words written in the week of
March 31st to April 6th
in previous years.
This was 1 month, 22 days ago

Out here, that feeling again. The elements of the world are simple: sun, water, sand, some grasses, some plants, many birds.

This is all there is, in may ways. This is what matters. This is what a life is made out of.

This is a missive from this present to your present. I just dipped into the internet a bit, and it is chaotic, mind-bending, ugly. Instead, out here, the world is clear, crisp. The priorities of a life hold shape. This is what a life is made out of.

I don't expect these words to make any sense to you. I pull up the net from the ocean, and pour it into your arms. Your arms get wet. Some puddles on the ground. But that's it. The net became the least wet thing (in the ocean) to the most wet thing (in the home).

Right now, these words are the least wet thing. I am trying to soak them up. Nothing may emerge across this transition.

What is clear is clear.

--

oh, oh, oh. oh I am holding this magic. oh I am pouring. oh I am vessel. oh I am lightning rod. sometimes here I am connected to all of these other moments that I have been more and less than a human; when my feet have blended into the ground, when I have been part of this world, when I am just an animal, just another animal, needing water and food and sun and sleep. here I am, here here here.

sometimes I get to these places and know that these are the answers. the answers are to be found here; not elsewhere. if they are to be found in books, it is books in a sun-lit room. if they are to be found in people, it is in people who can also be quiet, can listen to the world, who can open themselves up for a moment in channel and be present for all that is present.

the answer is so simple! it is to return. each glass of water an amazement in living. I remember, as a kid, talking to another kid who drank mostly soda. he didn't like the taste of water, he said. he said it didn't taste good. it didn't taste good! how was this possible? is this america, I thought?

what is at stake?

I love this question. what is at stake? somehow it feels like it peels open the world for me, it allows me to understand, for a moment, my death; how I will die, soon, here, there, whenever.

--

I sit here, off the coast of provincetown, near the ocean. it is impossibly still, and impossibly quiet, here. five and a half hours left until a deadline that represent a kind of hope for the future. part of the journey was the hope we hoped along the way, I say, a task of hoping.

This was 11 years, 1 month, 24 days ago

- for
- a moment
- the car drives by this building and the light and the angle of my vision is just so that for an instant I see through the building, two corner windows pierced skewered through with the sharp endless ray of my vision, and either the building becomes this clear open thing that for a moment is readable/understandable, or it is this moment at which the building suddenly explodes apart into discrete pieces and is felt suddenly as a lightweight being. the moment passes and the car moves and the building is opaque again, different panes sliding past each other. that was that.

yet I am somewhere else, lurching around corners, the sense of inertia and thus centripetal force pressing me against the outer boundaries of this car. tangibly felt is movement.

when one is in the midst of it, I think, that is all that exists. there is always the battle between the conceptual and the visceral, does the mapped shoreline and an understanding of fluid dynamics, the 104.5 degree angle between hydrogen atoms in aich-two-oh, do these compare to the brute power and the immensity of a beach, of an ocean? or is there an intellectual/mental antidote to the immediacy of presence, of hurt, of delight? if you are in the midst of it then isn't it all there is? and to some extent, is this not true? these visions of the world aren't skewed versions of a better reality, but more like: viscerally felt existence is really all there is; of whether one is sick, or not sick, in pain, or not in pain, healthy, or not healthy, and so on. I guess this would be like saying: there are only beaches, long stretches of land, there are only these moments of visceral experience that may prove to ultimately be paramount over anything else

in the thick of it. and not in the best kinds of ways.

This was 12 years, 1 month, 21 days ago

it's been a while.

I feel like I am full of confessions lately, but confessions that are not so much real confessions but just raw openings, admittings, sayings-to-the-world-that-get-to-the-core-of-me. on a spring day I will sit down cross-legged in a park under a tree somewhere, having biked around somewhere, and then sit and watch people laugh and run and think about the world. and say: well you know, this. and this. and this.

I am full of stoppages, of frustrations, of newnesses, of exhilarations, of questions. if there's a moment at which the lines of confusion, certainty, excitement, waiting, and all of these converge, then it is now, and I find myself waiting for something, looking for something, being nervous about something, being excited about someone, being stuck about something, etc. projects drifting in the air. potentials weighing down, pregnant. the remnants of old attempts lingering, etc. etc. etc.

blockages and stoppages. paralysis and blocks. at these points, one just should push and shit and feel free. so quotes from the past:

Nearly exactly one year ago, this time:

in ten years this will all have been hazy memory. in ten years I will chuckle to myself and recognize the same patterns, and I would have just have told myself to make something and be proud of it, to flex my muscles and feel the fibers firing, to know the joy of articulation, description, thought, system, and creation, to make and to make and to make. calculus integration is the technique of aggregating mathematically minuscule areas under the curve in order to find the total area. everything ever made is also an aggregation of the epsilon, the minuscule, the little sliver of x that is multiplied, added over a series of time and space in order to get somewhere. the epsilon of the evolution of a biological species is the genetic mutations that occur of the copying-over of chromosomes. action generates, generates, generates error and thus new value. make and make and make and eventually add it all together.

and a year and a half ago, a friend wanted to do a manifesto show, so I wrote this for her and never ended up sending it because I couldn't justify something, couldn't quite express it enough. but here it is, and upon reading it again it sounds just right for a manifesto --- which is to say, overly full of declarations, overly striving for meaning, overly cryptic, overly expressive. maybe I was re-reading hakim bey at the time. but it's all there, in all sincerity:

sort-of not-really manifesto, sept 30, 2010

Work towards the modification of my current manifesto. Everything worthwhile only happens in a process of disorientation and a loss of self: there is nothing so stagnant than wanting to have solid principles.

The deferral of initial judgement enables a critical, productive glossolalia, the originating primordial soup.

There is no good, great, skillful, or progressive, only interesting, fascinating, resolved, and obsessive.

Critically celebrate and celebratorily critique the gloss of signified signification, verbal spectacles: phrases describing semantic relationships mediated by phrases. Techniques are tools until I grasp hold of them.

Desire is a muscle, not a drive. It should be used, flexed, trained, pushed, rested, and like all other things bodily, should be fed.

Beware the normal and the formal: these are forces out of which a surprise at transgression and an alarm at impropriety originates, the muscle that arches up brackish crystallized life's single hawkish eyebrow.

Space has mass and is slow, heavy, a warm suffocating blanket, the embodiment of inertia. Move quickly out of my current geography and abandon yourself to the vagaries and vacillations of transit, before I start to stick, before I forget what it is to be lost.

The 'invasion of privacy' is a hygiene issue, like all other twists, breaks, leaks, accidents, spills: vectors that impel the drawing out of a new line, the creation of a new person-function, the formation of (your, my) newly-bounded being whose outlines and definitions will rapidly recede and be naturalized: forgotten & ubiquitous. Be enthralled by these moments when my inner organs become exposed to the world, harden to form a new outer body.

I can only tell myself what I would do because what I need, beyond anything, is for you to not be me, not a 'not-me' but to not-be me, such that we can have the most precious of ideas borne out of the fertile ground of non-ground, of agonistic conflict, of contamination, disorganization, muddying, loosening, diluting, impurifying.

This was 14 years, 1 month, 27 days ago

I'm not sure why, lately, los angeles swirls in my head, why car drives and the quality of sun and things like these are constant memories every tenth time I close my eyes, a yellow-orange sun flare, sun in your eyes, my eyes, shadows cast upon discarded models, things like these. I think about los angeles and I cry a little bit inside but instead the cry diverts itself at my neck to my mouth instead to my eyes and I make this funny little gesture with my mouth only, like a clown frown face, and it's something that I don't understand but happens to me anyways. I do these movements in elevators, on a bike, walking around, and all the while when it happens it seems that I'm thinking about LA, about cars, about the quality of cars on a freeway, that sort of experience that is so foreign to me, right now.

-

Right now everything feels so charged, so full, but I am not worried about growing older but am worried about worrying about growing older.

-

and back to LA. somewhere in some room in some darkened apartment in brooklyn someone is saying something about the sun. something about the lengthened shadows. something about the nights when it's warm out. of dangerous things, like the really scary things, like when these firefighters tried to open the locked pregnant trunk of a smoking, burnt car in the middle of herald square while a large crowd looked on; like today, when someone cried out loud in the subway, sweating, clutching his stomach, about to throw up or die or pass out, and for a second the dead realization that I don't want to see someone die right now came at me really quick in the midst of my tiredness and punctured this all, this all. all of a sudden everything changes. you get that dark taste in your mouth and the sky elongates.

-

sun in the morning and a dark-hazy-gray day. things to do and places to walk to. legs to move.

This was 16 years, 1 month, 23 days ago

consider: what I need to believe is different than what is true.

consider, I, need, believe, different, true -- all of these are overlaid sentences, like flowers that everyone has trampled on. even this analogy implies a primal purity, which is not what I want to imply. for the time being, let's progress - I have but one language and it is not mine, so what else am I gonna do on an online megaphone?

consider this: the motivating action for the process of creation (and not the process of creation itself) involves a sort of blind faith, an irrational disbelief that goes against all of my reason, like the red flags being raised when anyone says 'exclude' or 'tampered'.

consider that a movement from a still state involves an force.

consider that this action is irreverent and derisive to the tyrants and beggars of doctrines/anti-doctrines, structures/anti-structures, enlightenments/ignorances, ignorances/enlightenments.

--

you're you, and I wouldn't change your self-changing nature for the world.

This was 16 years, 1 month, 24 days ago

sublimed, reified, from my computer onto this megaphone-

== written after a dream:
can i get more than a d+?
get the value of 1 - and i circled 0
no, you can't
do labs
i'm taking a class for the core about his
okay

you had a seizure instead

obnubilate

==

cheap suits project

write transparent walls project in moleskine

the religious relics hidden within each church as inspiring game stories/adventures - finding separate parts to reunite them together to produce a mystical force

look out for digital baroque: new media art and cinematic folds
timothy murray on deleuze + new media?

(jotted during class): Is writing on the margins of the pages in ballpoint pen any more aggressive than writing in pencil? does ballpoint pen rival the hegemonic voice of the published book, the printed word in ink?

facebook photos - photoshopped into everywhere

sandcastles upon sandcastles
"it's sandcastles all the way down"

when the evidence of physical presence is itself an object of desire

all of a sudden, an image of two street artists

series of 6-million hyperplanes

blue colored flag in a blue colored sky

This was 17 years, 1 month, 21 days ago

I dropped by the MOMA today again after work. I wasn't sure what I was looking for, so I went to the contemporary galleries and started looking at the Gerhard Richter paintings that they had up. It seemed so strange to be observing them with such a casual eye, when I had spent an hour in the room a few months ago, like I was riffling quickly through books worn and understood. Acceptable flippancy, but the casual dismissing of something precious and important nonetheless.

All of a sudden I felt lightheaded, abstracted, pulled vertically apart. I realize now how lucky I am to be healthy, young and healthy and not in immediate worry about my physical operating state. It's an uncomfortable luxury, the way that pain is so transient, and I imagine asphalt and softer organs colliding, eyebrows gathering slo-mo in pain, time suddenly collapsing into units of the next moment, the next five minutes, just alive for these next few hours. Travel and culture might as well be these states on a larger level: imperceptibilities without present experiences.

I need to keep on shooting, to keep on viewing. I think I've temporarily lost what little eye I had to see power lines, weight diagrams, to watch spaces shift and compensate and solidify, attract and concentrate focus. I tried to take a photo today, and I caught myself moving things by habit, knowledge alone, with the top-heavy thought of this is how it is. Previously there at least used to be a faraway click, a gently muted sliding in, weighty coalescence, something like holding a large rectangular slab of wet clay and pressing it down onto the ground.

MOMA is good for plain surfaces. Each Monday and Friday: no people, no artwork, just one or two shots of lines and shadows, corners of rooms. The ratio of the amount of time I carry my Bessa around to the amount of time I've used it is now infinitesimal...