Two Points

One: the room congregationally shared with collegiate cognitive landmines. Professors. Six or seven, mingled in with our sitting lackadaisical class, for the most part observing, for one doctor's part analytically crucifying, a potential, a candidate to fill the shoes of one of the four of our department's retiring souls, who spoke with a disappointing southern lisp that I knew would be the straw that broke the camel's back of her acceptance. How tall and terrifying a feeling, and how revelatory, to share the ground with these intelligentsia, these profound looking men and women who seem to have forgotten, some in their selfless childish fascination with the world, others in the vice that comes with proportionate knowledge, that they too are flesh and blood, potential suicides, potential saints. I held myself and observed, and travailed the demonic desires that shuffled my bones: at intervals to run away, at others to laugh, at others to sleep, at others to be.

Two: verging on a solitary warm midnight at the apex of a four hour reading marathon, composed of the lofty, unattainable gorgeousness of Nabokov in the form of his immortal Lolita, and the hard-knit, still poetic, nearing-insanity quips of William Burroughs regarding the seventeen million cats he's owned in his lifetime. Suddenly, the muse resurrects, reverberates; my brain is tickled with that especial stimulation that can only be sustained through creativity. The eternal walk to the computer. The exorcising and expunging of a legion of demons that had accumulated for the last two months in my just previously stale-stuffed soul. Word after word after word. The warmth that grazed my heart. The smile I felt coming, that I supressed, hurriedly grabbing my near-dead pipe, to an outdoor wonderland tranfixed under the moonless sky. The smile that I set free, cascading my body with pinpricks of angelic joy. The smoke specters that emanated from my mouth. The festive relaxation of gods.