mark von rosenstiel is present.

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.