So, some of the fears and trappings of a young, lustful and wistful life:

I have great, gaping fears of getting lost in my work again— by which I mean rather the opposite of my art-work; by which I mean my current menial job. Living to work rather than working to live, etc.

Naturally, there are greater things to work tirelessly toward, greater joys and troubles to be had!

There are evenings of making dinner and talking social theory, locavorism, and dinosaurs with grand, old friends. There are gorgeous days of big flatland wind, expansive blue sky, and straw-colored sun dedicated to long lunches, where you can cover Martin Scorcese, Cormac McCarthy, and Kanye West in the hours it takes to happily devour tender semolina-encrusted calamari stuffed into a roll with lemon ailoi and lettuce & tomato, or a little crock of goat’s milk raviloi all burnished and beautiful. Glasses of prosecco! There are nights that follow watching Spaghetti Westerns, drinking cups of tea.

There are bigger and brighter things, and I am working, really hard, at focusing on those— as ever. It’s funny, but it really is truly scary to throw yourself headlong into the pleasure principle, the good stuff. To open yourself up and be present and loving and sensitive and vulnerable and observant and really genuinely real. You’ve got to let all sorts of guards down to get there, let me tell you.

On that we have a word from young Truman Capote, whose letters I am reading right now, on hiatus from Moby Dick:

“In this day and age sensitivity…is almost an anachronism. Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolescence ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you to the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.”