Caveat Emptor Entry 1.

It's the nearly the last day of August and this morning while walking to work, I smelled the beach for the first time in more than a year. It was like Proust's episode with the madlines, except less French by nature. More than just the beach, which is an olfactory amalgam of salt and seaweed and beach-roses and beachgrass, fish, and sunlight (which has a scent, I'm convinced), it smelled of the sand, of pressing your face into hot sand on a hot-as-balls day in July. However, it is August and I am very 900 some miles or so, 934 miles to be more exact) far away from the beach, which really should be Beach with a capital B because there are, technically, other beaches, but no other beach that has the home feeling or home scent of Bonnet Shores. So I was kind of thrown by that. Right now I'm in the bookstore and transcribing entries into the Irish folklore database https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4921577/4881205
Just did this one, which there are probably errors on, but, that's what I get for not taking Irish at Notre Dame. I tried, to be fair, just not very hard...it's hard to learn a language that uses the Roman alphabet but has everything make different sounds because fuck the sounds they usually make for English speakers. I mean, German does that for some letters, yeah, but it's kind of predictable, Irish is just like, well, do we really want to use our own typeface (in which it makes marginally more sense)? No, fine then, we'll just use this one, but...everything should sound different, because fuck it.
Anyhow, it's kind of a fun website if you're interested in folkore studies and things like that...which I am. Not enough to get a degree in Folkloristics, I think (though this is also because I completely fucked up my attempt at an MA in English, which fucked my GPA pretty hard, so grad school would be...difficult at this juncture)...but...anyway, I should probably pretend to work and sweep up the place.

A year and a two weeks and some three-ish days from the last post. (written 8/14)

It's been that kind of year (and two weeks, and some three-ish days, but, honestly, recently, things have been a hell of a lot more wonderful than they could be, so, there's that)...and it keeps becoming a larger and larger avalanche of sucking and shit (granted, I'm not in, say, Haiti or Chechnya or Somalia or a number of other places or Detroit, and granted I have it a lot easier than probably 95% of the world because I'm white, American, male, and tall. Still, things can turn into a shitstorm, and, in fact, have. Several shitstorms, a front of shitstorms, a gust front of fuckery and fell doings (not by me, but, well, pretty much, towards me, by the cabal that is apparently trying to through wrenches into the admittedly rather naive plans I'd sketched out for the next few years. It isn't a conspiracy, it's just the roaring, fast train of reality and I picking flowers that grow in the slag and rock between each of the railroad ties, assuming that noise is the wind or something, nothing to worry about.....
and then I'm flattened and splattered all over the landscape. Because it's really my own fault, and I shouldn't be writing this, I should be doing things that will help me get better instead of bitching instead of burning through two years of my thesis and then, fuckall, finding out that I ran out of time to submit it...three months after it was apparently due (I swear, I thought I had five years from the start of the program...and I was close to finishing it when I got that letter (Thursday last), and since then I've just been in a sort of constantly compounding shellshock about managing to fuck up getting an MA in a ridiculously easy program with very accommodating professors, I mean, it looks like I must have tried really hard to fuck up this fantastically, or, not tried at all, been too afraid of failure that I just shut the possibility of doing something that might then fail out of my mind and lived day to day to day, sometimes in almost total seclusion from the world, sometimes not, ending up with an apartment full of books, somehow, (me, that's how), and a lover I'd driven insane with those books, because of the piles and simple fucking obstacles they left for us (just moving around the apartment, moving-moving made my bibliomania (book-hoarding, OCD related to books, whatever) even more apparent...and yet, I'm self sabotaging, I'm undermining my brain by not sleeping, ever, really, at night, and by eating just the bare minimum of calories to keep me running and shit like that. It's damned unhealthy and damned near insane.
(Added to, 6/10/2016)
So, lots of shit has happened since I started writing this post two years ago. It's just sat as a draft waiting and gathering electronic dust.
First off:
I'm sans gallbladder.
Not the source of all my health problems by a long shot, but...it has made stuff slightly less unpleasant, regarding dietary aggravations, pain, etc.
Plus, now that I'm on my Comrade-Lover's insurance...I can get my prostate fixed, which is good...
though the more I look into it with an actual doctor, the more it looks like I was right and that there is actually no real way of fixing it because it is a brain-gut axis problem just like...everything else going wrong with me is. I'm sure LSD would fix all my troubles brainwise, but since I don't know any good chemists making reliable safe batches, I'm shit out of luck on that front.
Since August of 2014, I burned out of grad school, which...is my own fault because I shouldn't have been there to begin with, but...live, learn, and get massively in debt for no reason at all in the end, is the lesson there.
It's terrifying to think that I'm almost thirty and unemployed, even as I look for work of any sort, even the non-paying volunteer kind just to keep me occupied and not insane. Not as insane.

Books to Go

Due to reasons that have mostly to do with my bibliomania (now treating, in therapy and everything), I have a LOT of books. More than I need. Want some books? Say, a media-rate shipping box of them sent anywhere in the US? Free (cash donations/exchange accepted and welcomed)...
Let me know with a comment or a message or something and I'll do what I can to get you reading materials.
I have a few audiobooks, also.

Start with a quote, they said. Don't stare like that, they said. You'll go blind if you keep doing that, they said. They were right with the first one, but thankfully they were dead wrong on the other two. Though I do need glasses to see perfectly, if one can ever do that.

"Love, the forgiving hand of victory."
O'Sullivan Beare family motto, Edward Whittemore.

I want to spend the night reading Jerusalem Poker until I'm sobbing in unadulterated awe at the words E.W. uses to give unto history best book ever...

But a trip to Chicago is in the near future, and thus sleep before it is recommended by my lover, and even though her marvelous moonlit form isn't next to me, warming me and giving me that cliched but correct sense of perfect coolness that comes from a lover on a hot night...
I'll read her letters in my head until I wake up.

Goodnight folks.

Soon, expect actual posts to resume on this blog, as I've decided to get back into the fray of writing...

Prompted largely by the inspiration of marvelous folks around me, recent meetings with friends that have been friends so long neither of us can recall how we met, though we're pretty sure it was ten years ago that we first connected, and by remembering how much writing helps me stay mildly more sane...
and in the weeks, months, years to come...
I'm going to need all the sanity I can get, just to stagger forward at a geologic pace...
towards the glorious eventual ending in however many billions of years...

Iesu Christo, Pelecanus Mundi, as they used to say.

Jesus Christus Pelicanus.
Iesum Christum Pelicanus salvat mundi.
And all similar attempts to butcher Latin for my own ends.
It’s actually a very old (early Medieval, later Aquinian) thing in Catholic theology.
Called as such because it was believed the Pelican, to feed its young, pierced its breast and fed them on either blood or pieces of its own heart when no other food was available. Either that, or it killed its young and then resurrected them by stabbing itself in the breast and dripping its blood on their bodies, causing them to spring to life and continue right on growing up into good, moral, upstanding pelicans. This is…well, a direct allegorical link to the whole sacrifice of Christ on the Cross thing…also aided by how pelicans and cormorants dry their wings by spreading them out…in the shape of a cross…and generally looking all Jesus-like…for birds, that is.

Earthquake Weather

It's Monday.
It's the middle of July.
It's around 90 degrees, plus the humidity.
Bloomington is a nice place to spend the summer, especially if you don't mind the slow and torpid languor that seems unique to Indiana. I wish I could flee north, though.
North to the polar region, the land of ice, Amundsen, more ice, and the probable remains of Amundsen entombed in said ice until such time as the ice melts due to global warming and gives his body (plus Robert Falcon Scott, etc) unto the living again.
It'll be an exhumation of the dead, courtesy of greenhouse gases and people ignoring the Kyoto Protocol, which wouldn't have helped much anyway, but might have kept things back a few decades, given man the time he needs to thoroughly despoil the land before it is inundated, before Holland is a memory, before everyone who matters is watching Bangladesh sink into the Bay of Bengal from the Dyson sphere habitat that eventually replaces the International Space Station.
And it could be worse, that's the terrifying thing. Praise Johnson for the Clean Air Act.

Almost finished with my second semester of graduate school. Which means I get to start UPDATING THIS BLOG again really, really, really soon.