cutting great neck

how can i start.

i'll just describe where i am right now.

i'm on a laptop listening to mexican guitars and typing into this box. there's no air, or at least the air feels very heavy. i'm sitting on a wooden chair next to a hard plastic pine green table. an old man sits a few feet to my right hunched over the pa daily news, his jaws grating visibly into a salmon sandwich in a ripple motion, his eyes drifting slowly across the pages (do they really serve salmon sandwiches here? weird.) next to him sit stacks of donuts and other dough-y creations, their glazed bodies glowing in a languid fluorescent shine, burning off-white for hours on end behind curved, filthy glass. a young guy--maybe a stanford student, maybe a foothill one--types with one hand on his mac, face somber and focused on the screen; cars fly behind him, suvs and trucks and smaller cars, their bodies beaming sunlight and blue sky-light from every inch of their frames like great lamps.

i think it's funny how this place never closes. i wonder who was sitting on this chair at 2 a.m. last night--a drunk high school kid, or a stoned homeless guy, or a jetlagged venture capitalist from taiwan with nothing to do and nowhere to go. i've been waiting for two or more hours waiting for the washer fluid tank in my toyota to be fixed in the car repair shop a minute-walk away. i hate waiting like this. or maybe i actually like it. especially now because i feel so insert-french-word-here, so bohemian freethinking liberal, so hipster, typing my thoughts up sophisticated-ly in a shitty hole like this. i've eaten like twelve doughnut holes and i don't care, even though i feel like a giant iguana entered my body and settled comfortably into my stomach. it tasted good and anyways i needed something sweet to accompany the iced coffee. hopefully the repairman will give me a call in the next five minutes or so, though i'd imagine it'd be in an hour, two hours. damn fucking cars. i hate waiting.

and i'm so apathetic about life. i guess that's what i want to say here, is that i'm so apathetic. i've been thinking about death a lot lately and how afraid i am of it, really for no reason, even though i've managed to park this fear far into my subconscious several folds beneath the surface of my brain for a long time before. i don't know what happened--i was just lying down in my bed like five months ago and everything was dark and then i just thought, "shit, i'm gonna die one day." and it's not like this was something new--i've known this, that i was gonna die, for many years now--but not like this. the inevitability of it just packed me in the gut and it was so scary, knowing that one day it will come and i would have to endure this black night for eternity without even my thoughts to guide me. and every day i wake up now and seconds later i think, i'm going to die one day.

and maybe that's why i just don't care. really, i don't. i hate how i don't know what i want to do in life, such a fragile, fragile life, and how i don't know what's going to happen and how i'm supposed to live, what i'm supposed to become and who. maybe i've become this apathetic because of this move--i've just become cynical, like, oh, another move, who cares what happens to me and what i do because anyway i'm just going to move again, anyway i'm going to die.

whenever i drive back from the baylands after running i think about this apathy. i don't know if it's really apathy--though what else could it be? i just don't think i'm productive. i don't remember what i did the day before, what i did a week ago--it's anyway always the same thing: maybe went out with friends, most likely traveled the world wide web. and here i am, not really doing anything either--at Happy Donuts, waiting for the Repairman to fix My Car, and when he's done i'll just drive Home and do Nothing, really. maybe i'll go to yogurtland with friends after i run. i stopped writing for fun, or for anything really. i read the economist--that's the only thing i read. cover to cover, the whole week long. i don't know why i read it.

if someone asked me what i'm doing with my life, i don't know what i would say.

i guess i'm just waiting. i guess israel and rome will free me from this prison cell of apathy--the lack of routine, that lose-yourself-in-the-moment feeling, seeing people you care about. then i go to brown.

yeah. it just became noon. funny how time moves like that. i hate that, thinking about time, how it's just a countdown to our inevitable death--and how we treat it as if it were infinite, "hey let's meet at 3, not 2", like that hour doesn't mean anything but in the end, in the very, very final end, it will mean everything, it will mean a lifetime and more than that, it will mean a thousand lifetimes. i hate that. i hate it so much.