I like leaving my window open, letting cool air blow in through it while i run my heater at my feet. I lay in bed between them and feel how the two fronts meet and clash and there's that conflict. It is nice to know that something is moving, something is alive in this room, even if it isn't me.

Everytime the phone rings and is answered elsewhere, when a conversation begins a few times a night, I am reminded how much I am not talking to anyone. A few times a week my father will ask me "and what can I do for you?" It's one of those phrases they taught him in AA, and there's nothing wrong with it, maybe a normal person would respond to it. His intentions are admirable. I say "nothing, thanks" - that's always been my answer to questions of that caliber. Despite my mom's openess to talk about her problems, I wouldn't bring up one if my life depended on it. What should I tell people? "Well, I pretty much feel like I am dying." God, that sounds dramatic and if I heard myself say it, objectively, I'd be disgusted. Still, would you like to know the truth of it? Ask me how I am doing. I pretty much feel like I may be dying. Qualitatively, doing anything is as good as anything else as long as it distracts me from a background loop of nothing. Playing drums loudly, cymbals ringing my ears and making me deaf to myself, works pretty well. Being outside during the day sometimes draws away my attention. Records, played loudly enough while I lay on the carpet under the speakers, don't really help in the area of distraction but make the thoughts go down smoother. Drinking in public helps a lot. If it is destroying some synapses in my brain, I think, good. Maybe it will turn me into a different person.

You are wrong if you think I don't want to know about your life. You are wrong if you think I wouldn't like to say something about mine. The closest I come to telling anyone a real emotion I have is when katie and I do our dance where we point our fingers at our heads like guns and hop around the room with smiles on our face. Life has no meaning to me. Sometimes I can jump around and laugh in the face of it anyway. Sometimes I can have a good time. But it doesn't detract from the reality of the situation.

In this dream I had, I was at a large party at night. I was outside and bugs were humming while music filtered out from inside; we were on a wooden deck that extended into walkways going all kinds of directions. I was having a conversation with someone when another stranger, not part of the conversation, interjected a sentence about whatever it was we had been talking about. Except it was some kind of fact that related to my life, a response I would have made, something sort of personal. It was as if we had been talking about the dreaded songwriting and he'd said something about my thoughts behind a song from 4 years ago that no one knows or cares about. Somehow I find out from this new person that he had known me from afar for a long time. He had listened to my music and read my words for a long time or something horrific like that, and now he was just shyly stepping up to say hi for the first time. Saying it was flattering isn't really true, it was more like shocking because my life is pretty low profile. He was tall, scruffy headed, big, and shy. Him and I and my other friend agreed to meet later that night for coffee.

The coffee shop was a late night diner that looked like a gas station from the road. It was on a street that does exist here in Cleveland, but not in that context. The street in my dream was shady and green and curvy. In real life it's lined with parking lots and dirt. Inside the tiny diner were a lot of my real life friends hollering and ordering waffles. I'd never been there before so it was funny that they all knew about it. We settled in the booth across from each other and it was extremely awkward but still exciting that there was this person in front of me that I knew nothing about but that actually had an interest in talking to me regardless. It was smoky. The lights were yellow.

When I woke up I was really surprised. It was late. I had to hurry and not think and get out of the house into my car. A tape was playing in it with a song by Tuesday that says "Can't get over this sickness, nothing to do isn't nothing to do when I'm with you." It's something cheesy an old boyfriend used to say to me. On the car in front of me scratched into the collected dirt was "Don't cry". I couldn't tell if I was still dreaming. In dreams I let my emotions well up and become stronger and fuller than in real life. In dreams my emotions become three dimensional.

The rest of my day was boring.