Wild Nights

Sometimes I’m baffled by the width of my emotions. I do not think that I am bipolar, but I am too much of a scamp to be checked. For instance, today, I’m biking to work, heavy with dread all morning. I keep craning my neck around like disaster is following me, and on this day of days. The road so sleepy and wide without cars.

All afternoon I ditch around the building, fussing over this. I forget my ID at home and skip lunch. Buy as mocha across the street at the coffee place. I have espresso chocolate milk food. I am a 27 year old man! Why do I make these bad choices.

I go home and pace. Next door, a filmmaker and a cameraman are staying with Harish and Ben. They call me over. I sit on the floor and gab for a bit, start coughing uncontrollably, am given a cough drop; go home and nap til 8:30. Feel low and lonesome. Get up, click on the heat, have a stout and plug myself into this article about Descartes. Swoosh. It flies over my head. What do I know? He has some neat thoughts about axioms and about how ideas depend on thinkers to exist. I get a few texts, I send some back.

I listen to the Jawbreaker live album and revise a lesson on Wallace Stevens’ poem “Man Carrying Thing.” Holy smokes is that poem good.

I do this thing where I separate my handouts using text boxes and columns. I’ve got the poem on the left, some priming questions on the far right, some context above, and in the center, room for annotations. Blake S of Jawbreaker is singing “Jinx Removing” on the tinny computer speakers. I feel like one hundred dollars. I feel like I’m being hugged by the best feelings there are.

There is no telling when this feeling will depart, when it will return. Tomorrow morning I will get on my bike, spit into traffic, then what.