I think it somehow makes sense that, when it turns this kind of spring evening sunset vibe, it feels like the world is about to end. not necessarily end as in an eschatonic catastrophic tumult, but more like a fade to black, the film credits run, signifying your departure from that film world, which will continue on its narrative, like two giant circles (your world and the film world), twin eternal recurrences, touching at just a brief moment, so close as to be nearly parallel for the 90 min running time, (especially if you zoom into that tangent point), then diverging again.

-

here I am, divisible into two halves, or into a trilogy, a pentalogy, a hexalogy.

-

at this point I consist of learning about what things I am good at, or not good at. I wonder about which energies generate a relentless run, an angry sprint, and which energies translate into a quiet, slow contemplation. I wonder about whether or not it will be possible to get up onto that empty building and watch the sunset. I wonder if this is a fizzle, or if this is about having jumped off a certain kind of train and watching it recede into the distance, the noise and rumble being replaced by the smell of green and the sudden understanding of the malleability and the infinite flexibility of wandering.

I wonder eternally about ideas and concepts and whether or not this sense of having pierced beyond the veil makes sense; I wonder to whom I can talk to about the exciting pros and the addictive cons of intellectual labor. about, the intoxicating speed of thought, the deftness to which worlds are woven, the ways in which bodies and the logic of nature and physicality become almost invisible.

to that I owe architecture, I owe construction, I owe industry, I owe economy, I owe a debt and am grateful for the ways in which I understand wrongness, or error, or mistakes, now, not as problems, but more like the base mediums with which things are generated - that mistakes and successes are two sides of the same coin. the same wall, seen one way is straight, seen another way is curved. chains of complexity in scheduling and weather and resources and prices and communication necessitate that many things become about fixing problems, that turn into a solution, a wave of actions that generate problems and solutions alike, and another wave of actions, etc, etc, continually falling over themselves until they create a wave of something.

does this all make sense? the world seems to move at the speed of information, and information seems to move at the speed of communication, thanks to politics. politics and voting, goddamn voting and politics and laws makes it seem that all things can be created at the speed of consensus, of information, of agreement, of knowledge. if we decide it, it will happen.

perhaps my anger, if I shall name it (yes I shall), my anger is that I am surprised at the market, at industry, because it is smart and fascinating, despite the horrible contradictions and perverse incentives that underlie it all, despite my erratic marxism or not so much anymore -- it does things. it operates. in the realm of intellectual labor and knowledge. (or, at least the specific flavor of academic understanding that I'm surrounded with (or, to be specific, enlightenment-era physics/math-influenced empirical notions of Theories and Laws and Truths that have long held institutions into power, even when a notion of science and Truth may no longer be compatible), ). and the realm of intellectual labor and knowledge seems completely content to shunt all operation, all participation, all action into the realm of the market; that activism often looks like regulations and policy, not like heuristics. that action is assumed to "scale", to "propagate", to be "decentralized", to be "replicable", "modular", "self-sustaining", etc.

perhaps my anger comes at a kind of delicious loneliness at wanting to think and wanting to do, and not having those two worlds bridged. P says: "the work looks like the work". to me, important work is probably boring, because it interfaces with the slow, the heavy, the hesitant, the risky. how many millions of boring emails does it take to create universal healthcare?

underneath it all is a sneaking suspicion that the body is the site of injustice, that beliefs are the methods with which inequality propagates, but that belief-based action seems cut off at the knees, that intellectual knowledge can be quick, light. in the end there is my aging body and my young knees that will grow old, and a tired body and my emotions, contained within my body, as my body. ala churchill: I shape my body, my body shapes me; I shape my body, my body shapes me.

if I want praxis in my life I think: what do I do for other peoples' bodies?: the infrastructure creator
if I want to be interested in what I do I think: what play do I do for my mind?: the intellectual/debater

left over is:
"what do I do for my body?": the ascetic/yogi/connoisseur
"what play do I do for others' minds?": the artist/politician

--

so. I am thirty. I am angry, and I am curious about this anger. I feel like I am alone in being angry, alone in smelling this quite curious smell, that leads me off a train. do you smell what you smell or do you adventure along this train to new cities? do you trace paths inquiry that makes sense only to you? do I have the courage and energy to explore the things that are profoundly unsexy but that I find to be the rat-king-gordian-knot holding my internal structure together?

he thinks, he thinks. meanwhile the sun sets, a construction site shines from inside, a siren in the distance. new york softly naps, crude sunset in lime skies. the sounds of traffic sound like it could be of india (with some more horns), of palestine, of korea. voices in the distance. etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.