Since April 28—the last time I pushed an update to this site—I have been unconvinced of the content here. Isn’t what I suffer from the void between creative acts? There’s a vague disturbance coming out from the side—or the bottom, or the top—noises neighbors make, or a vague volition to sleep or get out of here.

I never feel closer to annihilation than when I’m unable to work. The vague disturbances make work difficult, the vague disturbances obscure my capacity to experience desire. Where is it? Where am I?

The idea of writing down my dreams exhausts me, but I had two that I liked, from almost two weeks ago. One involved two oversized indigo buntings, the size of vultures, both male, standing with their wings spread and facing one another, having sex. The other involved a light green komodo dragon, which bit me. The bite was supposed to be lethal, but I made it to a booth in the rainforest where they could give me an injection. Then I walked around a beautiful gorge trail covered with thick drifts of snow and icicles.

I’m “frigid.” I haven’t been able to make contact with my own genitals for two weeks.

It’s true, I went back to A, because he asked me to meet, and could I say no to someone so soft and pure? And we had sex, and I was completely shut down. If there was any pleasure for me that day it was in seeing him dangle the sunglasses from his mouth, or in compressing his soft neck before I exited the car the next day, until he made a little sound of pain. I want to bite and beat him. I have become the cold and cruel mother I wanted to be. I felt triumphant about how simple and nice A had become after all that.

I remember how I told him I was sadistic, on the first date. “Not in the sense of beating people up, but in how I use words.” I spoke about my website, and what I felt I was doing to Z with it, how I felt what I was doing to him in writing about D was sadistic. When I made the little shrine to A, I wondered what Z would think of it—he’s the only one who will see it, as it’s not for A to see, or for me, but rather directed towards God.

There was a stretch of three days when I was at Alex’s house, and I wrote drafts of an email to Zane, I would take the laptop out to the porch where Alex was vegetating over coffee, and I’d revise these emails to Zane. Its was funny, how flagrantly I was opposing myself to Alex, though he didn’t know the details, just that I had decided to work on something outside instead of being inactive with him, as I had tried to be in the past.

I couldn’t sleep last night, and was looking at all the photos I have of specific people; I have my mom, my sister, my father, myself, Zane, Alex, and Dylan split up into these little albums that the face recognition algorithm creates for me. I never look at the photos of my father, but last night I did, and was shocked by his beauty, which seemed to me to be perfect, unanalyzable. And it wasn’t a narcissistic shock, because he doesn’t look like me, or if he does, I can’t see it. But I sensed that I was most faithful to this impression of his beauty, and wondered if saying this would make me seem unattainable. A psychotherapist on a dating app asked me why I like Freud. I wanted to say that I liked Freud because he seemed like a genuinely nice guy, that he was a person who seemed to be both free to think down a singular path, and also respectful of the knowledge that had been laid down before him, so he was rigorous and powerful but somehow ethical or moral in what he did with his skill and learnedness. That I liked it when he failed, that he seemed humble, that he was funny sometimes. But is it because Freud had his own passion for the father, his own uneasy relation to the father, shown in his displacement of monotheism onto Moses, in his admiration for Moses.

“No use your roaming scientifically, / Each learns what he can and only that”

(Goethe, Faust, cited in Roudinesco’s Freud)

I could wander in a truer sense, but here at APL I don’t “roam scientifically” so much as I learn what I can. And this is evident to me when I revisit what I’ve written in the last six months, which does dedicate itself to sex; this focus is obvious, far more obvious than I had felt it was when I was writing it all down for the first time. There are patterns and insights and materials I find beautiful, not much excess, not much I should like to cut or revise. The frankness of certain sections embarrasses me, but that’s because I remember what it felt like to be unsure of what I believed, so the frankness seems to lie a little and hide the doubts I carried with me, as in “Vise.” But I like much of what I wrote in “Fleur” and “Fasten” and “Door,” and I think it’s important that I state this, in order to ensure that I keep on reading and evaluating what I wrote before.

And I think it’s cute that the master of sex, Freud, probably didn’t have much sex at all, before or outside of his marriage to Martha. And Roudinesco comments: “In the late nineteenth century, young women from good society, subjected to an interminable period of engagement and gnawed by frustration, often fell into a hysterical neurosis that led them to specialists in nervous illnesses. As for the young men, they frequented brothels or maintained liaisons with married women who were tired of an often monotonous conjugal existence. Freud chose abstinence, drugs, Romantic exaltation, and sublimation; all this combined to turn him into an excellent letter writer.” The bloom in me upon reading this! The bloom of identification!

I can’t stand excellent letter writers, I wilt and bend to them. But I don’t mind endeavoring to be one. The one of Freud’s love letters cited in the book goes like this: Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.

I met a new one last night—he was on the street. I had taken a walk down Six Mile Creek and on the way back took an errant left turn onto the commons, and recognized him from our conversation on a dating app—he was holding an accordion. A traveling musician, who said he was about to leave, but he came back, and is now living here. We spoke for a little while, longer than I would have, about Mary Gaitskill and Bolaño and Bukowski and psychoanalysis. I simply hadn’t expected him to be so bookish. I noticed that he had hazel eyes, and a lazy eye, and that he was even smaller than I had expected, just a little taller than me. Then as I left he started singing, and there was a huge difference, in the voice that was there, so swift and expansive.

A few hours later, he told me he was at Argos, and I decided to go over—it was 9:30. And he went on this long thing about writers! These weird names, like Linh Dinh and Leslie Scapalino and Pola Oloixarac. And becoming friends with some writers on Instagram. I told him his life sounded a bit like a plot out of The Savage Detectives. He has nerve damage on his left temple from a car accident, which caused the lazy eye. He described to me how he has double vision, and how he can feel the nerves around his eye, and I imagined a clump or knot, a knot of white, confused tendrils, or nitrogen nodules, like on the roots of a peanut plant.

Purity in randomness. I was lucky, to have felt so bad, and to have managed a solution for it.

I’ve also had a series of unlucky incidents: I didn’t win the department’s teaching prize, which I would not have applied for had the person in charge of judging it asked me to, which makes me feel even more sad about my apparent inferiority. I didn’t get the writing pedagogy job that I thought would be so easy to get, and I didn’t get the Cornell University Press job that I wasn’t sure I could get. Dissertation work feels stuck and hopeless half of the time. I don’t think anyone here likes me that much. My previous advisor would talk about my exceptional talent, but I didn’t like him and he didn’t like my work at the end of the day. Otherwise people have been distant and neutral, as I have been distant to start off with. So much of my desire to do a PhD was motivated by the special treatment I received as an undergrad, from particular individuals, and in absence of interpersonal ardor, I can’t seem to work, or want to work, but I should also remind myself that I’ve mostly been too arrogant to apply for things during the first three years. Anyway, in moments like these I’m struck with an aggressive desire to leave. But doesn’t this work require a young man’s indignation?

M and I text often, it’s strange how he reads, how he decides to read what I mention.

K and I talked about talking about sex in therapy/analysis. Strange to talk to a stranger about how I had suddenly lost my sex drive. This practice of chatting online is redolent of middle or high school.

E and P are the brown-haired tinder men, who knows if I’ll meet them? E knows A, and A admires E, and I told him that E had mentioned something A had told him: about how in Russian, the words for wild and cultivated strawberry are completely different. E asked me about my investment in strangeness, and I said that it was perhaps God who drew me to strangeness. I enjoyed the strangeness of my response.

I spent four hours on the floor today—“napping” from 1 to 5. Somehow my body managed to shut off the need for water, so I’d wake up only slightly thirsty, take a little water, and go back to the floor. I think I got up to urinate once. I didn’t dream, though in the beginning a lot of images flashed through my mind. I’m very aware of how much my spine hurts when I touch it, and how the duller tension there conditions how bad I feel when I sit down to write. Do I have fibromyalgia? Anyway, I felt annihilated, like a feather afterwards—with a powerful lightness of spirit and clarity that I associate with gold to airy thinness beat;

Then I took a walk in the rain, about forty minutes, under an umbrella. M messaged me about how he was disappointed that I hadn’t stopped by Greenstar, where he works, and I said I had annihilated myself today.

It’s June 19. It was June 18. It was June 17. It was June 16. It was June 15. It was June 14.
I think I have the energy to “purify” this post—to clean up the fragments, to make it unified.

June 20: I feel like life has crawled to a stop. I slept again for most of the day—woke up for analysis around 7, baked bread after, went back to sleep around 9:30, woke up intermittently but stayed in bed until 12, went back to sleep, woke up again around 3, went to FedEx, came home and took a 30 minute nap around 4 PM.

I went to the grocery store around 5 and ate a bit afterwards. Around 8 PM I took a walk for about 40 minutes and felt decent afterwards. I worked on my website, pushed an update, and slept around 11 PM.

June 21: I woke up around 7, ate a little, and then went back to sleep. I think I slept from 8 to 11. I woke up a bit tearful, having had some sad dream involving Alex leaving the bed. I was awake between 11 and 1; did analysis from 12:15 to 1. I laughed a lot and was energetic, but afterwards became sleepy again, after eating. I think I slept between 3 and 4. Between 4 and 6, I tried very hard to stay awake but wanted to sleep. I went for a run around 6:30 and it was very slow, I stopped about 1.5 miles in, walked a little, continued to run, and then took another little walking break. I ran 3 miles in total, at about 9:30 min/mile, about a minute slower than usual. Afterwards, I was fairly alert, and went to sleep at 9:40. I woke up at 1:30 from a dream.

June 22: Shortly after waking up at 1:30 I read Z’s email. Then I had a lot of fun scrolling through Twitter. I discovered that the tag –renderToDisk makes the command “hugo server” use less RAM. M messaged me around 4:40 AM. I wasn’t able to sleep again until around 5-6:40, and woke up to do analysis at 7:05.

I went back to sleep around 10 and woke up around 12. I watered the garden. I felt more confident after waking up that I wouldn’t sleep excessively through the day, that my inability to sleep after 1:30 was the cause for the nap. I had an intense orgasm from a deep spot near the cervix. I lay on the ground for a while around 1 PM, and woke up and left for a bike ride around 3:40. I came back, got ice cream around 5:40, and cooked when I returned home. I took a shower, lay on the ground for a while around 7 PM, and wrote back to Zane, and took breaks now and then to read Kafka’s “The Burrow." I slept after 11:30, before midnight.

June 23: I think the hypersomnia has ended—I woke up around 7, and made pancakes. This time I added some buckwheat flour to the sourdough sponge, which worked well. When I use a very active starter and high extraction bread flour the dough is more cohesive and I like that. I slept from around 9 to 10, but I lay down less out of tiredness than out of a desire to masturbate. I fell asleep immediately after having come.

For the rest of the afternoon I shopped for a bike handlebar bag and read Swinburne’s “Hertha” and more of Kafka’s “The Burrow.” Around 4 PM Alex came and I printed his return label and we went to his house; I processed strawberries for freezing by picking off the calyces and slicing them in half. He made a strawberry rhubarb pie and then we went to the garden to pick currants for kombucha. It was wet outside. While we rested on the couch he became aroused and you could see it in his drowsy eyes that were so focused on me. He started to touch my thigh, and I asked him to give me a hickey. I was afraid it would hurt, but it didn’t. Even the fear of that didn’t make me aroused. I wasn’t aroused at all but I enjoyed the attention and sucked him off. I coughed hard when he came. Then he cooked the steak and I read more of “The Burrow.” Before and after eating I did planks. Alex cleaned and danced. He said he was happy; he really did seem especially happy. We read Nicole Krauss’s “Long Island,” which made me feel stunned, and Paul Muldoon’s poem “MRI,” in The New Yorker. We slept immediately afterwards, stunned and tired, around 10:30 PM. I lay on him in bed a bit before ascending to my spot upstairs—I spooned him and he said it made him feel like I had come inside him. Upstairs I struggled to fall asleep, and ended up looking at cycling subreddits until 1:15 AM. Then I dreamt that my mother had a terminal illness and that she had started to write a novel.

It’s June 27, but it was June 26, it was June 25, it was June 24. Tuesday, Monday, Sunday, Saturday. I don’t have the energy to “purify” this post, to unify it. I spent yesterday at Alex’s house for the most part, reading, eating, sleeping. I like summer hibernation. I like the fact that he goes away for a week and I have his house to hibernate in. The linen sheets on the queen-sized bed in the basement, the vegetables from the farm share, the couch, the kitchen table, the solitude. I heard, and then saw ospreys, and saw a turkey. I seem to enjoy summers, no matter how much anguish there is in them. But the summer is delightful in a lot of ways.

It’s June 29. It was June 28. The AQI is at 169. I don’t like how I feel—I could do better. So I decided to cancel the date with M, to delay it to tomorrow. I talked to Savitri instead, and started writing an email to Jesse Nathan. Jesse’s first book is coming out, and he’s going on a book tour. So I want to see him in Brooklyn in October, and to tell him, with all the enthusiasm of the present, what I want.