Ed: Yes, you read right. Another posting from the dim dark ages. Twelve years ago. Speaking of J, a focus of fascination i never resolved.
10:30PM. 12-5-97. Sister in Cambodia.
I'll tell you what it took. It wasn't a cheap cassette player with Patti Smith singing over the black and silver speaker. No. Nor was it 50+ hours free of the dance, because I'd done that plenty lately. So often in fact it was having definite results in the area of my sanity. This was not what did it, but they contributed, the way winds in Tokyo are related to a butterfly flapping its wings outside my bedroom.
What did it was her most outgoing letter yet. Strange because this is exactly what I'd been wanting, a diversion from her ordinary "Went to this movie" type of letter. I'd been asking her to write this kind of letter, I was practically foolish everytime I saw a letter of hers on the table or on my desk. A silly grin would wrap ear to ear, teeth tombstoning across my face, giving off all the wrong signals.
So it is queer to me that I'd been waiting for such a letter for such a long time, and it was such a letter that freed me from my prison (for it's my theory that we all construct a prison for ourselves during life when we try to appease the rest of the world.) Certainly I was in prison at that stage, hiding all, especially my emotions. How could I express normal emotions when I had to deny my very pillar of existence, H. Nothing I'm ashamed of, I work harder with it, I pause with it, without it life is boredom, suicide and petty sweaty wanks.
So her letter sat on my parents dinner table, an unrecognised key when I first saw it. A slow acting key, like some fictionalised virus that slowly destroys walls of my own construction while I, the computer, walked around, ate...
And there it stops. Frustrating eh? Well, maybe you're beginning to get the picture. The writer is only his writings after all, and if they frustrate a little, then perhaps the writer frustrates a lot..