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Quiet times like these are for sitting back and sifting through, sloughing off the wrong, embracing the right. If. Possible. I read somewhere that memory is more about mood than pictures. How can the moods occupying all that swath of time be described with any accuracy—even the narrative I might impose on it right now must be effected by the mood I’m in this hour. And that will effect future narratives. Corruption without end.

Today is another nine-eleven. Which for me then comes out to sixteen pre- and six post-. Finally far enough, right, to be callous enough not to need to tread as lightly as possible and even appropriate the thing for exegesis about one’s personal life. Though I still feel that even mentioning it is an act of defiance—that last sentence too, another act of defiance. Defiance against what? There is nothing pushing back. What’s with all this fury (if w/o sound) that seems to signify nothing?

I run two miles every day now—up from one and working up to three. I know that isn’t much for most, but I’ve never been talented at endurance, so it’s more reason why this improvement gives me a sense of well-being. Like the carrot-and-sticks of old, like grades were before the all the insidious complacency. Intimations of greater ambitions to come; it’s fully possible to create one’s own superstructure of carrot-and-sticks, which people do, and it takes them all sorts of places.

And yet as always it seems like an impossible farce to grasp backward at the unbounded optimism, the infinite ambition, of a Stuyvesant sophomore when the entire direction of one’s life hence has been towards tepidity and timidity. Not just because you’ve grown older and wiser and now think that the most even gaze produces the most correct information, but really the other reason you keep your head down is because you happen to know that this world is full of horrors and that nobody escapes. (Guess which Tony Kushner play I plagiarized that last bit from.)

Relatedly, a good half of my real experiences with pot have been about pure terror, the same waking nightmare about *cosmic* solitude. When it’s not so terrible, it’s a background mood, a corpse in the room, which you refuse to look at because you’ve seen it before, and it was horrible enough to neutralize any curiosity about it.

This is not trivial. X, the only person I’ve met that seemed to really identify, said that it can be something to grow from. He said it so equivocally (maybe he has never been successful it?) that I almost didn’t catch it. It’s a thought that has really gotten under my skin, though. The idea that it is fully possible to ride roughshod over the abyss under your feet, the one that you know to exist, while drawing from energy that is its own justification. The same autotelic energy (“what is right? Whatever increases the feeling of power”) that can again, in turn, transitively be used to justify all those ridiculous sticks and carrots...