I heard this word this other day ('retard') out of the corner of my ear and wanted to say something like,

look, it's not that you think x is x it's just that you think these terms are solid dots when they're really like ships in the distance sailing by camouflaged to look like points, you're just looking at things head on, in three-dee space even lines turn into points, even planes turn into lines, even solid objects turn into flat images that hover in front of your head.

this is what happens in three dee, brother, morality in three dee, analogies forming moral structures. sometime in high school I thought of these concentric circles or circular gradients flowing out of scattered centers, and that the amorphous and always ambiguous tangent/intersection of these gradients would be the points of friction where your and my moralities rub up against each other. put that way, in that model, everything is rendered as understandable when you're the omniscient three-dee viewer looking down onto flatland. and so on. etc.

it just gets me, just gets me when things get naturalized, when I hear things like "well, such is such", and I feel like I'm watching someone at a party lean casually with his right hand backwards onto a surface (left hand: holding beer) and that surface is in fact something very precarious: so with the combined nonchalance and glee that a party for the 'systematic disorientation of the senses' can conjure up, the hand moves backwards onto something and you can almost feel the impending crash, the host's concerned gaze turning around the room in slow motion like a lighthouse. pressure point coming down onto a ground that is shaky.

except of course the way things actually work is that in this universe of words that create themselves having said this self-confident remark it actually keeps itself alive, the horror, the joy, it is self-sustaining; and so having said it, it is true; having created it, it is made;

things like facebook, technology, privacy concerns should be seen in light of a shifting subject, a person changed by technology. the more interesting and more productive questions are 'what kind of person do we become when these things happen', and so I guess that's why at a very literal level buzzwords like "social media" irk me, rub against my fur the wrong way, because it still holds to this model of the man and his external tool. look at me, I pick up a rock to drive in a nail. by this point there should be some sort of change in framework that conceives of this all as a process of internalization, of change within occurring as the result of a catalyst called the technological object.

anyways I'm thinking these things pushing around fries and I hear this word, and I think of a three-dimensional space in which lines are seen as points and a four-dimensional space where volumes are seen as static moments and so on, and I think of 2666 and bolano's moments writing this book obsessing about minor writers, a sort of surprisingly tenderly frank series of moments of self-doubt perhaps expressed in these scenes, these long car rides taken in search of a specter that's nowhere, and what happens to me when I'm thirty, and about having kids and stressing out about walking this balance between a desire to make kids and to have kids, progeny, things left, projections into the future, words on a page, things like grammar, visual grammar of interfaces, the idea of an interface you buy into that's like the lingo of a book or the set standards of a period, the organic slow puncturing of a membrane, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc, and of course I can't talk anymore.