2/5/22 – 2:50 p.m.
Everything is new. My skin feels different. I’m crawling toward something. The sun in the wintertime feels so impotent. It was warmer the other day, a shock to my system, the concrete I walked on was softer. I wonder so much about God, the way he exists in negation. Thinking about God is futile. Morality has become relative; it’s been that way for a while. God is not dead; he’s sleeping.
Clanging steel on my street, construction. My skin is a costume. It’s cold outside. Since my father died, I’ve become a different person. Since the pandemic started, I’ve lost all sense of normalcy. Too much information every day. I’m drowning in data from so many sources. I am working, which is good. It distracts me.
Alan Watts says the future and past are a myth. He was insane. But so am I. A few years ago, I lost faith in humanity. But I still believe there’s some spirit of goodness that keeps everything from falling apart. It lies at the center, both inside and outside of us. I was thinking about human extinction today. It is an impossible topic to think of, much like God. So, I don’t go outside much anymore.
The world feels plastic to me, not real. No, I’m not crazy. It’s a consequence of social distancing. There was a time that things made sense. But everything is non-sequitur now. I hold onto hope about the spirit of goodness keeping everything together. I hope it’s true.
Author’s Note: This is a new series I’m starting that I hope to keep up with. It will simply be a series of random thoughts trying to form into prose poetry. A kind of journal and diary about things I’ve been thinking lately and stuff I’ve been reading. As I’ve written before, writing this kind of thing out is very therapeutic for me. Many of the thoughts are strange and may not make the most sense. But it’s stuff I think about sometimes and not exactly the best casual conversation topics.
I’m calling it “New World” because for me, my life has changed so much since around 2018. My father died, I began a new relationship with my dear, Rachel, and then shortly after that, the pandemic started. I think about all these changes a lot, and I’m never quite sure how to process it all. Some of the changes have been positive, some neutral, and others maybe not so positive. Either way, it feels like my life, my worldview, and the world itself is so much different than pre-2018. So, I’m writing these entries to process everything and reckon with what I see is a brand-new world.
It feels a little weird to share journal entries like this, but I wanted to add some artistic flair and do it as a kind of experiment. I read a great poetry book a few years ago that did something similar and I’m trying to imitate that format. Anyways, feel free to comment and let me know what you think. This is all my version of so-called shadow work that’s become so popular lately. Delving into the parts of myself I don’t like to look at too deeply in order to come out better on the other side.
I think this is a wonderful idea.
Thank you, Jennifer! This is partly inspired by your Jam Jars that I really enjoy. I think it’s so cool to try to distill everything into this type of format.
That’s really cool. I’m thinking of keeping them strictly personal & doing something else with the little fictional vignettes I write from now on. I try to practice more with prose, but poetry always grabs me first.