For nearly the entire two and an half weeks I’ve been back in Athens, I’ve had hardly a moment to gather my thoughts. I apologize for the terse placeholder posts of the last few weeks and, now, for the journaly mood of this entry. I have nothing else right now.

This morning somewhere near one-thirty am, I finished a draft of “Prototype for a Black Cyborg Subject.” It’s fifteen pages longer than it should be. I don’t know what to do about my “voice,” my prolixity. It seems that outside of my journal and my blog entries, I only know how to write book chapters. I am slowly losing my mind.

Oh, and that brings me to my serious peeve of 2007. My east-side next-door neighbors have gone away for the winter. Bless their octogenarian hearts, but they’ve installed a motion-sensing floodlight on a shed in their backyard and the father-loving thing is on for most of the night, triggered (I’m imagining) by innumerable and nearly invisible animals, branches, and disembodied bad vibes. This is a serious problem because daylight wakes me and the floodlight bathes the corner of my house where my bedroom is located. I’ve found myself uncharitably wishing someone would break into their house, get hold of their ladder, a screwdriver, uninstall the floodlight, and make off with it.

I’m also finding myself challenged to withhold moral judgement. I don’t normally have much of an opinion about the intensity and magnitude of the self-deception people I know perpetrate on themselves. I do observe that self-deception (often a psychological mechanism that enables one to deceive others with clear conscience) may have negative consequences often not worth the arrangements protected by the self- and other-deception in question, but I don’t usually have opinions about the bare fact of such dishonesty.

Except, I’m furious for having to suffer as a result of the decisions, behaviors, and self-deception of others, especially when those decisions, behaviors, and deceptions have nothing to do with me. Yes, tag this paragraph “self-pity” because that’s what I’m giving myself. Even so, I think you should know anyone can see through you as through a window. Seriously. (And, yes, I’m talking to you.)

To the rest of you, I wasn’t expecting that. I hope you can forgive me for being so selfish and so naive.