My family thinks I have some kind of sleep disorder. Sometimes I do too. I am tired all of the time, throughout the day, I light up for a little in the morning, then dark back down again, and over and over again, the whole day long. I fall asleep sitting down. I fall asleep standing up. I fall asleep in the middle of sentences. It can be awkward. Maybe I am not sleeping properly. Or maybe the things that others take care of in sleep, I come back to all day. Maybe I have a hard time drawing the line.

I do not love Brautigan’s poetry so much as his prose, but I like the idea of a good-talking candle, a pan full of frying flowers, and a land where children love spiders, and let them sleep in their hair. My favorites are, A Baseball Game Part 7 (all of the Baudelaire adventures are pretty awesome, but this is the best), Boo, Forever, and

“A Mid-February Sky Dance”
Dance toward me, please, as
if you were a star
with light-years piled
on top of your hair,
smiling,

and I will dance toward you
as if I were darkness
with bats piled like a hat
on top of my head.

In the Watermelon Sugar, the lanterns are tigers, and glass coffins line the bottom of the river. A heartbroken girl hangs herself from an apple tree with a blue scarf, after spending too much time in the place with the forgotten works. The ones who live there drink a lot; they stumble around and slur about how the others are blind, have got it all wrong, how the tigers had it right (they ate his parents, but were nice enough), and eventually they kill themselves in a blood fest of a suicide scene, with ears and noses and faces carefully sliced off in a flurry of pride. A large old fish that in the story is a trout, but could easily have shown itself as a catfish to another (as Brautigan has explained quite clearly how Trout Fishing in America is his $35 dollar fountain pen), watches the glass coffin of the girl being built before she dies, and he looks up at the man who leaves her quietly. The man is the one who narrates the story, so she seems very cold and disconnected. But she feels very drawn to the forgotten works. She was wandering around in them when the bad thing happened, and she was all alone.

In this myth, the shimenawa, like the cross of Christianity, symbolized the mystery of the boundary between the worlds, “the existent nonexistent line” The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 213.

Through the sun door the circulation of energy is continuous. (Campbell, 42)

Maybe why I curl up in it like a cat. Maybe why I need a sunny kitchen. Thinking Pocahontas bringing in her hands to her navel then spreading them up and out in worship of the sun a la the movie m showed me by Malick, his favorite director.

do i have mental problems.

Through voluntary devotion I removed
binding ties. Therefore I had to remain true to love, and, devoted
to it voluntarily, I suffer the dismembering and thus attain bonding
with the great mother, that is, the stellar nature, liberation from
bondage to men and things.

i know; i am obsessed with the red book.

p. 320
/If your beauty grows, the dreadful worm will also creep up
you, waiting for its prey. Nothing is sacred to him except his eye,
with which he sees the most beautiful. He will never give up his
eye. He is invulnerable, but nothing protects his eye; it is delicate
and clear, adept at drinking in the eternal light. It wants you, the
bright red light of your life.

What abyss of blood-dripping history separates you from me!
I grasped your hand and looked at you. I lay my head in your lap
and felt the living warmth of your body on mine as if it were my
own body-and suddenly I felt a smooth cord around my neck,
which choked me mercilessly…

Rise up, you gracious fire of old night.
I kiss the threshold of your beginning.
My hand prepares the rug and spreads abundant red flowers before you.
Rise up my friend, you who lay sick, break through the shell.
We have prepared a meal for you.
Gifts have been prepared for you.
Dancers await you.
We have built a house for you.

from The Red Book- Incantations

Everything inside me is in utter disarray. Matters are becoming
serious, and chaos is approaching. Is this the ultimate bottom?
Is chaos also a foundation? If only there weren’t these terrible
waves. The Red Book, Jung, p. 298