Of all the things in the world I find most beautiful and terrifying, time is foremost among them. Time is guaranteed to take everyone that you ever loved away from you—whether in life or in death. Ultimately, it is also guaranteed to take the world and you yourself away from you.

There is no stopping it. There is no way to know who it will take, in what order, or when.

Of course time is also responsible for delivering to you everything that you will ever love in the first place. This caveat merely makes its power so much the more strange and unapproachably sovereign.

Conventional wisdom tells one to “live in the moment,” but no matter how intently one attempts to do this the moment always seems to go long before you are able to get any living done.

with the need to post something. This need has been tempered by an almost total lack of anything coming readily to mind. It’s not that my head is empty just now—far from it—it’s just that what is going on inside my head is not happening in words.

I’ve always believed that I have something of a visual memory or maybe even a sensory memory, and with it a kind of sensory relationship to the world. Funny, of course, because I’m not a “sensuous” person in that I don’t revel in sensory experience or seek it out, nor does it always impress or stimulate me. But I think that in terms of the way that I relate to the world, it’s often as a matter of images and smells and sensations.

Today images are flitting through my brain like leaves caught on wind. Here and there, autumnal, transitory, with slightly jagged edges. Many of them will inevitably end up underfoot, then be lost forever.

—

As Hemingway quoted:

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever…The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose…The wind goeth toward the south and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits…All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”

If you could collapse the causal nexus and make anything follow from anything else in the order you wanted, would you?

If life is only temporary and days are gone before you see them, why does anything ever seem important?

If you could convey one thought to a flock of birds on the street corner what would it be?

—

There is nothing for it but to press on. One is who one is, logistical, mundane, and ethical dilemmas notwithstanding. Life goes on. Life goes on.

You sit in the dark in the middle of the night swaying to a little music and not really noticing the glow of the lights or the movement of the air at the behest of the window fan.

That’s how it goes, how the moments of life get away from you, how they get away from every generation that came before you.

You always thought that your parents were joined at the hip somehow, that other sets of best friends were joined at the hip somehow, that other employees and their bosses were joined at the hip somehow, but nobody’s joined at the hip, nobody’s joined at all; they’re all just making promises out of air and living on faith.

You can decide, if you want to, to live on faith forever. If that’s your decision, though, you’d better hope that you faith was justified, because you’re trafficking in one of those big risks. One of those psychic risks.

That’s how it goes, how the moments of life get away from you.

They’re like chord successions; they’re ephemeral, they come and go and in the meantime occupy lots of space and cause people to swing back and forth a little as though they were dancing.

In My Life remains the greatest song ever written. It may be the greatest that will ever be written.

Faith is rare, ephemeral, and transitory. When you find it, you have to act without delay, before you lose it, and with it, opportunity.

—

Yes… it’s time.

Went to sleep well after midnight, got up at 5.00, have been working since the moment I rolled out of bed. Now I will go to work, where I will work some more until 1.30 or so. Then I will study like mad until classes start at 4.00, in which I am tremendously behind both in theory and in practice. Those run until 8.00, after which I will pull out papers and type away madly until very late. Thursday morning I get up and go straight to school, where I continue to type away madly until submitting the next paper Thursday evening at class, which runs until 8.00. Then I go to a speaking event, after which I start reading Durkheim cover-to-cover?

Fuck that shit. The right answer is “then I go back uptown to The Abbey, have a couple nice ones, and go see a quiet film. Or maybe stay in and see a quiet film. Or maybe play around with photos all night.”

—

My lovely significant other is going to San Francisco for a few days. Dammit I wish I was going with her. I could use a dose of SF right now. I never thought I’d be wishing myself back to California, but this morning I feel like I’d absolutely love to be sitting around Fisherman’s Wharf gawking at tourists and feeding seagulls and reading Durkheim instead of thinking about spending a weekend inside the NSSR or I-House reading Durkhiem.

Funny thing about life… it never seems to really be unified, tied together. San Francisco represents a definite thread of my life that’s very far away right now. I suppose the same goes for everywhere but New York itself. Is this sensation of separation and lack of integration really as simple as “geographical distance?” Have I basically just rediscovered that yes, San Francisco is indeed far away from New York? Maybe I overcomplicate things.

I suppose there’s also temporal distance. Most of my “San Francisco life,” inasmuch as there is one (it’s always felt like there was) is also years back in the past. I haven’t been there in a real way since mid-2003, and I haven’t been there at my leisure since mid-2002. And those non-event (i.e. not wedding or funeral or whatever) family gatherings that used to happen haven’t really happened since sometime in the ’90s, I think. I don’t suppose those will really ever happen again—generations have shifted. If they are to happen, it will have to be my generation that organizes it, I suppose.

—

I’ve just opened the shade to find that it’s snowing in New York this morning.

I was listening to Faith No More (“A Small Victory” actually) for the first time in a very long time and I couldn’t believe how fucking beautifully tragic it was. Amazing music. Tears to eyes. Seriously, I’m 31 years old. Seriously.

Now: KMFDM.

Gonna be a good day.

It must be spring break already; the elevators are generally free.

—

Life is tragic. Consciousness is, ultimately, consciousness lost.

—

This weekend: reading and photos.

In the city, beneath the sounds of living, you can always hear (if you listen with a certain determination) the subtle ticking of an eternal clock.

The thing that sometimes gets me about peaceful places far removed therefrom is precisely the absence of this ticking…

—

I had forgotten about the novels in my phone until just now. 😉

—

The ticking, of course, is inside me.

– There are two papers due this week
– I am not putting in as much time at work as work wants me to put in
– Work isn’t paying me as much as I want them to pay me
– My PC is dying, it feels like it’s coming apart at the seams
– I don’t have equipment here (or budget) to fix it
– The backpack is routinely too heavy, I am damn tired of carrying it around
– I feel as though I’m losing touch with people
– I wish I was taking more photos
– I have a lot of photos that still need to be submitted, but there’s no time
– I never even have time to pick up my mail
– Or shop for things like soap
– I did manage to drink some orange juice this morning, though
– My pants feel too baggy these days but I can’t wear a belt right now
– I lost one hat and while it didn’t bug me then, it’s bugging me today
– I miss the road—like miss it

—

“Always keep a patch of sky above your head, little boy…”

Here we begin to see the ways in which work directly conflicts with other things in my life. Not good, not good at all, dammit.

The emergence of a paved world fundamentally changes the experience of rain—from a sullying one to a cleansing one.

—

Candle on stone ledge in front of open window in rain: fire, earth, air, water.

—

This will also be a strange day, I think. At least it feels that way to me right now. Perhaps we are heading into a strange moment overall.

—

I don’t feel as old as I am.

Many residents of the present maintain a teleological orientation toward history. The past was always horrible, tyrannical, oppressive, and to say otherwise is to condone its tyrants. The future is always a space of improvement and to say otherwise is to fail to sufficiently act in the service of such improvement. The present is sandwiched between them as the unaccusable failure. The notion that nobody in the past was ever happy or that nobody in the future will be anything but emancipated proceeds from the marketplace of politics, which claims to seek emancipation for its constituents, but which actually administers domination for its patrons, also residents of the present—albeit ones with a completely different orientation.

—

Yellow pants. Early morning. Rain on window.

People leaving. This notion haunts me and will probably haunt me until the end of life. This is the modern phenomenon that explodes sociality and belonging.

—

Gotta start th’ day off rite.

Rain outside. Hot as hell, too, in the hoodie and the coat and standing around on the subway. Thank god the fans were running and the window was open when I arrived.

A strange kind of day, like a day from a past I can’t quite remember that I’m living all over again. No, not d