Why is the glass either half full or half empty? Why do we have to choose which? Why can’t it be either full, making us deleriously happy, or empty letting us know where we stand

5 PM. At Pippin’s. A gregarious crowd. Life goes on.

I keep everything on my iPhone now except for my calendar/agenda. I’ve never gotten the knack of keeping an agenda on the computer.

I bought this year’s agenda at Macy’s one Saturday afternoon with V. It’s pocket sized with black leather cover, and has elegant heavy stock paper.

Sometimes I open it up as if it were a diary whose code triggers my fondest memories from this year. It would not be the same if all that were on the iPhone.

I did not stand in line to get the new G3 iPhone. My current one serves my purposes adequately. I have barely scratched the surface of its capabilities.

The current wallpaper for my iPhone is a picture of me and V. It was taken the night we dressed up to go to a party. I have my arm around her. She places a hand upon my chest. We rest our heads together. And we are smiling.

I am wearing a faded azure baseball style cap, yet not exactly so with its short broad bill and shallow bowl nestled about my skull. My long hair tied in a ponytail streams out of it. I bought it at the Wal*Mart in Kauai during a week that began with high expectations and ended in bitter disappointment.

I recall those mornings in Kauai when I woke long before her. I sat out on the balcony and watched the Morning Star fade into the dawn over the ocean. Then I wrote poetry in a notebook and drank coffee until she woke. We walked down to the ocean and went snorkeling for a spell. When we got back, we ate breakfast, then jumped in the car and drove into the day’s adventure. Some weeks of our lives sear our memories until we die.

People might say it is an ugly cap made even uglier by me wearing it. Yet I feel different in my ugliness when I wear this cap–a survivor maybe. The one thing about being old is that everyone looks prettier including myself.

Life goes on. Things tend to even out for me and this cap.

My current read is Vollmann’s Europe Central. The narration slides between the doings in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. The exquisite evocation of suffering and slaughter on a massive scale fits well with the emotional collapse I feel now. Not that I compare the two, for mine is nothing compared to what others have suffered.

I am a firm believer that one should not run from melancholy, for melancholy is a natural part of our lives and serves its purpose in enriching our emotional lives as well as our intellectual lives. Without overcast we would never appreciate a cloudless dawn with the sunlight shimmering on the water.

My life this year seems as if I played a lost chess game against a vastly superior opponent. I have blundered badly on top of it. Yet what would life be if we did not at least attempt a few heroic struggles in games that only our wildest dreams permit us to see victory? The one thing I have learned this year is that it is better to attempt snatching what one truly and deeply wants than sit on the sideline and play for nothing, except a shallow and easy victory. I learned more about love in a few months than I have during the whole course of my life.

So, I read Europe Central fascinated, mesmerized, and appalled by people and events and ideas from those times. I read. The words inscribe themselves somewhere inside my soul if only to be scrubbed away by time.

V bought a new condo this week. There is only one small problem with it. The previous owner painted over the exposed concrete walls, a really hideous thing to do. So, we began stripping the paint tonight. Things started rather slowly, we’ll have to apply a lot more elbow grease than we expected, but the walls will turn out alright.

Things tend to even out after all.

I am studying the chess games of Bobby Fischer. It is like when I go alone to the Chicago Art Museum on Michigan Avenue. I don’t have a clue about art, yet I love it all the same and stand in awe of it.

There is something else about going to an art museum alone that I like. I see women with lonely haunted eyes wandering about by themselves. I have imagined they were as lonely as I was or had brokenhearts that seemed beyond repair. I have imagined being bold enough to ask them if they would like to get a cup of coffee with me in the museum cafeteria. We would have compared notes on love and life and art. I would have learned something from them.

The chessboard beside my computer is set to a position half way through one of Bobby’s games. A ghost moves the pieces.

Yesterday, I ate a slice (yes, slice!) of pizza for breakfast, a slice (there’s that word again) of pizza for lunch, a cheeseburger and cheese fries for dinner. The good part was that I ate a leftover chocolate cream puff before going to bed. It squelched any dreams I might of had last night–good or bad.

I have gotten so used to not dreaming when I sleep that I hate them when I have them on the rare occasion. The bad ones scare the shit out of me. The good ones are always about what could never be, which is even worse.

I’m writing again. I had stopped for a short time, but now the compulsion is back. I’ve been reading avidly again too. The writing begins again: a notebook, scraps of paper, words inscribed inside the computer, and most of all words in my head that appear as ghosts and fade away.

Certain days, I feel as if I have a soul independently of this blob of flesh. Strange flesh: flesh that remembers, plans, creates, and feels pangs of all sorts–pangs that are the feeling of what happens. Life does indeed go on, yet not for long, for after all I am merely this blob of flesh that things happen to and that feels what happens in ways not always expected even if dreamed vividly.

I remember last night’s nightmares for some reason today. My fatigue does not fog them.