Kerouac, joy, sadness, then joy again

What a strange, long, complex, filled up day. It started to early in an Ambien haze that still couldn't get me to sleep, me wandering around, shapes-shifting, on too few hours of sleep my necessary fuel, with all these impossible tasks banging at the door needing to be finished, a scholarly article and another abstract for another paper that I only dreamed up four days ago, due now, and all my straining at the bit, and my crap ass body that has just jumped ship on me lately, dragging around these leaden bones, and somehow, in a strange turn of events that never usually happens, I finished everything that needed finishing.

Picked up Joseph since D had class all night, already exhausted, but Joseph and me still had this lovely little evening together, eating pita chips and this to-die-for hummas, then eating broccoli and hummas till the whole little container was used up, used broccoli to wipe up the last little bits, me and him on the couch, munching down, watching Mythbusters. But ramping up the discipline too b/c he's been a little butt lately, and drinking a beer while he wailed his head off in time-out, then snuggling close again and doing I Spy before bed.

Then reading poor sad Jack Kerouac, bearing down on me hard he's so sad, watching him spiral down in Big Sur, but he's such a damn good writer, he takes you down with him. But that's not the place I want to be. I had to stop reading, even though it's due to be read by class tomorrow. Everything to him is frightening and terrors, sinister hills and mad drinking binges making his nightmarish images all worse. And then so much death, and this class has gotten kind of all conflated in my mind and emotions with this girl who killed herself midway through the semester. Sort of I feel like it's not even my right, my place, to talk about her. I didn't know her, had only spoken to her directly a few times. A bunch of other people in the class have been in the poetry program with her for three years. And when dear old Jack sees death everywhere, in his favorite cat, an otter on the beach, a mouse because he left the lid off the rat poison--I just... and I don't have a place to talk--I've had some hard stuff, but never the death of anybody close to me, I don't know what that means, I feel sacriligious like an outsider in a class full of grievers, but then I think about her a lot too. Alive, then not. It's something I can't wrap my head around.

Sad Jack, I can't bear you right now. I know there's a time for entering down into other people's sadnesses and the art too, but I've built my life around acknowledging grim reality while still building up a structure of meaning to raise my head up out and manage to tread water. Happiness. Positives. Comfort. John Green, a YA author I love, I came across a quote of his today, watching a videologue he'd done: the idea "that true love will triumph in the end, which may or may not be true, but if it’s a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have.”