a good end.
written: 8:41 p.m. on Saturday, Jun. 12, 2004

(I don't believe in buying literary guidebooks.)

Today I strolled into Kinokuniya at Orchard and purchased a book on practical criticism. How to read a literary piece of work. Suitable for students of Advanced Level Literature.

Or is that a euphemism for 'retards who can't read'?

You really wonder sometimes when you do things like that. Go against your beliefs. Or what you thought were your beliefs. Like they were important ones to begin with. What matters at all anyway when you don't even know what you're doing half the time, when you spend most of your life painfully breathing underwater yet believing that you're taking in oxygen? What are you to do when things that once made sense no longer do, when seemingly-eternal convictions dissolve and dissipate into thin air, or merely into the fizzy gas of the soda you're drinking?

See, you're drinking soda. You're not supposed to drink soda. Soda corrodes your stomach linings and makes it bleed. That's what you thought, but look at what you're doing now.

Does it make a difference then to even believe in something? Time will take it away, along with life and youth and the number of cakes you have left and the number of steps you can still take and the number of junk you can still consume and the number of words you can still read and the number of thoughts you can still conceive and then what at the end when you realise that the lights of the tunnel are headlights of an on-coming train charging at full speed?

So why shouldn't we all be cynics?

Why shouldn't we?

***

A dream I had a few weeks ago, or longer, I don't remember.

Scene: Classroom.

Characters: Myself, Girl A, Girl B.

Action:

He talks to everybody but myself. My consciousness is filtered through a film of grey. Vision is blurred. The flesh is weak, the spirit unwilling.

He talks to everybody but myself, he shows concern for all of them except for me, and he smiles at Girl A and Girl B and even though I am between Girl A and Girl B he ignores me.

And then.

My consciousness is filtered through a film of grey. An artificial sun sketched by a creative hand provides my vision with a broken beam of light.

He comes over, touches me lightly on the arm, says, "And you... you never tell me anything."

Thoughts:

Indeed I don't. No words are passed between us. I see him and I pretend not to. Even when I realised that things are back at square one (all over again) I pretend that no realisation has been made.

No words will be said, no contact will be made, there is a pathway but I choose to ignore it, there is a trap and I choose to fall.

This is, I think, the major pitfall of doing something one knows is absolutely stupid but doing it anyway because one is absolutely stupid.

Or is it the other way round?

What does it matter, anyway? What does it matter?

before sunrise // before sunset


Previously:
- - Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017
I'm moving. - Sunday, Jul. 11, 2010
In all honesty - Tuesday, Jul. 06, 2010
What I want for my birthday... - Sunday, Jul. 04, 2010
On Roger's behalf. - Friday, Jul. 02, 2010