Before I got up from the bench, I looked at the egg heads in front of the drama department. One egg symbolized goofing off, the other one was yelling at it, being all anal and shit. I imagined myself as the anal one, telling Gregory not to get drunk, and Gregory with his eyes rolled skyward and his mouth cocked to one side, uncaring and irreverent. I did not think this was an original idea. I wondered how many "deep" college students had sat right here and looked at those two asshole eggs and thought about their own situation, applying them just as I had. I was disgusted and stood up.

Then I'd gone in to ask the girl supervising the drama tryouts where the art building was. Maybe there'd be a cool exhibit for me to see or something. She looked like a typical drama major. Fat, 1999 striped t-shirt, non-made up, unnatractive face and pulled back, insignificant dirty blonde hair. She'd be a techie. She wouldn't get anywhere else. I felt sorry for her. She told me the art building was on my right.

It was really close, like 25 feet, but I wasn't looking carefully and before I knew it I was in front of the library. The library! Now that was interesting. I walked inside and it was probably closed and I probably wasn't even supposed to be in there but I am small and silent and nobody was paying too much attention to me and I slid in without anyone noticing.

I love libraries. Not the small ones, full of shrieking kids and asian ladies and all kinds of people I can run into that I know. The big ones. The college ones, where everybody knows the shut the hell up and mind their own business and read their fucking books. If there's anything that triggers the calm, it's those kinds of libraries. This was just that kind.

It wasn't as big as MLK, but it had this fantastic flight of staircases which I loved that came into each other and apart again, and these lovely silent doors that didn't make a sound if you dropped them closed. I found the area with the computers and decided to take advantage of my calm and turned one on.

I wrote for a little more than half an hour. The entry before last. Some guy a few computers to the left of me was probably reading his email. He'd type like mad for a bit and then sit back and read and laugh and laugh. I just sat and typed.

I just finished American Splendor today and it confirmed just what I thought. I was angry. I was sad. But I had the calm. I put my words into the little white box...white inside lavender purple. I shaped my anger into tidy little metaphors, wracked my brain to make my tears into pretty embroidered similes. At length, a janitor came in and yelled at me for being in the library after it closed, wrecking my calm. I'd hardly noticed that the lights had gone out 10 minutes earlier. He radioed to the security guards that I was coming out, which annoyed me. He reminded me of the asian administrator, radioing Mr. Branco, excited to play Cops with his walkie-talkie and excited to impose this little bit of authority upon a student who was no doubt studying to become a very much more successful person than himself.

I'm amusing myself right now with a cute little pink penis I've twisted out of cinnamon flavored Trident stuck to my desk. Okay, so maybe I won't become a millionaire, buddy, but I won't be a fucking night janitor either.

That has absolutely nothing to do with American Splendor. Which brings me back to my point. After I'd done typing, I didn't really feel much about the argument any more. I wasn't really upset anymore, frightened, angry. I felt perfect: numb. I'd finally acknowldged the feelings that had been plaguing me for those two weeks and I'd packaged them tightly into my extended metaphor and tied it with a introspective bow. And now those feelings seemed like nothing more than a metaphor to analyze on a page. They meant nothing. Better than Prozac: I was empty. American Splendor: he drew comics to distance himself from the illness he felt. They helped him to get through it all...he wasn't really suffering this, wasn't realling living this. It was just a character.

And all my problems were perfect now, beautiful, ugly mud shaped into a gorgeous sculpture. And far, far away.

last night i dreamt of the stone bowl and pistle we used to grind up ginger. It was on the floor, broken.