it's been a long time. i don't know if I'm good to write anymore. it doesn't feel as fluent and easy off the keyboard as it used to.

i'm getting older and i've started feeling more honest about myself and my life.

it is late and i should be asleep. mondays are constant reminders that god exists.

it's late and my folks are asleep, i think, and i have in front of me, arrayed in the backlight of my monitor, in an otherwise dark room, i have three things in front of me - an empty glass of whiskey, a plastic jar with a bottle of blue ink inside it and a tube of moisturizing cream. i'm getting old and the dry winter dust now smarts and leaves my skin dry and painful. old parched skin hanging off a scaffold of withering flesh and creaky bone. that's what the cream's for.

the bottle of blue ink is another attempt to do something out of passion. so when it's so easy to buy ball pens or gel pens, i mess my hands with ink every now and then, and then scratch paper with the ink until it's time to fill up again. it reminds me when i was younger and did things with the gusto of unaware youthfulness.

i do that all the time - pick up new passions. if you feel hollow inside you keep picking up things that convince you that still feel. it's ersatz love. so you get a new hairdo. you watch French movies. and at night you nurse your glass of whiskey - not one too many. you want to savour the pleasure of empty bleak pain, the bleakness of impending death, the pain of continuing life.