good morning!

5:46 AM
Woke up from dreams about my aunt who will be dead soon. I am resisting the clichéd action of mending fences on a deathbed. I resent my own guilt. Her inquiries. Why don't you visit? It'd be so nice to see you. What happened to those pictures you promised me? Remember that? The dying think they have a right to a hurry-up offense race against the clock. Familial bum rush.

6:04 AM
Not sleeping. Feeling cramped literally and figuratively. I feel hungry. Eat when hungry. Eat when bored. Think the concept of boredom is really just laziness. Feel horribly stagnant due to lack of exercise. Fighting a major aversion to exercise even though I know it will give me: energy, less stress, more peace, better sleep. I make mental note after mental note to call Hector. I believe he is the only one who can get me sweating regularly again. I need/want to call him. He will answer because he always does and I am fairly certain that he always will until he simply is no more. I hope he lives to be 100. Brief panic upon realizing that I don't have a single picture of him.

6:36 AM
Reading The Bell Jar. Was stopped on page 30-something for a while after inadvertently leaving the book in Boston at holiday time. My mother sent it to me in a Fed-Ex package that also contained: photos of my road trip last summer, an aqua colored t-shirt with the slogan from my uncle's city counsel campaign emblazoned on the front (size XXL), the latest edition of Columbia College Magazine. Slipped inside the pages of The Bell Jar I found a photo of a baby girl in a diaper. She is being propped up by a large hand attached to a very hairy arm.She wears a look of amused bewilderment. The back of the photo reads “Claire Brown (3 mos.) Dec. 2006”. I assume that she is the child of the only relevant Browns I can think of. My father's step-sister's son and his wife. I resolve to use the semi-mystery child to mark my page for the remainder of the book.

6:59 AM
Still reading The Bell Jar. Feeling somewhat inspired by the writing style and the author's unmistakably pissed off tone. And craziness. Something disconnected. I relate to the way she views herself as a writer. Agitated by the pulse and noise of someone's music. It's not the Reggaeton that normally flows out of car windows down below. It's Bjork. It's coming through the wall. From the neighbor I have pegged for a serial killer. I have my suspicions because he sometimes leaves the TV on for days at a time. He blasts music at all hours, mostly techno (nobody listens to techno!), and rarely leaves the apartment. One early morning I heard a sound that was either homicidal or sickly masturbatory. It was a frustrated,intense prolonged cry that went silent then came back for an encore. I think of him ejaculating while ending a life. Feel ill.

7:11 AM
From The Bell Jar: “We were always taken out on expense accounts, so I never felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everyone I met in New York was trying to reduce.”
How depressing. Skinny is not attractive.

7:46 AM
Feeling sleepy again. Pushing fleeting guilt about aunt away. Putting the barrel of a shotgun down the mouth of my memories. Making coffee for Sleeping Beauty.