O.o.C.Q.o.t.D.: "There's a sheep somewhere, why aren't I warm?" _
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02:43:14 PM, Saturday 1 November 2008

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Idea for an art project: go through an office and take candid pictures of everyone's cubes from a similar angle. Even in the most drab of corporate environments (I am thinking of a stint working for a cable company) cubes are tiny little homes, with pictures of cats or children, or sports posters, or lack thereof, with plants, sometimes even fish, or lego creations, or teapots, or comic strips, or maps of the world, and have things filed away or strewn about, and sticky notes, and whiteboards with diagrams that are never to be erased because they contain important information not held elsewhere, calendars used or unused, org charts, wall length project plans... Of course this would be difficult to do because offices are private spaces, even beyond the privacy of the occupant, there is confidential business data everywhere, phone numbers, stacks of important documents containing financial or otherwise secrets, and so on and so forth, and besides I am not much of a photographer. But I just like the idea, to capture the little flowerings of humanity in places that seem from the outside very dull and uniform and corporate-- and really are I suppose, as much as possible, but only so much is possible. My current office is actually not the best place for it because it's not cubes, it's offices-- more room in private offices for self-expression but you don't see as much walking past. _
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10:23:28 AM, Saturday 1 November 2008

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i am no philosopher.

wisdom
i do not love

i am looking for a bowl

i am looking for a relic
so i can reach into my pocket
and touch
bone.

there is no dust, no mist
between that (kiss)
and this.

bone
shines
because the rest is gone.

wisdom
i do not
love
_
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07:57:57 AM, Friday 31 October 2008

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looking in a smashed window at faces, the old abandonded disco
the ball turns dazzling dazzling
the dancers lose their bodies
they scatter into the city
come dawn that very day

the ball sits quiet quiet
beneath the chandelier
the dancers are here, I mean gone
right? so why am I so afraid?
_
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07:25:55 AM, Friday 31 October 2008

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O.o.C.Q.o.t.D.: "I have a blanket. I can conquer the world more comfortably if I have a blanket." _
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08:39:31 PM, Wednesday 29 October 2008

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06:52:22 PM, Tuesday 28 October 2008

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06:43:54 PM, Tuesday 28 October 2008

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wrote this a month or so ago:

there was a moment when very ill when i sort of lost track of the future. all my plans vanished, and seemed impossible. it was strange. i think facing death must be something like that. without plans, without the future, the moment becomes very close, very vivid. i suppose many meditation techniques try to induce such a state-- the whirling dervishes did so fairly effectively. it's as if one is looking directly at the bowl, where one would normally look at tracks and maps written on the bowl. the limitedness of the world is very clear, as well as the ever-presence of everything. if one could let go of one's ego and still be human. if one could die and not die. i think the sufis aim for something like this. if one can die and not die... or at least, see the self as limited. this must be someting experienced directly, in this moment, it is no use putting it off for the future (though i do, i do-- the king is here but i wait for the king. the king is living but i weep at his grave). every way of seeing god is a trap, and perhaps it is wrong to say even that god exists, but god is useful (perhaps i should say "tao" here instead of god...). there is no universal perspective, there is no way of understanding except by being. to realize "i am very small". i am a thing among things. i am a dummy, like a brick. i am merely a conception. i am one of billions. to "change the world" is a horrible concept. the world is enough in itself. it does not need changing, in fact cannot be changed. to impact the world is impossible. not to impact the world is impossible too. i am caught up in it, i am one of its more obscure corners. self is an illusion but not an accidental one. it matters immensely what i do. it matters immensely how i face this moment. facing this moment is all i can do... the fear fades a bit, the source of fear wraps back into itself.

_
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11:06:22 PM, Monday 27 October 2008

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People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That's clearer to me each day.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead _
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10:38:41 PM, Monday 27 October 2008

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07:17:15 PM, Monday 27 October 2008

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... _
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07:09:28 PM, Monday 27 October 2008

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07:07:17 PM, Monday 27 October 2008

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My cat says meowl. He is very insistent on it. I thought I'd pass the message on. _
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11:43:01 AM, Saturday 25 October 2008

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On Man on Wire: I was wobbling between grinning and tears throughout. Brilliant film, or at least, brilliant thing to do. Just absolutely perfect. One of the accomplices says that the twin towers were built for this. That really seems almost about right. _
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11:25:20 AM, Saturday 25 October 2008

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in response to a magazine article:

the tall hat rabbits squawk and squawk
(self must not be self when if...)
that is not where i look
for wisdom anymore.

here is a paradox
here is what remains
when we have cut and cut at the truth
with a shear point of light.
here are its tatters,
we can see through them
strips of shredded paper on a table
here is the truth
that was to be your coat
and keep you warm.

let that light dim.
it is not a matter of belief
or disbelief.
stumbling around in the dark
words are hands.
a warm hand met in the dark, unexpectedly
steadies
and gives strength.

_
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07:58:18 AM, Saturday 25 October 2008

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pyrex

shattered, cracked
then glued back piece by piece
fracture lines still showing

melted, fused
then poured into a mold
congealing but still flowing

fragile, unstable
I fill it with water
and hope


I wrote this a while ago. The file says 2006 but I think I wrote it a year or so before that, on paper, during a lecture on programming languages. At some point before I had heated a pyrex pie plate in a 500 degree oven and then poured water into it (to steam bread you see). It shattered impressively. _
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07:15:06 AM, Thursday 23 October 2008

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The world is still MAD. _
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06:23:32 PM, Wednesday 22 October 2008

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Dogen-zenji said, "Shoshaku jushaku." Shaku generally means "mistake" or "wrong." Shoshaku jushaku means "to succeed wrong with wrong," or one continuous mistake. According to Dogen, one continuous mistake can also be Zen. A Zen master's life could be said to be so many years of shoshaku jushaku. This means so many years of one single-minded effort.

Shunryu Suzuki _
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02:37:25 PM, Wednesday 22 October 2008

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puff!

tall reeds swish
and tap each (hollow) other.

leaves and feather fluff
skitter cross the water.

gulls glide in smooth lines.
clouds houses ripple.

branches bare themselves
in a yellow tumble.
_
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05:55:43 PM, Tuesday 21 October 2008

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there are insides, there are outsides,
scraping at the shell of the egg

but at the moment's crisis
everything flattens.

i cannot breathe there
or wrap a word around it.

the forces are immense
and carefully neutral.

they pass through me
or catch in my throat.

nothing is accomplished.

there is nothing to learn:
this moment the tip of the top the world spins on.

there is a struggle
the shell cracks, light pours in, breathing begins. _
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08:08:14 AM, Monday 20 October 2008

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Unexpected benefit of house shopping: it really makes me think about who I am and what I value. Today we saw an oldish house that had not been re-modeled in a very residential neighborhood but near bus lines, a house that was big but had been remodeled very sketchily and had a bizzare two car garage converted to a shed taking up most of the backyard, and a loft townhouse in an urban part of Cambridge.

The loft was very open, with skylights and a bedroom open to the rest of the house. Felt like a treehouse, or the set of a Woody Allen movie, or some sort of hipster hangout, or a college slum attic apartment that was nicely finished. It had its appeal, it was someplace great to look at but not necessarily to live in. It is the only urban place we've looked at so far. It made me think that there might be something to miss out on by not living someplace urban. But I'm not sure if urban is really me. The traffic is really something.

Space is an interesting issue. Most of the places we're looking at are two bedroom, not much bigger than our current apartment. The question of kids hangs in the air, how much space they would need as they grew up-- how seriously to take that possibility. Of course looking in the same price range one sacrifices things for space. The biggest place we looked at was a total wreck, well it reminded me of some apartments I've lived in, but it was pretty makeshift. It seems that big places tend to be half-remodeled, like the one we saw today, someone with terrible taste had gone through and done half-assed DIY, for instance badly tiling in a clawed bathtub, which is like why would you do that? The kitchen had been professionally done to the full yuppie standard with granite surfaces and a steel refrigerator. Useful I guess but it rubbed me the wrong way.

Interesting how big a role aesthetics play for me. Some houses go click yes, some go click no. I try not to be too influenced by staging. I get offended when it's overdone, when houses are done up by interior decorators to look like magazine pictures. Many of the houses have been remodeled in a sort of current style, like I was saying with the granite countertops and the IKEA-like shelving units. It's appealing in a way, clean, fashionable, new and shiny and ok when it's not overdone, but even then I get faint queases from it. I'm not sure I realized this until we saw the unremodeled place today. It had these great green cabinets with black hinges, I don't think I should want to buy a house because it has green cabinets with black hinges, but there it is. It felt just homey, the right contrast to all this computer glitz that I deal with every day. I thought I wanted a dishwasher but it turns out I don't care in the slightest. It was also near my favorite park, I think the park vibes influenced me.

It somewhat surprises me that I go by feel like that. I find it difficult to analyze what I like and don't like about a house. I liked the vibes of the huge disaster house too, but we don't have enough money to even barely fix it up to the point of livability. There was this one house, the first we looked at, that had all these creepy little spaces that weren't useful for anything, and I had a terrible time explaining why they felt creepy to me, but I left the house just feeling spooked. There's no way I could buy a house based on specs alone. I need to go there and absorb.

Also, what is up with the totally random built in pencil sharpeners? One house had one in the basement, hardly reachable behind a post. Today's had one in the kitchen. Weird, weird.

Wow I have gone on long enough. Congratulations, fair reader, for reaching the end of this post. Now you know more than you ever wanted to about me and houses. _
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01:47:21 PM, Saturday 18 October 2008

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There's a storefront in Cambridge for the "All & Everything Company". The sign looks very old. I'm curious. No web presence whatsoever. _
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12:53:51 PM, Saturday 18 October 2008

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For more than two years Mr. Padilla was detained in a navy brig on the order of President Bush, without being charged with any offense and without access to counsel. He was kept in a cell with nothing to read except, for a short time, a copy of the Koran, and no sense of time or daylight and no interaction with anyone except his interrogators. When he was once taken to a dentist, his eyes and ears were covered to maintain the sensory deprivation.

A psychiatrist who subsequently examined him, Dr. Angela Hegarty, found him to in an "absolute state of terror, terror alternating with numbness. It was as though the interrogators were in the room with us."

[...]

Somehow this country has to reassert its historic repugnance at the use of torture. And that may not be easy. A recent poll showed that Americans' support for the torture of alleged terror- ists has risen from 36 percent of those asked in 2006 to 44 percent this year. We were shocked by the Abu Ghraib photographs. Since then a good many of us have become desensitized to the use of torture.

!!!!!!!!

What do we do about this? I am really asking in all sincerity. I don't give a damn about anything else in politics, but this is important to me. I don't have any idea where to begin. I don't want anyone being tortured on my behalf. I want those responsible for torture to be held accountable. I understand the fear and anger behind the drive to torture, but I think it is possible to rise above them. Loving your enemies always seems pretty counterintuitive, but fundamentally enemies are human beings. Treating them as such is a sign of strength. Failing to is something terrible. A venom concentrates, atrocities enter the world, and there is no way to undo them, even long after the fear and anger have passed. This is so important. We are all implicated in this. Where do we begin? _
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08:46:10 AM, Saturday 18 October 2008

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Sometimes I do not know that I have been half asleep until I realize I have been thinking about the pressing need for google to issue advanced woodcutting licenses to deal with the lumber crisis. _
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10:07:51 PM, Thursday 16 October 2008

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Thank you Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov! It's nice to have a non-annihilated world. (via Moss) _
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07:33:55 PM, Thursday 16 October 2008

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i wanted these days to follow through.
i wanted back what i thought i had.
i thought i had it.
thought i could walk away from writing
be done with it
move on.

now struggling again.
now needing again to step back, to consider.
needing to set my head straight.

if not now then when.
i remember this, i remember that.
i remember the one who told me
there were caves where
your voice
returned to you
as an eagle's.
i don't remember his name.

worries and worries. stops in the gaps.
forcing and being forced.
worrying, squirming, fidgeting.
attention passengers.

attention passengers, your belongings
may be stolen.
your motives are in question.
you may be questioned
at any moment.

the world spins
or is it me?
the tight thread, spun.
the thread taut, untangled.
the code folded.

stop looking for some ideal world!
says the smack of the stick.
stop looking for some sentence
to express the ideal
that is not.
stop trying to drown yourself
in phrases.
you cannot be drowned.

the code folded,
tomorrow's appointments made.
holding the thin thread
from finger to finger.
_
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06:32:27 AM, Thursday 16 October 2008

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03:03:52 PM, Sunday 12 October 2008

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11:56:51 AM, Sunday 12 October 2008

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11:56:38 AM, Sunday 12 October 2008

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11:56:21 AM, Sunday 12 October 2008

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11:56:07 AM, Sunday 12 October 2008

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11:55:16 AM, Sunday 12 October 2008

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11:54:43 AM, Sunday 12 October 2008

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11:52:09 AM, Sunday 12 October 2008

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Raindrops fall on the surface of the pond. Expanding circles intersect. Bubbles appear at the center and vanish, one by one.

What's there is there, and when it is revealed I seek it in the same place, but it is no longer there. I look under the same rock and the crayfish is gone. I go to the same street corner but the coyote does not come. My hand is a fist in the water, it grasps hard but comes up empty.

The rain stops. The pond is still. _
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08:23:33 PM, Saturday 11 October 2008

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This story by Andrei Codrescu is the best thing I have heard yet about the economic collapse. The audio is highly recommended. _
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08:48:07 AM, Saturday 11 October 2008

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