modernism influenced him. They argued about language and to what extent it could be impartial or neutral or unbiased. This was the intellectual context of his philosophy:

Some of the most enduring works of art, literature, and philosophy produced in Vienna around the turn of the last century question key concepts of liberalism and Enlightenment – such as the notions of progress, of the coherent and rational subject, and of a stable and unproblematic relationship between subject and world in which language is nothing but a neutral and transparent mediator – in ways that seem to prefigure contemporary debates.
Michael A. Peters (2019) Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide. Homosexuality and Jewish self-hatred in fin de siècle Vienna, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51:10, 981-990, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2018.1548881

Wojnarowicz said the invention of language changed the experience of our feet on the ground.

The preinvented world is mapped onto the primal world in unexpected and counter-intuitive ways, creating a sort of existential friction.

Reflection from 2019 seizure journals. For an overview of the project, click here.

Good morning Jesus

I had déjà vu in the Airport in Chicago at least three times. I learned how to spell déjà vu because I got a drink with a Grindr boy at Wolfgang Pucks who was a PhD student in French Lit.

Except I didn’t get alcohol. I played it cool and asked the server for ice to pair with the $3 bottle of sealed water waiting on our table. Later she ran onto the nearly closed jetway because she hadn’t noticed me drop a five dollar bill on the bar. This means her tip was probably pocketed by the bar tender. I felt kind of bad but not really because I didn’t even get alcohol.

But that’s not the point. The point is I tried to get alcohol. I ordered a beer at the first stop in the terminal. After a sip, I felt wobbly and the depth of the building started to move so I paid and left.

I asked my new friend if he minded me being emotionally inappropriate. He didn’t and honestly I would have anyway. After a while, I regained my senses despite the overwhelming lights and the noise and the people—mostly the people—at the airport.

This was the first place I learned to prevent aura from turning into full-on seizure. Remain calm and keep breathing. Plus, my new friend was engaging and smart and no one interrupted me or questioned me or assumed anything about me. And I didn’t care what they were thinking. I kept them out. That familiar, wobbly sensation of depersonalization and the usual ensuing existential-crisis faded.

Maybe I’ll ask my new friend to have a look at this nonsense when I have a draft—he referred to a random passage in Wojnorawicz’s memoir as gorgeous. The adjective struck me and is of course fitting—his writing is gorgeous. But only a lit guy would describe language as such, with an adjective more germane to renaissance paintings than a grungy memoir by some queer who died of AIDs. I mean, Juliet is the sun, but not really.

Reflection from 2019 seizure journals. For an overview of the project, click here.