All of my pets died.

This fall means death and sliding thin wheels over wet leaves. Sometimes I don't like to speak louder than a whisper, so you will have to lean in close and feel my words, puffs of warm air on your cheek, tiny paws across the counter top.

I drew the same stupid picture I drew when I was in first grade and I loved cats and I had a best friend and she loved cats too.

We communicate with squeaks or moans or throaty purring engine noises. Sometimes I run out of things to say.

Technological advances.

They have words and numbers that come from scrambling fingers and scramble through wires to appear unscrambled on another screen somewhere. They have radio airwaves that scramble and unscramble, too. They have phones that don't ring or that ring when you don't want them to, but sometimes never stop ringing. They have live and active yogurt cultures. They have live and active digital pets. They have doors that will slam themselves in other doors faces. They have eject buttons under every chair. They have three dimensional holograms so you can know all your favorite people again. They have robots that will cry themselves to sleep and robots that will stay up all night and worry about that homework you haven't done. They have post office robots that are always open. They have washer-dryer combos. They have robots that will do the exercises for you. They have robots to check your email fifty thousand times per minute. They have transatlantic bridges. They have cars to drive across transatlantic bridges. They have robotic lobsters wearing robotic lobster bibs.

People are just people.

I can't sleep. There are girls on my floor singing songs from The Little Mermaid. My mind and body feel like they've been working in the coal mines for decades. Where do all these aches come from? Why can't I stop crying? I took three ibuprofen to numb it, and maybe I'll take some more soon. When I was ten I got unbearable aches in my legs that kept me up at night. Dad said they were growing pains. FUCK that. I'm too old to feel my bone cells crack and expand. I can rub my legs with my elbows, which intensifies the pain but also helps to relieve some of that internal tension. It feels a bit like homesickness.

It will benefit you to know that I am slowly learning my own tactics and soon I will be able to master and eventually overcome them.

It will not benefit you to know that my eyelashes have been wet and that I have deleted hundreds of very important letters -- erased, infact, all traces of an entire imaginary relationship with a non-existent humanoid -- and felt a peppery blend of freedom and grief. The more times I said "don't call" the more times I meant "please do." You would never have guessed these facts on your own. My divulgence incites a suspicion that I can feel over the cyber-waves.

On dreams.

Thursday night I reached lucidity and wanted to do what I could never mention in real life.

Friday night I dreamed I had a lover who shot me in my in the thigh and then shot himself three times, until he died. I put his body on the carpet near the back door of our old house. I called 9-1-1 later and told the dispatcher not to bother using the siren when they came because I didn't want to disturb the neighbors. I could feel his disembodied tongue in my mouth.

Oh man.

Pandora's box.

I caught the plague. So far it is treating me well.... perhaps even better than I treat myself. But I am often reminded of the boy on the stairs and how if I tried to say anything at all I'd end up wearing my trachea's yellow-green lining on my sleeve.

I had sticky ink under my fingernails so I cut them off with scissors. I wished I still had the bubble gum pink, bear shaped plastic brush that was always sitting by the kitchen sink. Now I'm going back to the printmaking studio to soothe my pounding head with the sound of steel on zinc.

Robot sex.

Edvard Munch

Mustaaaaache.

People at Villanova are funny. Here are two examples:

1. One of the boys in my AGP class LOVES to draw little pictures of Abe Lincoln in Photoshop. He always has a big potato shaped head, and a carrot nose, and and a GIANT twirly mustache and he's always holding an ice cream cone. And while he's drawing he says in a really quiet throaty voice, like Danny from The Shining, "Mustaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaache." It makes me laugh really really hard, but I don't think he knows what I'm laughing at.

2. At lunch today, I was sitting with my boss Kyle and a different camper. At the next table over, a kid started doing creamer shots, and Kyle and I were both like, "EW!" And the camper we were sitting with said this, "What's so gross? I do that too. When my dad gets coffee and doesn't use all of the creamers I like to drink them." He continued, "And at my dad's work, people think it's weird if he drinks the creamer so he takes it into his office and shuts the door..."

I love them all. They don't even know.