the head is a lonely hunter

These last few evenings have been consumed in head work, and I generally do not like head work.

It is akin to trying to slam through a summer reading list that is nothing but nonfiction books.

I know I'm no Grace Lee Boggs. I'm not capable of thinking hard about 300 things at once with ease, articulation, and brevity. I ain't there yet. But, oh, sometimes it would be so very nice.

You know how awful it is to have a good friend ask you "What are you up to these days?" and you realize that any meaningful answer you can provide takes so damn long to explain you'd rather not answer at all? Even my fucken job takes at least thirty seconds to describe, and that's only if I have the energy.

Same goes for "What's your book about?" and "Why are you going into geography?" and so on. It's not even that these are perfunctory questions for people who don't really care what my answer is; they really are intrigued. I am just getting tired of trying to answer this curiosity satisfactorily. It feels like it's all coming from the head and nowhere else anymore.

I'm reviewing this manuscript about white decolonization. And it's, well, 300 pages long. I agreed to do this back when the stress of this anthology and grad school apps was still minimal, but then I put it off (just a month, which is very good for me), and now I can barely put my thoughts together on it. I'll read a snippet, start typing feedback, write for a half a page or more, then stop, realize I've gone off in my little head world, which is totally useless for me and for this manuscript's author, and another hour has gone by to boot. Dammit!

It's situations like these that spur serious doubt as to my commitment to something like 'academic rigor.' I have synapses firing on everything from Deleuze to open source technology to dialectics to societies of control to Asian America to 'indigenous warrioring,' which I still don't really get. I try and talk about these things and almost immediately I feel vacant and unenthusiastic, nothing but mishmashes of things I've read or terminology I pretend to know how to use. This infuriates me but I try and keep at it, as if by continuing I can feel more confident and assured. And I never do.

And why is it--truly, why is it--that when I have finished extracting a song from my guitar, setting a spoon down on plate's edge at the end of a recipe's conclusion, waking hazy and in desperate love with a dream that flew my body headlong down the long slope of a story, why is it that I wait long moments, sometimes hours, before snapping open the case, depositing dishes in the sink, hauling these bones out of a bed, steeling myself for another return to the land of head work.