http://rett.org/

“Rett Nearburg passed away on Friday, January 14, 2005, at 10:40 p.m.”

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

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.

But to put this into context: I was riding down this street at 10:00 PM and I noticed that the tracks veered off to my right. This did not unsettle me, as I had driven over these tracks before. But what I did not realize was that I had never peddled over the tracks at a 75 degree angle.

I heard a dull clack, and my front wheel sank into the rail groove. I dislodged it, but I must have twisted my handlebars in the process, and my rear wheel became locked in the groove. Naturally, I fell. I caught my fall with my left hand. But somehow, I split my knuckles in the process. Knuckle wounds are great. They take a very long time to heal.

Damages: i) Apparently destroyed the neck of my mirror. Further observation shows that the mirror is still usable. ii) My chain fell off.

I am very lucky. If this event occurred at rush hour, I might be dead. I have a very vivid image of my skull being crushed under a pickup truck wheel like a pumpkin. Fortunately, no cars were on the street.

Please enjoy my first documented crash.

I have included images. Please excuse the poor quality. During photography a fungus began to fruit on our camera lens and rained spores on everything in its immediate vicinity. As a result, we all experienced several flushes of fungal fruit that night and rather ugly cases of thrush a week later.

In the main arena, Swedish Egil was rocking out. Green lasers were shooting into bands of fog and we walked into the lower pit where girls and boys were locked up in trains on the floor just like garden mollusks having intercourse. We walked over these trains like so much vegetation and began to dance with other youths in a great crowd which emitted the scent of patchouli mingled with male and female genital musk. Many members of the party noted that this scent seemed to be weaving an orderly chain around all of us, and we slowly sensed it growing in its complexity until it completely crystalized and when it crystalized our pricks would flop out and ejaculate and our cunts would swell and go into estrus and drip mucuous which we would use for locomotion.

Trash and nibbled food everywhere. Cigarette butts, empty Tecate cans, egg shells.

Every toilet in the apartment is broken. One overflowed and flooded the master bath. The chain broke in K’s toilet. It is the only functional toilet. One must reach into the reservoir (and get one’s hands wet) to flush it.

It is freezing. It’s like a cold castle.

The entire place has been spent and discarded. There is granulated sugar everywhere.

K. is sleeping like a bear in some kind of Oriental(?) (Tibetan?) fishnet tunic.

“I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t think it would be this bad”

I was pretty candid with my friends last night and this morning. I am afraid that I will find all of this embarrassing in a few hours. I am not sure how lucid I am. But now I will be totally honest with you, too.

I do not expect you to respond to this because I am probably just gassing.

So, I have this funny feeling that your e-mail correspondences with me must ultimately be ironical-that they must just some kind of ongoing joke that you (and maybe Kate) like to giggle about periodically.

But then of course, my emails are usually too boring to joke about. Sometimes they are weird. Very, very weird. And this is probably not due to any quality I possess. I think the weirdness is just the result of some kind of performance, some kind of acting. Acting. I always declined Kate and Itkin’s requests for me to audition for productions because I felt that I had done enough acting.

And to be quite honest, I am not sure what that means.

I am pretty sure that practically everything I ever (have ever written) wrote (in the quasi-literary sense of ‘write’) meant absolutely nothing and had no sense. This does not really bother me anymore because I (think I) have abandoned all (quasi-)literary pretensions.

And when I think about myself most of the time, I come to the conclusion that there is really noting I can do. But that’s okay. Every day I become more comfortable with that.

The funny thing is that I have always really known it would turn out this way. I feel like I could see this point of my life at the age of ten or eleven. And I feel like I can see the end now. Of course it’s all just hubris. I am just being a jaded young person. Nothing surprises me. Hubris.

Prediction: The rest of my life will be like some unbearable Sunday. One sits on the couch and waits for something to happen. One fidgets. One’s hands are clammy. It’s too bright outside, too still, and too quiet. But there will finally be anonymity and a guarantee of total privacy. I will have to hide nothing because no one will be looking. And there will be nothing to look at.

I have learned a number of things about Leo.

Here is an example.

I sat with Leo and discussed some of his behavior - e.g.

A)

We were in the kitchen and he made a sexual comment about Christina. He expressed his desire to have sex with her. I cannot recall the details. But as far as I can remember, there was nothing unusual about the comment. Many boys our age make such comments.

I found the comment disgusting, but my disgust was not the result of deliberation or reflection. I am just talking about a brute psychic state with no thought behind it: a reaction.

Now, I have given some thought to this reaction. I think it might have been the result of: i) K’s past involvement with Christina and ii) Leo’s (currently rocky) relationship with K.

To explain: I think that I must have been disappointed that Leo would (ostensibly) rank his sexual desires over K’s feeliings. Of course I realize that Leo was probably just thinking out loud. Again, Leo’s expression was typical of boys our age and might have had no connection with an actual desire to engage in a sexual act (I am tentative here). It might have been nothing but a humorous comment.

Still, I was disgusted. It occurred to me that I could not blame Leo for the reaction. Leo just said something, and then I experienced a feeling of disgust. I do not think Leo could have had any grounds to believe that his comment would disgust me. Here we have a bad result that (perhaps) could not have been helped.

I expressed this to Leo.

B)

My conversations with Leo are usually like this:

Me: I do not think that is the case; X.
Leo: NO! NO! It is the case a, b, c, d,e,f,g and Y and Z and Q.
Me: But-
Leo: h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p and Q and oh yeah F and I am going to talk about O for some reason.
Me: Yet-
Leo: q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z It was nice talking to you.

And by this I mean to express that our conversations seem like a very remote semblance of a dialogue. Usually Leo will say what he wants to say (and more) while steamrolling the possibility of any input from the other party.

I do not think he does this intentionally. But I told him that it bothered me, and asked Leo not to do it anymore. Leo expressed a desire not to do this anymore.

Half an hour later Leo did just this - the steamrolling. I told him to stop. MF told him to stop. Leo said he would stop, stopped, and then started steamrolling again.

I have realized this is just what Leo does. Which is to say, as far as I can tell, this type of behavior is nothing but an impulse.

I do not know if I can blame a person for having an impulse any more than a person can blame me for having certain psychic states.