January 25, 2017

Flames dance in my study gas heater.

Hung my new painting in the living room, the demi-Kandinsky. It is lovely, I think.

Asked in a meeting to think of a day when I was happy with my vocation as a teacher, and it was but the day before, when I was giving my students Donne and they were accepting him with both hands.

The department is not as wild as they might be about initiating an MFA. Anecdote had led me to expect better.  Everybody feels overburdened. Add  twice as much to do and we will feel exactly the same degree of overburden, so, why not? Poor A is now in charge of assessment, which, like the lines at the airport, is 100% bullshit. What makes it worse is that it’s bullshit no one will look at after it’s laboriously cobbled together. The perfect tool of bureaucracy: make work for others from which you yourself are exempt.

Gym at opening the dark of this morning. The one person there before me was Brent, ripping the machines apart, flaunting his supernatural level of fitness. Were I filming The Iliad, he would play Diomedes.

Dream one night in which I was a kid living in a sort of camp where young gods were trained. I was not treated very well, and I thought I was meant to be a servant, but one morning I woke up and realized I’d turned into a god in the night, and my identity had been kept from me by a woman who claimed to be my mother, but who was actually an evil witch. That woman was Jane Fonda. I was so beautiful that I left my clothes in a pile, to give people the opportunity to see me naked. But, I needed to escape from the camp, and from the wicked Fonda false-mom. I ran into the parking lot (it was still night) having discovered that nascent gods get a blue sports car (mine was a Lotus) on their emergence day. I looked for my car, to see evil Jane mom trying to run down the battery so I couldn’t get away.