Is May over yet?
I know: May only leads to June, which leads to July, a month during which I gradually lose my mind until I end up in August hating everything.
Still: May has been a month of half-thought unwritten blog posts, grading, problems with grading, problems with my printer, problems with my computer, and, most importantly, the last month of a job which had me skittering around trying to find my balance.
I never did find it, which is why it was my last month.
C. asked if I still felt bad about quitting, and, yeah, I do. I wonder if I tried hard enough to make it work, if I wasn’t looking to get out long before I actually got out. Did I fuck up—that is the question.
Alas, it’s not a question to which there is any ready answer; more to the point, I don’t know that I could answer the question.
This is how I am able to get off the Neuroses Tilt-A-Whirl: If you can’t know it, let it go. Let it go.
You may have noticed that I repeatedly have to remind myself to Let It Go—which repetition means that I am not so good at Letting It Go—but such reminders do actually work to [warning! metaphor switch ahead!] loosen my fingers from their death-grip on What If? I may manually have to pry each digit from the What If? using various devices (including, most usefully, the This-Is-Out-Of-Your-Hands multi-tool, with, among others, its You-Can’t-Know-It lever), but I am able, finally, to pull my hand away.
Sure, my fingers may wander back over the What If? or Why Did I [Not] Do That?, but a deep breath and a reminder is usually enough for me to set the regret back down and sigh, Let It Go.
Anyway, this was not a big regret, just the most current one. It might stick around for awhile, might recur at odd points far into the future (I still occasionally think about the fan I couldn’t fit into my car when I left Minneapolis and had to leave behind), but it will shrink, and will lose its stickiness.
In the meantime, I’ll remember how much better I feel now that I quit, and remember that fuck-up or not, I’m glad to be done.
AbsurdBeats 
When I think of where I’ve come from
or even try to measure as any kind of
distance these places, all the various
people, and all the ways in which I re-
member them, so that even the skin I
touched or was myself fact of, inside,
could see through like a hole in the wall
or listen to, it must have been, to what
was going on in there, even if I was still
too dumb to know anything—When I think
of the miles and miles of roads, or meals,
of telephone wires even, or even of water
poured out in endless streams down streaks
of black sky or the dirt roads washed clean,
or myriad, salty tears and suddenly it’s spring
again, or it was—Even when I think about
all those I treated so poorly, names, places,
their waiting uselessly for me in the rain and
I never came, was never really there at all,
was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven
like a car along some empty highway passing,
passing other cars—When I try to think of
things, of what’s happened, of what a life is
and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant,
the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths,
all the painful, belligerent news, and the dog still
waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices,
presences, of children, of our own grown children,
the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now,
each physical moment, passing, passing, it’s what
it always is or ever was, just then, just there.
-Robert Creeley
Creeley: Lovely.
Gogol Bordello? Will have to wait until tomorrow night. . . .