2025-04-30 Journal Entry

The movers are here. I’m sitting in the kitchen mostly because I’ve never really learned what one is supposed to do when the movers are doing stuff in your house. You want to be around to organize everything and to answer questions as needed, but you also want to get out of the way and let them do their job. So I just end up standing awkwardly in the kitchen pretending to do other kinds of work or whatever.

Alright I’m setting a timer and I’m just going to keep on staring at this page and writing for 25 minutes. I feel this little hole in my chest that’s been growing ever since I’ve been irreligious about doing these morning pages. I can feel all the anxiety sitting in me. It lives in my hips – something I learned a few months ago very clearly. I can sit still and feel this tension in my hips and lower back, about an inch inward from my hip flexors. It’s a really fascinating area to feel into. I think it’s the mythical psoaz muscle that every wannabe guru talks about. I think it’s just one of those natural tension points, less magical than some may wish to believe but more impactful than skeptics say.

I’m very ready to be done with dealing with the house. I just want it out of my life – I don’t want to have to think about it anymore. It looms large in my mind, for better or worse, just because it’s a monstrously large financial commitment. It’ll still be there, I think, in my mind. And it just ties me down to this place – I feel like I’m starting to hate it again. I don’t like that feeling. I don’t like that little burning sensation in my chest, that itch to just get the hell out and go somewhere. It’s not the worst feeling in the world, but it’s that little gnawing sensation of unsatisfaction. It’s the awareness of another, seemingly more beautiful life that one could have.

I was sitting at Wesley’s dance recital today, and the kids were delightful, but the thing that gnawed at me was looking at the parents. I just sat there watching them and though god I hope I’m never like that. It’s like that painfully white community in Knives Out, vaguely misshapen grandfathers and more blondes than I thought was genetically possible, mothers in those puffy-shouldered summer dresses and wrinkled smiles. I don’t now why the wrinkles bother me – there’s just a distinctive sort of crinkle that feels rich, like the wrinkles on John F. Kennedy’s forehead from too many summers on the sailboat out on Cape Cod. That sort of thing.

And so I just felt like I wanted to leave that room. But it also felt nice, the air conditioning up and the piano gently playing Row Row Row Your Boat behind me as little girls in tutus tried to stay en pointe.

I think the draw I feel is the draw towards story. Things here feel stayed, static, vaguely suffocating at the level of the soul. As DFW described it, it feels occasionally like a Lou Gehrig’s Disease of the spirit, perhaps. I don’t think it’s a spiritual sickness or anything. I genuinely think people enjoy the lives they’re leading. I just find it uncomfortable. Something about bringing children in the world seems to me a decision so large when I’m incapable of making much sense of my own existence. There’s a whole world out there that needs seekers, shamans, people who help us make sense of the nonsense. And so I guess I’ll just keep on sitting here and writing.

I was pondering BZ’s perspective in my story. I can’t really tell if he’s the bad guy. The more I think about him, I always just wonder what his desires are. He has this fatal flaw, which is being so narrowly focused as to miss the whole grand view of his work. It simply cannot be a coincedence that he misses several cases of sexual harassment in his midst. But on the other hand, I can see a man who is simply dead-set on being inspiring to the point where he forgets to be good. And he paves the way aggressively himself, forgetting that he could be wrong somewhere along the way. He gives students a voice, not realizing that he’s creating parrots.

And each of the students have their own tragic story. Relying in that money to pay for school, instruments, some kind of foothold in an orchestral world that doesn’t really seem all that much to actually want them there. They try so hard to climb into that walled garden, and lo here comes a man with a ladder.

And David St. George, what does he want? Does he want to be loved? To love? I don’t actually know if he was married. I imagine not. What drives someone to do that?

Is it bad that writing is a crutch? Or a salve? I’m tired, but I don’t think I should sleep at 5pm.