Tag Archives: Robert Frost

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Half Ass Post About Walden

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I’m thinking truly nothing today, so I’m going to have to defer to some more Walden up in here. I was reading that some people think Thoreau was a buffoon with stupid ideas. Well I guess people think that about everyone. At least Robert Frost liked him. I don’t know anything about him except this book and what I wrote in my first post. But the book seems worthwhile to me.

There has been a lot of talk about sitting on pumpkins and well, nothing bad can come of that.

I guess I left off on “It is never to late to give up our prejudices.” Well, that’s a comforting thought. Most of the time I think I don’t have a choice in life. He writes “…it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.” That’s worth thinking about.

“What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.” Thoreau apparently has this thing about old people not being necessarily wise. If he stopped there I would agree that being old is not a sufficient condition for wisdom. But he also thinks that people know more about life when they are younger, and forget and become set in their ways as they get older. I don’t know how I feel about that. I can see it, especially in the Picasso sense of every child being an artist. But old people usually know what’s up. I guess they just collect a lot of prejudices and that can be a problem.

It’s funny that he wrote this like two hundred years ago and he talks about fuel in the same way that Kurt Vonnegut does in Man Without a Country. He writes “…people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled around the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people…”

Which is like Vonnegut’s quote that I’ve quoted probably twice here before, about gasoline, “Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.”

So that’s a funny parallel.

Well. Shit I’m not feeling very enthusiastic right now, even with this coffee. It’s almost time to go to work. I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee the last few days and it just hasn’t been doing me any good. It’s like the first time I drink a lot of it after not drinking any for a few days, that’s awesome. But then I’m like, man I’ve got to keep doing this, this is great! And then it just gets worse and worse and I just get all nervous and shit. Anxious and not even very awake. And my eyes start tearing up. I don’t know, shit’s weird.

But anyway, I’m trying to post every day just to keep in practice. Tomorrow I’m going to a Cinco de Mayo brunch and I’m bringing a lot of tequila and limes so I don’t know if I will post.

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Boring Post

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Ah shit. Bad sleep last night. GF had to be up early to go to work. Like six AM. I woke up and saw ZzzQuil on the dresser next to the bed. Hope I didn’t keep her up with mad ravings and coughs and snorting sounds. I am a little sick.

Yesterday before work I had an iced coffee with a shot in it. That was a good idea, even though it seemed like a bad idea when I did it. Sometimes it hits me right and sometimes wrong. It was wrong the last three times before yesterday.

We had some interesting people last night. All different tabs and this lady was scared to leave her credit card with us.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows…”

Yeah I been trying to memorize this poem for almost six months now. It’s pretty crazy because I don’t really know any other poems by heart. I guess in the old days people didn’t have much else to do but memorize poems. And anyway I guess I do know a lot of song lyrics.

I just saw a bird out the window that I’ve never seen before. Just a little one but it was all black and white. It’s gray outside again. It was bright when I woke up.

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Feeling Sorry for Myself

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I’m in a weird place now. I didn’t want to start writing a post because I knew that when I did, time would start passing faster, and it’s almost time for me to leave for work. The new AirBnB guest is supposed to be here about the same time I have to leave for work, too. So I’m not really looking forward to either one of those activities, as usual, even though I don’t know what I’m doing that’s any better than that.

Last night I thought sure I was going to wake up and write something. I got everything in order and sat down to the computer at 10:30. By the time it was 11:30 I had opened up my word processor and I was ready to go. By 12:30 I had written two terrible paragraphs about nothing. So I got up and ate.

I’ve said before that the only times I feel good at home sometimes is when I’m eating something. More instant gratification. I did study for the LSAT for 30 minutes and that felt fine. Didn’t want to do it at first but it became fun by the end. Then I read some of Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! It’s interesting and I had to stop reading it because I knew time was really going to fly if I got too into it.

And it’s cold as a bitch in this whole house again. I figured I hadn’t turned on the heat up to whatever point it was, so no reason to do it now, with only so much time to go. So now I’m sitting at the desk with my jacket and my shoes and my hat on all ready to walk right out the door. I’ve been like this since more than an hour before I actually have to leave. I don’t know why. I guess I’m scared that I’ll get caught up in something and then won’t have time to get ready to leave or something. I’ll really be screwed if that dude shows up early.

Maybe I’m trying to force myself to write too much and I’m not really having much fun with it. So many things I have to do, or think I have to do, I don’t give myself any time to just not do anything, I guess. I don’t know. Same shit all the time. Maybe I’ll try to memorize some poetry while I’m at work or something. I don’t know. Count to ten in French a bunch. That should be helpful.

There where it is we don’t need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

This morning it was bright outside. I had to take my jacket off as we walked to the train in the sun. The birds were chirping as I sat down to my computer in my house made gray by the curtains and the upholstery. And now I’ve moved to the office, with windows all around, and it’s gray outside now, too. And my feet are cold inside my shoes, still soaked with last night’s sweat.

I guess I’ll never talk to my best friend who went off to the Army again. We aren’t the kind of people who can be friends into true adulthood. My great Aunt died and my dad texted me: “Don’t know if you heard but Aunt Annie passed away. Looking forward to seeing you this weekend!” Weird. Last night I had a dream that I was drunk at my parents house and I wrote some kind of journal thing and saved it on a 3.5 inch floppy disk and my mom found it the next morning and was really upset as I helped her unload the groceries from her car. And I had stolen her bag of Domino sugar and cocaine had something to do with that.

Tomorrow I am working a double so that my coworker will cover my shift on Saturday so I can take a bus to Long Island and meet my mother there, and then she’ll drive us back to Delaware. I’ll be there until Tuesday.

I’ve been wanting to get drunk all day, or at least just have one whiskey and ginger, but I keep putting it off for good reasons, just like the heat. We are having wine class before work today, so maybe I can get enough, but no I already know how that story goes. And yesterday I drank a lot of coffee but it was either too much or not enough because it was not making me feel good. I wish I had a flask but I know I’ll never do that. I’m sure they would notice I was drunk by how happy I would be.

We are set to make 500 dollars from AirBnB for the month of May. So far no one has noticed anything and we’ve had four or five sets of guests come. We have a pretty full April, too. I guess we’ve made about 350 dollars including this guy coming today for March. So that’s good. We are going to need a lot of money for our Eurotrip. GF keeps thinking we should stay for longer. I don’t know, shit, people do it but they are rich or have no debts I don’t know. Damn sure can’t throw it all on the 3,000 dollar credit card I have with an interest rate of 22 percent and already 2,000 dollars used up on that bitch!

I guess I’m about the laziest person I know, in a way. I don’t know how to live without instant gratification all the time. I don’t know how to live with a bad feeling in my heart. I don’t know how to struggle through a day gracefully. I don’t know how everyone shows up to work and acts like they do.

For a while there, it seemed like I had some perspective. I was reading the news and history and seeing myself as part of a bigger picture, instead of just self-analyzing and obsessing with myself and all that. How can I get that back? Guess I should read the news and history again.

Ah well. There goes a half an hour. Better spent than the three hours before it anyway.