14 A book of faces, face of bookends, butt ends, endings, air.
15 In silence, yes, as it is inert, but with furor thereafter in such spillage that it might be thicker in its size by seeming to have no true dimension up front, and yet quasi-unending, of tiny slivers that fill the face.
16 Words bouncing other words out of them in a silence, refracted by association, filling out the flesh around the flesh inside the head with what.
17 Each day the same websites refreshed over and over, seeing nothing new and nothing new, though the flutter of the possibility of a newness having appeared since the last refresh causes some internal corridor through which I eventually return and find myself again refreshing, and refreshing, the site inert, to which I kneel.
18 “The abstract machine crops up when you least expect it, at a chance juncture when you are just falling asleep, or into a twilight state or hallucinating, or doing an amusing physics experiment. ..” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
19 These people removed of body, organs, removed of touch and sound, translated into symbols, numbers, smudged of tone.
20 Why am I still thinking about this. Why am I still thinking about this. It’s a Facebook comment. Why am I still thinking about this.
21 Inside the sentence, each word or image shits another; and from each of those, again, again.
22 All these people’s words inside my words.
23 What are minutes. I’ve been in here all these years.
24 “My mind wanders too much to drive.” Andy Warhol.
25 Their own hours at the glowbox, typing into nowhere, node to node.
26 Where’s that.
27 “Where are these thoughts from? Rudd wondered. Who is crammed in here with me? Within him someone was speaking, leading him further and further out.” Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain.
28 The drift between each instance of any word that much larger than the word itself.
29 The knives in any house.
30 No two pictures of a person ever seem to really look the same, even exact copies.
31 There is no such thing as metaphor.
32 All blood, except quite up close, looks the same, despite its codes.
33 The chains and chains of cells grow out of the brain, draped on air and draped on floors we together walk upon.
34 These thoughts tend to rarely transcend their box — they mostly only ever serve as reinforcements for the semi-impermeable distinction between mind and skull and skin — encircling the self with gradually increasing spiral, stitches in a blanket, cells inside a shield.
35 Slumber, Shut-eye, Sleepyhead, Sleepy time, The Land of Nod, Nighty-night, Sleep tight, Sleep light, Oversleep, Shut-eye, Haven’t slept a wink, Fall asleep, Go to sleep, Go to bed, Go bye-bye, Go night-night, Turn in, Zonk out, Knock out, Roll over, Drift off, Pass out, Doze off, Conk off, Nod off, Forty winks, Sleep on it, Sleep one off, Crash, Collapse, Bedtime, The big sleep, Lights out, Shut up, Catnap, Get a nap in, Catch some z’s, Count some sheep, Siesta, Snooze, Sack time, Slumberland, Bed down, Bunk up, Saw wood, Hit the hay, Hit the sack, Hit the lights, Retire, Death, Die, Doze, Drop, Dream.
36 Sleeping gas, Sleeping bag, Sleep mark, Sleep goggles, Sleep Inn, Sleep King, Sleeper sofa, Sleepaway Camp, The Big Sleep, Sleeping Beauty, Sleepless in Seattle, Sleeping in, Sleep out, Sleep over, Sleeping around, Sleep with the fishes, Good night’s sleep, Sleeping soundly, Sleeping well, Sleep sores, Sleep aids, Sleep deeply, Power sleep, Sleep it off, Sleep standing up, Asleep on the job, Asleep behind the wheel, Crash, Crash out, Sleeping together, Sleep pills, Sleep drugs, Sleep meds, Sleep like a log, Sleep like shit, Sleep like a baby, Sleep like the dead, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, No sleep for the wicked, 24/7/365, The city that never sleeps, Sleep herbs, Sleep shirt, Sleep Nazi, Sleeper, Sleeper car, Sleepwalking, Sleep trouble, Sleep Society, Sleep advice, Healthy sleep, Sleep patterns, Master of Sleep, God of Sleep, Sandman, Orpheus, Sleep perchance to dream, Shhh the baby’s sleeping, Sleep on the sofa, Sleep on the street.
37 “To build a wall, the mason adjusts his stones one after the other in a logical order, in this case beginning with the bottom and finishing with the top.” Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays.
38 How many times a day I say aloud “I am going to kill myself,” each time seeming as if this actual cog in the arc is enough to bring one down, even as caused by such logs as crappy traffic, stubbing big toes, and so on — the mind filled with all those however benign images of ways I could imagine my body being done under — water, razor, rope — in some way fixed with virtual structures of what someone else has visioned for us, through false bodies — I am Jack Torrance, I am the camera, I am BOB.
39 Cells I made and carried, cells I needed, cells I did not, cells I burned to take my mother’s hand, cells as storage of my thought, destroyed.
40 A Google search for “Kurt Cobain” finds 4,280,000 results, which is actually not that much in consideration, as for how his image has faded even since then — fewer hits than James Joyce and Abe Lincoln, more than T. S. Eliot and John Wayne Gacy, less than Sting.
41 “Come As You Are” places me in hours half my life ago sitting beside the speak of a light — a certain texture of the air I relate to Sunday and to heavy blue tone and my mother in the kitchen down the hall.
42 The season after season of our self-named, self-generated rosters of teams in Baseball Simulator 3000, all still saved somewhere in that cartridge, a catalog of buttons that we pressed. Buttons touched for whatever reason. The space lodged inside the game.
43 They never bounced as high as I thought they should — they should have never come back down.
44 The kid I knew in middle school who’d ripped the heads off all his posters in an anger; the kid whose room was wall-to-wall with women in their underwear, for every inch, how I can still remember the way the skin formed the room into a flesh shell, how I always wanted that for mine; my own posters rolled now into cylinders or stacked flat in piles in closets, hid of light.
45 I swear I brushed my teeth not twenty minutes ago and my mouth still tastes like blood.
46 “If we had the true and complete history of one man — which would be the history of his head — we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, the vanities, the diminution of intelligence, the endless trivia we’d encounter, the ever present dust.” William Gass, The Tunnel.
47 The spit I spit onto Scott in the scene we performed together alone on the stage, the endless quotes therein regarding time.
48 Each now another closed door — I imagine — I have passed by and in passing become changed.
49 “In the sentence nothing is incidental but in the world sentences certainly are.” Tony Tost, Complex Sleep.
50 This onslaught having begun from a point of nowhere and having approached through casual acquaintance a state of near hysteria, in the clothes I should be using to seek rest, the way that people do.
51 “A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.” Schopenhauer.
52 “The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth.” Deleuze and Guattari.
53 “Learn to leave your worries outside your bedroom door just as they did their shoes in the ‘good old days.’ ” Webb.