the last week was 1000 days long and full of threats of death besides (even more than usual). I am spent, sick and my brainwalls have somewhat crumbled - my tenure review is due tomorrow, hours of work on it left to do, but all I can manage is to lie here and listen to the bottoms of my feet hurt, making a list of people I'm sure I love based on how much pain they've caused me or that I'd allow them to cause me, the more love the more encompassing the pain like a math equation even a retard could compute. I wonder: is there something fundamentally wrong with this math? is it true that 1 = -1 or is that debatable? maybe some people would imagine a list on which the people they loved were counted by how much pleasure they provide (?), like 1 = 1 typa deal instead. maybe I should be lying here noting the difference btw pain and love, not its absolute similarity as a sensation (?). huh. in that case, though, it'd be a really short list, as the people I love are logged on the "I'd bail you outa jail with my last dollar" list, about as pleasurable to me much of the time as an absessing tooth (no offense)

Because affliction and truth need the same kind of attention before they can be heard, the spirit of justice and the spirit of truth are one. The spirit of justice and truth is nothing else but a certain kind of attention, which is pure love.--Simone Weil

Resisting pain only increases its intensity. The three types of pain quickly follow one another in life, they pervade life. First you feel fundamental pain [the general pain of dissatisfaction, separation, loneliness], and then the pain of alternation, from pain to its absence and back again; and then the pain of pain, the pain of all those life situations you do not want.--Chogyam Trunpa, "The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation"

Rosie Thomas: The One I Love (R.E.M.)

bonus: R.E.M.: Wall of Death (Richard Thompson)