Oddly, your emotions may get quite intense, yet you are not as high-strung.

*

The newest Grand Theft Auto has hit the shelves, and I begin to feel in my real own life the same way I felt during my six weeks in Italy-- which I never really got around to talking about. Like I live in a foreign country: isolated, strange and unlikeable. Pious but not sufficiently pious. I really think I could have made it as a drug addict or as a religious nutjob-- but as a mere moderate functional adult, I am...

Unsatisfactory.

I can't quite bring myself to be what I am, hence the repetitious belly-aching about contact.

Ah, Jack Kerouac. You were a martyr for ecstasy; Erin cannot make up her mind.

*

A new mantra:

Last summer, Brandon and I--

(Brandon is an ex-Navy chaplain's assistant, a pleasure-seeking theologian who collects people who interest him, of which I am one.

Honestly, I don't know Brandon very well, but my impression of him is as an ocean covered with a burlap blanket, and a treasure on top of the blanket, which Brandon may never reach because the substance is below.

Maybe that is my impression of anyone who doesn't allow their life to sink into turmoil.)

--were eating together at Formosa, a Chinese restaurant in Chattanooga, and I presented to Brandon my dilemma: the risks of being my own ultimate arbiter (re: god, morality, action, compromise) and the lack of decent alternatives.

Brandon answered simply, "You have doubt."