October 21st. Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Thought thought thought.

I've only cried two times since that fateful haircut in early August of 2001. The first time was December 29, 2005, a few hours after Kat broke up with me, lying in my parents' bed at 346, and realizing I'd never get to hold her side-blubber again. I guess even back then I was a slave to the little things.

The second time was September 17, 2007, two or so days after the first break up with Steph, when I finally watched Finding Nemo, sitting on the living room couch at Claremont, and the cover of Beyond the Sea came on over the closing credits and I just lost it.

Number three is right around the corner. I can feel it lurking in my head, waiting for the right moment. I don't think it'll take that much to set it off anymore. I don't even have anyone that can break up with me. I'm just really fucked up these days.

I have my first midterm of the semester in an hour. After that disaster of a Milton quiz who the hell knows how this'll go. In my head, everything's pretty clear, but.

I haven't done a word of Windswept in over a week now, I think. It's starting to gnaw at me. There's still a timidity to it, but it'll grow.

Days like these and suicide—no matter how distant how far down the line—feels increasingly the only option. Some life.

And in the background: phone calls from no one, and my throat's gagging full of neo-Platonism and

a chorus of voices singing together happy

"We could dance all night..."

October 12th. Gordian Thoughts.

Time-taker-uppers keep keeping me down. The weeks are like a maze with no exit signs and hardly any landmarks. I've written myself a few notes on my arms. Keep writing. Don't skip classes. Don't be too late for work. Don't eat too much junk food. Don't make that jump. Keep waiting. Keep wading. We'll see where they get me.

The hockey season's started, which means I'm going to be spending way too much time caring about it. I guess all my cares are disproportionately important, though. The stupid facebook messages to no one, the attempts at decent comebacks (in French and in English), how to get yellow to stay on top of black. Whether anyone notices a grey ghost with his grey goose shuffle, day in day out. And let's not forget the endless perfectionism in the artistic medium of plastic bags and the food that's making its slow walk towards becoming shit in so many toilets all over the downtown area. So we go on, the new HNIC anthem extolling our virtues in lieu of a eulogy. Galvanised.

I wonder if beauty ever means anything, in the end. I wonder what processes lead people from being babies to being babies. I wonder at how I can be so serious, so unserious, so quick to retort and so thick-skinned, all at once. I wonder how deep the needle will have to go when I finish the semester and finally start Ulysses and finally finish it and finally get its cogs and screws and nuts and bolts tattooed all over my stupid body. I wonder about capstones, about headstones, about stone henges, and stone heads. I wonder, like Character, what I'll be like in my thirties (Ed.'s note: Notice here his life is imitating his writing, and not vice-versa. A sign of times changed? Or just a crippling addiction to binaries and paradoxes? Who knows.) Who will be left to read out my eulogy to a quiet church half-full of faces untearstained? Who will be left to collapse, nauseous, at the wake, wondering about what might've been?

I guess the solution is to not die. Thanks, Alexander.

October 4th. Marx's Grave is a Communist Thought.

Outside my front door the floorhallway smells like cherry popsicles childhood. It's strange and sad and stoically silent how they manage to bottle a perfection like that and use it to clean shit-tiles with in little apartment landfilldings tucked away into nowhere. I live on St. Marc. Nick and Norah were all around St. Mark's Place. St. Marx place. Swing with me, sixties. We're running away, running away into the night. We're never coming home.

I had almost forgotten how I can't deal with stress without slipping into suicidal ideation. Mmmm-hm. My bike got stolen. My spotlight never got turned on. Christ, I hate myself. All these thoughts—"crazy vs. talented, more sex than i've had since two months ago, i got what i wanted before it was what i wanted and back then i wanted something else anyway. sick, six, sick. metro cars. metro cars. fuck."—

and i'm always trying to recapture in words that image in my head (that imagine my head) of the old, broken men, arms crossed resting on rakes or shovels, staring at the clouds as they roll, roll, roll out. watching. waiting.

and it's beautiful to me in my head and the image imbues the words (for me) with something powerful but i think they're stilted outside of my skull. who knows. who the fuck knows.

i miss the idea, i miss it, i miss everything. i miss my stupid bike and worrying about it. i just need something to love, and someone to listen when i say "i had an epiphany today." i guess epiphanies are like dreams; they only mean anything to the person who had them. anyway, they're too ethereal to remember properly after a few hours. so fuck it.

i feel heavy. i'm weighed down by all the million-weights of the waiting, of the eternal waiting. beauty and the way it makes me smile only worsens the time in between. listen to me. someone needs to take me out back, shoot me in the head with a bolt-gun, and make glue of me. in death i could finally keep things together. kiss kiss, bang bang.

i could go on for as long as this window's capable of expanding. let's not and say we didn't. everyone has better things to do. if you'll excuse me, i have a date with a pencil and my memory of some coming mannerist attraction and a piece of paper where everything is nice in my brain and comes out all shitty. b+ eternal. i need to learn latin so i can be even more depressing. that or go back to reading emile zola.

i wonder if even one of any of my fleeting angry crushes ever caught their eyes on me, where i'd be. i'd have thrown it all away—i'd still throw it all away—for some hand-holding. maybe the beatles were right, after all. we all live in a yellow submarine.