he describes himself as searching for peace, trying to exercise patience, trying to find language that is real for a world of grieving beauty and beautiful grief
he describes himself as a combination of good and bad judgment, good taste and kitsch, astute and dull, quick and dense, fleet and phlegmatic, ardent and diffident, prone to being one way when he thinks he's being another, conveying one message when he thinks he's clearly saying another, sometimes adrift with an inverse reverse barometer on a sea of certainty, surviving disaster like buster keaton, oblivious to the zugzwang of life, where every day is a new day
he describes himself as someone who cares too much about the outcome of certain teams games and who looks forward to the day when relievers blow a three run lead by walking three batters and giving up a grand slam to a .128 hitter or a football team loses in "miraculous" fashion, carving out a defeat that will live for decades in the mythos and lore of some opponent, and he just won't care - college football team, professional baseball team - lose away, lose in such arcane and obscure ways as to baffle and befuddle sense and wonder - he just doesn't care anymore: emotional capital is limited, and all that is available for you is spent
he describes himself as loving books, the general codex form, some with leaves slightly deckled or with pages still uncut, with bindings of sewn signatures all tied together, placed in a case of cloth over board, with slight embossing from the type on all the pages and slight embossing of the plates for the images
he describes himself as an unreliable narrator through faulty memory, as he recalls
he describes himself as an all too imperfect perfectionist
an unknown third person. Some months ago, hearing a speaker introduced with the phrase "he describes himself as", I was struck with how the person introducing the speaker gained some distance from the speaker - and it also seemed odd to me, though I've heard it before, this quality of being able to describe oneself is a privilege. The oddness could be phrased like this :"the person speaking tonight, who I'm introducing, speaks about himself in the third person with confidence and vigor, using adjectives and phrases that would cause the most garrulous individual to blush."
he describes himself as telling a story with narrative fractures, incisions of vignettes, knottings of unravelings
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