2006-06-02 - 2:36 p.m.

Last night I drooled over several bits of poetry, my mind a hard, factual lump like Mr. Bounderby's, and I couldn't crawl out from under. I had wanted to write a poem refuting just one line in Great Expectations, but I abandoned that project for a piece that screams self-mockery, which I like, because I have seldomly found a better person to mock than the self. I took all the lines from all the unfinished pieces I had been laboring over for days and combined them, poked fun at myself repeatedly and ended the piece by boldly proclaiming that I couldn't write.

A long time ago, I was taking submissions for an underground newsletter I wanted to distribute. A wannabe gothic girl from my high school, who hung around me like vultures over a highway, E-mailed me a poem about "a gothic doll on a ground full of dead leaves while there's a thunderstorm and a full moon." It was a terrible piece of writing, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that this girl was now asking me for my "honest opinion." For the first time in my life, I did not give my honest opinion. I did not tell her that her writing was ridiculous and cliched, that maybe she could become a better writer if she stopped thinking about being viewed as "gothic-er" than everyone else, that I've shit better poems out on a bad day. No, I told her that the premise is fine but that she should look over it some more, maybe fix some odd ends, spend more time with the poem and try to understand what she actually wanted to say. Her reply was something to the effect of: "Fuck you! You're just a poser! You're a wannabe! You carry around philosophy books all the time so people think you are cool and smart but I bet you can't even read most of the words! We're not friends! You're mean! I hate you and I'm going to make sure everyone else does too!"

Honestly, I don't know what the point was to sharing the above story, except that it just popped into my head this afternoon and it's been following me around all day. Better to get it down and let it dissolve than to let it stagnate and mutate in this brain of mine.