So I’m posting this from an NEC MobilePro 900 that I’ve just upgraded to Windows CE.NET 4.2, a nice ersion of embedded windows that contains Pocket Internet Explorer 6.0 rather than the previous (often usless) versions.

Along with the USB Clik! driver and the Orinoco wirless network driver, plus a 512MB CompactFlash card, this thing is essentially a little mini-laptop weighing in at a pound or so, about the size of a Zagat guide (or a couple of checkbooks stacked on top of each other, for those of you not in New York).

It’s actually pretty damn cool. Only drawback: still a DSTN screen, no active matrix here. That makes it much less “lookable” than the nice active matrix screens on “real” laptops, but the trade-off is that you get a half of day of battery life or more in the exchange.

Combined with SoftMaker Office, it’s basically about as much as a person needs to carry these days to completely compute.

but there hasn’t been a moment at which I both wanted to write while at the same time also having time to write.

I’m still not sure that I’ve arrived at such a moment. I have other, pressing things to do and I’m not in a particularly good state of mind.

But I did want to observe something about all of these years of blogging and all of the many long years of periodic despair and indignation that friends and family have seen me go through, some of them worrying if it was a matter of depression or “emotional problems” as they say.

It isn’t and it never was. The despair that I feel on days like today is, quite simply, a despair at the way things are. Not about my own shortcomings, not even about the suffering on earth, but more a kind of helpless anger and sense of betrayal at what other human beings are—it is the values that they “hold dear” that cause me despair, the things that they claim as rights, the practices that they embrace as “right.”

It is not the despair of the depressive but the despair of the malcontent that I feel. A despair at capitalism. A despair at individualism. A despair at “freedom” (read: western style liberalism). Yes, all of these things cause me despair. And the fact that by proclaiming that they cause me despair, I place myself solidly in the role of sociopath, outcast, criminal, untouchable, evil—that also causes me despair.

There has always been a constant dialectic for me between wanting to be part of human society, wanting human connection, and the deep sense of anger and indignation that I feel about the very structure of society and my inability to express it if I want to be a part of society.

I don’t like the way things are. And more to the point, I don’t like the “idealistic dreams” that people have for society. That’s what causes me despair… the fact that I don’t seem to share in the universal dreams of humanity. In fact, they seem ugly to me. I have opposite dreams. I can either keep them to myself and live as a hypocrite, feeling a deep, unexpressed indignation at the bulk of human discourse and action, or I can openly embrace my own moral universe and in the process cut myself off from most other humans and from most opportunity that sustains the barest physical comfort.

Today again I’m feeling stuck in the middle of this tension, feeling as though life itself is a kind of ingenious hazard or trap in which, as everyone knows, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

In short, you are damned, and that’s worth despairing over.

If liberation is imagined not just to be freedom-to but also freedom-from, one of the complications of life in a disciplinary society is the way in which it problematizes liberation by pitting these two against each other not just at the external, coercive level of sanctions but internally at the level of phenomenology.

Increasing discipline correlates precisely with increasing responsibility; the more free one is to move about and act, the more one is forced to take on the unhappy role of the overseer and executioner of dear ideas and heartfelt impulses.

Non-imprisonment becomes something of a threat. The less one is shackled, the less one is cognitively comfortable. Only in a concrete cell can one think clearly. Of course, being able to do so doesn’t provide any advantage, since there are few ways to act physically or socially while inside said cell.

I suppose it’s a truism by now that “freedom” makes for unproductive idiots. It certainly doesn’t make for “happiness” any more than imprisonment does, if one takes the giant yet often implicit rhetorical leap of drawing a line between it and “liberation,” whose positive connotation saves us the trouble of having to conjure with denotative entanglements at this point.

—

Yeah, it’s all nonsense.

—

I’ll just be a sociologist and count how many people use blue sheets vs. how many people use red sheets via a survey, and then muse about the implications of these numbers for workers in the blue and red dye industries and whether or not this will affect their selection of cantaloupes, between big cantaloupes on the one hand, and small cantaloupes on the other…

on a community college campus in Queens, New York.

It’s feels like it’s been a million years since I was in a wholly neutral space, a space devoid of complications. There are no distractions or temptations, no interruptions, no traffic noise, no difficult positions or uncomfortable temperatures. There is, in fact, nothing of particular bodily, emotional, or intellectual importance here.

It’s a kind of miracle.

There is nothing more precious than disconnection when one lives in the city. This sort of thing is almost impossible to find, almost unheard of. It’s only because I’m a college instructor with keys that get me into places like this that I even have the experience.

—

It’s tough to get perspective from within the wild, frenetic confines of everyday life, always tugging at you in multiple directions. Even your “own” space is so full of your own personal status quo that it appears to create a kind of ideology of the self that is difficult to overcome, that makes clearheadedness or unbiased thinking almost impossible.

What am I doing here?

Is this adjunct lecturer and budding academic thing really working out? Is it, in fact, time to move on? I keep hearing my wife’s questions about stability and comfort; they’re echoing through my head.

Sitting here in this quiet area with the first real break I’ve had in months, where there is nothing to do even if I wanted to and no-one to stop me from doing it even if they wanted to, I realize just how much of my life has become stoicism and struggle. What I do, mostly, is grit my teeth and press on, steal a nap here or there, feel guilty for being behind schedule, and do my best to catch up without completely throwing quality or integrity out the window, though I know I’m never doing my best work anymore and maybe haven’t for years, simply as a matter of always being rushed, distracted, and overinvolved.

It’s a sort of anti-Zen existence, if there can be such a thing. There is zero peace, zero centeredness, zero freedom from immediate desires or needs—in fact, it seems as though life has become nothing but a series of rapid emotional-intellectual reactions or reflexes. I am that automaton of popular literature, simply tottering about manically according to my “programming,” trusting that someday I’ll wake up and be a person once again.

—

This all sounds horrifically dramatic, I know.

But maybe it’s time to reconsider the New School. They haven’t really done anything for me lately, and these days whenever I say the words I almost feel as though I want to spit teeth in frustration.

And maybe it’s time I think about writing again. I know I never made enough money at it, but maybe now I’m better equipped, more mature, can write things that more people actually want to read, and can do my part to market them more effectively.

God knows I miss writing.

—

I don’t know what tomorrow will be for; the list of things to do is many seasons long. I do know that this has been an incredibly precious twenty minutes, sorely needed, and almost not discovered.

I need more of this—more silence, more walls, more empty spaces, more of the incredible freedom of enclosure, unmovement, and isolation. It helps me to think, to make head or tails of the universe.

I just don’t know whether it’s possible to get it on anything like a regular basis when one lives in New York City.

ought to be executed.

Period.

—

Those of you who think that I am exaggerating or that this is hyperbole, I assure you that it is not. I will happily press the button to lop the heads from your bank employee relatives when the time comes.

They will be the

first . against . the . wall . when . the . revolution . comes

and we as a society and as a planet will revel in their blood loss. Capitalism is the joy and the surging life force that has sustained these functionaries and bureaucrats for long enough.

Let them die.

Let them die horribly.

Amen.

—

The American people and the globe, I suspect, are with me, given current economic conditions.

Let them die.

Let them die.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/opinion/02cohen.html?_r=1

Birthday over.

Thirty-three, I believe. Aside: title already taken. Commentary: owell.

—

This is a “second keyboard” sort of post.

This is a “two keyboard” sort of life.

—

There was a morning in southern California at ABC-CLIO, after I started riding a bicycle to work, when I sat against a concrete cylinder on the grounds and wrote about sailboats in a harbor and the changing of seasons. This is essentially my only fond memory of the region or the epoch.

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Miserable periods of life are notable for two things: 1) poignancy, 2) sensuality. The sun, the pavement, the sun, the pavement, the meaning of it all, the day after day, the lie of it all, the ecstasy.

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I bought two small $2.99 plants at Home Depot, both ivies (one medium light, one low-light) because I believed that they would help to wick away stress and promote tranquility in material-visual phenomenological being. So far so good.

—

Car needs a new blower and a new seal around sunroof. In a day or two it will pass 221,000 miles, all on original engine. At some point it will have to be replaced, I presume, though the thought of a “public transit life” always hovers about the edges of a New York individual biography.

—

Two fans in my laptop and both are getting older/slower/louder/less effective. Yes, I’ve used canned air. I’ve even had the damned unit totally into pieces replacing hingeset, MiniPCI cards, and the like. Dust removal = temporary fix, but eventually this will die.

—

Eventually everything will die.

—

The USB RAID-1 I have sitting here has a pulsating blue LED when it’s in powersave/sleep mode. I remember when blue LEDs were invented. It is only a few years ago. Japanese guy, like all worthwhile inventions.

—

The Kindle is officially a tremendous waste of money and at the same time also the most worthwhile thing I’ve purchased in years. It was instrumental in helping me to pass my graduate exam with honors and has been a critical factor in the acceleration of my nonfiction and fiction reading as of late. Hooray, Kindle. Bigger brain, me.

—

“Love” comes in all shapes, sizes, and sensibilities. I have “love” for many of my friends. If only that meant that I could actually do something for them, the purpose of love’s relative diversity would be much more apparent.

—

The tires will burst soon. Cities are hard on tires.

—

Meanwhile, bicycle season is approaching again. Good thing, too. I remember when I could ride my bike to work. Funny, that. Everything was perfect in many ways and it was the least happy period in my life so far.

—

I’m officially learning many languages as of this month: German (re-learning/perfecting), Polish (how can you not speak it if your wife does), Chinese (goddammit, the family speaks it why haven’t I yet) and Arabic (why not?) are on dock. Others later, in no particular sequence, certainly not as correlated to either need or utility.

—

New York Subways are a kind of wombcoon that foster anti-ennui in the soul. The indescribable sense of “being on the subway” cannot be conveyed to or shared with anyone who has never actually experienced it.

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Were I “on the subway” right now, all of this would be twice as important yet half as critical.

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My neck is sore lately.

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I remember having a soapstone African figure of the sort that is all too common. I bargained for it at a fair with a person whose accent was such that I almost couldn’t understand it. To my shame, the figure is long lost, my thoughts about the figure are rare, and they are heavily oriented toward the figure itself rather than toward its origin.

—

I don’t think I crossed the Midway more than once or twice in Chicago. I miss Chicago, even as I love New York.

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There is more than enough culpability to go around. Those who are most willing to condemn are least willing to accept or evaluate it.

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In general, the consensus about parking lots is that they are not particularly inspiring. The parking lots of national forest campgrounds, national park trails, and national monuments, however, are of a uniquely different caliber: they make one feel not only alive but also primordial, expansive, natal, and explosive.

—

There is no such thing as a soul.