Life management = not my strong suit. In particular, I suck at managing time, money, and health. That’s pretty much everything so I’m a little in trouble.

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Things:

– I will be calling CEOs all week at work
– I want to send more and more to Alamy but no time to do it
– I need to read and write more and meta-act less
– I need, absolutely, positively, to shoot much more
– I have sore muscles here and there
– I bought money management software but never used it
– Community is essential but it is also self-rationing
– Thinking about religion makes me tired and depressed
– My career in publishing is clearly over
– It sounds like winter again outside instead of spring
– Late again, late again

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People change as they age. This seems obvious, but at the same time it can really be a shock to watch the personalities, interests, and givens of people you know, friends, etc. evolve in directions you never would have imagined or that are opposite your own directions.

I know they must feel the same ways about the people in their lives, including me. It’s a little unsettling because you are actively losing people you once knew as they are replaced by new people.

The notion of putting things inside of other things (i.e. plugging a cable into a device, putting food inside a box, etc.) is unique to humankind and the higher primates, for the most part, and is really a “modern human” (in the anthropological sense, so ca. a few dozen thousand years) development.

This implies that the notion of nonsubjective interiority is a high order conception. But maybe that’s not really the case and I’m extrapolating more than is justified.

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Second post within a couple of hours. I’ve been working on photos and I feel a kind of deep frustration right now at something or other, but I can’t tell what.

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I was never the little boy that wanted to be a fireman, a police officer, a soldier, a construction worker, or any of these “man” professions.

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People really do have a radically broad range of personalities. I see some of the people living here at I-House and I think “how can you possibly be that way?!”

This is despite my early university education in cultural anthropology.

I think the thing that shocks me most is the variety of speech acts and, more specifically, the framings of experience and naiveté that they imply. The categories of experience and naiveté are amongst the most problematic in human interaction because they concern themselves directly with what, for lack of a better term, I will call cultural ontology while at the same time being indexes to respect (or the lack thereof).

I routinely see these interactions here at I-House in which one person demonstrates to another his or her sophistication, in response to which the latter’s eyes twinkle in that “geez, aren’t you a silly hick?!” way. It’s easy to grant the relativism of almost anything other than sophistication, to which for some reason in modernity/postmodernity in particular we attribute a kind of absoluteness akin to the speed of light in a vacuum.

Sophistication, metropolitanism, and cosmopolitanism are supposed to be the acultural underpinnings of a new hypersaturated, all-encompassing epistemological transcendence, but instead they are just like scarification or child-rearing practices, only very few people realize this, instead positing a kind of universal world-weariness where none exists.

I have no idea what I’m saying at this point, I’ve been here in silence for too long and all words are once again beginning to mean the same thing.

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I remember walking in Chicago in the rain in various kinds of emotional distress at various times of the year listening to varying pieces of music. At one point it was the Pumpkins’ “Soma,” then later it was Neubauten’s “Ich Gehe Jetzt,” then finally, before I left it was Fleetwood Mac and “Dreams.”

Ironic, that.

You always suppose or posit in advance an awareness of the ephemerality of your current state of affairs in general, but this is totally different from actually living and knowing. I don’t know why it should surprise me that imagining and predicting are different from living and knowing, but nonetheless it does.

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It’s getting late and I’m getting stupid. ;-P

on which I want desperately to post but on which I feel an utter lack of words. I say that but I also wonder at times like this whether a lack of words isn’t really just a lack of the courage to write them or to face what I think at all.

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I stood up and walked to the other side of the room and noticed a small puddle of muddy water on the floor right where I was squatting. It somehow makes me happy to see evidence of my having been here tonight; I feel something like a ghost.

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I’m imagining a scene in which a man comes home from work by subway after long hours at the office. As he goes up the stairs from the station to the street he sees a small flower growing in a crevice where the station meets the sidewalk. His first impulse is to pick it and carry it home with him, but just as his fingers clench the stem he feels a pang of guilt and stops. He lets go, stands up, and backs away, bumping into several people. He walks half a block to the corner and has to wait to cross the street. While he waits he looks back toward the station. At first he feels shock, believing the flower to be absent, but then he realizes that his view is obscured. He shrugs and walks home, but when he arrives he feels an incompleteness about the day and pours himself a double scotch before going to bed early.

—

I took the 3-train home even though it was on the 1-train track and hit the 1-train stops. I did this because the MTA man on the platform told me it was a 3-train making all 1-train stops. What I want to know is why it’s a 3-train in that case… if it’s on the track of the 1-train and it makes those stops, then why is it not the 1-train? One car in the train had the (1) sign out, but all the other cars had the (3) showing.

I don’t suppose this puzzle merits this level of attention or is indeed even a puzzle at all.

I’m gonna work on some photos, I think.

Dammit, I hate it when that happens. The level of complexity in social interaction on the smallest scale is still staggering.

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It’s not a trivial task to think critically about oneself; just coming to the threshhold of the process is like trying to identify north, south, east, and west in the middle of the desert with eyes closed.

somewhere in Chicago, too… Sitting outside in front of I-House in the wee hours sensing the weight of everything gone before and everything to come in the tepid air and quiet hum of the city. There is no salvation. Or rather, salvation is sleep, if you can find it.

We are all orphaned souls.

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“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Tr

It is invariably on the nights that I don’t want to do so that I am forced to walk dozens of blocks to get home. Somewhere a million miles from here is a better way. Here, however, there is merely Broadway.

Broadway and the omnipresent, endless list of all the things that have gone before. These are of course one and the same thing in some way, especially at 2.00 in the morning on 100th Street with no subway running.

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Years ago in undergrad a friend told me that it’s not enough to care if all you do with that caring is regret everything once it’s already happened. Every now and then I think back to that person and feel like finding them just to say, “I suppose it’s that much better to use your caring to make someone feel miserable and guilty about their own way of caring? Or even better, to use your caring to make them stop caring at all?”

Humanity will not get along. There is no justice for existing sins to be found in such a transmutation. And we are far too far along in history to find any sort of a resolution without justice—even vengeance—for everyone that has ever been wronged.

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A sociologist? I’m not even a scholar. I’m a lost facet of misguided conscience. I’m a stone-hitter.

Everything is theorized. Theory becomes canon. Canon foreshadows embodiment. Everything is retheorized.

Do I buy this? Does it matter? Surely not.

If I don’t become a “professor” what will I do? Is there anything else I want to do? (To generate income, that is.) Do I even want to do that? Surely not.

What do I want to do? Have a clam bake. Be a grandfather to someone, maybe. Read a nice novel. Pick berries. I guess none of these generate income. Fuck, I don’t know. I suppose it’s a silly question. That is the enlightenment of the far east: the recognition that they are all, without exception, silly questions.

—

A man in a Raiders jacket. God that’s a strange thing to see in New York—it absolutely doesn’t belong here. Raiders belong to another world completely alien to this one. It’s like rounding a corner and coming face to face with the Tin Man as he tries to hail a cab and bitches about Bloomberg.

He’s clearly drunk. Well I can tell him why: he’s completely out of context and it’s driving him to the bottle.

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I remember that when I was very, very small my parents built me a makeshift sandbox on an empty patch of dirt. It didn’t actually have a bottom on it, but they filled it with a couple of bags of beach sand (God knows where from) anyway. As I got a little older I was able to dig deeper and deeper. It didn’t occur to me that I had transgressed the nonexistent “bottom” of the box and was at that point just digging in backyard. I implicitly thought it to be magic and without musing about it knew only too well that my sandbox went all the way to the center of the Earth.

I totally had my alarm set to get up today… but when it went off I did two things that did not strike me at the time to be contradictory to one another: I hit the 10-minute snooze option, and I put the phone on silent.

Of course the result is that the alarm has been going off in utter silence (tree in forest, anyone?) for rather a long time and in the meantime, I am somewhat late.

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I need to work on my verbal skills.

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I don’t want to live in New York forever. By the time another year or three have passed I’ll be dying to go somewhere else. Somewhere rustic or provincial, no doubt.

…and have been gone for quite some time. I opened my door to the scent of star anise, wrapped in a hint of sweetness. It’s one of those gorgeous surprises that life gives to you only when you aren’t asking for one. When I stepped to the window ledge and turned on a little paper shade lamp given me by a friend, the whole world became a soft, sweet glow on a March evening.

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Sometimes I wonder if there has ever been anything or anyone, anywhere, at any time, that was not absolutely beautiful in one way or another. I suppose I’m a romantic. There are worse things to be.

Everybody who blogs has off weeks during which everything they write is both facile and trite. Part of the experience, I s’pose.

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I didn’t pack the newton keyboard, the power adapter, or extra charged batteries. Now that feels like a minor mistake. We’ll make it work though—could be interesting to try to write a paper or two by digital pen.

My girlfriend said something to me today that’s got me thinking about every major city I’ve ever been in and my own relationship to writing and living. I guess I’ve been thinking again about place and space and the degree to which they can change your experience of the world.

NYC is a lovely place, not because it’s beautiful, particularly, but because it’s so functional. Everyone here is reasonably sane, everything here runs reasonably on time. There’s a minimum of nonsense and it’s easy to make it, emotionally. But somewhere in that shuffle, something is also lost—at least for someone like me who’s a little more reflective and circumspect about life.

Writing in particular isn’t easy here. Everything just sort of flies past you, like the tunnel appears to do when you’re riding the subway train—without your noticing a thing, from beginning to end. In San Francisco and Chicago, writing is easier. In Chicago, words were just falling out of me constantly—there was a pathos to the place that was unbelievable. San Francisco affects me in a different way—it’s a more quiet, timeless place, but it’s inspiring as hell in a way that really creeps up on you.

New York is actually like Salt Lake City or Portland or Austin for me in that nothing comes to mind when I think about or in these places. Not only do I not really have the drive to write anything here, but when I try to force myself to do it, I’m empty—I’m thinking more about getting lunch or how much time I need to reserve for a train ride or when my bills are due.

Is it the architecture? The people? The natural climate and geography? Is it something deeper? Maybe nobody’s happy enough and nobody’s hurt enough in these places where I can’t write. There are deep reservoirs of joy and sadness in San Francisco and Chicago that bubble just below the surface, always trying to come out. Seattle seems sort of the same to me. Vancouver is a different sort of place, neither one thing or the other—maybe because it’s Canadian and I don’t really have a good feel for Canada in general, beyond being in awe of the degree to which it’s functional in a completely non-American way.

Los Angeles is different in that there’s no joy bubbling beneath the surface—there’s none of that “agony and ecstasy” tension that inspires a person to do things, there’s just layer beneath layer beneath layer of agony, lost paths, and broken dreams. Las Vegas seems the same.

I don’t know enough about Dallas or Denver or Nashville or Boise to comment on them. New Orleans seemed the sort of place that would get one thinking, but it also seemed dangerous in a very deep way—as though even the strongest person might lose themselves there, get swallowed whole by the ghosts of the place, never to be heard from again.

Nothing I’m really getting at with this post, I don’t think, beyond all of this. I’m just musing, basically.

in Taiwan, or China, or the Soviet Union, I would know about 20x more now than I actually do, about everything in the universe. Also, I’d probably be happier. And, I’d most likely be complaining about these very places and the degree to which they limited my personal choices.

Life is a funny thing. I suppose there is something to the “paternal state” metaphor. Maybe the thing is for everyone to live in a strongly centralized, highly competitive state until 20 or so, then toss them into laissez faire markets in some other segment of society.

I don’t know, I talk nonsense. We should simply build the computers and let them control us. Better yet, put us all in the fucking Matrix. I don’t mind.

That’s all, just no idea. Because I don’t have enough money to know anything. Because I’m too old to know anything. Because I have read too much to know anything. Because I have drunk too much to know anything.

—

How do I feel? No idea. What will I do today? No idea. What will I do in general? No idea. Who is asking? No idea.

—

Wreckage and ruins. Apropos terms, those—clear as a bell and straightforward as hell.

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I haven’t yet managed to see a single gallery in New York, nor a single show of any kind. I was much more engaged in Chicago. I think L.A. took the piss outta me.

Yes, I’m apparently the sort for whom going to a movie theatre is generally surreal, like a rift in reality opening up in front of me. All of this sound and fury and construction and scale just to entertain a handful of people with a picture of something called into existence precisely for the occasion? The conceptual architecture of the spectacle is by its nature circular and surreal. Maybe this is why I like Benjamin so much. I don’t think he could entirely suspend disbelief either.

It’s been quite a while since I did the theatre thing, actually—at least a year. Not a bad sensation. But certainly a very specific kind of sensation.

The world is too complicated and everything is too inescapable. Beh. Meh. Blah. I’m gonna go and see a film tonight. Then, later, I’m gonna resurrect the Newton and start using it instead of the laptop sometimes. Also, I’m gonna drink some Pernod, which has been flowing into me all day like The Force.

If Durkheim or Weber come looking for me, tell them I’ve moved to Scotland. If anyone else comes looking for me hide me under a blanket, sit on me, and tell them that nobody’s come along matching my description so long as you’ve been sitting there.

Meanwhile, I’ll be taking the 1-train, which is sometimes fast enough to outrun the past, but very iffy on weekends. If nothing else, I’ll fondle the hell out of those giant statues in the Time Warner center.

Dammit.