for a moment it's like: smiles, lapels, patterns, a dim room with a guitar, people piled in, listening with hushed tones. where is this? philadelphia, portland, san francisco. a good-bye to a house, this thing, it feels so otherly, also something very familiar and body-worn, something that makes sense yet is not part of where I am, to a certain extent, and so as I drift through this scenario saying hello to good friends who I haven't seen in a while, I wonder a little bit about where I am, if this is still new york, if these people think the same way I do, if tonight's bike ride home with blinking lights and helmets will be the same for you as it will for me, which is to say, passing by a series of group-chatter dissolving themselves away on the sidewalk, saturday eve, brooklyn, parties dissipating into the air, the sobering effect of night air, summer cool, bicycles that are startlingly faster than you remember them to be.

the question I have is of age, kind of, and tenderness, and the other side of ambition, or not, or a public face, or being in a phase in which how one is perceived alters how one is perceived. the language that you use affects the language used for you. I am afraid of finding keynes' beauty contests everywhere, discursive notions of beauty being more powerful than self-directed desires, cliches being stronger than sentimentality, etc.

in the end it comes down to being interested, and being motivated, and being swept away by the cumulative and multiplicative sum of your sensations, and balancing your material nature with the intellectual/cognitive question of altering the world, to what degree, in what way.