Too short a time.

Queasy.

and this culture.

As soon as I get my Ph.D., I’m leaving.

So here I sit on the New School campus once again, in school, as it were. The place is teeming with students, busy as ever, just as it was when I left.

It feels very strange to be here, as though I’m back somewhere I never expected to return. For the second time since returning to New York, I really don’t know what to do with myself. I am at a total loss.

I suppose this is where I’m supposed to be, though, and I assume that if I sit here long enough, it’ll all come back to me…

Am I ready?

No, I don’t think I am. :-

Early Saturday morning. I’m the only one in the building awake, I swear. The whole place is utterly silent and utterly empty, but nice and bright and well-lit thanks to the sunlight streaming in through all the windows.

At times like this I always feel tremendously optimistic for some reason. Not only does it feel as though the whole virgin day stretches invitingly in front of me—it also always feels like there are no limits to what can be accomplished. I convince myself that this day, unlike all those other days, will see the completion of all the things I’ve been meaning to do in my recent life, and perhaps even that on this day important things that will happen that will really mark the beginning of the rest of my life.

Of course that’s before I reach 3.00 or 4.00 pm (or sometimes even just noon) and realize that this day is disappointingly like any other.

Still, the sensation is not easy to ignore or dismiss. I just wish I knew or understood what it was actually trying to tell me to do. Join a Buddhist monastery? Buy tickets to Berlin on a whim? Take a train to Maine?

I suppose one of these mornings I’ll find out.

—

Yesterday saw snow in New York for the first time this season. Maybe that’s why I decided to walk home from work, 100 blocks from the low edge of the flatiron district to the top reaches of Morningside Heights along Broadway. The walk was cold and strange at first, but it quickly took on a sensation all its own, leading me past Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, through Times Square, halfway around the Columbus Circle and Central Park, past Lincoln Center, and past Columbia as well, all in the dark, with snow swirling around me.

It took me a couple hours, but with the snow and the evening lights of the city it was absolutely beautiful, one of the nicest evenings I’ve had since I got here in September.

—

Back to Saturday Morning.

I just realized that class starts next week and that I’ll soon see all of the school people again. It’s a strange thought somehow, as though I’ve been unexpectedly told that characters are to be jumping out at me from a (formerly) fictional storybook in a few short hours and I should prepare myself for the spectacle.

Am I prepared? Who knows.

Claremont & 116th. It’s been a long day and a long year. Maybe the longest in my life. I am finally here, really, completely, certainly here, on my own, with open evenings ahead of me for the first time in ages, maybe decades.

I feel a kind of deep satisfaction, but also, at the same time, a deep loneliness. I have realized tonight, too, that for the first time in a very, very long time, there is no woman I my life that I can turn to, or at least that I am inclined to turn to for companionship and understanding.

Finally, finally it’s just me & the world… just me & New York… just me & the evening.

One of the things that struck me most about New York when I first got here was how easy it had been for me to feel at home, without really even thinking about it. Everything was automatic and I was completely comfortable with the place and never as conscious of my own being as I have often otherwise felt in my life.

It was all so transparent. To put it another way, I slid right into a very nice groove and stayed there, tapping my feet and humming along. There were other problems, sure, but New York itself wasn’t one of them.

Coming back, I feel that old consciousness of self again. “Here I am,” I feel as though I am constantly thinking to myself, “with a wall over there, and a window over here, and a bookcase and a chair, and it’s 70 degrees or so in here, and these are my hands, and it’s about 8.00 in the evening, and…”

So the question is… What happened? Why now that I come back to New York is everything different and back to its old, uncomfortable, “gotta move on before too long” self? Will this sensation go away? Am I just doomed to always be stuck with it, no matter where I go?

Gaaaaaaaah!

I met a man with seven wives…

Once again I’m hopping a plane alone in the middle of the night to land alone and go home alone. Even while I’ve supposedly not been alone in recent years I have, in actuality, done an awful lot of this alone. Hopefully that will change someday. For now, back to New York.

So here’s the thing… I’ve just realized that I can make blog posts from my mobile phone now. So… it’s likely going forward that the stream of posts will be endless, provided that this first attempt at a phone post works out.

—

I fly back to NYC in just a few short hours now. I feel so fscking liminal right now it’s ridiculous. But, as a good friend recently told me, I should be happy—I’m going home.

We’ll see. Hopefully that’s how I feel when I get there. (And for some time afterward as well, seeing as how I’m reasonably committed to staying there for several years.)

The flight, at least (I just found out), will be nonstop this time. 6.00 tomorrow morning I should be hoppin’ the airtrain. 10.00 I should be sitting on 26th street… at work.

It’s hard to decide anymore when I’m going ‘back’ to normal life. that, I suppose, is the real project these days: to try to build one to go ‘back’ to.

Complicated things, feelings. As easy as it is to assure oneself at any troubled emotional moment in life that in future one will control and master and understand (wisely, no less) one’s own feelings, when the moment for having them actually rolls around, there’s no control whatsoever. Feelings, whether the product of enculturation or pituitary, are deeper than any conscious attempt to master them.

They are also, not coincidentally, quite irrational and quite delightful as well.

—

I’m leaving Salt Lake City in a moment. White I do feel a bit apprehensive of the return trip, I can also say with some authority that for the first time in a long time I don’t feel as though I’m losing something by leaving the place where I am. That, ladies & gents, is damn nice.

—

Funny thing… It is often the case that the people you miss most in life are the people you can least afford to tell.

Time on break is running short. I’m not looking forward to the plane trip back. I suppose that’s not quite accurate—what I’m really not looking forward to is having to make the transition once again. These transitions are so jarring, each time I change locations. They are starting to affect me in a deeper way than I think I’m used to realizing. We humans aren’t designed for this—countless millennia of evolution have molded us into beings that specialize in getting to know and master our environments inside and out. We are specialists at analysis and systematization. Now, in modernity, we suddenly begin to shift contexts virtually instantaneously. Every last detail of the environment around us, even down to the social network that we are a part of and the dialogical techniques required to traverse it, is concomitantly shifted in a clean shear event each time we travel.

We don’t have the evolutionary adaptations to deal with this kind of total and universally simultaneous variability. We aren’t easily this flexible; it renders our wonderful systematizing and analytical skills effectively moot, because it tends to render our knowledge and observation moot.

Every time I do this I feel completely and entirely destabilized and lost.

Also, plane trips from west to east (or vice versa) are very long and a pain in the ass and I’m not looking forward to that, either, nor the airtran and subway ride back from JFK. Not to mention the strange apprehension I have here now, as though I’ve never been on the subway in my life.

Shifting contexts again. It’s like being a dozen different people, each of them different, one “me” for each place I’ve lived, none of them quite the same or with quite the same personal history.

So it seems as though there ought to be something insightful to put here, but really it’s just another night so far. I was watching the times square stuff on the tube for a while and I didn’t really have the feelin’. No idea why. I guess I’m just too old now. Birthdays? Whateva. Xmas? Right, okay. New Year? Sure.

In general the people I love best are far away from me most of the time and many have been pushed to the fringes of my life. This seems like a backward state of affairs, but when they are nearby I’m not necessarily happy (in fact, experience shows the opposite). I suppose this state of affairs is called ‘modernity.’

—

“He roller coaster
He got early warning
He got muddy water
He one mojo filter
He say ‘one and one and one is three’
Got to be good looking ’cause he’s so hard to see
Come together right now over me”

—

Okay, so there’s something wrong these days. I keep starting email messages to friends, then aborting them halfway through and never sending. I open up the blog form and then close it again. I pick up the phone to dial, then put it away again, bewildered.

I am losing something. Words, mostly. Thoughts. Insights. Something deeper than that that has no name. Why is it that I don’t have anything to say anymore to anyone, and what does it mean for my future? Is it simply that too many things have happened in the last few years and some part of me has gone on sabbatical to collect itself?

Or is it something more simple and maybe a little bit frightening? Say, an indicator that I have made the wrong choices somewhere along the way and am living in the middle of a life that isn’t exciting me, that isn’t quite what I want, in which I am not terribly motivated to participate or reflect, but am rather merely going through motions?

I wonder. Sometimes recently I wonder. Was Alaska right? I don’t know. If there is something that is “supposed” to be (however you want to interpret such a phrase, whether allusory, theologically, colloquially or whatever), I don’t think it was Alaska. Maybe it was staying in Chicago, though somehow I don’t think so on that count either. If there is something that “would really keep me awake” versus the “I’m falling asleep, maybe” problem I seem to have just now, I suspect it’s something that I’m not aware of.

I don’t know. I want to be excited, I want to be motivated, I want to not want to go to bed because I’m so engrossed I can’t possibly sleep and to wake up at 5.00 in the morning because I can’t wait to get back to whatever it is.

But I don’t know what it is.

Once, a very long time ago, it was programming and computer science.

Then, for a while, it was writing, arts, poetry, blah, blah—”creative” stuff.

Later, it was academics, social theory, film, criticism.

More recently, it was a certain motorhome for a while… and then photography…

But there is no “life’s work” here. There is no “life’s work” anywhere in my life—not a significant other relationship, not a coherent ‘career,’ not a child to raise, nor a book to write, nor a quest to complete. That is what is missing—some notion of a life’s work.

Or maybe I’ve just come full circle back to what I’m always moaning about on this godforsaken blog: that I need a reason to wake up in the morning and so far I don’t see it. That I’m a single adult in this wilderness of urban modernity and capitalism that we’re supposed to embrace as “the best of all possible worlds.”

Dammit, I hate it when I realize I’m repeating myself over and over and over again.

“So what are you gonna do about it?” I can hear some of my friends asking.

I dunno. Take steps maybe. I almost did the other day. Silly, uncouth steps. But steps nonetheless. Maybe I do something crazy as hell, which I’m thinking right now but don’t really want to write. Probably I won’t, at least yet. Probably, for the moment, I’ll just go to bed, get up, and go to bed again for the next seven days, then fly back to New York and do the same for a few more years. Maybe I’ll try to have faith in New York for a while.

I suppose that sounds like a plan.