Friday night—no, it’s morning. Mourning. Too much is going on and yet I only seem to feel this single flame that won’t extinguish—this fear of extinguishment.

What happens when you fear killing the thing that’s killing you? What happens when you try to kill something that seems apart but really isn’t?

Who is it all for anyhow?

This is the hour of domestic dispute. The silent, personal dialogue is suddenly out on the street. It always happens at this hour. When I’m asleep.

Too much is happening.

Diversion.

Working. A lot more. One day proofreading for a marketing company, the experience of which Andrew says I should write down somewhere, anywhere. The part he means is the bit about propaganda germination and my well-worn opinions on the subject.

Like some quintessential temp experience, they put me in what they called The Pit, where they kept the company Xmas tree and lights, and an old Windows 95 machine. The machine didn’t even have Word on it.

The place was nothing. If I went there again I wouldn’t be able to see it through the noncolor, the acres of nondescriptiveness. I hate how they keep us in mazes we teach ourselves to navigate, and I hate how pathetic everyone looks. How do they live like that? They’re used to it, I guess. Take it for granted that’s what living is.

They had nothing for me to do and I was only there for seven hours, which was long enough for me to count down the day by hourly trips to the bathroom. I went often enough to use each stall once. The company employs enough people that the bathroom is never empty. Creepy.

Anyway, they’re marketers. Their MO is behavior modification. In one specific case, which I witnessed, the plan was to inflate the dangers of the Internet in a campaign aimed to sway parents to subscribe to a large, international ISP. The result: even if you don’t buy into that specific target, you still feel afraid. It’s the secondary influences that are the most dangerous.

People engage in that business consciously. But how? How can they construct lies and feel good about themselves at the end of the day? Why can’t one or a bunch of them think, "No, we can’t say that about the Internet because it’s just not true. We’ll have to come up with another way to showcase the attractiveness of this offer." I think it’s part of that whitewashed living. The anonymous edifices and homes by The Bon Marche. They believe in the lies. I looked around at them all in their JCrew and Gap clothes (and tattoos), people my age making a living, probably happy to have a good-paying job. They’re nice people, they just live in that thinnest of air above the being’s core.

But it's not often you see the machinations behind consumer capitalist culture. You know it happens, but you don't see the actual writ. It's disgusting. I believe in compulsory media education in public high schools. I can't imagine, though, how we can ever institute it while business has so much influence over legislation.

Anyway, that was only a day.

And the day before that Mary showed me around Starbucks corporate headquarters and I was amazed at the company-provided luxuries. I thought I should try to get on the corporate dole just to make all that much more money and have my coffee and fitness and numerous other expenses, such as health care, paid for, too. But then, you know, they own you.

And then I was assigned a writing project, which pays more than editing, more in two weeks than I used to make in four. Money again. It’s such a relief. I never want to work in one of those effacing offices. I like my weekday trips and sojourns to the shore. But, I never feel free. Instead, I’m enslaved by my own procrastination—that’s how it is. When we work by someone else’s time clock, we allow them to dominate us so we don’t have to face the ways we enslave ourselves. We project the self-hatred onto them.

So I try to ask, what is this procrastination protecting me from? At 5:00 a.m., it’s the unfamiliar feeling that living is unbearable and of wanting to die if living is going to be like this—Like what? Agonizingly, interminably, alone and afraid. A transitory communication from somewhere inside.

Intellectually, I get it. I understand that aloneness is ontological. And Rilke, my late-night, bedside preacher. Your homilies comfort and help me settle into just being. I like to think of you, filled with solitude, working away in the castles and flats of your benefactors. I hope to live so wholly as your creations, my isolation so well-funded.

And then I think of you in real life and wonder if people—lovers—found you aloof and cold.

And want to ask, what did your solitude protect you from?

I am buying again without anxiety. Lipstick. Clothing. Yoga. Others.

Andrew’s mom and sister were here. We ate around town and went to Vancouver. It’s funny to think that Andrew of Coredumps From My Brain calls someone mom. It’s funny, I mean, that it seems odd to me. After all this time. It’s one of those gems of idealization (buying into persona) embedded deeply yet.

Before his mom and sister left, we had dinner at Cafe Flora. Behind Andrew and me was a middle-aged couple, the woman unidentifiable, self-effacing, and the man clearly a SNAG. Throughout dinner he spoke softly and sensitively on topics from his affair with a married woman to the deep sadness characterizing his life. At times, the woman responded with the only words appropriate in this New Age scheme: "I feel a deep sadness, too." We couldn't figure out the relationship between these two because no real emotion was expressed or exchanged, but no matter what its nature, I wanted to turn around and tell that woman to run. What's so irritating about the whole SNAG routine is that no one is allowed to get pissed, to just say, "Fuck off you incense-burning, drum-pounding bastard! I'm not buying this shit about how the hole in your heart is causing you to sleep with married women and how you're sorry, blah-de-blah, blah."

We are going to Vancouver again tomorrow because we have a hotel reservation for the RSVP, which we’re not doing because of my still-healing knees and because we were having difficulty working out the logistics. We wanted to keep the reservation for the weekend even though we just spent a few days there. Maybe we will watch the riders arriving. And buy stuff. Syrup, sunglasses, lipstick. Cake.

There have been other things, which brings me back to the core, the stuff that woke me an hour ago.

Maybe there’s a hint of it in Yvonne’s letter. (Her letter arrived the day after I spotted the Perfect Moment. I love it when stuff like that happens.) She’s being brave and leaping ahead in life. It feels like a betrayal, like we had a pact not to change. It only uncovers my obsession with stability, whose false vice is unchange.