when you talk about a person, about what they are, or to glorify or pay tribute to the life they have led, or whatever it is they have done that has put that feeling in your chest, … and it wasn’t because you had some personal connection to them, although unquestionably their life’s crossing with yours was transformational, in the sense that something became more than what it could have otherwise imagined it could be—you did that, before you had devices, the world did that to you…

it’s because you were paid to edit his youtube videos that you really watched them, saw a man not for his suffering nor for his devotion to living a life that could fill us with that feeling, or not just that, but for his challenge to do something with that feeling, for his devotion to make that challenge honorable to us, and to make us want to take it and share it with the people we think could change the world for the better, which is everyone oh yeah all of the time!

oh yeah, remember how you used to sit down and have to focus from the poetry, just to keep going with your life, how you would go on and on, adding, going around things, connecting them in your attempts to define other things, how you could still do that, are probably even wanting to do that right now…

open a new word document every day and save it with the date, like 12012015 for december one two thousand fifteen, or save it December1201Five if you want—however you want to do it, just be consistent, make each doc as radical or as interesting or as exactly the same as yesterday's while you can, just call them page 1 and page 2, and so on, don’t get cute and start calling them page 1 again or page 69 revisited. that’s how you talk. that’s how you process information.

to be clear, how you talk and how you process information is not by getting turned around, which is what would happen to you if you starting getting cute with your titles, or the way you refer to your days or your pages. you could write stories. you could recount your life in stories… you know, anecdotes real or imagined. but if you told your life in stories, would it be interesting? would the stories be interesting, i mean. do you not live astounding stories because you're afraid of not doing the stories justice? or do you not tell stories because you don't know where you are when you tell stories: in the story, or in the body telling the story?

you go back and forth between the story you are telling and your casual interrogation of its means of being told, how you marvel! when you're pretending to be listening, which is partially all of the time, you are usually not tuning out so much as you are in… excuse me i'm so sorry—i have to admit i was really just having this amazing idea—but i don't want to interrupt what you were saying!—and also i can't remember what it was because i never said it i just saw the formation happen in my head and then it was gone, not like a cloud but like a chemical cloud, like all clouds are chemical clouds, duh—about the whatever it was… but then i would throw out some indication that i really had been listening, and usually—and sometimes to my surprise—i'll discover that i had been tuned in enough to repeat what had just been said, and to have an opinion about it. meanwhile, i could start to dissect my newfound understanding of the way my brain might work, just worked, or is currently working, stamping certainty into an unknown amount of dimensions before disappearing… or changing so much as to be unrecognizable. it happens fast. faster than you would think. you aren't who you were and the people around you never knew who you were. no one knows who you are.

don't go existential on me and say no one ever did. especially if you honestly think no one ever did. tough for you—or good for you, i don't care. the thing is you keep going. it's not that you might one day be unrecognizable but how far you must go as a stranger. is that what slows you down on a tuesday evening, is that what you think about to induce the right amount of breaths per minute? the deep exhale and a new world focus?

oakland streetlight off asphalt and through a new display window, same light, artificial, but passing through you now, and part of you is that asphalt, and part of you is that new display window—the things you notice on a night you try to distinguish from the rest: are you done with distinguishing? are you going to finish that? or is that what you try not to think about, like when is this voice coming back around, what will it do to us if it has nothing to say and we know it and we have to say it anyway? or choose to. what if we have no legitimate fears? what if we're afraid to ask the stupid questions! or mis-punctuate to make a point?

the main point is to attack head on—you'll always have to move to be able to see, oh to just look at the thing, to let the feelings pass through you, the waves of nausea, of regret, disappointment, discomfort, dissatisfaction, even, with your energy level or with your degree of feeling it, anything other than what you're feeling—even if that's apathy, even if you couldn't imagine a more fulfilling way to spend your time than to personify some intersection, one that doesn't see much traffic, just the sun rising and holding court and eventually setting, the occasional travelers passing through, various species, some lingering too. some making homes there, at that intersection, some never leaving, and some yet still who outgrow it, who spend years stomping over the same sewer cover, maybe lose a ball down there they wouldn't play with now anyway, but the disappearance of which at the time could have ruined an entire summer evening, a whole night without the interactions that ball made possible, another part of the night left up to a child's own devices, knowing even then your willingness and even eagerness to play the same game over and over with the same players was a way of affirming the pointlessness of resisting it—even when you were bored, how you could exaggerate how bored you were and love nothing more than that, just that shared exaggerated boredness could wake you up and make you pound your glove:

let's say the shared pass-phrase in a knowing toner!

humminuh! come on, batter! humminuh! and you would hum with toner too. we still do this. we still hum with toner when you hum with toner. and you hum with toner when we hum with toner! we've just all gotta hum, man! yeah, with toner, man!

with knowing inflections we pass through doorways and into family lines, folding our possessions neatly into our laps and putting off our request to be excused from the table.

we hold court like the sun over our foibles, with the benefit of your atmosphere. we long for you not to leave us. perhaps we can burn them off if you just keep talking, uh-huh? it's not that we're afraid of facing our fears or our shortcomings—we believe we do that constantly—it's that we might not overcome them that bothers us, and that we would be just fine how we are if we didn't.