A few day ago I got to thinking that I should start writing again. This is hard for me to do. I have a 100% failure rate so far; I’ve bought so many diaries and journals that making another one just seems doomed for the old, abandoned, stack. I think I felt like I really needed to make one though. Life is changing for me in many ways.

I got to LA about five weeks ago. Somehow it feels like I’ve been here forever and I can’t wait to get out again. My bed is a two-bunker because the room, a studio, was made for two and when I first came in I didn’t think I would get so lonely. But now I do and I wish sometimes that there was another person here. It was nice the first two weeks or so. I went crazy decorating the place, shopping thrift stores everyday virtually to craft someone out of four bucks. It does look nice now. I’ll have to take it down in a week though. I’m moving back to the dorms.

Yesterday it looked like it might rain. I was walking back up from Westwood and I felt one drop. It probably made me too hopeful — I was hoping I’d come back fully drenched — but no. Today it is back to being sunny. I’m really craving a downpour. Unfortunately, as fate would have it I’m sure the first thunderstorm will come the one day I’m late for an important class and I won’t make it and I’ll fail. I like to forecast disasters like that. Weather-predicting appeals to me in a strange way, like one of those quaint jobs which don’t exactly seem to belong in the world I live in. I’ve never checked up on weather enough for me to change my life; it’s there no matter what I do so I guess I’ll never bother with it. At the same time it’s all wrapped up with the issues of climatology and global warming,.. and I know that’s important (“important”) enough. But rain? I wish I knew the sky.

I realized that there are so many things I want to do so badly. I’m not really doing any of them. Money as always is an issue and I want to blame money but I know it’s really my own problem. For instance I want to have a camera so I can take pictures of those things around me. But last year I actually bought one and I haven’t even developed film from it. Or how I’d like to write a novel but I can’t even finish a few sentences into a paragraph no matter how many I start. I wonder what’s wrong with me. I wonder what’s wrong.

Some mornings I wake up — more and more often — and I don’t even want to get up. I went though a period which was pretty fantastic: I’d get up around seven or eight, or nine latest, exercise daily, eat well, and do work; now I’m entirely apathetic and I overeat too often to call it excusable. I want to change but wanting is never enough. What happened to that inertia which makes us change? What happened to inspirational movies that hurt your body enough to make you cry? Why don’t I feel the things I want to feel anymore? I wish I could find a missing piece someplace. But these things you don’t pick up on the pavement.

Yesterday going to Whole Foods there was a woman waving at the cars going in and out of the parking lot. I thought she was going to bother me, because a lot of people bother me, but she didn’t. I was nearly in the store entirely — I was around the melons that they keep outside; and she was still flapping her arms toward the customers leaving. I don’t know why but I actually went up to her and asked her what was wrong. I don’t know why but I did that and when I went up to see, I saw that her face looked real toad-like: her mouth sagged enormously, dragging her flat round nose down and her eyes down on the outside edges.

She was immense, but not vulgarly so; she didn’t look big because of a puffy quality–she looked big like a worn tire deflated. She said help me buy some groceries my kids and me we need food to eat I gotta feed them. I thought about how fat she was and the mean part of me thought she could do with a diet. But I knew she wasn’t lying even if she was lying about the kids: she was hungry and having that kind of nothing could make anyone lie, or worse. I said I don’t have enough money to buy you everything because that was the truth. But I do have enough to buy you something. Let me buy you something.

Then she said, well I can’t take anything from you, you’re just a college kid wearin a beat up old Packer’s sweatshirt. And for the first time she laughed as though she might have actually meant it. I felt so bad I really did want to get anything for her. I have a lot of pride. I have too much pride to give any away: and she had given hers all away, so that here she was asking for money from person to person for groceries. She wasn’t asking for money for drugs or alcohol: she was asking for a head of lettuce and some chicken and some milk so that her kids could grow. I think when I knew that I wanted her to be okay and I wanted her kids if they were real to be okay.

It’s devastatingly sunny outside now. I think the air conditioner gives me a migraine. I will try to write every day.