date: 11/12/95
12:54 PM

Been busy the past week or two. Haven't quite relieved myself of fixating on the word SLAW, but my feelings about the word and what it represents remain healthy and anti-neurotic. I still see visions of warm, tepid slaw-strings any time i hear the word, and it seems like the kind of mysterious substance a doctor might remove from someone's insides and wordlessly dispose of. Open heart surgery moseying along until several ounces of slaw has to be forciibly removed from the patient's aorta, the slaw itself clutching to the side of the person's heart. Or maybe it would be in the stomach, taking up space and ruining the poor person's appetite by squeezing itself against the inner tummy. BURP.. November 13, 1995 1:40 PM November 15, 1995 1:42 AM Up too late. Day off tomorrow, so there's a buffer zone of sleep deprivation in which I can rest my silly head. Been reading the autobiography of jean-paul sartre. i never thought of him as having a sense of humor, but now i do. i had a terrifying looking copy of being and nothingness that maintained an obtuse distance from me for several years. it was a paperback edition, and i remember thinking that this had to be a bad translation, because the text was just impenetrable. and there was this ghastly picture of him on the back, he was all puffy and old and the picture looked like a candid shot of The Phenomenologist trying very hard to get out of a beanbag chair but having no such luck. So sartre was always this abstract, mystical, cloudy kinda guy. now i think he's very funny, and "The Words" had me laughing out loud, and it was only 50 cents at the bryn mawr used bookstore. You just gotta love these guys. I mean say whatever you want to say about them, but they really are caring people who "love you." of course it's odd that in their entire 6-page pamphlet they give no indication of who in the world they are. but i'm happy when things like this make their way to me, adn this reminds me that i should really wrap up The Reverand Dwayne and do something with it. It was another episode of slaw at the Green Kitchen Diner tonight. I didnt notice it until I was well into my food, most of the way through the cheeseburger, but then I took stock of the little plastic cup in which sulked a little slip of warm, fleshy slaw. There were little carrot-bits and sundry specks throughout the mixture, and somewhere between stirring it around in its cup and hopelessly flirting with a woman at another table, it all started to seem stupidly absurd, this whole ceremony of waiters and waitresses dressing up in uniforms and happily serving cheeseburgers, french fries, damp lettuce and spit-warm slaw. I think it was just the stupid outfits they make the staff at the Green Kitchen wear. Was reading in Time Magazine this morning about theww magnificent photographs being returned by the Hubble Telescope, and wondered what the human race would say to aliens if they asked us to explain what it is that makes us think we're so special. besides the capacity for thought and reason, the only thing i could really think of was our capacity to love each other and to care about each other, but then it all started to seem ceremonious again, like the waiters at the diner tonight. the ones with the slaw. and it's all just a formality, the births and deaths and funerals and respects. the speech that Yitzhak Rabin's grand-daughter gave had me sobbing on the bus home last night. i can't think of the last time i read something so perfect, and if i'd seen her deliver the speech i don't think i could stand it.