"Without self-expression there is no self. That must be why the victim of an atrocity, no matter how many times well-wishers advise him to "just get over it", returns again and again to the horror."

-William Vollman

A Tautology; A Poem

When your world shrinks, and oh it can, to the condition wherein the most important thing to you, the thing you talk about with such passion as to plant the toes of your shoes squarely on the ground while flexing the muscles in your calf anxiously, moving your heal in sync with your complaints about the "soap-opera(y) qualities of Dexter: Season Two; when the "cuteness", the quaintness (cunt comes from quaint) of these things swells with electricity and the anecdotes that illustrate it cease to to strike you as hopelessly absurd; when your parents three story, five bedroom house breathes like a vigorous meadow, circuited by gently rolling streams, appealing, and their having to downsize fairly seethes tragedy so that your eyes become ping-pong balls and you look even more like a donkey; when your sad, dark eyed friend slurps up your vacuous exuberance with blindly comic desperation; when you see this play across her face and you know what it means and suddenly you want to read a magazine instead, National Geographic, poor people; when you wonder why class distinctions exist at all; why moribund peoples are paraded through the leaves and across vast wire streams but are still ignored, you realize that nothing is trenchant and wonder at your own stupid volubility and cringe at the blindly sententious way you must sound when you talk.

750

I am writing a book. I don't know how many times I have said that, or tried to do it. For some reason, though, I am now willing to argue that I mean it this time.

I don't know how to write a book. I don't have the slightest idea. Does anyone? I haven't seen enough to have a book to write. Or, as a part of me really believes, I have seen enough to feel tired for it, and that is enough. People I know have seen death, and stopped deaths and lived how they wanted to despite the fact that it was impossible and stupid. Not me.

So here I am with a blog. A kind of bloated appendage that I don't know what to do with. If it spurs me to write though, it is useful, right? Why, then, should I not use it as a crutch (I am a coward after all) to keep me hobbling through this book? 750 words today... not good enough.