There Goes a Regular

Here's the time when I bid you all internetty farewell for awhile, hoping to take the first part of this blog's title at face value and leave my big "but" out of it. Feel lacking in the bravado that's necessary for the arrogance that I should be saying things anyone else needs to be reading. Time to go do something useful. Time to figure out if the un-examined, at least in burdened prose, life is. Time to recharge and rethink and just shut the fuck up, as it were. Put all my parentheticals away before someone figures out they're Russian nesting dolls with nothing inside the smallest shell.

No doubt I'll be back at some point, because I've got too many of these words in me not to let them out. But five years is a long damn time you know. If you figure even a half hour average for those 2500 entries, that's 52 days of my life round the clock here.

And as a parting present, here's one of Harry Matthews' sublime entries from 20 Lines a Day:

One kind of sadness says it's over before its begun. It discounts the future in the awareness that of something about to happen, nothing will be left. This implies that sometimes something is left, and if this is no doubt true, it is only so as expectation, never in fact (unless you count letters, marriage contracts, and other testimonials to intentions--testimonials perhaps to that very same expectation). What happens in fact, always, is that nothing is left: the moment is over, the day is over, the meal is over, the movie is over, the circus is over, the embrace is over, the bottle of Chambertin Close de Bèze 1937 is emptied, the class is over, the course is over and the students are filing out of your life, and life too is over--my father's, George's, Bob Auzanneau's--and nothing remains, nothing remains, except me. The change may be less radical than it sounds if I understand that there was never anything but me, and the bottle and the circus and Bob existed in me. As consolation this is guaranteed to not always work. Nothing remains of the embrace, and I sink towards sleep, or look around to see what will happen next. Sometimes this sadness happens next. How can we keep exposing ourselves to such disappointment? What inspired this impossible longing in us for something conclusive? Maybe just the experience that hunger wanted to put a thing inside us, and that desire had a body for its target? To swallow her, to be swallowed by her--two apparently terminal acts whose illusion is more "solid," more durable than steak and her bones no matter how exquisite. I want you and can never have you. You said it yourself: "You're already gone!" So I write these words down, leaving the problem (if it is a problem) intact and unmodified.