The Illustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe

Am I feeling sad? Is that why I suddenly find the capability and urge to write in this journal again? Well, of course I’m always a little sad and bitter: this life I lead is my life after all. I’ve often thought that happiness is the murderer of creativity and that only when one is sad or distressed or in some way darkly passionate that the work flows easily. Sometimes abruptly and sometimes careless but it moves. It is moving for me now and in the foreseeable future but what have I to be sad about?

Only mundane things. Money. Work. Weight.

Everything else is as great as I could ask: I live in a wonderful two-story house, even if only temporarily; I have a beautiful and wonderful wife; and she has within her our daughter. Perhaps it’s my mother, slipping into grayness, becoming in her decrepitude someone capable of feats I never would have had imagined, but, as selfish as it may be, I am glad it is my sister and not I strapped with the care of those feats and the refuse that they have created. It is more than I could bear, I know it.

Is it my father’s house, the house in which I was raised, now ruined by four feet of sea water urged with tropical anger over the shore and miles inland by Hurricane Ike? The sofas on which, as a child, I had laid sick floated to the other side of the room and now pregnant with deadly mold. The fridge that still had a bottle of wine opened with my father that my mother was too sentimental to throw away, leaning open, contents out and rotting, nine, ten, eleven chicken dinners gone to colorful and furry growths. Dine on that which my mother refused, you fancy colonies of disgust. Is it the fact that my sister, climbing over the detritus in the dark, unable to find the plaque of my father’s honorable discharge from the Air Force somehow gone from the wall?

The landscape of my childhood completely obliterated by hurricanes over the years. First the neighborhood shaved of most of its trees and now the house destroyed. I will probably never step foot again in the house I had lived in for nearly twenty years. I haven’t spoken on the phone to my mother since the hurricanes, since she evacuated and has been living with my sister, since the stress of it all had disintegrated her detoriation even further: trying to wander out into the storm, into the night, forgetting that the old house existed at all.

Perhaps it’s the scare from last week, of arrhythmia.

I don’t know but there’s something that is tugging at me and, as negative as it may seem, I am grateful for it because it puts my pen to paper again and only when I am writing do I feel truly myself, feel truly alive. And when I come here to distract myself with games or with whatever, I find myself instead writing into this journal, pouring out whatever there is at that moment to pour, aware as ever that no one is really reading and no one is really listening. Is that the key ingredient to this obscure honesty? Even if there are many people reading, I still pretend that this goes out to no one, or maybe to just a patient and tolerant few. I think perhaps that I’m afraid of a sea of monitor-lit faces.