I’m a little tea pot

02/28
A black widow with a bulbous abdomen perched itself on my toes. I attempted to crush it. The spider was made of metal.

A bystander: “The black widow fucks its spouse and eats it. What can you say about a creature like that?”

A school of crocodiles thrashing about in murky water
Boy says to princess, “These are the siblings I have concealed from you.”

(Old)

I was in a courtroom and Satan appeared to me (Ivan Karamazov) as a large dinosaur. A number of spectators were seated behind me, but there was no speech, just something in the air which we all understood tacitly.

The dinosaur (he reminded me of a bad magician) performed a number of feats for us. We did not so much as flinch. It was like we were observing a bad hologram.

The mind is guilty of plagiarism.

Last night I put Karamazov down and attempted to sleep. I eventually reached that transition state between sleep and alertness. It is something like delirium. Suddenly, I opened my eyes, and just as I did, a winged tarantula flew at me from my bedroom window. I lifted my comforter to block it.

Bertrand Russell appeared to me as Jiminy Cricket.

“Boy, analytic philosophers are English number hoppers”

***********************

Introduction: Each week in my seminar on neuropsychology we discuss a new disorder or family of disorders. It often jars me into a newfound appreciation of my relative normalcy. However, it often also invites me to contemplate what it would be like to have an important part of my brain not function. I suspect that sort of contemplation prompted the odd dream that I had last night, in which I experienced something similar to what patient H.M., who had his hippocampus removed to curb seizures, experienced—which was an inability to encode new memories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient)

***********************

I am living on a farm with my mom and my sister. It is lush and green, and I am happy. I spend most of my time atop a hill. We are harvesting tomatoes and transporting them by vehicle across a field to one of the only three buildings in sight. When we get to the building, I place a tube attached to the vehicle inside a storage bin, and my mom does something inside the vehicle, and tomatoes start shooting through the tube into the storage bin. I feel utter surprise that they do not break and bruise.

My mom notices my surprise, as if I have never seen this chore done before. She takes me aside and pulls out a battered photograph. It takes me a second to recognize it. It is our field, my home, the only thing I know. But it is different. Where there is now a smart red barn in the middle of the field, the field in the photograph is empty. More than empty, it is barren; there is no grass, no life. The field in the photograph is dead. It jars me to see it. I feel confused. I don’t understand how the field could have been that way. My mom says, “You don’t remember the field this way, do you?” I say vehemently, “No!” But she keeps talking, gently, and I understand what she explains to me: that because of something wrong with my brain, I can form no new memories. I’m living constantly in a fleeting present that will immediately drop from existence. I feel swindled, and I don’t know how many times my mom has explained this to me before, futilely, for I forget everything. I don’t know what I don’t know. I feel despair, but also a strange resignation. What can trying to fight this reality accomplish? Even this moment soon will pass from me to reside in the same place as those moments that never happened at all.

I dream of Brian Setencich.

I took an English class with Allen Ginsberg. I approached him and said, “Franz Kafka, I do not like your writing”

Allen Ginsberg turned into Eric Hagel and had a fairy fit.