I have been taking long naps the last few days. I am exhausted. The teaching job drains me. You have to be Johnny on the spot in an often chaotic situation. In the afternoon my mind and body seem to shut down despite my best efforts to stay awake and finish my lesson plans for the next day as early as possible. Doing my work too late at night causes me anxiety and makes sleeping more difficult than it already is. I had some drinks in Beijing last Friday. A mere ten shots of Jack Daniels over a couple hours. I had not drank in sixty-five days and looking back on the night a whole series of events and feelings added up and hit me all at once and broke my tenuous resolve. I bought some wine on the way home but was way too intoxicated to finish it. In the course of things I lost my self in Beijing and spent so much money on taxis it is pathetic. I was rather confident though  only that morning that I would continue my current period of abstinence from alcohol for much longer than I did. I am sure the relapse has contributed to my lethargy and despondency.

    What kind of plans and dreams can a person have when they cannot even maintain their passion and resolve from "pillow to pillow" (to quote my old housemate T-Bone Todd.) When I reflect tonight on my life it has always been such a way. An erratic almost frenzied existence that spent ten times the energy of some of my friends and family and yet it all added up to nothing. I feel I am in a dark room running out of air and cannot find the light switch. I read part of some book a million years ago by Wilhelm Reich called The Murder of Christ (it had nothing to do with religion really) and I recall those few chapters lately as I ... as I do whatever it is I am doing here in China, along with still a few other fragments from Ernest Becker's Denial of Death. It was all so thick and dense for me then, but now it all has returned sentence by sentence and my waking world and my dream world are scripted it seems by the fatalism and pessimism of my morbid reading from those times. I read it for some other reason then, and I would fear to read those books now. I do not know why I read it all. Sometimes one chapter over and over for months trying to understand something.

    Now I wonder why and what has it all led to. Reich wrote of the trap we live in, in our own minds and hearts. He talked how we stay in those traps and yet convince ourselves that we stay there out of choice, or that that we convince ourselves we are free from the trap and that we have some message we can impart to others to free them from their traps, and yet, we are as trapped as ever and more so. It was all pretty cool stuff when I was twenty five and full of energy and wild ideas. I thought I was not trapped, or if I was it was not so bad because I knew I was trapped and had an insight into the nature of the traps we fall into. I wrote so many pages of prose and poetry then on the nature of being trapped and the delicate anguish of being aware of the trap. Of course I threw out all of those journals before I came to China. Maybe almost two thousand pages of ... of something I did not want to have any longer or pass on to anyone else. Some of it was great stuff. I can never replicate it. Why would I? Why replicate the Black Death?

    But it has some reference to me now. Like the way a dream comes back sometimes years later, even a dream you forgot about when you woke up at the time. But some strange, invisible thread remains attached and when the right and pertinent moment strikes it all comes back. It really means so little and yet, it seems to be the very thing that makes up the fabric of my life. The fabric maybe of life as a whole, but I would have no clue and lack the arrogance and confidence to make such a bold statement. Nights like this make me remember how soothing a Twinkie and a glass of cold whole milk could be.