collections

Fish ladders, grain elevators. Up, up, up. I am always complaining that people should stay home more and sit quietly, not strive so much, not clump. Clumping leads to strife or agreement, either of which leads to trouble. I like to stay in and organize the binders and scrapbooks my collections would be in if I had collections. The management of a large collection like mine might someday be, or the management of a number of related collections that might evolve from my original collection which doesn't yet exist, requires a talent for organization and detail and the dedication that comes from a passionate involvement. The idea of collecting appeals to me but I never found anything I wanted to collect. I've been preparing for future collecting for decades now. I have a label maker. I have a handsome antique apothecary cabinet which would be just perfect for a collection of small, treasured things, like vials of contagion. I resist the idea that actually starting a collection would be beside the point. Laying the groundwork for a lifetime of collecting and never actually collecting is not some kind of performance or metaphor, I just really haven't found the thing I want to collect yet. My problem is that I'm not drawn to anything at all, I have to decide to be interested, and too much of a certain kind of thinking kills passionate involvement. And then there's the problem of the internet, it's too easy to discover that the thing you were maybe possibly considering becoming passionately engaged in collecting is already the lifelong passion of many hundreds or thousands of other people, all of whom have an enormous head start and might live in Finland, giving their collections an international cachet that yours could never match even if it existed. It's the problem of why bother. There are too many people doing things, there needs to be a lot less of that so that I can have my chance. Sit down and don't move your hands, I'm so fucking tired of you.

recumbency now

I am a creature of serene repose, now that I have a new reading chair in my study. It's a recliner. Postures of tranquillity are now obtainable at a moment's notice. Thomas De Quincey writes about taking opium and staring out the window from dusk to dawn without moving. If he had this chair he could do that without the opium. I'd rather have the opium than the chair. I will trade my new chair for any quantity of narcotics you happen to possess. Actually, no, that De Quincey line wasn't about taking opium, it was about his love of solitude and his disenchantment with the hubbub of the city. He wasn't on opium when he spent the whole night staring out the window, he just liked looking out the window. I think. I don't remember. Imagine spending an evening listening to Thomas De Quincey talk about anything, especially if he's taken opium. Or listening to one of his opium podcasts. I know, puns are the worst.

not even dead

Here comes me. I am so forcefully present in my own blog, don't you think? After a long absence I come roaring back in all my alarming vividness to re-inhabit this derelict rectangle. Suddenly the stale air in here whips around me and my coat of many colors. How authentic I am, how robust in appearance and demeanor. I live. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in a reflective surface, like a four-slice chrome-plated toaster, and even taking into account the grotesque fun-house distortions of such a reflection I sometimes strike myself as too real and must avert my gaze. OK, enough of that. My neglected blog is coated in hairy dust, something must be done. I live, therefore so must this. Somehow. Maybe I'll change the layout. I hate everything about myself and want to die. Cosmetic changes are in order. You should never speak of dead people. There are no dead people. After you die you're nothing, not even dead. You're not a corpse. Attributes cannot be attached to you, that's the horrible thing. Not even dead. My blog isn't dead, although it came close. Now look, blood is rushing to the surface. Shimmering pixels.

Oh, something happened, I've been dying to tell someone. Have you ever had a meaningful exchange of looks with a dog? Dog owners will know what I'm talking about. I was looking into my dog's eyes and he looked into mine and for a moment there was this thing between us, a moment of truth or what have you, it was a little unsettling to tell you the truth, and I suddenly understood how much of his life is ruled by fear, and he might have understood, in that moment, how much of mine is too. So I turned away from him like I turn away from a chrome-plated toaster, because I can't really handle anyone's fear but my own.

the most precious thing i possess

theory of time

Have I explained to you my theory of time? We're such good friends. I love you so much, in my own way. How intimate we've become, what with you reading my blog and all and my not knowing who you are. My theory of time is only for my very closest friends. I'm not going to print up leaflets and stand on a corner like a lunatic, downtown across from the public library. It came to me in a moment of insight which later turned out to be of inferior grade. Life is marked by moments but the quality varies. I was given a check to deposit and I put it on my desk and the next day when I looked at the date on it sixteen days had passed. How can this be? I received an email and later in the day when I went to respond I opened it and ten days had passed. Astonishing. The number of moments in a lifetime is like the number of heartbeats in a hummingbird's arsenal, fixed at birth and rapidly depleting. A moment is always in the present, there are no past moments or future moments. The duration of a moment can stretch a little, think ecstasy or torture, but for the most part it's very brief. But it is experienced or not experienced, no in between, and the unexperienced ones accumulate in silence, and since they aren't experienced they accumulate in great numbers outside of time. These agglomerations of unexperienced moments stretch the fabric of a life and cause bizarre deformations which are perceived as convulsions of time. This is all commonplace but it establishes the background for my theory of time. We'll drive out one night, we'll play my Talk Talk CD, everyone loves a dark car, we'll set a fire at the beach and I'll tell you my theory of time. A beach on fire is the perfect setting for what I have to say. 

terrible mistake

A long time ago I lived in New Haven, Connecticut for a few years, while my boyfriend was in grad school. What a shithole town. I worked at a bookstore, in the basement, opening cartons all day alongside a crotchety old bag and a chatty middle-aged dullard, and I made minimum wage and saw no interesting future for myself. Worst of all I had really ugly glasses. I knew I'd made a terrible mistake coming to New Haven, basically putting the brakes on my life for no good reason and knowing that in a pivotal moment of self-deception in the future I'd blame someone else for this terrible life mistake. Granted there is no more rewarding pleasure than assigning blame to others but that would have to wait for its proper time. I remember walking home one day through a foot of snow, listening to my Walkman. I was strangely happy during that twenty minute walk and I've always remembered it. That walk took twice as long as normal since it was hard to trudge through so much packed snow, and I had nothing to do but think, and I let utter hopelessness permeate me in a way I never had, but it had an astringent quality that agreed with the snap of the air and everything seemed sharp and vivid and hopeless and I found it very relaxing. The bracing clarity of taut annihilating despair. All these years later I can remember every step of that walk home, because earlier in the day I'd dropped a box on my foot and I think it was broken.  A heavy carton of those green and red Cambridge classical texts.

ball of an evening

Most things are seeming hilarious to me at the moment, except for the things that are terrifying. Of course one sometimes laughs at oneself in the midst of terror. There you are curled up in your regular ball of an evening and suddenly the comedy of existence moves through you like a shudder. My terrors are often comical, I'm the first to admit it. Some of my terrors strike me as funny, or my reactions to them strike me as obviously too much and then with that sudden new perspective I'll chuckle at myself, and then the next day or even a moment later I'm once again immobilized with fear by the very thing I'd chuckled over. I'll try to remember what it felt like to laugh about it and try to re-inhabit that frame of mind but it never works. Not that I want to be continually oscillating between wracking sobs and maniacal cackles. That's probably not a mien I should be eager to cultivate. I don't think my fears particularly care whether I laugh at them or not, they're tough that way. Impervious to mockery. In the neighborhood they live in, my mind, you can't be thin-skinned and expect to survive. My terrors are armor-plated and battle-tested and my amusements are covered in scar tissue. My pleasures advance inexorably in deep ruts. It's not a pretty environment but in its grim functionality and stripped utilitarian character it gets the job done. Like Sacramento. An elegant consciousness is fine for fancy people back east but out here in the hardscrabble west we like our coffee black and our minds graceless. 

twittering machine

I can hear those damn birds. Birdsong can be irritating. The mute objects of my study are just about to tell me something when those pre-dawn birds start in with their twittering. They don't sound like they mean it. It's not even light out. It's close, the sickening light is that close. I hate how inevitable morning is. There's a grinding, idiotic quality to it. People should all have to agree to let dawn come, there should be a referendum or online poll. Direct participatory democracy. At long last we have the computer power to take time back from nature. Nature is profound and senseless, supposedly that's where the beauty lies. I fear there will be no one to take care of me if I need help. I will need help, time being what it is, a container of unrelated events. Clocks soften you up and then events finish you off and you're dropped in a hole. Now. Everything needs to stop so I can think. When have I not needed help? Tell me one time in my life when I have not required a great deal of help. Everyone needs help and no one gets any, people are left to spend terrible nights alone listening to huge grinding gears somewhere deep inside the earth. On my old site I once wrote about those gears, my childhood nightmares of seeing them, of stumbling upon the great subterranean mechanism, a vivid recurring dream of terror, and how years later my exact dream was recounted in a Village Voice article profiling downtown partygoers' experience of the k-hole, back when ketamine was the hot new thing. Different people described their k-hole experiences and one of them was my dream. Isn't that funny.

kill galaxy

Did you know that a spiral galaxy, skillfully thrown with a whip of the wrist, can take your head clean off? I often imagine committing murder, and not just with vast astronomical entities. It's relaxing to know you can kill someone if you really want to. Stab them repeatedly. Everyone is capable of murder. This ability is a birthright, like getting a library card. There is a murderer for every victim, it's the dating service with a perfect record of matches. I've imagined very vividly being murdered as well. Someone usually bursts in, I'm usually killed in my DOMICILE, often by someone known to me, in accordance with known statistics. When I imagine killing someone it happens in all kinds of places but never in my RESIDENCE. I suppose my home is reserved for my own murder in a way. As if only one bad thing is allowed to happen in any given house. In movies people learn about the terrible event that happened in their house decades ago, an unspeakable crime or whatever, and that explains the thing happening now, the haunting or what have you, and they always accept that explanation without further inquiry, as if another even more horrible event couldn't have happened even earlier. There's always something even worse if you look farther back in time, something even more monstrous, as astronomers and psychiatrists well know. When I moved into my last apartment in San Francisco I was told the previous resident had died, and I immediately wondered how many people had died in that apartment over the decades, and where they'd died, in what crumpled postures, with what grimaces or frozen attitudes. Naturally I wondered whether I'd be one of them, it's the first thing anyone thinks when they move into a new place. Obviously I didn't die there and now that I've moved away it's certain I never will, which just means I am free to kill someone there, by pushing him or her out one of the large eighth-floor casement windows that conveniently open out.

the law closes in on bette davis

bee fees

I had a dream in which I was sitting in a wing chair, a rather ridiculous, grandmotherish wing chair, not like the notorious wing chair in the Thomas Bernhard novel Woodcutters, that's probably the best wing chair in any novel ever, not that I've done a comprehensive survey of wing chairs in western literature. It might have been like the Woodcutters wing chair, how unalike can any two wing chairs be after all, but I don't know if Bernhard even described that wing chair, it's been so long since I read that book, not that that matters since I forget everything I read within minutes of reading it. I can reply to someone, with a straight face, "I don't remember, I finished that book twenty minutes ago." Anyway, in my dream I'm sitting in this wing chair, odd enough as it is since wing chairs are not part of my life at all, and I don't remember much about the room but there were people milling about, wing chair sort of people, people in tweed sport jackets holding cocktails, murmuring to one another, when a man in a very expensive looking suit, I'm no expert on men's suits but I know a beautiful tailored suit when I see one, this man with an instant degree of presence, even gravitas, because of the suit he's wearing and because he has a well-scrubbed, meticulously maintained, pore-excavated Patrick Bateman look about him, sits down right in front of me, sits right down on this pouffe, this dainty little stool or ottoman that matches the wing chair in spinsterish ridiculousness. He sits down on this very feminine little pouffe, his legs spread apart in a rather sexually brazen or simian fashion, his forearms resting on his thighs, like he's about to pick up a dumbbell and do a set of biceps curls, or is about to fit me for a new pair of shoes, and the incongruities and messed up signals are just piling on top of one another to the point where all you can do is be amused, and he leans forward with this simian weightlifting shoe-selling bearing and tells me that my bee fees were not received, that this business of the bee fees should not be taken lightly or treated as unimportant, that if he does not bring this money back then I will be asked to come up with a quantity of horse paint in addition to the bee fees, did I fully appreciate the gravity of the situation, etc. etc., and the carnal threat of his posture becomes a subtle but unmistakable threat of violence, which of course to my way of thinking are pretty much the same thing. And of course I have no idea who he is or what bee fees or horse paint are, neither the me of my dream nor the dreaming me have a clue, we're both utterly baffled. And here's the best part, I love this hackneyed little cinematic detail: After he leaves, the people around me start murmuring again, or rather the volume of their murmuring returns to its previous level, and the music too, the idle plinking of an unseen piano, and only then do I realize how quiet the scene had gotten when the man had spoken to me.

last shot from Ozu's last film

anti-sun

I'm no fan of the sun, or sunny days, or daytime of any kind for that matter, but the first sunny days of spring have always been especially troublesome, not because I loathe sunlight in some kind of goth affectation, I am a member of my species after all and not a vampire, not counting my tendency toward emotional vampirism which is another subject entirely, but because temperamentally I seem to default to a kind of knee-jerk contrarianism, which is useful at times and at other times most definitely not so helpful. When spring comes and everywhere the streets and porches and all available urban green space are populated with grinning sun worshipping morons, wandering in that familiar squinting stupor, I have the instinct to find fault with nature not only in the form of nuclear fusion but in its regrettable habit of demanding compensation for its electromagnetic largesse by lopping twenty points off everyone's IQ, mostly targeting people who didn't have a single point to spare to begin with. There's also something tribal and atavistic about the whole thing, it sometimes feels like our relationship with the sun hasn't evolved one bit despite centuries of scientific understanding, not to mention the advancement of knowledge concerning the dangers of overexposure. I mean look at all we now know about the hazards of tanning, the epidemic of skin cancer, and yet every health spa and "fitness center" has tanning booths as if that's not a potentially fatal mixed message at all. Imagine the sort of person who uses a tanning bed. No one who uses a tanning bed could possibly have anything to add to my life in any way. Whatever meager endowment of common sense people have is dropped along with articles of clothing in the race to the beach and not picked up again till after Labor Day. They position themselves under the blazing sun like lizards draped on outcroppings, with the mentality of lizards, and in time they'll have the skin of lizards too. 

Barbara Stanwyck's will to power

technique

Of course I feel better now, just as I predicted. I am manipulating the mammalian brain with old school technique, tried and true. Of course it doesn't last, I have to do it all the time, several times a week. But it helps. I'm also going to give this meditation thing a serious go, I will become a master manipulator not only of the brain but of the breath. Tonight I'm reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which also includes "The Forged Coupon," upon which Bresson based L'Argent. Gary has some images up on his blog from Daniel Schmid's La Paloma (with Ingrid Caven) so I might watch that tonight too. I got it from a bootleg site some time ago. I answered an ad on Craigslist from someone trying to start a weekly film club, and it's relatively near my house. I need to get out more, have some human contact. I don't know if I'll be able to really do it but answering the ad was a step. Tomorrow (today) we're going to see Junior Boys at the Doug Fir. On his blog, Gary Indiana reprints an essay about La Paloma that's also included in his recent stunning collection Utopia's Debris. There's a paragraph near the end which has always struck me as saying something that I need to hear, and saying it perfectly:

I like Daniel Schmid’s idea that we are all private radio stations transmitting on our own frequencies, sometimes audible to each other, sometimes not. Personally, few blue-ribbon cultural products occupy my consciousness with anything like the force of my own imagination or experience, and those that do, like La Paloma, seldom belong to the upper reaches of any established canon. I am indifferent to any argument that a "greater" work should affect me more profoundly, or that there exists a legitimate authority to declare one thing "major" and another "minor." In the end we have only our experiences and we feel them with the particularity of monadic creatures.

final waking moments

Intense loneliness today. It's not such a bad thing, I mean just because I admit it doesn't make it interesting. There are worse things to feel. There's no depth to my loneliness, it's just a weak habit of mind, it lacks ennobling chiaroscuro. Later I'll dutifully go to the gym and go through my ridiculous routine, I've gone so many times and it still feels silly, it's unlikely I'll ever get used to it. The middle of the night, no one around, a lone figure panting for breath. But for hours after I get home I feel pleasantly blank, my mind is just so wonderfully inert. That's when I really recharge my batteries, forget sleep, sleep does nothing for me, it takes me forever to fall asleep no matter how tired I am, as I'm drifting off I wonder if I'll ever wake up, I stare at the dog's sleeping face and think is this the last thing I see (you can't do much better than that, admittedly) and my dreams are usually disturbing, or disquieting, probably related to my anxiety in my final waking moments. You can't have these insane anxiety levels, these death fears and life fears, and expect to have calm dreams. What a relief it is to get out of bed, I never linger in that horrible place. I wake up and I'm surprised to be drawing air, a functional organism, one of nature's charming mechanical gewgaws, a couple of deep inhalations and I'm waddling out the door toward who knows what. 

now cry in darkness

Nell [without lowering her voice]: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But—

Nag [shocked]: Oh!

Nell: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

— "Endgame"

spectacled bear

Despondent, downhearted, then I saw a documentary about the Andes and there were some spectacled bears and dancing flamingoes and a cloud forest and an eerie salt pan. I have made a fool of myself yet again and it feels like it might be time to change. What a clown I can be. I miss people who will never come even part way back and after a certain point it's pitiful to even hope. I might like to be a spectacled bear. They can climb the tallest trees in Peru, and of course there are the spectacles. But then there's the whole animal thing, I'm pretty attached to self-awareness, who knows why. The allure of something like Facebook is the promise of "reconnecting" with people you knew in the past but of course it's almost completely illusory, no one has any intention of reconnecting with anybody and in fact wouldn't even know how if they wanted to, and for that matter to reconnect you have to have been connected in some way that isn't completely trivial and that's probably an illusion too. For most people, the life they have right this minute is all the life they can pay attention to and want to pay attention to, unless they are single and desperate for a partner, in which case they have all the time in the world and will think about you even more than you think about yourself. The spectacled bear is pretty much a loner, the voiceover narration explained. He doesn't get too excited one way or the other when he runs into other spectacled bears. I read a Robert Pogue Harrison book called The Dominion of the Dead and would like to read his Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. He's a Dante scholar and quotes a lot of Dante, so I might profit by reading Dante before I read any more of his books. The thing is, the spectacled bear looks like he reads Dante. Probably a majority of randomly selected strangers, given pictures of me and a spectacled bear, would say the spectacled bear is more likely to read or to have read Dante. The voiceover narration said that Paddington Bear, "from darkest Peru," must have been a spectacled bear. The Paddington Bear books were my first favorite books. I tried for years to like marmalade because of Paddington Bear. I did better with the hard stare.

sam

Keeping my cat from vomiting is my occupation. I discard strategies, try new ones. I find myself imploring food to stay inside him for the time being. I spoon it out and say to it, Now I don't want to see you again for a whole day. Sam is old, approximately 13. I got him from the shelter in '97 and the vet there estimated he was around a year old. His body didn't begin to betray him till recently, one alimentary sorrow after another. You wouldn't think a cat could stand that many enemas. He can still scramble up to his high carpeted perch though. He's puked in every room of the house multiple times. I should ask the neighbors if they'd let Sam puke in their house. They'd say no and I'd say, Suit yourself, but he's not going to live forever.

When I lived alone I had the most amazing conversations with Sam, across a range of topics. Now I have people around and Sam's a little slow on the uptake so it's not the same. When Sam dies all the horrible secrets I told him will adhere to me again and I will need to commit murder to finally discharge them. 

consider the lobster

i walked with a zombie

In All About Eve, Karen Richards tells Eve Harrington that as a playwright's wife, she, Karen, is "the lowest form of celebrity." This was in 1950, decades before the internet, so of course Karen could not possibly have realized just how many lower forms of celebrity would eventually become discernible in the fetid depths of our "sweet cesspool," as George Sanders famously put it in his suicide note. The extremely sensitive celebrity detection apparatus recently evolved in the human neocortex can sniff out levels of renown only microscopically higher than one's own, thus triggering the human envy gland to squirt its reassuringly familiar chemical secretions into the bloodstream. In other words sometimes I find myself so enraged by the trivia that passes for online news that I have to scream into a pillow I keep handy for just such nocturnal shrieking. George Sanders's brother, Tom Conway, said something relevant in I Walked with a Zombie but I forgot the exact wording. It was in the boat scene at the beginning, assuming there was a boat scene. Maybe it was some other scene, or wasn't relevant, or some other character said it, or it was some other movie entirely. Maybe I said it in my movie and forgot. 

the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death