July 6, 2011 - Breakfast

Awoken by dread. Did 50 toe touches and drank some water.

[Wife] and I spoke last night about wanting to turn back the clock. The bulbous inevitability of these children gives us the willies. We could have taken the money and lived in Europe for a while, I said. We could have been reading books. We said this curled up on the bed; the babies were jumping around inside of her. My back was to [Wife] so I could feel them jumping, through her skin, through her shirt, through my shirt. When I speak to them (one at a time, left or right, although I always get mixed up as to which is the boy and which is the girl) they jump at the noise and my wife says, "Whoa."

Of course we wouldn't have been happy in Europe. We would have been lamenting lost opportunity--unable to perceive the perpetual distance between what the monkey has and what it thinks it wants. You think that you want things but in truth you're just preserving that distance, protecting its boundaries. Basic satisfaction comes with a combination of wealth and grandchildren, it seems. And hobbies like mineralogy or fishing or gardening or amateur programming or model trains and stamp collections. Things that are unbearably slow, that demonstrate that you have mastered time, that you have time to squander. No one collects stamps without looking death square in the eye and saying, okay.

What I have to do is imagine myself as a videogame character going through a level. I can see my squat pixelated body gathering tokens, jumping, hacking, slashing, dealing. All the worries become abstraction, bars of light that go up and down.

Let's see where I can get by 10AM towards finishing Magazine.

Weight: 334.5 lbs