A wilted tip from a head of lettuce, with six spines down the length of a lumpy, pockmarked, bulbous, vaguely pyramidal surface, round at the bottom and then coming to a point, the yellow green of dried grass at the bottom fading to white toward the tip, dull and waxy skin, wavy, as unpredictably formed as the bottom of the ocean. This is the gourd on the table next to me. A cross between an avocado and vomit. Like a miniature spaceship sent to harbinger the coming of the Great Old Ones. A seed pod for the forest of suicides. A three-dimensional record of everything in the universe, readable only by a race of aliens with a sense of perception I can't describe in language. A melted marshmallow that gained sentience and is forming itself into the object of its fondest desire, a starfish. A bad omen. Corporealized moonlight. The magical item sacrificed in the creation of the new album by The Fall. A carving made by a squid to represent its god. What's left of a prehistoric mountain that's been chiseled down by erosion until it is nearly nothing. Butterfly wings captured by a camera that records emotion as well as light.

Want to see it?

America

Anne and I just spent an hour and a half looking around Eastport for a bar or restaurant that was both playing the American League Championship Series and had open seats. They were all full on this crisp autumn Friday night, the Irish pub, the steakhouse, the boat-themed bar, the pizza parlor, the ribs restaurant. Who are these people going to bars just because it's Friday? I know, I know--almost everybody. But Greg is not almost everybody. I was going to see the game, because I don't have a television. They were there to feel people all around them, be seen in their fashionably stupid club clothes, drink watery domestic beers and eat like primitive humans. Can you tell that I don't like these people? Oh, and also, someone's ass was in my damn seat. I don't know which seat was mine, but somebody else's ass was in it. No justice.

Then, because we failed to find any place to watch the game, we went shopping for groceries. (That's logical, right?) And since we were hungry, and it's been more than a week since we shopped, we got a lot of food. Like, a lot of food. How much food? A lot of goddamn food. $175 worth, to be exact.

Our shopping list probably accounted for a fourth of that. It was great fun, though. We just went from one aisle to the next like a ship of fools, loading the cart with sale items and all those things we were hungry for, all the things we would have been eating had we found an open bar seat with a television playing the ALCS. I have long been a sucker for retail therapy. Kay Duffy once saw me shopping for books and CDs at the library--this is many years back now--and said, "you're like a girl, aren't you? You shop when you're sad." Yes, I do shop when I'm sad. I don't think it makes sense to say this makes me like a girl because, well, which one?

But anyway, this was the first time shopping for groceries has ever had the same therapeutic value for me. Usually I feel anxious in the grocery store, never knowing what to get, always feeling like I can never think of the things I want when it's one in the morning and I need something to get me through another 100 lines of translating; when it's a cold weekday and I want something hot for lunch; when there's no plan for dinner and nothing in the house is fresh.

But this time, I thought of all the things.

Granola bars on sale? Sure, let's get two boxes of them. We got three bags of Utz potato chips, and five boxes of cereal. Beans were on sale, ten cents less per can than they are even at Trader Joe's, so we got six cans. I got wheat germ and yogurt, like Xhuliana once offered me when I stopped by her apartment at 3 a.m. on New Year's. I've never eaten pork and beans before, but that sounds good, I'll get a can of that. Hot dogs two for one! Ballpark franks aren't the best, but would that really bother me as long as there are hot dogs? Bread flour on sale! Celeste frozen pizzas ten for $10! What about those mixed nuts, do those look good? Sure, let's get two pounds of them. And ooh, caramels and apples! And some pumpkin spice tea!

I think I'll send the receipt to Eric in Berlin. I'll write on it, "America, fuck yeah."

Now we're home, and the game is over and was just archived on mlb tv, and we're going to have home-made "chicken wings" made with chicken breast, and we've already had a Celeste pizza each. Sometimes life is good.

Hopelessness Vs. Shame

Still a world out there, I suppose. I have been doing a (very) little personal writing lately, but for the most part I still haven't acted on an obvious realization: I will only do all those things I wish I did (writing, learning another instrument, getting on a reasonable sleep schedule, seeing friends) if I . . . do them. If, instead, I sleep until 2 p.m. and then read baseball analysis for three hours, books for another two, do a translation job, and then watch a baseball game, I won't do those other things.

Yes, amazing, I know.

I just always feel like reading is fun, and those other thing are work. And since my ambition has steadily shrunk as my twenties wear on, I have less and less impulse to do work to achieve goals. I keep thinking that since I'm mortal, accomplishments are of very limited meaning--to me or others. I don't know. I guess the world would be a very, very slightly richer place if I put in more effort and made a more productive use of all this leisure I've lucked in to. But the difference seems beyond subtle to me, beyond infinitesimal and into the realm of . . . no, actually infinitesimal covers it.

But at the same time, I feel like I can't keep going through life not doing anything. I can't keep wasting days, floating through time, looking up every now and again to see that I still haven't moved. I feel like I might as well not live if I'm going to live like that. This isn't to say that I'm feeling suicidal--merely that I don't know how I'll be able to live with myself, not that I won't be able to.

So I guess what I'm saying here is we're about to witness an evenly matched battle between hopelessness and shame. If you're going to watch, you'll have to be extraordinarily patient. I take my time with the best of them.