Inside a month.

—

This morning the green oracle says: Drink Coke Play Again

A conversation came up about Dialectic of Enlightenment and I found myself stumbling over some of the basic threads of Frankfurt School thinking. Rationalized labor does make you stupid, even when the labor itself requires smarts; it makes you forget everything else you’ve ever understood, focusing instead on abstract tasks that somehow degenerate into infinite repetition in spite of themselves, no matter how varied each instance is — a kind of conceptual simulacra. It is all numbers and lists and checkboxes. Things are either helpful to you while you work and between work episodes, or they are unhelpful and annoying; goals and tasks and breaks become The Goal and The Task and The Break and they are the only things — everything else does not exist, is written out of consciousness and history and meaning.

You are ruthlessly oppressed by nothing in particular, short of the fundamental worldview that rationalized labor adopts and through which it works.

That, I suppose, is the basic thread of Dialectic of Enlightenment, in a sideways sort of way.

I can’t get back to academics soon enough.

Ghosts of people I have been
Come around and shout “obscene”
Ghosts of things I’ve said and done
Come to haunt me watch me run

Everybody I know is falling apart
Everybody I know wants to die
Wants to find

Long day. Some days are simply longer than others. They just hang around, unwelcome, as sun falls and the sky dims and you feel yourself aging, powerless to stop it, slow it, or even appreciate it properly.

I am getting older. I can feel it happening to me.

I heard a song earlier and afterward I was ten seconds away from driving my car east, due east, until I reached the other ocean. I want to live deliberately.

—

Somebody hit my car. I was at the pump filling up and a girl in a giant sport utility looked at me, backed up, smashed into my car, knocking my drink onto the seat, some things out of my glovebox, and the gas nozzle out of my tank. She looked at me for a brief moment, then sped out of the parking lot, making a right turn and disappearing.

I didn

I am growing to dislike Mondays. 🙁

I feel uncomfortable and out of sorts and I want to go home and take pictures with my camera (which I don’t have).

cra)…)…)=simulacra(simulacra(simulacra(simula

—

I was am being will be have been would be am God.

I think I’m going back to school
Cause I’m tired of being a fool
And I’m tired of playing it cool
I think I’m going back to school
I never understood the weather man
I never understood the moon
Why don’t you pour me out a glass of wine
Why don’t you pour me out
In the days before America
In the days before priests
In the days before Rolling Stones
In the days before speech
Everybody hates the President
Everybody loves the Queen
Break the planes and close the planet down
Why don’t you break with me
I think I’m going out of style
I think I’ve known it for a while
I think I’ve known it with a smile
I think I’m going home

—

File under “best song ever.”

I have to buy CDs by

– Neil Young
–

No, there are no others, just Neil Young. Have to buy some Neil Young CDs. CDs by Neil Young are what I have to buy. When I buy, it will be CDs by Neil Young.

—

Running Fedora Core 4 in a virtual machine hosted on a Fedora Core 3 system with a 900MHz coppermine CPU and 512 megabytes in PC100 SODIMMs is

is

TOO DAMN SLOW.

I’m sitting here all day waiting for the computer to think. I miss the days of >1GHz >1GB SMP.

But only sometimes.

—

My god, Neil Young.

—

be aware

I’m working with almost bizarre intensity these days. My day job is frenetic; the projects are truly massive, the deadlines are very soon, the number of titles is in the dozens, the number of authors is in the hundreds, and the number of pieces they’re writing is in the thousands… while the timelines are measured in some cases in weeks. My night job, even moreso; I am rewriting 700-800 pages of technical content and figures in the space of little more than a month.

Only once before in my life have I concentrated at this level or felt this productive: my last two semesters at the University of Utah, when I was finishing a double degree, arriving on campus before light and leaving after dark, writing papers and reading books all night.

At some level, it all feels very good.

At another, it’s like you’re losing time — losing moments of your life that you’ll never get back.

I have been having coughing fits all afternoon. Serious ones. I feel ill. Like, pnuemonia ill. Earlier, someone offered to let me go home early. I should have taken them up on it. Maybe I still will.

The problem is that we humans are too bright; we

1. Work (8am-5pm+stress)
2. Work (5pm-9pm+stress)
3. Money (ongoinglack)
4. Moving (bigexpense)
5. Paperwork (loans, schoolapps, grantapps, gradlooseends)
6. Ticky-tack shit (worntires, brokenpacks, coldremedies, shoelaces)
7. Relationships (sigothers, family, friends)
8. Future (insurance, savings, movings, schools, degrees)

I am starting to feel increasingly overwhelmed by everything, everything, everything, everything.

you see too many things

—

You can tell that time is passing because you:

– realize that your tires are worn and have to be replaced
– keep finding empty beer cans around, no matter how many you toss out
– find more and more wrinkles on all over your feet
– start to empathize with glowing tiffany lamps in lonely offices
– want less, have more, understand less, know more
– die

—

I would cross the Yellow River, but ice chokes the ferry;
I would climb the Taihang Mountains, but the sky is blind with snow…
I would sit and poise a fishing-pole, lazy by a brook —
But I suddenly dream of riding a boat, sailing for the sun…
Journeying is hard,
Journeying is hard.
There are many splits —
Which am I to follow?
I will mount a long wind some day and break the heavy waves
And set my cloudy sail straight and bridge the deep, deep sea.

—

The world will always be full of things you don’t agree with, don’t like, don’t understand, don’t believe in, can’t countenance, want to change, and are powerless to stop. In the midst of all that, you find one or two little things you like and you get excited about them out of all proportion and dedicate your life to doing them, taking time every now and then to eat noodles.

suche ein

metel

—

Times are what they are; I’m working too hard. I’m not working at all. Always do it deliberately; always do it with full intent and full knowledge. Never stumble about. There just isn’t time. There isn’t time for any of the nonsense.

—

My resumé is changing far too fast.

I just realized that it’s been quite a while since I backed this thing up.

Something to do tonight while I’m working on the book.

It’s going to be a slow day; I’m reading pages. I wish I had more to say these days, and I think that somewhere, beneath everything, I do… but it all gets sort of suppressed when you’re working full time or more. You lose track of what you think (and what you’ve thought) — you lose it to the larger structure of the day, and to the larger structure of your responsibilities and agreements.

Very few people manage to stay larger than their titles, larger than their jobs, larger than the body or canon of their work, I think. I’d like to be one of them, but I’m not there yet. I’m fighting with everything I have, but I’m not there yet.