Diving. Scheduling. And Ginsberg.

Tonight I am going to watch high school diving. My brother coaches. I love diving and I hate it. The beauty of it intrigues me. The danger of it undoes me. And, I despise those few second between the leap and the landing: reverses are the worst.

Even Greg Louganis, the world’s best diver at the time, cracked his head doing a reverse. Of course, he went on to win both the spring board and the platform competition that year. The dive that actually won the platform competition for him was a reverse dive. Irony.

I think I have an aversion to reverse dives because I saw someone land on the board trying to complete one. She didn’t get hurt, but I was afraid in that split-second that she would break her neck. Possibly I was afraid she would fall from the board into the pool and drown, surrounded by life guards too stunned to move.

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Last semester, I didn’t have room to breathe. This semester, I can’t seem to get on a schedule. I read next week’s assignment this week, and didn’t remember to do this week’s assignment. Having too much time is sometimes worse than not having enough.

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Finally, I will leave you with this, some of my favorite Ginsberg from Howl:

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and some eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, …