I’ve been having a funny relationship with forgetting these days; the sensation of being on the cusp of suddenly seeing a past self as an Other instead of Me. Which, I guess, is something that happens throughout life, although we hardly see this progress as it is usually the carving of slot canyons of the soul; long nights and days over desert outlooks.

I catch myself looking at people in my life and wondering “who did I once know you as?” and there’s a lot of trajectories that suddenly become apparent, like fireworks shot out of one of those tubes I can hold on 4th of July.

I’ve been thinking a lot of a friend I had long ago, who I fell out of touch with. Back then, word was that he had just gotten in a car and disappeared and maybe had become a chemist, or a professor, or started a company. 

Now new words have trickled in of sad posts on Facebook about being a single Dad and the heaviness of a certain type of life. Part of me heard this and hoped instead that he was trolling people in a way that he found funny. I remember long ago when I was in high school I had gotten an email from my doctor (or it appeared to be so) that they had found some unusual things in my blood work that had just been done; this had just been that friend spoofing emails, which back then was as easy as cut and pasting sentences from Wikipedia.

If the medium is the message and we are the collection of thoughts and interactions of a world around us — a medium in flux — we become messages for a period of time that we have coalesced around; a jellyfish caught on the mind’s paddle. 

I think at moments it becomes startling to realize this message and to wonder if this is really who we are. 

I’ve had the sensation as of recent that I’m laying on my head against a newly installed section of drywall. I’m standing and slumped against the wall with my cheek just a few inches from a tape line that has just been mudded and sanded. That new construction taste is in the air, which if you haven’t familiarized yourself with it as of late, is a bit like if the oldest materials on earth had a bit of a drug habit: it’s both earthy and chemical at the same time.

I wonder if one was to spend enough time around cement mixers, if their lungs would eventually become a Rachael Whiteread sculpture; two human chest balloons gray and speckled in concrete; delicate like dove eggs that breathe on their own and think of their future as birds.

This wall my head is against makes it hard to write. It makes it hard to paint. It makes me wonder if I’ll ever make something of purpose again. I guess that’s the dramatic ebb and flow of process. I think part of what has been on my mind is how I don’t have the desire to write about things in the way I once did. I have a different feeling of voice in my head that isn’t concerned with what it once was, and as someone that grabs desperately onto the past this is concerning to me. It makes me wonder about this current me and if they’re a very interesting person.

This is that large expanse of wall that gives no playful hints at closets or bedrooms, but instead only seems concerned with vantage points and long lines that are parallel but can seem to touch if given enough room to roam.

I have been thinking of being in a zoo a lot recently where the displays are windows in aluminum frames, set in concrete walls looking onto various animal exhibits. The aluminum frames have calking oozing out between them and the thick glass, giving the impression that each exhibit could be filled like a fish bowl, shaken and rinsed of its contents. 

Looking at the monkeys they eat fruit in a bored manner, take two bites and throw half eaten fruit bowls to the ground. I think talking to people can be a lot like dressing up as monkeys and eating fruit. People casually discard threads of conversation and pick up others with the interest of clouds discussing precipitation: all is known and nothing is new.

Every once in awhile I lock eyes with someone and watch them carve the contents of a piece of melon perfectly down to the rind with a spoon the color of lightning. They are a surgeon with foods that have high water content. I can hear the spoon like a blade against the onslaught of a five o’clock shadow.

This morning two brown rabbits sat by a freshly dug well in the backyard. One ran by in hi-def and the other seemed a bit pixelated.

I wonder how each of them eats fruit.

I’ve been working the last 3 months on paperwork to build an ADU in Los Angeles. It’s been a slightly opaque (haha, JUST KIDDING, it’s been a muddy river filled with food dye) process which brings into question a lot of things around what politicians mean versus say and the PURPOSE of what people say is important. Never-the-less I’ve tried to just jump into it like a seal learning new tricks trying not to think about its own captivity. 

Today I had to resubmit a section of paperwork because it was a scan of a page and not the original, but having thrown away the original, I had to bike to a notary before heading to the department of building and safety.

Signatures on signatures.

I pulled up to UPS and placed my document on the seat of my bike, only to watch it blow away into a puddle. With original signatures called “wet signatures”, the thought that an original document with wet signatures now was a wet document with wet signatures seemed like a good fit of language.

And as I stood there dabbing the document off on my shirt (wondering where this water even came from…) I looked over at a tangled coat hanger laying next to a tree planting and thought about the convolutions that had gone into the process that I was in that simply was a coat hanger at heart: something quite simple to keep a shirt off the floor.

On the bike ride to the building department I pass one of my favorite buildings in LA: the Promenade Tower Apartments. It truly looks like something out of Belgrade or Chisinau; all angles and glass and concrete coming together like a crescendo of a brilliant composer; that soviet-style where it looks both accessible, but at the same time there is zero daylight that reaches its interior. As you get close to it, however, it is absurdly simple. Low resolution and a bit like fitting square blocks in square holes. It is only from a distance that we can pretend that it holds some complex meaning. 

I think a lot of human endeavors are like this. We wish to stay far away and make things always seem complex in order to guarantee ourselves something to do in the future. We are terrified of the moment that we must just sit. The complexity and drama is the purpose… outcomes are not really the point.

Endless scrolls on a news feed is a bit like doing paperwork for the city. It is the paperwork that IS THE POINT. All that ink, wet or dry, perched on pages like the front row of a gospel choir singing its own praises.

I just finished reading a short story about a conscious mechanical machine that runs on air: air pushes through it to activate its enormously complex mechanisms. On opening itself up, however, it realizes that the mechanics of itself are actually just recording states of the airflow. In a way, the air itself is the consciousness it believes the mechanics were holding.

I think paperwork is the same. I think a city is just a manifestation of 8.5”x11” paper (or A4 if you’re in Europe) being passed from one person to another. It is all that fiber and ink like strings to the toes and fingers of its inhabitants.

There’s a piece about getting older where everyone seems to get a bit further away. Their lives become more dense and who they are as a person also takes on a more facetted quality; stories that they tell, that I used to only take as lighthouses of past experiences, now become a throbbing electrical pulse in the present. We are all kites crashed in windstorms, string tangled around a 1000 trees. 

And there’s this piece to me that pushes back against this thought, because I want to be someone that thinks we are all close to those we love. But I think that in some ways, love that is strongest is love that is aware of distance. This, of course, comes off as a little self congratulatory as I am married to someone who lives 3000 miles away (it may be more… probably not less), but I think this is just a coincidence of external circumstances coming into line with an internal state, much like two cars at a stoplight who have a blinker that enjoy the same downbeat, periodically. 

Although I love being congratulated, love at a distance doesn’t refer to something long-distance itself, but instead refers to love that is aware of the space between the people involved. I’ve always said that love is the absolute measure between two people, a unit-less number like a ratio, and I think some of the pleasure of how we love people is knowing that we can love equally or more people that are emotionally or physically far away.

When first meeting people we have the sensation of always being able to move closer, but there is a point where language and physicality find their own Planck distance, and there is no way to have the sensation of being “closer”; but yet we can still love more. 

I think understanding that we can see how far we are from being the same as someone, but love them closer than anyone before, speaks to the way we can find satisfaction in the abyss between individuals: the divide that guarantees I don’t wake up some day and think I am someone that I’m close to.  I think the problem is that we sometimes think of the abyss as a void full of nothing. But I think the abyss is maybe a space filled with too much. 

In complexity sciences most interesting behavior is created on the edge of chaotic systems evolving from order: the point of intrigue is the moment before things shatter apart or coalesce around a single thought. It’s like throwing a memory of childhood towards the sky and zooming in right as it reaches the moment where its direction is neither up or down.

I was riding my bike along the LA river yesterday and the wind pulled its skirt up right near my face with pollens from desert plants pulling me into songs of sex and bloom. It was an affront, but made my teeth sew a sweater of the scene; something tangled in memory and craft; smile gnashing at all around. On the return trip the wind was still pushing hot against me, and I couldn’t help but think the wind had taken its directional queues from the ever pervasive LA traffic. 

I thought of the place in the middle of the river where the two streams whooshed past each other. This quiet place where the winds skirt went back around her waist, and the pollen all sat quiet in the front row as the last song was just played. Stage empty of ghostly instruments.

As lights dimmed across an incredible divide a deep bass resonated through us all.

I was just at Whole Foods getting some groceries. It’s been a week of middle distance gazing and a bit of crisis around who I am and what I am doing. I sometimes think 25% of art is this crisis, which is maybe more readily described as trying to understand the relationship between purpose and meaning.

I wandered the whole length of Whole Foods once without really taking in what I was supposed to be doing, which meant, like a typewriter, I had to fling the return back to the beginning and start my traverse all over again; the Whole Foods as blank white paper with the partially dressed LA glamorous hiding in the margins. 

In moments like this the sights of the world can feel a bit like tennis balls bounced off a practice wall during overly hot summer days.

My current condition made me think a lot of a movie I had just watched, Another Round. The premise of the movie is that a group of friends decide they are going to spend the day partially drunk in an attempt to prove whether human beings are meant to operate with a constant, slight elevated BAC.

What was interesting about the movie is that the protagonist, played by Mads Mikkelsen (who on recently hearing his name from a friend declared, “How’d you come up with THAT name?!?” as if it was fictional), comes to this experiment in a moment of unoriginality in his own life: his relationship and career are steady, but steady in that way that stagnant water in unkept parking garages is also steady; he is lonely and slightly used feeling: a penny abandoned on a highway, still currency but battered and with no sheen.

He is adrift. 

The movie reveals the exuberance that drinking brings back into his life as well as the downfall that comes with the eventual excess. But neither the upswing or downswing is total. It is jittery and unfinished, bouncing between the good and bad without showing moral certainty; a bouncy ball down attic steps, but ending up always in the attic. What I loved about the movie is that it put a vice (alcohol) in relationship to the constrictions we create in our own life. The vessels that we hold ourselves — relationships, career, spirituality — can be filled with the infinite or can be filled with a poison that will sink us.

Much like a wine glass the containers of our lives can bring joy or destruction depending on how they are utilized and what practices we make around them. The movie made me think about how much we condemn vice while never looking at the more broad cultural constructs that lead us to them.

In a way, containers (ones of vice or culture) can be mechanisms to view the totality of something: something that tears us from our multitude to see only a single vision. “I believe in X so this means I am Y”. But instead an infinite can be seen in any container. Much like Henri Bergson or the like talk about a number being made of a unit of measure, where the number is this multiplicity as well as the object itself, the way we decide the units of our containers, change the density and countability of those containers. One hundred can be made of a hundred singles or one hundred can really be two hundred made of what we think of as halves.

Carl Jung said, “A decisive question for man is: is he related to something infinite or not?”. 

I think in days like today, where a pandemic draws a box around my experience, I feel a certain dryness in the last years of my creative practice, and my friends (and wife) are cast at distances which now are harder to travel, it is easy to loose the ability to see the infinite. The imagination seems to be at a place where it actively discounts the parts of life that give it a multiplicity; or maybe fixates on what is missing. I think William Blake had something to say about this in relationship to his idea of Ulro.

I once dated a woman with a heavy french accent (a great tongue twister for a heavy french accent, “Terry Richardson lives in a wardrobe”) who wrote me a long email about the pain of living in a world that had, among other things, Nazis and social security numbers. I think she was maybe talking about boxes of different types; containers. And I still look to her with inspiration for the fearlessness that became her box, so tightly wrapped around her, as she flung conventions to the way side, pounding on the doors with those eye slit openings and used ammonia not to clean her studio but cook crack.

We need to be aware of our countable containers. We need to find ways to see their edges. And then step half the distance and half that and half that… and finally just see the infinite steps.

As I finish my second pass in Whole Foods, a woman in fashionable layers, with skin and thin fabric on a date to some desert rave, walks a small dog through the canned goods aisle and I watch it sniff and pee a little on a can of beans.

I buy some anchovies and pasta and head back home.

Let us turn, then, to Gibson’s ‘theory of affordances.’ This theory suggests that there is a particular set of actions ‘afforded’ by a tool or object. Thus a knob might afford pulling—or possibly pushing—while a cord might afford pulling. It is not that the tool or object has agency as such, or the capacity to ‘invite’ or ‘prevent’ certain actions. Rather, it merely ‘affords’ certain operations that it is incumbent on the user to recognize, dependent on pre-existing associations with that tool or object. Likewise, those operations are also dependent upon our capacity to undertake them. Thus certain operations might not be afforded to those without the height or strength to perform them. Moreover, certain tools afford certain operations, but do not preclude others. For example, we could affix a nail with a screwdriver— albeit less efficiently—if we do not have a hammer at hand. Similarly, it is easier to cut wood with a saw than a hammer.