Winter 2001

Tonight I see two immense columns of light in lower Manhattan as a tribute to the destroyed WTC. I've been doing nothing except wallowing in confusion and trying to go back to sleep for days on end. I'm looking forward to leaving this city and dedicating my complete energy to accumulating as much money as possible through as much work as necessary. I am fortunate to have people that care about me and have opened their doors to help me through what has been a particularly difficult time. In exchange I hope to offer a hand and my technology experience for a program dedicated to assisting people with successfully adjusting to life after incarceration. Whether or not I needed a favor, I realize the importance of this work and have wanted to participate but have been preoccupied with life in NYC.

I've had a look at classifieds on the internet at iAgora.com for rooms and apartments in Barcelona and found reassuring prices and evidence of viability in creating a life for myself in this city. I don't need or want to be here anymore and know that it is time to go. If I can pack my things tonight and take care of a few errands tomorrow, there is a great chance that I can be out of here by week's end.

As the most important function of keeping a record like this, I need to note the degree of despair and depression I'm suffocating in. While my dreams and plans that I'm holding on to like a piece of wood in the middle of the ocean are terrifyingly unsure, they are the only thing that I have to keep me going until I see relief. I forget how real life is when it's not going your way. When you're cruising along in a routine which doesn't require very intensive thought or feeling, the calendar can flip through years without any significant landmark or milestones. Life is so much more beautiful when I'm confused and confronted with all that goes with the reality that within a few days, minutes, or seconds, everything that is serving as the foundation for your existence can evaporate, shift, invert, or explode leaving you with what you have always had and the only thing you are fairly certain to have for your term of existence. Yourself. Most of your body.

Thank you NYC, thank you friends. Dear God, please stop the warring, please emphasize that we're all humans and that the solutions for our problems don't lie in weapons and force.

Thinking of those in US society which have committed acts which were examined by other humans in an office of the Judiciary system of our government and deemed to be wrong and punishable by moving the human into buildings with bars and disease, stale air and treated without dignity, I am drained of strength. Not many people know the way which people treat other people in the name of law. Police are sometimes the most cruel, diseased, and unjust people imaginable. It has become hard for me to feel sympathetic when I hear of an officer injured while upholding justice. These people often don't care about the citizens they take into custody or how they are treated. They are racist, sexist, they are bullies, they are cowards, and they wear an air of arrogant superiority that in my eyes practically awards them the deserve of any harm they encounter. I say practically because I would not want them to be harmed. It just twists me up when I see how they behave and seem to think.