Placenta Shampoo

Oh yeah, that's about my mental state tonight. Placenta Shampoo. Look it up.

It's been a strange weekend. Though I've only left the house once -- this afternoon, to get a few groceries -- my mind has been going in all different directions, both firing and misfiring. I'm also sort of afraid that I'm getting sick, as I don't feel bad, but also can't seem to get enough sleep. The past two nights, I've slept for ten hours or more, straight, without waking up, and could've slept for another four or five. There's no way my body needs that much sleep without there being something wrong with me. I've made sure to keep up my vitamin regimen on a daily basis and have added an extra vitamin C pill to it, as well as a daily zinc pill, to stave off anything that may be coming. This is the time I usually end up getting sick during the fall, and this year it's the worst possible time for me to be getting sick -- as I'm only a little more than halfway up the proverbial mountain of work to be done.

The car's thermostat is really going wonky now, and it's dripping out a lot more coolant from the overflow valve than before (previously, it had been only dripping a little, or none at all). If it even is the thermostat, after all; who knows, really. Tuesday morning, when it's light, I'm going to put the stop-leak in it (finally) and refill the coolant tank again, as the stop-leak needs to be put in when the car's going to be driven for at least 15 minutes or so (which would be my trip down to Wichita at about 25 minutes). If that doesn't fix it or at least curb how much coolant it likes to drip, there's not really much else I can do other than keep refilling the fucking tank over and over again until I can actually get enough money to get it worked on, which isn't going to be for a long time. I just don't have the money. Period. No, I shouldn't have to worry this much about a car or about money, but I do. That's just the life I have. As I've said many times before, it sucks. A lot.

Even if it is the thermostat, the stop-leak should seal everything enough to where it shouldn't be dripping as much as it does every time I park it. Sometimes it's a few drops, sometimes it's a big puddle. My driveway is one big stain at this point. If it's not the thermostat and it's a leaky hose instead (or something similar along those lines), then all the better. It's pissing me off enough to this point where I'm really ready to climb underneath the thing with duct tape and seal up anything that doesn't look like it should.

No, I wouldn't actually do that. But the thought has crossed my mind. The damned car didn't leak a drop when I bought it. It only started this shit in August or so, and only occasionally then. It's so frustrating because words cannot express how much I need that car to just work, and just work without costing me any extra money right now, because again, it's money I just don't have. If I were to take that car to a shop, it would easily cost at least $1,000 to fix everything wrong with it. That's so, so much more money than I ever have to spare. Like, five times more money than I ever have to spare.

All I want is for the damned thing to keep running. Nothing else wrong with it is necessarily important. As I've said before, my Monte Carlo is one of the very, very few things I own outright that nothing and nobody can take away from me.

Anyway.

I've been in a half-sleep daze most of the weekend. Fatigue more than anything else, but it doesn't make any sense to me because of how much sleep I've gotten. I can drink full pots of coffee, I can be active around the house (I've been doing chores for the sake of doing them, even if they waste study time, just so that I can stay awake), and I can write here -- none of it helps. I always want to go to sleep. It's 9PM, and I'm making another pot of coffee just so that I can stay up to do more of the work I have to do over the weekend. I still have three rather important things to finish tonight and tomorrow, if possible.

I've been reading The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa for my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit class. It's like reading the translated Japanese version of Finnegan's Wake. Definitely modernist, beautifully written, and almost totally incomprehensible. In those respects, it's very akin to a James Joyce book. I pity the folks who choose to write a long paper on that novel. Good luck, there.

I'm also trying to finish Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for my Grad Studies in Fiction class. Yes, still. The book is massive, folks. I'm over 200 pages in and barely 1/4 of the way through the version I'm reading. The only reason I'm wasting my time with it is because I need to write a short response paper on it just to get it out of the way. I'll probably end up doing that in my office on Wednesday morning, before class that afternoon. It'll take until then to actually finish the damned book, or at least get close enough to finishing it to where I can just say fuck it, I'll find out what happens in class. Like I said before, it's more than likely going to be the only book this semester that I won't actually finish and may just give up on. I have way too much other shit to do for my other classes (and in general) to read a very wordy Russian novel that I have no vested or otherwise real interest in.

On the plus side, I did write one of my best poems of the semester and/or year this weekend, and I've been working on another. My creative juices have been flowing recently (read: over the course of the past week or two), and as they're about all I have going for me at any given time, when they flow I dive into the stream and see what I can produce. It's always hit-or-miss, but occasionally I can write something good.

As for the poetry book planned for release on November 5th, I'm holding off on it for a while; yes, I could publish it myself and get some money out of it, but it wouldn't be much. Instead I'm going to polish the manuscript as much as possible and submit it to book contests/publishing houses -- as per the advice of our current poetry workshop professor in class last week. While I'm doing that I'll compile the second book and edit it down as well, and for a while I'll have dueling manuscripts floating about. I'm sick of all this "let's try to get published in journals and other publications" bullshit; I'm a book writer, not a single-piece writer.

If all of that fails, I'll either have a hell of a thesis already finished for when I graduate, or I'll publish the book(s) myself at that point through the outlets and options I have. More than anything else, though, I'm going to go balls-out proactive with my writing, as really it's all I have going for me and may eventually be the only thing that saves me from being in totally crippling debt for the rest of my life.

On that note, I need to go see if I can finish The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (about 80 pages or so left, but it reads fast) and take care of the weekly house trash, as it's garbage day tomorrow.