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When Batsukh comes over he does not know the mountains he is helping me climb. When he says the food is good he does not know how frightened I was of cooking; when he asks me to "play the American song" he does not know that it is the first song I wrote with guitar and that he is the only one who ever heard it. One day he chopped veggies while I cooked and I put on the Be Good Tanyas. He liked them a lot. On Internatonal Army day I didn't know what day it was, only that I left my apartment at 1pm and a guy was already puking outside it. Anyway Batsukh was drunk. Which makes him a less effective but funnier guitar teacher. Boroo Khideg! He says. I made a mistake! "I made rain," in Mongolian.

It's weird to know I am in the middle of the era people look back on with a mix of nostalgia for the fun and frivolousness and rolloercoasteriness and regret for the stupid shit they did and people they hurt--it's sheer free time that lets me hurt still about guys and stuff--Poh did say the other day that the word should is not helpful, that the amount of time something took doesn't figure into the healing nearly as much as the meaning that was attached to it…

I wonder what meaning looks like. A hanging thing with Velcro I attach and reattach to a big furry wall. No it's more sticky than that. Dark windy tentacles I wrap around things, around logic and memories and my heart, that I can't take away after that because it's bonded to the thing it surrounds.

Ah, people in their 20s. Self-involved and self-entertained. Of course this is true of me, which is why the same muscle I use to write is the one that disgusts me. Why do I try to escape the prism of the senses and the emotional awareness in order to write when writing is only possible through those things? Be at peace, Ming.


In Mongolian raisins are "water grapes." One normal day a woman was moaning and spitting sitting on a stump in the dirt strip I always walk when I leave the gym if I want to cut across to UB mart, the dirt strip above the Children's Park where the rock doves bloom up in an unintentional collective art movement or something with the statue of some dude only visible bust upward because of the fence surrounding--which during the warm season, the season that just started so suddenly there are all these white people thronging the streets again, is guarded at the north entrance by people trying to fool you with their pressed clothes into thinking one needs to pay to get into the park…the park itself has a swastika and "we hate the Chinese "graffiti, and there was once a Chinggis figurine who somehow was made to breathe or something? This A told me when we walked her dog in the park in the eye watering cold and she had on her black market sweatshirt with guns all over it. A has the most beautiful auburn curls I have ever seen. She's fucking smart too, you can see from the breadth of her expressions. Normally droll she's actually very sensitive and trained as a teacher. I cant tell if the ones full of shit are the ones who pretend like they don't care when they do, like A, or the ones who carry on and won't shut up about it all, like me.