I guess for like 10 years I’ve been coming to the computer to begin the day almost every day. I wake up to it, it is there. The machine has buttons that allow interaction with the system on a controlled level, meaning unlike humans it will not waver unless it finds errors or accrues age in hidden crap in such a way it can hardly work with the new sizes of the files of programs that run the programs that make the days go.

I wonder if you could run Google Chrome on my childhood Apple II GS at all.

The machine has a face and you can pick it out. The machine loves you in silence, unlike a dog. Unlike people who I have lost in part at least for the time I feed into the machine in ways and who in their leaving I have felt my ability to respond to people as people decrease. I mean, I can talk and be nice and joke around and shoot shit and enjoy the time but all of this seems operating on a cursory level, like the machine. I’ve found the hours with the machine kind of replacing how I see people, how I want to be held by people, my time capacity before there is this itch. I don’t know if other people feel that. It seems like a lot of other people I interact with have not had this happen, at least to the same extent.

What do I want? I can’t remember. I didn’t see anything I’ve been doing coming. Which is weird, considering that every day I do the same thing, one would think one could realize what was being done. One didn’t. Me. I didn’t realize. And yet I ended up somewhere quite different than I expected. I don’t know what I expected.

I am typing into a wordpress blog post editor in my browser in a little room. A couple nights a month sometimes I get paid to come sit at this art gallery where they hold classes and when everyone is gone I lock the door. The people here are trying to learn to make art. A lot of the art the gallery here shows is what most people who like art would consider student art. It’s grappling to understand the functions of perspective. It is a late life choice for a lot of these people; they are older. And they take pride in what they make. It makes them happy. They show up excited to show their photograph of a beach in the student show. They are concerned over whether everything will be presented correctly, if everything has been done. I am supposed to answer phones if they ring. They ring maybe once a night. I never answer.

Often when I am talking out loud to people I feel this thing in me clenching, begging for the conversation to end. It can be a conversation about the day, the weather, the walking. I mean this about people who I don’t know well, who are talking to me to fill space. It’s not that I feel different from them, or far from them, I just don’t know what to do. I can type into this machine for hours.

There is food in the other room tonight where the class will be. I am hungry and want to go get the food. An instructor who I am familiar with and have had medium length conversations about things outside of simply the art here is sitting in the room waiting between the classes he has taught. I don’t want to go into the room to get the food I could have because we might talk. Though I like him. He is a nice person. I keep walking past the room pretending like I’m on my cell phone to see if he’s left the room. He’s reading a magazine.

I’ve read three more books by Thomas Bernhard so far this year. They all felt like the same book in different sections, a book of terror not of days but of undays. I dogeared a lot of the pages in The Loser for lines I liked but I left the book at home and can’t remember any of them in my head. I wish I could remember things. All the books I read seem to just go through like into a little saw sticking out of a table where my brain is and the brain cuts them in half and feels the cutting and then the book is on the other side, though in this case the book is whole and I can read it again if I want to, though I don’t reread as often as I should. I think rereading scares me because it is at the same time so foreign in rereading and with traces of things that are remembered that the book feels even further away than it was the first time despite that I know more about it now.

I wonder why I am typing this. I was going to try to play games online but the net connection here is bad and I keep losing signal for long points where the clicking won’t do anything. I tried to play Magic online and there were these long gaps where I was clicking and it wouldn’t press and the guy chatted me in the game ‘???’ and I told him i was sorry I was taking so long but my connection is bad and he played a few more turns with me and then said he was sorry and he had tried and then he quit the match by conceding, which caused the machine to believe I’d won though I hadn’t done anything to win.

The Borders in Atlanta is the best bookstore in Atlanta, it really is, it has more books of the kind I like than other bookstores here. I don’t know if it is on the list of those that are closing, because I haven’t looked.

I don’t have internet at home right now, it’s been about a week. I let my subscription go. I didn’t really mean to but I did. When I get home there is no internet though some nights there are films from Netflix, so 1 in 3 or 4 nights I watch that but then there are the periods in between where there are no movies and so being in my house feels surrounded as if by the presence of a feeling that everywhere else is surrounded but in the room, which feels surrounding.

I can’t write on a machine that doesn’t have internet.

My best friends are ones I would/could never touch. That is comforting.

Why is that comforting?

Really interesting, good things are happening.

The instructor in the other room who I hadn’t eaten the food because of just came in and asked me a question about registration for his upcoming class. He just walked in and asked the question and I answered it and he said thanks and went back out.

This isn’t really about anything. This is about books. This is about me and books.

I just thought ‘I should post this on my personal blog instead of HTMLGIANT but I’ve written it with correct capitalization and punctuation, which I don’t think I’ve ever done on my own blog’ then I thought ‘but what does this have do with anything that anyone would want to see on HTMLGIANT, it’s not about books really, well, I just said it was about books though, and it’s how I feel a lot of most everyday, even though really I think I am an easy to get along with and pleasant person in general, this makes me seem like some sad weirdo’ then I thought ‘yeah’.

Sometimes when I am typing things I wonder ‘What will Adam Robinson think of this if he reads this’ or ‘What about Gene’ or several other people. I don’t really think that about my fiction writing ever, or nonfiction writing ever. Just blogs and tweets and status updates and crap, though I don’t even always think about it then, just when I am like writing something maybe to fill a space of boredom or to stab at nothing because I feel upset in an abstract way and don’t know how to handle it but by lashing out at the machine through the machine again. I almost always end up deleting 4 out of 7 things written in this way, immediately after pressing publish, though I always press publish, and then immediately feel the weird thing like shame, and delete it, even if it means nothing and in the realm of all of this it is a nothing. Sometimes I wish there was more deletion and sometimes I wish there was less of the deletion urge. I think if I didn’t know me I would think I was going to kill myself or something. And I would probably roll my eyes at me saying I would probably think that. I don’t think I’m going to kill myself. I mean that in the way that ‘I know I am not going to actually kill myself’ even though I think ‘I am going to kill myself’ with some amount of regularity, which seems weird considering that I think everything is pretty good.

If I had not started typing at the machine daily 10 years ago or however long that was would I still think things like this and just be thinking them in relation to like computer programming or professional backgammon or daytrading or whatever else I would have done, or do I think like this because of books?

I feel like I know when I’m sounding crazy and I’m okay with it though I don’t think i do it on purpose.

I don’t think reading books makes me feel better, as a reader. I read an hour a day usually while I am biking and so the book comes along with me. Sometimes I really enjoy the book. Often, maybe, I do. I just read Lance Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets and really liked it. It had a lot of ideas and moved with rapidity and felt different and felt like I could ignore the fact that I was working out while reading because of it. That is my favorite kind of book now: the kind that makes the fact that I am working out while reading feel like nothing, which means that time seems to not exist, though at the same time the passage of time is pressing even harder because I am so aware of what I am doing and yet the time is going in big chunks, though that seems even more scary.

Every day if I don’t get to sit with the machine at least three good hours, and preferably closer to six or as many as ten, I feel like I have not lived.

I like going to the movies by myself more than going with someone else whether they are old friends or a date or anything.

A good old friend quit the band he’d been in for 7 years last week and last night we went and got sushi and he looked scared for some reason and when I asked him if he was scared about something he said no and smiled but then his face went right back to how it had been before I asked him and while we were eating sushi he said he doesn’t like, is terrified of, people. I didn’t know what to tell him.

We talked about writing a screenplay about many different people putting the same object in rapid succession, alone, into their mouths. We laughed a lot.

Afterward we walked to Barnes and Noble and I looked at the magazines and then the new hardbacks while he walked around looking at I don’t know what and at some point he came up to me with some Magic cards and laughed and asked if that was what I wanted and to be honest it kind of was though Barnes and Noble has bad prices so we walked to where the games were again and I put the cards back, then my friend said he had to take a shit and did I want to leave or hang around while he was shitting because he had to go home after and the shit would probably take a while and I said I would just go.