Earlier this evening, when I read about what could be the most grotesque injury suffered while celebrating a goal in the history of soccer, I thought about asking the obvious but cynical question - in these joylessly over-proscribed days, when lifting your shirt up over your head to declare your love for your girlfriend, announce your kid's birth, or self-aggrandizingly proclaim your patriotism wins you automatic caution points, did the referee card hapless goal-provider Diogo (note, he didn't even score the damn goal) for over-celebration, as well as auto-amputation?
Well, it turns out he did.
Insult to injury could not find a more literal definition. Seeing that it was the 3rd goal of a 4-1 win, one can only imagine that everyone involved with the fourth goal stayed away from anything sharp or nasty looking. Better stick to the hips-a-swiveling Elvis impressions by the corner flag, the hop-over-the-sidings-and-preen--at-the-crowd pose, or the Robbie Keane-esque demented, aborted cartwheel - my personal favorite.

A week and a half into my break from school, and I feel like I'm starting to find my feet back home at the ranch. It's taken time to retrench; my rope, if not at its end, was pretty frayed by the end of the quarter, more so than it ever got all of last year. Grades have come in - A's in the two classes I completed, an incomplete in the one I haven't done the proverbial Twenty Page Paper for, yet. This is good, considering I thought I had the quarter from hell - though that had to less to do with schoolwork than the feeling I was blowing it all through chronic, congenital indiscipline. And some things outside of that. What I've left undone is a theory class; I really do like theory (the most significant and surprising thing I've learned since moving into this discipline from a more artsy, creative one) and I'm reckoning I'll do a paper on Habermas and the public sphere. I should be doing it these days, getting it over with well before the whole holiday hullabaloo kicks off. Actually, I should have it done already. Actually, I should take a pragmatic approach and do the thing on some theory I've done papers on before, instead of one I'm superficially acquainted with but surmise might be useful in future research. The shortcut, Michael, take the shortcut. Do I do that? No.

Now that I'm at home (funny, most of my earthly possessions are out in Ohio, but Connecticut is, and will always be, "home"; the more I move about, the more I clutch at and cling to a constructed Connecticut Mentality) I spend my waking hours reading, writing a bit, and involving myself with this daunting project of transposing old writing journals on to the computer. I play an endless game of catch-up, first churning out three or four notebook pages' worth of new daily rambling, snatches of poetry, plagiarized insight - a way to get my brain firing, my eyes searching, my senses limbered up. No expectations, no decided form to it. Then I let it go for weeks, months at a time...I turn the page, and unfailingly forget what I wrote. It falls out of mind. I don't look at it. I'm not even tempted to look at it. After a while, maybe when I reach the end of the notebook a couple months later, I start transposing it back, seeing what I was thinking then, sometimes viscerally reliving where I was, what I was doing. This thickens the present. Remarkable how the most vapid, quotidian and seemingly banal details, once written down, help reclaim an experience, a phenomenon. Good terms - there's a lot here that resonates with the phenomenological experience. I don't write every day, unfortunately, but the discovery that simple, specific, unspectacular writing can recall and deepen the least of days impels me to try.

This method has been my surrogate for writing short stories and (attempting) novels - the only thing I thought I'd ever do, only I don't - for a while now. Certainly not since I started doing this MA a year and a half ago, and even before that. There are reasons. Lack of discipline, lack of rigor, lack of tenacity, lack of stories I feel I have to tell, lack of attention; being necessarily but laboriously broken down beginning at the point when I realized doing an MFA in Writing in NYC wasn't for me, and being slowly but appreciably built back up now, in a far more structured, distant field. I'll write about it all here at some point.

But for now, the project of these twice-recorded notes, systematically printed out, stuffed in ring binders three inches thick, and now sitting in my travel bag, is manifold; to gather up my written self - my body of work, so to speak - in one place, and then to probe it, analyze it all for recurrent motifs of thought, emphasis, development, structure. My ragged, quasi-fictional Bildungsroman; how to conceptualize it, physically, structurally, metaphorically? It is a task of divining a metanarrative of living, of detecting the undetected. Pattern recognition. Trying to make some sense of myself first, before I even start trying to make sense of others, other things, or the world.
It is a precursor to art, if not proven in the end to be a lame, time-wasting substitute for it. A couple years ago I intuited that, contrary to the self-evident proofs that I knew how to write decently (a schoolboy reputation, a few early but unhelpful successes) I had to stop and start all over again if I was ever going to create anything I was proud of. I may have been right, I may have been wrong. This could go either way.

Enough navel-gazing for one night.

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In honor of the fact that I'm re-reading Media Virus, I'm inducting Douglas Rushkoff's blog into the Sidebar of Fame.