Creepy calm & safe in the suburbs, every house dark and every light bright, big trees and loud cicadas, willow watering the sidewalk, everyone watering the lawn after dark and growing mold between blades.

Road striping coming right up, the view uphill from the silent center lines at four AM. Nothing here even saw Nixon; nothing even needs to now. There is second-growth prairie and fake lake at the end of the street; there is folklore on TV, immigrant scrap-pickers coming for your old machines, the sole stratum of the parking lots, grown men who've never been to the library, fast food head-quarter-pounds and drive up to the window, please.

I read the book in two days and this feels like it will take significantly longer every time I start again. It gets me so glazey and I get guilty and wonder how I'll say anything later when I can barely see now.

Creepy calm & insane, I'll track my hours alone and check mark through the day. Try as I might it's in my life and all kinds of shit crawls between your covers.

Starless and irrational is too soon to sleep, but I dreamt I was brought into confidence and led a whole legion after me. We looked within confidential files, the hall of history, of manipulative marketing and internet dark matter, and I laid in my strings so carefully that, at the first tug, I ran all the way out between the wall and its discoverers. I dreamt on: sophisticated survey techniques, grotesque fetuses or the archaic disgusting destiny, and be grateful you live in a modern age, at least.

She was recruiting me to critique radio as a visual medium, reading me her reasons in a false gesture of disinterest. The sound hit me like the extinguished blackscreen and overthrew the mind's eye, knocked me out until I was looking in on myself living her life. As she's holding the book the text is shrinking, and as she leans it blows up in her face.

Mediocre long form, for Daniel elsewise or. (midnight, June 14)

In the middle of a movie, in the middle of the night. At this point, it’s limping. I can see the script through the scenes. I believe this is a mark of poor acting, more so even than a mark of poor writing. The characters are thirty-somethings and bland. Late twenties, actually. No offense. Being in front of the camera, scripted, on their fifteenth take, wearing near-flawless makeup, is aging them.

The main character is 28. When he finally gets angry, his voice is reedy and unconvincing. He is the marginally more hip character, so he has a satchel. There are mumblecore influences. There are lines like, “You seem weird about this whole thing.” There are road shots. There are so many films I could be describing.

If you could hold the pool in a half-pan

Color pulse of youth energy consumption flows all through the dark, packet by packet, dangling camelback or elephant in a hat, orange and lavender and cream and teal and rust. It's happening between us on the most uncertain terms. In old age, coming on already, we'll wake early to look back on the nights.

If I held my hand up, palm out, moved it towards you. Your palm is opposite polarity, stops mine when close is close enough. Hereby is established the space between us, the cloak you're under when I'm around. It's the same space that divided the center of that room, divides me from what I want to be to you. Well, how scared are you of scared?

I slept an hour maybe, a little pool of dim sieving through my hands, and substituted with a portion, a potion on ice. The surf sound, the analog squelch, squeezes your pathology out of my brain, and the bass line shakes loose the cobwebs, lines up the words, sends them, chugchoochugchoo, blues style. If the train ran beneath my house, if I heard the whistle at night and it was all black and noise and butter-yellow light and the doors were sliding open under me. If it was a sleeper car, tropical canopy and crimson plush, if I could sculpt my dreams and if I could get downtown.

What is it you're hearing from me that you can't say back? Less to say, more to write, and again and again all night. What's this game we only acknowledge acknowledging? Visceral, sly, inverse to daylight? I think you know what I mean, but I just can't say the same for myself. Maybe none of it, maybe nothing. I can't begin to decipher such uncultivated unpredictability. But I know you, I want to know you, I know, you know.

Dear things that just don't work out in the morning: maybe you can beat the rap and maybe you can beat the rain, but you're here today and you can make it again. Quick, say it like a poem so you don't lose the words before you make it to the train. Honey, good words will come back, but not through your fingers and not before the five-ten.

You already wrote how the deco-letter beasts quiver in their stalls, humming and shining to run. How the suits cluster where the doors aren't yet, how the colors of vinyls shift from car to car, how even the commuters flinch at power out on the outbound underway. If I had Buffett's money I couldn't stop it, not while we've got Burlington-Northern-Sante Fe and all these places so far away.

They heard me singing and they told me to stop,
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose,
But late at night the feelings swim to the surface
'Cause on the suburbs the city lights shine,
They're calling at me, "Come and find your kind"

Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small,
Then we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl,
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there's no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights.
- Arcade Fire, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"