There are two strangers in Starbucks talking about how their wives left them. It’s this thing they have in common. They’re on opposite sides of the store, though, and the music is loud so they’re shouting. (I’m pretending there’s something playing in my headphones.) One stranger says, “I was going to kill her, the kids, and the lawyer, too. I was going to torture them and then I was going to kill them.”

He says, “But I’m 54 years old now, an old man.”

It’s 6:17am. The sun hasn’t even come up yet.

Wednesday (Cloud Observatory): Cirrus clouds through a window pane at 9:53am. Had a hard time avoiding reflections. Was irked. Spilled coffee (unrelated). Avoided cleaning up coffee. Cleaned up coffee out of guilt. Realized I knew essentially nothing about clouds. Looked up stuff about clouds. Found out these particular clouds were cirrus clouds. Felt pretty good about the things I was learning about clouds. Considered buying an expensive briefcase.

Anyway.

I’m listening to the Mountain Goats right now and the recording is so bad it’s almost more interesting than the music. I keep wondering, Were they happy with this? Was this what they were going for, this 1/4th inch cassette sound, these detuned guitars? But saying something is interesting is not the same as saying you like it. But in this case it is.

I keep thinking about how all the art in our apartment is from Bed, Bath and Beyond.

The air was so misty earlier, I could hardly see out the windows. Apparently a storm is coming. The clouds are sagging because they’re full of rain. And rain — there’s something I don’t totally understand. I’ve seen the pictures in biology books, the circle that connects the ocean to the clouds to the forests, but that doesn’t look anything like what’s happening out my window right now. There aren’t any forests near here.

I think there’s an inverse relationship between how talented somebody is and how much of an ass they are. The most creative people I know are incredibly kind and generous. They’re not all that impressed with themselves.

I can be an ass, though, sometimes. It’s terrible.

There’s this temptation, I guess, to be clever instead of honest. To be complex instead of simple. Everyone wants to be impressive. We want to do things that nobody else would ever think of instead of doing something that feels like us, that feels honest to who we are. My life is not a poem; I don’t think I could ever be a poet. And so on, etc.

It was 70 degrees outside. Why was it 70 degrees? I had on my fingerless gloves, a long-sleeved thermal, a jacket. I checked the weather before I left and I still wore these things. Why? Maybe I couldn’t understand it being so warm when I’ve wanted so badly for it to be cold. I had thought winter was something we were owed, that weather was some sort of transaction.

I got an amazon gift card yesterday and spent it 10 minutes later. There’s always something else I’ve been meaning to buy. We were at Target and Janessa said she needed a black purse. I said, you always need something. She said, But sometimes I lie.

What if someone were to be happy in their misery? Why would that be different than any other sort of happiness? But, someone might say, That’s not true happiness. As if they could know such a thing. And not that I would understand that kind of happiness either, but I would understand my ignorance of it. Maybe some people need to be sad for awhile, just to find the edges of it.

I’ve been thinking about how you can’t travel a negative distance. Every movement is forward. Maybe the destination shifts or changes or vanishes over time, but the motion is still the same, and I think the motion is where we find our sense of morality. (It was optimism that lead me here in the first place.)

I am a happy man who dabbles in sadness. I am a tourist of it, a student. But I think it would be selfish of me to actually be sad; I’ve been given too much. To be sad would just be unobservant.

And one more thing about Blue Valentine: The director said he didn’t want to make a movie with a message. He just wanted to make a movie that felt honest. But maybe that was the message, the honesty. The way a flower teaches us something just by being beautiful. I can’t imagine thinking I had anything to teach anyone. Maybe when I’m 60, but not now, not at 24. My only contribution to the world, I think, is to look around.

Negative attention is still attention.

Today, my email account got hacked. A few years ago, my messenger bag got stolen. I forgot to lock the car door; I forgot to change my email password. I felt violated, disoriented, angry — sure — but most of all, I felt special.

If imitation is a form of flattery, what is theft?

//-//

And every time I stop thinking about something in particular, I start thinking about Blue Valentine. I was listening to an interview with the director and he was saying how things don’t always happen for a reason, characters don’t always have motivations, people fall out of love and they don’t know why. It’s arrogant to think we understand why people do the things they do, he said.

//-//

The barista said I threw her off, not coming in this past week. She never knew when it was 8am. I said, I come here so much I should get paid, I’m practically a piece of furniture. How much does that chair make? I should make at least as much as that chair. She said, One day you’ll stop coming in, and I’ll have to buy a watch. I said, I guess that’s true.

My dad also showed me how to take pictures without film. You stand in the pitch-black, let your eyes adjust to the darkness, flash a camera-flash, and there, temporarily burned on your retinas, is a photograph of the room. If you blink, it’s gone. A biological Polaroid. Magic.

If you bite wintogreen mints in the dark they spark blue.

I bought a new copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek today. Mine had markings in it. I wondered who had made them. Why would you underline half a sentence, a single phrase, the word “chomp”? I didn’t care about these sorts of things back when I bought the book, seven years ago. Has it really been seven years? I guess not actually, it’s only been five. I’m trying to remember if these markings are my own.

Back then, I’d thought this book was dull; now I can’t put it down. In five years, I’ve learned to appreciate boring things. I put green-olives on my pizza. (Every couple hundred million years, the poles of the earth reverse.) I used to listen to rock n’ roll; I used to watch action movies; etc.

Let me tell you what I’ve accomplished this week: . . .

I was thinking this morning about how everyone is a workaholic, we just define work differently. Sometimes people say things like, “If you love what you do, you won’t have to work a day in your life.” But that makes work sound like it’s a bad thing. Maybe we should just say, “If you love what you do, great, congratulations, good for you.”

It was foggy today. I couldn’t see the tops of buildings. I thought about all the people up in those buildings and how they were probably thinking, “It’s foggy today. I can’t see the street.”

I buy a case of St. Arnolds Lawnmower. And green beans, and carrots and bananas. I realize it’s been months since I’ve been grocery shopping. At the counter, the woman looks back and forth between me and my ID six times, and I make a mental note to get a new driver’s license picture somehow.

Our apartment is warm today despite it being 30 degrees out. I open the windows to let in (or let out) some cool (or warm) air.

They’ve finished laying sod in the courtyard next door and now they’re hosing it off. The workers have all pulled their hoods over their heads, but I can’t imagine it being cold out there — it’s so warm in here. I can be extremely myopic sometimes. Mozart sleeps under the comforter again and I keep checking to make sure he isn’t over-heating. I can’t decide what to read now. I have a stack of books I keep adding to. I read Kierkegaard until I fell asleep last night. He stopped making sense around midnight. I pull another book off the shelf, Annie Dillard, and maybe I’ll give this a try.

I might be in a slump. In multiple areas, actually. Maybe slumps come in clusters.

I clean the apartment, but not very well. I just do it to have done something. Our apartment doesn’t recycle so we have to save our bottles and cans until one of us takes them to Janessa’s parent’s house. Actually, okay, Janessa does it every time. I balance a cardboard box on top of a milk carton and tell it to stay.

“Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”

My friends all look exactly the same. I realize I’ve known them for four years and haven’t seen them for two. “You haven’t changed a bit,” they tell me, but I’d sort of hoped I had.

Anyways, I renewed my free trial today. Next month, it will automatically charge my card unless I remember to cancel it. And let’s be honest, I’m not going to remember.

I started reading Kierkegaard today. I hope you’re impressed.

I was telling Janessa about how cold it was at UTD last night, about how I almost screamed out loud walking across the parking lot. It was probably -20, I told her, with wind chill and everything. She said she couldn’t remember what -20 felt like, and I forgot that she used to live where it actually got that cold. I was thinking about how heat is quiet but cold is loud, like someone screaming in your ears. There’s something hilarious about it. I get in my car and start laughing out loud sometimes.

I realized yesterday morning that everything I’ve ever done is total crap.

But then today I realized that yesterday I was just being over-dramatic. It’s not all crap, and nothing has been a waste of time. It’s dangerous to measure your productivity by your accomplishments, I think. It’s all adding up to something.

I found out I have a hole in my left shoe, which is disappointing because I really like my left shoe.