highindustrial.

I cleaved a flap of skin clean off my left ringfinger-tip today while slicing some brie. At some point the dairy gave way to meat, my stray digit in turn yielding carelessly to a butterknife, of all things. There was no pain to speak of; only the generous divot of dermis, dangling obscenely, translucing from shocked pink to rust as its excavity became engorged with blood.

Some Neosporin®, several Band-Aids® later, and I'm typing this, for the most part, with my right hand. My words feel as halting and deliberate as they maybe-probably-usually read.

It occurs to me presently that when we write in the literal-manual sense, stylus on papyrus, we do so with one hand; but we interact with a keyboard ambidextrously. I've often wondered why my thoughts self-assemble more readily on a computer than they do in, say, a spiral notebook—and as much as it has to do with the figurative superconductivity of one medium versus the other, perhaps it also has something to do with the hemispheric cleavage of the brain.

Anyway. In other news, I'm almost not sick anymore. My sore throat is but a mucous memory. + 5

I have taken ill with something seasonal, or perhaps unseasonable, these two days past. "Cooties," if you will. The provenance of the pathogen is unknown, although its current location is my sore throat. Medicated and deflated, I've become a spectral participant in my own life, wraithlike in my solipsism, viewing the passing eclipse of the world through the pinhole of my discomfort.

Just kidding. I am sick, though—and I think the scarf I'm wearing actually wrote the preceding paragraph. Meanwhile, my trusty big-ass bottle of Dimetapp, neglected these many months, is suddenly very much the object of my phlegmy affection. We're past formalities, Dee and I. It used to be I indulged her desire to "spoon," but lately I just "take take take," suckling directly at her saccharine spout, lots of tongue. Recommended dosage? Swigs, several. + 10

Some nights are haunted but alive. Pedestrians glide through alternating currents of lamplight and fog while automotive traffic careers in an obscure sympathy of metal and flesh. The city is a simulation, existing only where I see it, possessing volume, sprawl and history only insofar as I have known it. Sleep is rumored to be everywhere. + 9

People who whip out their cell phones when you leave them alone for so much as five minutes really annoy me. I'm sure they'll count me among their ranks someday, when I'm old and ensnared in the time-is-money you-look-fabulous let's-do-lunch love-ya-gotta-go-buh-bye death grip, but for the time being I still take a dim view of such behavior.

Always remain in the moment. + 9

Some words are neutron-stellar when isolated onscreen or in print, offset by leading or indentation or paragraph breaks. Yes, no, and you are such words. I is also such a word, albeit not so much spatially, because it's too slight and looks like too many other glyphs. At least to me. Me. These words occupy a special place in the mind. They are among the first distinctions we ever learn to make, and in some cases the last we fully come to understand. + 2

The wrong long nap will break a day in a bad way, crushing evening, causing afternoon-night to collapse upon itself in an unsavory brunch of missed connections and just-cold news interleaved with people, with copperwire voices semiconducting weakly through your neural infrastructure, with emotions that barely register at nine volts.

There's this shot of Sharon Stone in Sliver. (Yeah, Sliver. Well, I think I remember this shot being in the movie, but I haven't watched the movie in years, so I may have interpolated it, but my point is: there may be this shot of Sharon Stone in Sliver, near the climax, just after most of the lowgrade psychosexual shit has hit the fan, but just before the first-billed names come to fatal blows.) The shot is of Stone sitting in her apartment, her gray beautiful sterile upmarket apartment, just sitting there, staring at nothing in the midmorning light, looking bored and slightly fed-up; and if there's almost nothing else worthwhile about that movie, its soundtrack notwithstanding, that shot is just a little daring, because it lets Stone's boredom register. And she's really pretty. But mostly the boredom stuff, I swear.

So yeah, I think I was writing (around and) about boredom. I would say "apathy," but the word seems to have acquired a certain holier-than-thou self-congratulatory connotation in recent years. Well, I sort of just did, didn't I?—say "apathy," that is. But I was writing about boredom. They're not the same thing, I don't think. Sometimes boredom is other people, to paraphrase Jean-Paul. (We're on a first-two names basis, he and I.) + 6

More often than not I have ideas for posts but I'm nowhere near a computer so I "write" them in my head and then I feel like I've already consummated the thought so why bother transcribing it and it's not like it was that important anyway and now that I think of it it didn't really make sense to begin with or at least no longer makes sense the way I remember it know what I mean know what I mean? + 13

For some or other reason this evening, I was thinking about protection, about the ways we learn to shield our soft-shelled thin-skinned selves as we get older, as our bones knit, as our emotional membranes become more selectively permeable. It becomes methodical, I think, over time—the choreography of revelation and reservation: the active process of self-possession requires us to be our own spin doctors and gatekeepers, summoning our discretionary resources of persuasion to alter the way our personalities unfurl, to time-lapse our childhoods, to finesse our rough edges. And indeed, I think there comes to be such a thing as "perfect" frankness—but it's not necessarily an act of total disclosure so much as it is a distillation of detail, an evolving presentation. It's something that happens as we grow into ourselves. Well, at least where some of us are concerned, at any rate.

"Rydell watched this man move ahead, in front of him, and felt something complicated, something he couldn't get a handle on, but something that came through anyway, through the ache in his side, the pain that grated there if he stepped wrong. He'd always dreamed of a special kind of grace, Rydell: of just moving, moving right, without thinking of it. Alert, relaxed, there. And somehow he knew that that was what he was seeing now, what he was following: this guy who was maybe fifty, and who moved, though without seeming to think about it, in a way that kept him in every bit of available shadow. Upright in his long wool coat, hands in pockets, he just moved, and Rydell followed, in his pain and the clumsiness that induced, but also in the pain somehow of his adolescent heart, the boy in him having wanted all these years to be something like this man, whoever and whatever he was." (p.196) + 1

I think I'd like to let the music do the writing sometimes, really do the writing, like fingers pushing a planchette, the words rising from id in an incense of inertia and association. I think it's possible to sound sensible without quite making sense sometimes, when there's an outline, a shape, a form, and the plotted points don't deviate from one another too abruptly. Words are music sometimes. Pay no attention to the lyrics, sometimes. + 4

Some days the world is just friends and tourists and we mingle with our pockets full and our bellies full and we're on our way to laugh behind closed doors in rooms encrypted with private jokes and we're older and younger and our mothers are far away and I think somehow there were maybe more than twenty-four hours to play with. + 3