Status Updates From Actual Air

Going to finish this tonight, mark my words

"A yearbook’s endpages, filled with promises to stay in touch, stand as proof of the uselessness of a teenager’s promise. Not like I’m dying for a letter from the class stoner ten years on but..."

"I am trying to get at something/and I want to talk very plainly to you/so that we are both comforted by the honesty." "still we have no idea/how he came to die in that lake./Perhaps he could not bear to think/of his name only surviving in the index/of someone else’s biography./Or he was recalled by a higher power, having—/I don’t know—masturbated too many times/in a drugstore Halloween mask."

I have read David Berman, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman for the same reason at times. It isn't a nice reason, but in a way you could say it is if you look at it right.

The wayback machine was down for a while, and during that time I knew for certain that my blog from when I was 14 (2005 or so) was completely inaccessible. I wonder if anyone remembers it enough to find it on there besides me. It seems like another person's. At the end of "Submarine" Oliver talks about feeling like he has a tiny version of himself inside pulling levers. I am a 10 part nesting doll.

3:00am-Sometimes I think about how most authors grew up with the big important books everywhere. Their parents had read them or at least knew of them. They were learning to be part of the system and even if they decided to be punks later on they still knew the proper mannerisms in their bones. But I grew up in the woods. Planting potatoes every spring break. Playing with frog eggs. Learning to be part of what is.

deliberately reading this very slowly—absolutely amazing poetry collection so far. David Berman is a master.