between me and the entire west:

I don’t like freedom. I’m not sure people should have it. To me freedom smells of slavery and inequality and rape of the weak by the powerful.

I know, this is one of those things you can’t say. But I’ve been reading politics for an hour and I just have to say it: I’m unconvinced by the New World Order and the intellectual victories it claims to have won.

And I’m unconvinced by liberty. I rather sometimes think that they should have just given Patrick Henry the death. Liberty is a luxury for the rich. The poor get “failure” which is the liberated euphemism for domination.

There are tyrants and there are realists. The rich and powerful tend to see no difference between the two. The poor thank their lucky stars for the latter, when they survive.

—

Pissssssssss.

This is a weird moment in life. Nothing is settled; nothing is even clear; nothing will be here tomorrow. I am living on dollars that don’t exist traveling to a place I’ve never been to study a field I just got into. My girlfriend is leaving weeks before that, without knowing about her visa status or whether she’ll be able to return.

Nothing here is real; it is all ephemeral; it is all liminality; it is all insersection, interspersion, internacular, interdiction. Everything is what it is not rather than what it is. It is not where we live, it is not where we lived, it is not an easy moment, it is not class as usual, it is not the building we’ll be in next year, it is not easy to afford New York, it is not yet time to really live together, it is not a mutual departure, it is not an equal arrival, it is not a familiar place to me, it is not the usual trip-taken-alone, it is not yet next semester, it is not trivial to disagree, it is not an easy moment, we are not fully awake.

—

I remember what it was like to be a kid and to have no clue that adulthood lay in wait for me. Adults were adults and kids were kids and there was no point of conjunction nor spatiospectra between the two. What I think I don’t truly remember is anything else about what it was like to be a kid.

I remember the images, the events, the names (well, some of them). What I don’t remember is the sensationof childhood, apart from the considerations of adulthood. I suppose it’s the sort of conception that inheres—whose very ontology comprises—the lack of adulthood’s presence. Once you are an adult, you can never again “remember” what it is to be a kid. You can only remember the places you went, the clothes you wore, the fits you threw. You can’t remember the being.

You can’t remember being, period—only what you sensed in being.

That is the essence of death, I suppose.

—

It’s 9.47pm on Thursday, June 7th, 2007. If this was my German I class a million years ago in high school I would have begun the day at 8.00 in the morning by saying:

“Heute ist Donnerstag, der siebte Juni, zwei Tausend und sieben.”

Of course this is nowhere near my German I class a million years ago.

No, this is the 31-year-old me, that by the calculator has as of tonight lived 11,421 nights. Birth is a strange and obtusely prophetic event that guarantees nothing but that there will at some future point be unfathomable signs and wonders upon which to reflect.

—

It is as Benjamin says.

“There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on Earth.”

I am used to feeling very much in control of my own life. Right now it feels as if I have absolutely no control over it. I don’t know what’s happening until it happens and there is a distinct difficulty at times in understanding why it is happening.

People tell me that everything is wonderful and everything really is, but my exhaustion is mounting and it seems sometimes as though my options are simply to let go and live life purely as it comes (something that runs counter to my own personal philosophy) or to risk everything just to try to regain some minimal ownership of the time and space that surround me. People keep telling me that not letting go is evidence of lack of trust or faith, or that it represents some variety of self-centeredness.

🙁

I don’t know who I am right now, I sometimes think. There exists at the moment, in addition to all the lovely things, an undercurrent of nervousness and in-the-darkness.