Borderlands: Lakeview/Ravenswood 1 - Moving In

Real summer air came down over the course of about a single afternoon and evening a few weeks ago, and now it's worked its way in. Humid and densely nourishing if a little over-rich, heavy with the scent of lilacs and lawnmower fumes. It's just past the time of year when I'd normally be staring down my collection of flattened boxes and refusing to clean or put anything away since I'll just have to clean it all and pack it all by the end of the month.

I'm staying put for once, not that I've been immune to the flirtations of the For Rent signs. But this weather makes me think of the real work of moving -- after the giddy thrill of selecting the new, empty apartment and before the comfort of having burrowed one's way into the neighborhood. The work of being unsettled, trying to build new patterns of living and hoping that they aren't the wrong ones.

I feel like I've written incessantly about my first few months in the city, but that isn't exactly true. It's mostly just that my antennae were turned up as high as they could go; I seemed to feel everything three or four times over. (And it's true that I did narrate much of it over the phone, long calls to California that were the sole venue for a relationship for a while.) Later I transferred much of the mood of that time into an ambitious work of fiction I'm not ready to say I'll never finish. But it's still not done with me. In beginning to write this here, I realize that it will be a multipart affair; a density of delicate threads occupied those short seasons.

I would have been ready to take the first apartment I looked at in Chicago. My mother and her urbanophobic boyfriend were driving me around getting lost and hating everything while I became increasingly belligerent in the sincere hope that they'd kick me out of the car and drive away. The first place was at the corner of North and Kedzie and probably really was a worse apartment than the one I ended up with: small, dingy, with matted gray carpet on the floor and a bathrobed older woman wandering the linoleum corridor outside. $525 with heat, however; fair enough. The landlord seemed nice; my family hated it. As we drove north and east into Lakeview my mom was relieved by the increasing number of restaurants and coffee shops where, she noted, it'd be easier for me to find work.

She had a point. The place on Ashland had several dismaying features, but it was technically just within the officially desirable neighborhood of Lakeview, and close to two trains. So I could ignore the fact that the tub, in lieu of a showerhead, had a sprayer attached to the faucet; that something in the rental agent's demeanor suggested that the place had been sitting vacant for many months; that the '70s-era stove was not hooked up to the wall. It was a lot of space for a studio and for my barely-existent collection of furnishings -- good windows, a whole separate kitchen with space for a table, walk-in closet standing between it and the bathroom. I knew almost nothing about renting apartments and was a little surprised and annoyed that the landlords wouldn't let me move in that very day. It would have been so easy: all my things from college were packed into and strapped on top of the car (including the newish, shiny orange bike I'd bought myself, whose naive cable lock would be neatly clipped the first night I moved in).

So we all went home to Grand Rapids three hours away and packed it all up again the next weekend. My mother and grandmother somehow found some empty corners of the car to stuff with household necessities. "They have dish soap in Chicago, you know," I grumbled in embarrassment.

I suppose I had an idea about making it on my own, starting from scratch. As if some silverware and cleaning supplies would corrupt that vision. Everyone -- and not just my family but also the man at the bank who set up my new account and the parade of tradesmen who would pass through my apartment trying to make it livable -- was already extremely dismayed that I was staking my claim in a town where I had no job and no prospects, with only two or three acquaintances, a liberal arts degree from a tiny anachronism of a college, and $3,000 of summer-job money to my name.

It took three anxious, humid weeks to find a full-time job. I did manage to get taken on by a temp agency right away. They sent me on a handful of $10/hour jobs across the city, the first being a convention where my task was to sit at a table and request that French doctors sign in as they entered the conference hall. The French doctors fell into two camps: those who resented my presence deeply and those who were delighted by the terrible French I served up to them. (All had horrible handwriting, which we later were tasked with decoding into names to be typed into a spreadsheet; many of the words we ended up with clearly could not have been the names of actual French people, but no one we asked seemed to care whether the spreadsheet had any particular connection with reality.) The caustic Frenchwoman in charge of the temps clearly sympathized with the former camp; she'd spent a lot of time fussing with our appearance (I'd bought new clothes for the job, which I still own and still dislike) and nearly sent another girl home for wearing what were essentially fancy sneakers.

"It is not that you must wear heels to look nice!" she spat. "Look at her! Those are flats! Still appropriate!" The heels of my shoes were not flat, just covered by my too-long pants, but I took in the extremely mild praise anyway, feeling that I'd passed a test while shrugging sympathetically at the sneakered girl.

I have mostly not been very good at the various low-wage jobs I've taken, such that I can still recall nearly every tidbit of praise I've received while doing them. At the movie theater I was appalled and flattered and then appalled at being flattered when the manager who'd hired me confided to a small group of us that she "only hired attractive people." ("What about Ashton?" "I didn't hire Ashton.") There and at a couple of my restaurant jobs I served the occasional customer who caught me in a rare moment of efficiency and said, "Boy, you're really good at what you do." Part of me yearned to let them know that this was false -- yes, in the obvious way that I was actually an cringing klutz 90% of the time, but more than that I wanted to say, resoundingly: "This is not 'what I do.'"

When I finally got a full-time job it was at a Persian restaurant about two miles away, and when I finally lied that I'd gotten another, better job in order to quit as quickly and neatly as possible, the manager, Saad, said he was not surprised because, in his words: "You are very great person." I was surprised and incredibly touched by this. It was true that he'd been one of the nicest people I'd worked with there -- sad-eyed, seeming a little too smart and refined for the work he had to do, a man who insisted on trying to fix the watch whose back I'd removed and been unable to replace before very gamely admitting it couldn't be done -- but still: I had been a terrible waitress. I'd dropped a full glass of wine onto a man's chest and then desperately, idiotically offered to bring soda water to help shrink the ocean of purple soaking his shirt; I'd sent an entire tray of heavy, expensive lamb dinners crashing to the floor and then, when the replacement order came out, slipped in precisely the same spot and done it all over again; I'd brought customers dishes they had no intention of ordering through cultural-linguistic misunderstandings.

Saad seemed to understand that this was not "what I did." And though, as my boss, he certainly had the right to disapprove of me because of it, instead he accepted my chaotic presence in the restaurant and liked me well enough anyhow. He believed in my fabricated future.

This was valuable to me because "what I did" was very unclear at the time. I went long stretches between in-person contact with anyone who knew anything about the kind of person I was and the kind of goals I had. You have to make small talk with a lot of people when you first move somewhere: repairmen, utility workers, landlords. In response to their reasonable questions about what I was doing with my life, I had nothing to say. I was just here, taking up space in Chicago. Even after I got the waitressing job, I couldn't quite say: "I'm a waitress." It wasn't a career. "I wait tables," I'd tell them flatly, daring them to press onward. And I vacillated between being comfortable moving through the world as a cipher and aching for someone to intuit what it was I really stood for.

Maybe that's part of what made my first months in Chicago feel so hyperreal --  that no one around me knew who I was. I was the only one in charge of perpetuating that entity; I couldn't pawn off parts of the task on the job I had and the routines I'd established and the friends I interacted with. There was no shorthand yet for processing my day-to-day existence, that series of constant collisions with a place that didn't know I'd become a part of it. 

This is much of the work of travel, too, I suspect. Such work is exhausting, but exciting -- all that room for reinvention. I'd do it the same way again.

The Embarrassment of Being Earnest

I.

Over a few days this past week -- mostly while packed into a car also containing my mother, my sister, her friend, Heather, and the dog, en route to and from the Red River Gorge where we were doing some small-scale backpacking -- I read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, just something I'd pulled off Heather's bookshelf for the journey. Everybody knows the story, I suppose: young man enthralled by Tolstoy, Thoreau, and his own depth of spirit sets out to make it entirely on his own, living off the land and then dying on the land after a mercilessly swift series of miscalculations. Krakauer attacks the situation with sympathy, especially in a middle chapter dissecting the chorus of sneering voices who chastised Chris McCandless for his foolish death.

        

From the available evidence, McCandless doesn't seem to have been an especially likeable person. I would, I think, have clashed with him across the seminar table in college, constantly prickled by the suspicion that beneath the discord our deepest convictions sang in unison. His notes are full of ardent underlining and rampant self-glorification. He seems to have treated other people highhandedly and with insufficient respect for their reality. But I don't think that fully explains why lives and deaths like his are held in such contempt, because there's also something defensive, reactionary, in the tone of the castigators.

There are certain lives that are popularly read as an act of judgment against mainstream existence, whether those living them would ever formulate such a judgment or not. The smoldering annoyance provoked by this continual imaginary judgment comes out against the less dramatically ascetic as well: there is for instance the scorn tossed at vegans, straight-edge kids, non-drivers (to name only categories of which I am or have been a member). And I've just as often fallen on the other side: how often have I rolled my eyes at the fasters, the neatniks, the taut creatures who organize their days around workouts?

All these people have given their lives a certain tentative form, and the more committed, like McCandless, a much stronger one. Such forms omit deliberately things widely considered worth pursuing; they refuse to frame their neglect to obtain these things as a failure. And, often accidentally, they function as statements, as argumentative positions that would be very uncomfortable to engage seriously in debate. So their deliberate omissions must be reframed as failures. They must be drawn into comparison and competition with the critic's normal life, which is shaped without much conscious intention by the essentially economic imperative of continual growth, acquisition. Any answer to the critic's challenge will typically serve only to make the defendant appear as fanatical, judgmental, and foolish as everyone has suspected all along.

Therefore it's better to be silent, assuming one doesn't in fact possess the strain of messianic zeal that made McCandless apparently insufferable. I yearn to go unnoticed when I turn down the cheesecake, just as in high school I gave only a cheery "no thanks" to whatever bottom-shelf bottle was being passed around, just as I demur on any number of more sensitive and deeper-seated subjects. I keep the scope of my convictions very small. They do not trespass on anybody else's life.

II.

"Would you believe -- could you hear without laughing  . . . that for years my secret ambition . . . was to stand up fearless and honest like Joan of Arc or Galileo --

         "And suffer for the truth?"

So says one of Joanna Russ's characters in The Female Man, and my laughter is only the laughter of sympathy. After I considered that martyrdom and ensuing sainthood might not be as accessible a career path as I'd hoped at age five, I still retained St. Joan as a role model and thought perhaps I'd enter a convent. At fifteen I'd abandoned religion or the other way around, but I still tried my hardest to find a way to accept the Christianity a friend of mine was trying to lead me back into by way of Chesterton and Anselm. I walked around under low, oppressive clouds for two weeks after smacking into what seemed the inarguable blank wall of Spinoza's Ethics, which casually and coldly did away with any meaningful conception of free will given its premise of an omniscient god. (It's not really much better if you omit the deity and start from a scientific, mechanistic standpoint, but the whole thing seems less invasive, somehow.) The knowledge nauseated me. Color was drained from every interaction until it crept slowly back of its own accord, as sleep must come after a long string of insomniac nights.

I mean to say that truth was of direst importance. I tucked a letter into the library volume of Spinoza beseeching anyone who'd gotten around the problem to assist me; I passed notes on the question to a bemused, unhelpful friend in class; I wrote a term paper for my community-college philosophy class that was little more than a wail in the general direction of the heavens and my professor. I got an A, but no answer. 

I thought I'd be a philosopher, probably (and just the mention of the word brings on a phantom chorus of cackling about useless degrees). When I finally decided not to swear off college, I went to the mountains and talked and talked about truth for four years. To get in, I wrote entrance essays on riding my bike (which my high school English teacher all but called boring) and on Robert M. Pirsig's work of pop philosophy Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I took very seriously, not knowing how little respect it was accorded. My youth is a chain of embarrassments, and not in the regular way of awkward and troublemaking teenagers everywhere.

But I also got a little more urbane at college, aided by friends who knew how to deeply enjoy ephemeral things and make cutting remarks in amusing ways. I'd never been a pure crusader for truth, anyway -- too lazy, too easily distracted. Imperfectly, I became civilized.

So I'm arch, I'm diffident, by nature and cultivation both, but push most any button and watch buckets of earnestness come pouring out. Just get me on a long car ride alone or a walk in the woods or at the edge of the shore at night and you'll easily harvest enough material to embarrass me further for years to come. For instance, I'm readily seduced by thoughts of wandering away into wilderness ready to prove my self-sufficiency. I loved many of the fellow creatures who accompanied me up and down sandstone slabs and switchbacks in Kentucky, but I also ached to travel those same paths in solitude and silence.

(Part of the appeal of being alone in the wild is, I think, the near-impossibility of really doing wrong. Most of my crimes against what I feel to be my better nature pertain to other people, or to making poor use of my time. There are no other people out there, and only a limited number of ways to spend one's time, all of which seem intrinsically worthwhile, if not virtuous. A very bright and morally simple reality presses in from all sides, leaving little room for error.)

A wary thrill rises in my chest when I meet a fellow natural pilgrim. My friend Kari once noted that she tended to date "Levins" -- after the Tolstoy stand-in in Anna Karenina, the spiritual seeker, agriculturalist, and railer against falseness. I seek them out too, on the page and as acquaintances; I wrote my senior thesis on Dostoevsky's Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Myshkin, two exemplars of tormented earnestness. But I also keep my distance from them a little, aware of how easy it is to be written off as a kook, to make oneself completely unlikeable in the rigidity of one's chosen path.

It's an odd mix: in many ways my character is built for strong belief. There just isn't much content with which I can, in good faith, fill those channels; it's a dry, impoverished truth I've ended up with after a youth spent trying and failing to make various doctrines add up. But my thirst for those big nouns -- the good, the true -- remains, ready to embarrass me and annoy any of the more sensible souls who come into contact with it.

Borderlands: Little Village/Marshall Square

I have always tended, somehow, to live on the edges of neighborhoods, so that even when I have technically lived in a neighborhood acknowledged to be "good" or "hip," people are still always asking, "Oh, is that still a part of that neighborhood?" when I name my intersection. There was the one barely in Lakeview, or was it Ravenswood, more or less neglected by the maps; the one uncomfortably far west in Logan Square (though the bars that are deliberately divey rather than unreflectively divey and the little record shops have crowded nearly to that line of longitude by now; so it always seems to go, "progress" nipping at my heels as the moving truck arrives); the one practically falling off the riverbank of Lincoln Square and splashing into Albany Park. And now this one, a thoroughly settled-feeling patch of greenery and architectural flourish allowed by luxury rather than dictated by the minimal level of civilization belonging to its decade. But still just one city block out of Rogers Park. By one measure it is within Edgewater Glen. I use this measure, because I like the name.

Is it a money thing? Are buildings on the boundary lines cheaper, no matter what boundary it is? I am extremely cheap. The cheapest apartment I ever lived in also took me the furthest afield from the white, coffeehouse-inhabited nucleus of Chicago where nearly everyone I know in this city lives. It was $500 a month for a building that was essentially my own -- actually just the upper floor of a garage, connected to the main building by a covered staircase. (The lady at the phone company trying to connect my line was distressed when I gave "Garage" as my apartment number; I think we settled on #2RG or something equally unwieldy as a compromise.) But it was satisfying to look at the little chunk of brick with bars across the windows from across the parklet behind it and know that I inhabited all that space myself.

You could get onto the roof, but not from my apartment -- you had to go through the window of the man who lived on the main building's second floor, who invited me up one early summer day to drink beer and listen to Loretta Lynn. He was in his 40s or early 50s, lived with a roommate with whom he shared shouting fights the other neighbors had complained about and speculated (incorrectly, I tentatively guess) to be lovers' quarrels, and had decorated the apartment in psychedelic style. A two-bedroom, it could have been mine; I was offered it by my landlord, but, at $600, I felt it more responsible to decline. 

In retrospect my brief acquaintance with this man -- possibly named Michael? -- likely had a foundation of essential sketchiness, but I have always been embarrassingly willing to assume that people's intentions are none other than those which they communicate to me. In this case, a friendly welcome to the neighborhood. Even if he did a) claim to have been Soundgarden's original manager, b) talk excessively about his young and hot Korean girlfriend who would soon be flying in from California, c) invite me to go dancing that evening with some friends of his in Millennium Park, and d) ask me to help slather tanning lotion across his pink, substantial back.

Well, okay, yes. I gingerly applied the tanning lotion. I weighed the dancing offer seriously before declining. Some surprising corners of our musical tastes overlapped; he lent me some CDs. Would I do the same today? Well, probably.

He'd lived "all over the city," Michael said, and this was "the Wild West." I'm not at all sure how long he'd lived in the area; my memory is of asking and receiving a vague non-response. He took pleasure in the Outlaws headquarters on the corner, and enlightened me with the anecdotes that had made its bomb-proof door and razor-wire-topped fence necessary. (Whenever I walked by I had a vision of the scene from Pee Wee Herman, domino-ing the whole line of motorcycles down.) He prepared me for the head-poundingly loud weekly Mexican music festival held in some large tent whose location I could never entirely pin down. I still don't know which road it stood or stands on. Its swooping top shimmered mirage-like from my back windows, planted somewhere in the wastelands between lumberyards and demolished lots and the Cook County Jail, whose white, alien, razor-wired forms I could also see. The cops were bribed to allow this festival to operate as loudly as it did, Michael told me, in the way that older men especially are pleased to demonstrate their knowledge of the secret, corrupt workings of things.

I was mainly glad to have met a neighbor. Later some college kids moved in, the earnest, vaguely Christian kind who had vacated my own apartment and helped my family (my mother shell-shocked by my chosen surroundings) lug my couple armloads of furniture up the stairs, and I met them too. But I was much too shy to unspool my tentative Spanish to most of the people on the block; I'd just smile at the kids playing streetwide games of hide and seek and work my way up to exchanging a sentence or two with the adults.

(The English-speaking Lawndale Gardens project was across the street, but that block seemed mostly self-contained, and I'm not sure I ever really met anyone who lived there. Maybe a couple of kids, whose soccer balls I'd lob back over the fence when they dropped in from the park.)

I biked down my old block of 25th Street again on Saturday for the first time in a couple of years and instantly felt again as I typically did in that neighborhood when it was sunny and I was walking around on the boulevards. (California and Marshall, namely; the immediate vicinity was called Marshall Square, another corner of Chicago almost nobody at all has ever heard of. Though it turns out it's where Stuart Dybek grew up, and there are churches and alleys I know from both his pages and my wanderings.) I felt light. Hazily happy, with no particularly strong sense of self to attach the feeling to. Just a kind of nectar in the air.

The sunshine seems more expansive down there, in the same way the sky is bigger in the West. It's enhanced by how I always get there from the North Side: down Damen through the two or three blocks of pitchy tunnels that run under the freight lines just north of 17th Street and finally reward you with the pastel murals of Pilsen and the tinkling bells of paletas and elotes carts.This is the eastern edge of Little Village, depleted by the County's needs and, one supposes, by some mid-20th-century act of slum clearance soon after it stopped being an ethnically Bohemian neighborhood. Half-blocks of fenced-in grass, littered with rubble, are patched here and there among two-flats. (A couple more vast, gloomy warehouses have been pulled down since I lived there.) But there's still a strong enough web of community to keep it feeling like a neighborhood.

It makes me some kind of hypocrite, I suppose, but I feel weirdly oppressed when I am in a crowd of other young white liberals, young white city-dwellers in general. The Damen bus as it nears North Avenue, for instance. Their opinions seem a cartoon copy of my own, their slightly bad taste a corruption of my guiding aesthetic. I become a claustrophobic grouch, sniping at snippets of overheard conversation. So much privilege, real or imagined, makes me itchy. 

It does not feel natural for a neighborhood to be organized that way. Over and over, I sink myself into the dense city and immediately start swinging my arms to make enough space. The borderlands where I've wound up -- they do have that.

Big Things

Something in me says yes when, for instance, a train shakes past at close range and high speed. Likewise in the presence of heavy machinery: earth-movers, steamrollers, cranes. One nice thing about the sterile neighborhood of my office building is that something new is always going up, staking out another piece of the artificial land. For a few days last week, every time I tried to ride to work the bascule bridge at Columbus was being raised or lowered -- perhaps some kind of spring maintenance. I couldn't cross and, already being later than I'd hoped, stood one day as the traffic light cycled dumbly and the horizon shifted in an unexpected direction. The monolith of road towered toward me and assumed its place in the skyline. I have seen this only a few times. I was wider awake, afterward.

One night last week too I found, riding up Damen, that construction blocked my way. (Every time I ignore the detour signs until it is too late; usually a bike can pass where a car cannot, but not always.) Made to walk anyhow, I poked around the site a while, patted the bulldozer's metal-plated feet. The best thing about this, though, was the pit: taking up half the road, square and perhaps twenty feet deep? This number is almost certainly a little too high, but as an emotional distance it is about right. The rain that was falling joined a thick stream of water at the bottom which I perceived as only an occasional minnow-flash of light and a burbling sound. It may have been just the accumulation of the evening's downpour, but it sounded live and as if it were going somewhere.

(At the park by the river by my childhood home, the informational plaque headed THE BUBBLING UNDERGROUND STREAM never failed to produce a vernal thrill in me -- still does, just knowing it is there.)

In the presence of great heights or depths or moving powers I feel thoroughly scrubbed, as if by strong wind or Beethoven. On workdays I've been walking to a new grocery store to get my lunch, and one day taking a different route came across a rather shocking, barely-protected drop -- just the absence of a building that would have had to travel several stories up to reach street level.

Now: a daily transcript of the chatter of my inner radio might seem at first to reveal a weird abundance of death-related programming. But that's a facile reading. For example, take this drop, this slice of space as perfect and luscious as a piece of cake in a display case. A surge of desire came up in me to toss myself lightly over the rail. This was in one sense a motion toward death, but only inasmuch as death is a motion toward freedom. (It isn't actually, of course, but the false equivalence tugs mutely at the soul, grounded in or bolstered by our loveliest hymns.) One wants to have the experience of falling through the air, or being gripped by the waves that claw their way across the Lake Shore Path, or being met full-force by a large truck -- to come right up against the palm of God. But it is impossible to desire, if not straight out impossible, to have had such an experience. Any thought of after is a total corruption of the thing. So the mind stops at the logic-blind impulse that says: there, in darkness, in absence, you could do anything. It will not be tutored by the lesson of Kant's dove no matter how often reason sends it flapping through the brain.

Friction, though: that's what we have to work with. That is where we spend our days -- at the level of force produced by texture, not by some clean thrust of will or gravity. The fine-grained surfaces of the possible are not the impediment to the real motion of our lives; rather, they give it almost its entire character. Most of its itchiness, most of its prickliness, most of its velvet. 

Further Meditations on a Theme

(A note before I begin: look, I really am essentially okay, in case anyone's worried. I know I keep talking about this; it probably won't be forever. Minds interest me, and mine's the one closest at hand for study. That's most of what's going on here.)

1. Here's another thing mental illness has helped to do to me or for me: it's made me an essential skeptic. I've had to clear my inner closets of things like religion, political ardor, mysticism, and even to some extent self-confidence so that madness can't find them there and turn them toward ill use.

2. I know that setting all the clocks in my house a few minutes ahead would help me get places on time and thus improve my life in measurable ways. But this seems less valuable to me than actually knowing what time it is.

3. I'd forgotten about this other mode of depressive psychosis: decoupled from anxiety, there's a flattening of affect toward the excessive meanings that the world continues to produce regardless. Then this thing turns self-mocking and mean, but it has an okay sense of black humor. As the butt of an insult comic's jokes in the audience might still laugh.

4. Part of how it works is: there's a quasi-physical sense that my "I" is too small for my purposes. I feel it clamping down over me like a clamshell or the underside of a set of knuckles. (It's come to me in milder form on the edge of sleep for some weeks, too, as was often the case in childhood. It is of course ontologically intolerable that our selves should disappear for so long every night. The mystery is that we can think of anything but death.) With this constriction arrives the certainty that a thing so small could easily be guided by some other force that I almost have access to. (In some corner of this hall of mirrors flashes the fact that in one obvious sense this hidden force is the illness itself, not that there's much to be done with that notion. Look it in the eye and move on.) A feeling of insufficient personal reality descends, although it's not clear whether I'm more or less real than the things around me. The cogito gets you just a couple steps from nowhere; after that, you're on your own.

Sensory input doesn't arrive with its usual force. It's coming in from a long way off. I find myself gripping iron railings, running the back of my hand along brick walls, trying to tie tighter knots between me and the world.

5. Historically, voices haven't been the main hallucinations I've experienced, but I can so easily see how they're produced. In such a state, thoughts become words -- even become couplets of medium-poor poetry -- instantaneously, and don't seem to stem from my own powers. The world's speaking to me in sentences rather than in sense data. I don't have to go to the trouble of translating and assembling them myself. It's like the subconscious has just disappeared. Context, subtext: they're all just text scrolling across the wall at once.

6. Hate, like heat, collects in things. Every object wears its most ghoulish mask. There's a dead possum on the sidewalk. But actually a plastic bag. But, upon closer inspection, perhaps a bloated pigeon? (A plastic bag, of course.) Church architecture an assemblage of mausoleums. Everyone on the street is lurching in the throes of some contagious illness. But it affects me almost abstractly. My body goes through the motions of disgust: the shudder, the crossing of streets. Something else is in charge of that, though; I can hear it happening somewhere in the neighborhood, but not where I live. So the mind laughs flatly at itself, for allowing the body to be moved along such senseless routes.

Psychiatry calls this patient insight and it's indisputably better than the alternative. But it makes it hard to maintain much, ah, self-esteem.

7. In depression is the counterargument to one of the values I'd most like to transform into belief. Ipsa scientia non potestas est. Instead of acting on the cold knowledge, the iterative disillusionment, that it's constantly synthesizing, depressed consciousness loops and loops through a bureaucracy of inner courts. They are endlessly in session and endlessly handing down convictions.

I've sometimes harbored a little abstract envy toward other, more florid species of psychotics -- the ones with delusions of grandeur, the ones being called upon to save the world. You could maybe get a few things done in such a state.

8. It's good and terrible that mental illness is incommunicable. Cannot be communicated. Lately it seems more interesting to write anyway than not to.