It’s a cold, windy morning and the streets are dim and foggy, swirling with ice and snow. The traffic has somehow disappeared, I can’t hear it or the subways at all from my little room. Instead, I think I actually hear the past out there hanging uneasily in the air, rising and falling, moaning and sighing, walking the neighborhoods of New York in search of redemption.

I almost feel as though if I don’t concentrate hard enough when I leave, I’ll step out the door and find myself in another New York—of the 20th century? The 19th? The 18th? Hard to know. It’s a brutal kind of beautiful out there, in any case, the kind that only nature, when she’s forgotten herself and isn’t being self-conscious, can inadvertently create.

—

It’s also St. Valentines day.

Happy Valentines day, u. xoxo + love.

Simple love.

than stumbling across spelling mistakes in old blog entries.

Dammit.

rather late, as has been typical lately, which means that I will have to stay at work well into the afternoon again. Dammit.

Also, I am dying for a morning infusion of chemicals. I don’t care which ones.

I fully intended to come home relatively early last night and catch up a bit on sleep, which has been—as a general sort of proposition—a rare commodity lately. Of course, in a way that is very much in keeping with my life in New York thus far, sleep proved elusive for a number of reasons and so instead I’ll once again make my way through the day with a back pocket full of delirium and the loud ticking of night-table clocks buried in the sounds of my steps.

—

The family apparently panicked in response to this “mass shooting” in Salt Lake City, even though there are drive-by-shootings and high-speed chases and gunpoint-muggings more or less continuously in Salt Lake City, which has a strikingly high per-capita violent crime rate. So far as I can tell, the only reason my family has reacted to this particular event with horror is because the media have covered it with the meme “mass shooting.” The media only covered it this way because the victims are wealthy and white, the shooter was wealthy and white, and the location was a picturesque place frequented by lots of wealthy, white members of the public on the lower east side. When the “beautiful people” get shot up, it always seems to horrify everyone. I suppose that’s how it works.

—

A sudden rush of sadness. I don’t know at what. At the ephemeral nature of life, I suppose. At uncertainty and change and the passage of time and the shrinking of futures and the short lives of mice and birds. At the loss, already pending, of this morning as a space of happening and possibility. At the already long-accomplished death of yesterday.

Bleh. I have to wake up and go.

On the west side trains platform at 42nd street a woman was playing a guitar and singing Time After Time. That’s the sort of thing that can make you pause unexpectedly on a Monday night. I went up outside and watched the lights on Times Square for a few minutes and listened, half-asleep, to the little conversations of passing pedestrians.

Suddenly I am very aware of being in New York and of being me, and of right now, this moment, sitting on a subway train while Manhattan—and an uncountable quantity of oblivious souls—sails by imperceptibly overhead.

—

Gotta get home and make a few phone calls before it’s too late. I have this phone that I pay all this money to keep operating, yet I seem pathologically unable to regularly have phone conversations with anyone.

—

I remember a day in Portland walking downtown before going to a swanky kind of pub to have a beer. I can’t clearly remember much about that particular moment other than cobblestones—endless fields of moss-covered cobblestones.

—

The process of aging is the process of losing or sublimating your fears, slowly but surely, so that you are more and more able to face the wind. Eventually there arrives a day on which all of your fears are gone. On that day there’s nothing left to live for and the wind blows you, now light as a feather, entirely away.

There was a time when I could steer after a six-pack on an empty stomach at 4.00 AM. Now 3.5 before midnight and I’m a little wavy despite myself. I guess that’s how aging works.

—

After this weekend, it feels weird to come home to an empty place at 2.00 AM.

—

I have to get up early and do some laundry.

—

Belated happy Sunday, everyone. February is almost halfway gone, and 2007 is 11.4 percent gone. Based on average US life expectancy for Men, my life is 41.8 percent gone. Give or take. Dammit time is moving fast.

Calculations like this do not make me feel particularly successful. I should stop doing them.

On the N train the conductor sounded Indian and he was chanting the station announcements like a mantra. It lent a sacral quality to the melee for once, as if the universe had finally broken through the static and into consciousness via an otherwise forgotten loudspeaker at the far end of a busy rail car.

—

There are times when I have the sense that I understand absolutely nothing about the world after all, that the things I ‘know’ are actually thin trivia and silliness, like baseball statistics or esoteric history.

—

Pigeons are perhaps the most universal component of ‘plaza’ as a concept, itself central to our image of the present. I wonder sometimes if modernity and postmodernity don’t really all boil down to the presence of pigeons everywhere and little more.

—

I was literally the first person in the building today. I don’t know what that tells me about anything. I went straight to the third floor to find the table at which I often work to be piled with light bulbs. They came and collected them a few minutes later.

Okay, kids, this is the part of the movie where the protagonist goes to the school to get a lot of work done and move the plot along.

—

Fact: work is not working for me. It is compromising my ability to:

study
live
progress
sleep

Fact: I can’t afford to be without work, so in that sense it is the highest priority in my life. At the same time, it is absolutely not something I feel the need to do and it is potentially damaging to the real priorities in my life. This is problematic. I think my ‘pay my way’ ethic needs rethinking for next year.

—

I’m not ready for another week to start. Time is fucking flying and I must arrest it.

—

For some reason, the west side trains are narrower and smaller than all the other subway trains in New York.

I think I like them smaller.

—

Tunnel time. More on the flipside.

There is so much to say I almost don’t know where to begin.
It is therefore likely that I will manage to say very little.

—

Fortune has smiled on me over the years. I suppose everyone thinks like that sometimes. Tonight I am thinking like that and smiling to myself in response. I would post more but I appear to be falling asleep. Already I am drifting in and out of a lovely dream that I am only too eager to have.

things:

– Riding a subway is an act both of faith and of transgression
– So are books stacked horizontally
– So is masculinity
– Time’s ability to heal wounds is tremendously sad
– As is the very notion of trust, since it implies the possibility of betrayal
– Blogs can get quickly out of control sometimes 😉

—

I can never decide whether I regret some subgroup of my past relationships. I certainly don’t buy the “I don’t have regrets” thing that so many people do. Anyone who has no regrets either a) hasn’t had much of a life, b) is lying, maybe even to themselves, or c) is dim. Just sayin’.

At least, I have yet to be convinced.

—

I wish there was a mariachi band in here right now. They’d get a hell of a tip.

—

Walking home, I saw a man sleeping on a cash register through one of the shop windows on Broadway. I felt as though I wanted to help him out somehow, but I don’t know what I could possibly have done for him.

—

At the right moment nearly anything in existence can take on a transcendental sheen for the right observer. To be that observer at that moment is to experience joy.

—

Already I feel as though I’ve lived a million years in New York. I look out the window and I can’t for the life of me remember what it was like to see that for the first time. I can’t remember how it felt to arrive, or what I thought about the local neighborhood. Is it the place doing this, or something in me?

I have to go to bed, I’m trying to shake a god damn sniffle.

I am suffering from a distinct lack of time to work on things that are not immediately time-critical. All of the time-critical stuff keeps floating to the top and the other things then get pushed indefinitely backward into non-existence.

Fucking hell. I am tempted once again to skip the office today (Maybe reschedule it for Saturday? I know some people are generally there then…) just so that I can get some other important things done that are absolutely not getting done.

If the school was fucking open until midnite every day, things would be _ so . much . easier _ to schedule and fit in. This “building effectively closing at 9.30 on weekdays and 7.30 or sooner on weekends” is absolutely murderous and I am beginning to get a bit cynical about the school’s seriousness and dedication when hours are considered in this light.

that is open at a library table as I arrive:

“…Photomicrography, Matches, Boy Scouts, Forestry, Marine Sport Fisheries, Metals, Distilling, Minor Arts, Salvation Army, Mycology, Agriculture, Geology, Photography and Motion Pictures, Dogs, Music, Sociology, Forestry, Plant Pathology, Etymology: Romantic and Celtic, Tea, Taxonomy, Card Games, Gambling Games, Zoology, Railroads, Color and Colorimetry, Ferns, Applied Photography and Equipment, Chemistry of Photography, Industrial Management, Icthyology, Navigation and Seamanship, Paints and Varnish, Ecology, Physics, Christian Science, Glass, Fishes, Tropical Fishes, Hardware…”

—

The entire world exists thanks only to a certain suspension of disbelief. This can break down suddenly and without warning, leaving you at the center of a maelstrom, an infantile attendee at a miasmic circus of lights and maniacal laughter.

—

never done nor undone
and without words, buried in the crux
of an empty high-rise building in New York, you
are the man of repetitions,
the harbinger of recurrent dreams,
the anonymous, indigenous calendric cycle,
inexact and unmarked;
not quite forgotten,
you are rather not yet lived—
deep green and embryonic amidst endless fields of crimson,
a deferred death,
an incarceration in a womb,
apart from apotheosis, embracing those ephemeral junctures
that lie beyond the ferrous light
whose boundary circumscribes your history
and your unheard,
ceaseless

breath

—

In the breast of a steel lion rides a heart indistinguishable from a common clump of dormant tulip bulbs. When he runs, deferred fertility passes noiselessly over the plain of Africa, held prisoner by motion, embodied being, and the tyranny of ecological context. When he dies, the bulbs decay long before the body rusts into submission. They would not have grown anyway.

—

Libraries are spaces of learning, certainly, but they are also spaces that draw futility into exaggerated relief. Tonight, here, I see a universe I will never fully inherit, no matter how long and hard I try.

Also, I feel a little odd.

Not in a bad way, necessarily.

When I first started reading I was told that the key to knowledge was the written word. That is to say that if one were to assemble the correct body of work—a precise, arcane, and enlightening project in its own right—and one were to read this collection deeply and often enough, one could understand everything that there is to know about being—about living and dying and existing and what it is all for and what everything ultimately… means.

Only in recent years have I realized (with some surprise) that I’d clung to this very belief without realizing it, always searching for the “right” books and reading them voraciously for signs and wonders, trying to assemble the body of understanding that I implicitly presumed (without being conscious of the presumption) would grant me some kind of absolution. Instead, with the realization came the requisite loss of the belief.

To have lost the belief that somewhere, in some combination of ideas lies a kind of transcendental rebirth is actually a kind of damnation, but it is also a kind of liberation, if from nothing else than from the prospect that one might actually have to read and re-read everything ever written in order to achieve salvation.

—

Printing is a prophetic technology, modern personal printers too, in much the same way as typewriters and presses. Today in particular they operate (or rather, are operated) only because we have faith in their ability to deliver knowledge to the future at the time that we engage them. There is no knowledge stored in them, and comparatively little knowledge is embodied in them. In fact they are now removed by several steps from knowledge. They are tools operated by thinking machines operated by demigods exercising little more than belief. But as tools, they project texts safely and simply ahead for generations, something that neither the demigods nor their thinking machines alone are able to do. As a result, what printing machines actually do embody, now in the “information age” more than ever, is the quaint notion of an uninterruptible continuum between present and future, and the Euclidean curve along which the future is therefore ultimately delivered to the present. Through them we can thus know what is to come in a way not possible through “online” texts or verbal communication.

All of this is also bound up in some way with inertia, which is the greatest prophetic force known to mankind, an obvious thing that’s rarely (if ever) said, since it’s so self-evident. But sometimes it’s helpful to notice such things.

—

All language is performative. Sometimes simply engaging in acts of communication (written, spoken, alexical, whatever) thus makes me feel disingenuous.

Years ago now while I was in computer science I dabbled in trying to design a purely imperative, highly structured human language. The result was a mode of schematic thought in which one was incredibly aware of the process of declaration, i.e. all state expressions had to be reconstructed as imperatives (many of them modal and scoped) that clearly demonstrated the intentionality of the speaker/writer to communicate and to do so with precision. They were thus implicitly social and also democratic in nature. I was not a linguist of course, and I was really young, maybe eighteen, so it was full of problems and naïveté, but I did write a lot of poetry in it and found it to be a strange and unique mode of expression.

I still have data from that time period on my PC, but it’s completely unintelligible now because the character and rule sets for the language are in formats only easily accessible from OS9 platforms and these are today by and large extinct and probably not worth the effort to try to reimplement, the data too fragmentary to reverse engineer.

This is the realization of information mortality (and thus of time as well), something implicitly posited during classical periods and the Enlightenment, but not perfected until late modernity’s “information age,” which ought rightly to be called (as Google or eBay would tell you), the “age of filtration.”

—

Hurm. When your blog posts look like this, you know it’s time for bed. Good night all.

Hot shower and bottle of water and all is better, cleaner, more awake. Though I do think I’ll drink a bunch of vegetable juice and similar nonsense today.

—

Two commonly held pieces of conventional wisdom about life oppose one another.

“Live deliberately,” goes one of them, demanding deliberation about one’s own life-as-object requiring, naturally, both consciousness and detachment, between object and self. You make the right decisions, says the logic, because you’re constantly aware of the decisions that you’re making.

“Live in the moment,” goes the other one of them, repeated every bit as much and often by the same people in different circumstances. This second formulation is meant to suggest the surrender of consciousness to the purely phenomenological, i.e. the dismissal of scruples and enjoyment of whatever comes your way. You make the right decisions, says the argument in favor of this position, because they’re intuitive and untainted by second-guessing or self-doubt.

As I said, these two do not go together. Also, they’re both crap.

—

There is nothing in the world so beautiful as the frozen moment, because to stop time is to annihilate mortality while making possible the immortality of otherwise transitory joy. This is why photographs are so compelling: overpowering the temporal nexus itself, they appear to grant a carefree eternal life at the engagement of one’s choosing.

This is not a new idea, but sometimes I can’t help but stumble over it and gape at it for a second.

It must have been cold last night. I left the fans running like usual (one in window, one on ceiling) and upon waking up it was fscking freezing in here. As a result, I feel a little iffy, as though a headcold is trying its damnedest to climb on board here. Maybe the sensation will go away as the day goes on, we’ll see. I suppose I have to start turning the fans off and using blankets.

—

I’ve crossed the 400 threshold at Alamy. That’s slow, dammit. My intention when I started listing with Alamy was to hit 1,000 by January. Maybe I can at least hit 500 by April. Bleh.

—

I’m feeling a bit uninspired today. I suppose that’s what Mondays are good for. Wait, I just remembered all of the reading and related work I have to do. Now I am quite, uh, “inspired.” Hahahahahaha.

Okay, okay, yeah, I feel stupid after writing that, I’ll admit. Wake up, me. Gotta wake up and get to work.

I’m gonna go shower and drink a V8 or somethin’.