CATHARSIS NOW

Guess what? I am back to hating my writing. The theme of this weekend has been: my poetry is laughable and I don't have the time to make it good enough to get into a program that'll help me write better and I'm going to be stuck in my current job forever, sulking through the rest of my life bent beneath the weight of my unspeakable disappointment, only to be crushed to death at the age of 47 by a rampaging piano.

I have decided that I am in desperate need of catharsis.

As a result, I spent yesterday morning in the Joaquin Miller Park doing about 5 billion ab exercises. Now I can barely sit, stand, eat, laugh or lift my water bottle to my mouth to wash down another round of aspirin and drive away the psychic, oh wait, I mean physical, pain. In the afternoon, I tore myself away from my laptop and joined Chris on the couch to watch Portugal vs. Iran in the World Cup. I decided that I was Iran and the world was Portugal; Portugal won. Finally, I allowed Chris to coax me into letting him take me for dinner, and we ended up at a little Italian bistro called Fellini's. As in Federico. As in the name of yet another person whose artistic capabilities hang so mockingly out of my grasp. Gorging myself on garlic, I tried to focus on how exciting it will be spending the next 2 months working with Kim Addonizio, only to visualize her rifling through my recent poems as they turn from crisp sheets of white paper into melting pool of slithering and viscous pulp.

Catharsis isn't working.

And so, after a night of sleep in which I dreamt I was a yellow plate, I woke at 7 am and decided to spend an hour exploring my anxieties visually by revisiting my failure to learn Illustrator. The fruit of my labor is pasted above. I call it, "Self-portrait, but crappy." The blue words around my face are, clockwise from the top, "Meow, porridge, Loony, TV's Webster, crazy." I'm not going to transcribe the typed text because, well, that would ruin the mystery.