i went for a walk with my sister to h&h bagels because it's closing this sunday. carla and i unexpectedly walked the whole way there. we'd intended to take the train at 18th street, but that's really a bogus thing. one's reluctant to go down into a subway when one's walking, and a 3 mile hike is a wonderful thing to stumble into, except for the terrible bits between 30th and 50th or so, when there's an unavoidable swath of fast traffic and with basement hatches and the bike locks of messenger boys clanking. Hell's kitchen, or MiMa as developers are trying to rebrand it, is a really hurried place where every restaurant delivers.

carla and i had some serious conversation like we always do. This time we lectured each other on creating stuff, on the significance of being generative. it's topical for me because i want to write and i feel i have to justify and clarify my ambitions. i've clumsily told people that i want to be famous because that's an easy thing to say, but it's also very stupid. i don't want to be famous necessarily, but i want to have the stuff i write exist outside of myself, for it to be a satellite that doesn't rely on me personally for it's vitality. i want to take an empty word document, like a mold in a forge, and pour little bits of myself into it. and i want those bits to harden into something meaningful even in that anonymous forge, where people are sweaty and distracted and wearing welding masks. my ambition is to have those bits prove more durable than they were on my computer screen and my keyboard dirtied with my fingers, i want them to achieve at least the fleeting permanence and stand alone legitimacy of a newspaper article. I want to be more than fragile nostalgia. i want to be in an archive, not a scrapbook.