"And I guess I'm a writer who uses italics"

(Accidentally deleted on March 3, 2013, cached and reposted from August, 2012)

Uses italics uses italics

I reread what I rewrote from one of the last posts (pieces) and I realized I was glazing my fists. Just obvious, obvious words strung together. No room for the imagination. I don't lack in imagination; I lack in narrative structure. Let me play you a song called "Narrative" on the three chords with the four strings I know how to play.

It sounds a lot like "Wonderwall."

I don't read Sartre. I read No Exit and 3 other plays and it was awesome. I am not a person who reads Sartre or writes about reading Sartre. I hate those people. Matter of habit.

I AM reading a book called "Einstein's Dreams" and it's great. Little vignettes where time acts differently and we act differently because of it. It's moving and very human, these quick characterizations and images. Long, tragic poems. Howl for physicists, or maybe not. It's good though.

There was this particular vignette about time as discontinuous parts. I finished the piece (post) and I was thinking about Portland in the winter, how the sky will hang low and gray. How the birds will chirp and Brian, my cat, will whine about whatever, how my friends will look thinner, stronger, worse, paler in their sweaters and suits. I'll say hello to them, do shots at the dive in Gateway, lose my patience, lose my resolve, miss home, miss them. In an instant of the gray Portland canopy, I remembered it's August. I won't be home (if it's even home) for 4 months. It hits me hard when I have to unpack what I've tried for so long to compartmentalize.

It's the same everywhere, all the time. I only miss where I'm not, who I'm without. What a drag and how silly!

The next vignette was about local time: all the cities are states and time passes at different rates depending on the city. Travelers pass between time zones and adjust to the new rate, but if they went back home after a month, years would have gone by, or minutes. I wonder if that's the real time, our time.

If I explore facebook, I can find all sorts of times, with classmates now Captains and businessmen and children, with children.  We're seeing behind the curtain. All your time is local. You feel like everyone is getting old so fast, losing and gaining and dying and dying while you try to live. We're supposed to go back home and feel better or worse about our situation because of how our time rate differs.

I think college is a vacuum, a time suck. Once I leave, I'll speed on through the rest of my life, which was actually an earlier vignette...