January 30, 2001.  Tuesday
 

    Another quiet evening at home tonight.  trying to tidy up the place. Work is becoming increasingly demanding.  But there's probably nothing I'd rather be doing, so let's not start complaining.  I'm going to try to write exactly what I'm thinking now.
    Can't do it.
 
 

    Anyway, I spent a lot of the day at work researching the Beach Boys. And now I've got the song God Only Knows in my head.

    Anyway, cleaning my room led me to a number of artifacts.  I'm really a historian at heart. I'm always archiving and trying to date things. I always have to know what happened when and in what order.  Hence, the web journal.  The problem is I always get too notalgic, which lately is equating itself with sadness.  And a funny thing happens at times like this.  Good memories just make you sort of sad, and bad memories are for some reason remembered with an almost fondness.  This thought didn't originate with me, by the way.  Someone else noticed it.  But I suppose a lot of people tend to do that.
 

    Anyway, it's sort of scary how much of a calming distraction cutting your toe nails can be.

    I can't really think of anything to write. But one thing I've always been able to do reasonably well is to talk about things when there's nothing to talk about.  So let's see... I'm not sure where I am mentally right now.  In any interpretation.  I'm definitely in a state of flux, and I can't seem to settle myself into contentment.  Then again, I can't say i've really been what you would call blissfully content in a long time.  Of course, that's probably only happened a few times in my life.  How many time can most people say that they were really, truly happy with every single thing in their life at a given moment.  Off the top of my head, I can think of about two post-pubescent examples.  One was in early 1996, standing in the rain in the quad at Washington and Lee.  The other was probably late winter 2000.  The moment in '96 was the happiest I'd been my whole life till that point.  The few days last winter was  probably the most content I've ever been.  "Content" is a really good thing. It's a word that sort of sounds understated, but it's really not.  Anyway, those two times stand out to me the most.   Right now, anyway.  I feel like I'm shortchanging my friends and all the time we've spent together. But it ain't like that.  It's just that these two times stick out the most right now.   Oh yeah, one other time, was in 1998, right after an Underpants Cowboy show.  James and I walked around campus, and all these people we ran into would yell "Underpants!"  we felt like big rockstars.  that was a load of fun.  Fun times.  the irony of course is that everyone involved in those moments is significantly less a part of my life now.  Which leads me back to the good memories making me sad.  And now I gotta take that to bed with me.  Rats.

    So let's try to think of something nice first. The little James memory reminds me of the time he and Matt and I were at this party around the same time, out in the country in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere and it was freezing rain out, and we ended up in these hot tubs outside and everybody was steaming and all these girls took their shirts off.  That sure is a nice, benign memory that will probably never, ever make me sad.

    Something that sort of amuses me:  Jed has been spending an awful lot of time on Jed.com.  It's a place where the Jed's of the world can get together and meet other Jed's, and what being a Jed means to them.  He sits at my computer and reads out loud other Jed's descriptions of themselves and giggles to himself.  It's alternately bizarre and scary and hilarious.
    Also, jen read me an email she got today that she thought was particularly wonderful.  And it was indeed really nice. Part of a Walt Whitman poem.  We're very happy that Jen is so happy.  I see blissful contentedness in her near future.  That should be nice.

    I imagine this must have been maddeningly vague. Sorry.  If you want to complain, or learn more, you can always email me. I like email.
 

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