while i was taking a bath i thought i had something to say about it but i don't anymore, i was under the influence of a horribly hot thing. it's strangely uncomfortable to float in the still waters of a tub. like, i don't like my appendages to


this is too intimate. suffice it to say that it's odd how comfortable it is to be strapped into our clothes.


tomorrow im flying to portland maine and it feels a bit hectic. it turns out i'm not sick. the hematologist said i might have some slight, slight auto immune disorder but nothing keeping me from being a superhero. what a sleepy bloke i am.

i ordered a coffee at wayne's coffee because my hands were freezing and then sat down at the table right next to the counter which turned out to be an ideal spot to plot to steal a pastry from the counter. there was no one at my back and a column that halved the counter, on the other side of which the employees lingered; there was one 30 something schlub and 4 or 5 blonde girls scattered about. and i was sitting there reading on the road by jack kerouac, really ready to hate it half out of insecurity and half because i'm inclined to disrespect narratives and all that active living because i'm really a homebody. and his prose is so wild and fresh, even today, the best kind of comic book punctuation, and i'm feeling very stale and absurd and overwrought plotting for this macaron. i'd settled on the vanilla macaron that was sticking up on the left side of the little glass bowl.

but i had so many problems. it's amazing how a little plot like this is foiled by the meanderings of fate. people kept coming in, though it was nearly empty. and there was a door to the kitchen on the far side that'd have a clear view of me and my arm. and there was a woman sitting 10 feet to my right who looked sour but eager and extremely willing to have a conversation and not that interested in her paper and whose wandering eyes would sink the whole enterprise. and so i felt very baroque emotions for the complexity of the set up, and found meaning in how my cellphone had forgotten the date and time, so it was 1:22AM on January 4th, 2006, and which i kept thinking was vibrating but was actually just a quiver in my thigh. the whole situation was so bombastic, an exquisite scaffolding of meaninglessness, compared to the absurdly active world i was reading about, all external, hardly a moment for reflection when nothing was not totally new, when the whole world wasn't right there in the horizon, ever moving, and blinding you or freezing you in the night -- you know what i mean, just that he's exposed to the raw immensity of it all.

and it's all the more embarrassing because i feel like i'm imitating that falling-forward writing of his.

Freedom

what's it say about god, the birds eye view to read novels in which everyone's unhappy, and so convincingly so, because their narrow understanding of their lives and the universe can yield no other conclusion, while everyone else is staying miserable armed with that parallel narrow mindedness? happiness is in other people and all in the way you understand them. the high drama of lots of stuff, as the birds eye view reader, are the pinnacles of dubious feeling worked up in solitude, feelings one can't unravel because they're too tight with dignity and privacy and all the other unhappy bullshit that keeps us from other people.

but who wants to take the average, then, by talking it out?

it's sad how bottomlessly hypocritical i am. it's just so hard to be in this world, to be principled. not too long ago i was raging, raging against the inexpensiveness of meat, about how frankly unconscionable it was to be a meat eater because, well, it destroys the world. but you can't blame people about this so much, they'll walk within the cordons of price and fashion, and the world today has put the blinking lights and neon arrows in the steak aisle. so it goes.

but i ache for change and i half believe that we could all make a difference if we worked together and sacrificed. i made the sacrifice and now i've got a soapbox. but there are so many other causes in the world. the fact is i really relish my soapbox, you could not unreasonably accuse me of being a vegetarian for the sole reason of having a grounds on which to denounce other people. i get awfully universal about it; i've got this cause and if you aren't with me you aren't living right. my sister brought me down about this. she reminded me that the world was awfully big and that people have their own causes, things as important as i thought my vegetarianism, and that i likely wasn't living up to their own hopes about transforming the world. like i'm not a vegan, don't give away all my possessions, don't vote socialist, am an ass, etc.

the other night a friend of k's and mine was over and she's got a much taller soapbox than i do. and she mentioned something about flying, and how all the cute recycling one does, all the plastic bottles you've doted on don't mean anything when you compare it to the panda incinerating industrial hell furnace that is an airplane. people shouldn't fly. now k lives in stockholm and i'm from new york and i'm in stockholm right now but im going to have to go home soon. and i am going to miss her wretchedly and i am going to  get on airplanes as often as i can afford and come here. and the friend knows this. and so i hated her in that moment. what a fucking low ass blow.

there's this play i read a while ago by peter weiss with a very long title about the marquis de sade and an insane asylum and jean paul marat. it's about the french revolution, at any rate. and there's this one speech in which marat, i think, is bemoaning the failures of revolution from his bathtub. he talks about sacrifice. he talks about all the sympathetic, righteous feeling there is in the world, but how on an individual level things break down. things get sentimental, special. he talks about how one man wouldn't give up his house and another his dog. one woman wouldn't give up her husband. and it goes on. and that's the death of it, the romantic particulars, the singulars, the individuated life. i don't think i could ever really believe that someone could know what it's like, let alone have a parallel experience to my missing k. and so i'll take my goddamn flight. and strike a blow for the status quo.

of mice and men is so fucking terrific

of mice and men is the most beautiful book in the world! 

i mean, it's too obvious to be good, it's found in high school classrooms. it must be good the way a truncheon is good at crowd control, a thing with which to herd students towards knowledge and adulthood. 

but it's SO GOOD! it's wrenchingly beautiful. it is so fucking touching! AMERICA, YOU MAKE PEOPLE SO SAD! 

like it's so beautiful how curley's wife's face sets after she, you know. when it isn't so heavy with broken dreams anymore, no more bitterness about "pitchers"

when i talked to k about the book, raving with love, she spoke of her horror of it, horror at the uncanniness of lennie. and he is a monster. and she's right of course. but it "wadn't never done in meanness." it was, if anything, done with the wildest misunderstanding and terror. 

and slim! slim the sage! and the poetry of the unlearned working man, the beauty of speaking like you spit. 

and george's rhapsody about land. that book makes a terrible sucker out of you. what a tantalizing thing. 

and the repetition of it! the spareness of the metaphors and the rhythm of their lives. this goes with the poetry of the working man, really. it's so elegant, it's got the suppleness of old leather, of a thing done many times.

man i LOVE that book.

Inland Empire!

well that was difficult and frightening and very long and incomprehensible.

i love the TV hostess that asks nikki about an affair. she's a smiling monster. it's important and wonderful to show how terrifying those frozen faces are.

also, the woman holding the lighter up to show her the light as she dies. and the women doing the locomotion on the shag carpet.

i've already forgotten the whole thing. where can i put this? i'd say it's fodder for dreams but it isn't; it'd be predigested. i was reasonably sure there was some underlying feminism, and nina simone was great, but where did all those black people come from?

i think that was awfully close to being a complete waste of time. though in writing that i feel forced to defend really liking mulholland drive. but there're huge differences. like how sloppy it was. and how thin.

oh, everything's fucked

the price of meat! i mean, the price of things in general, but meat in particular! what a circuitous and evil road to the number on a sticker!

this will sound weird, but meat is too cheap. it's evilly cheap. it's too cheap because on it's way to being stuck with a sticker with a number on it lots of things weren't paid for. it's too cheap because spilling 25 million gallons of pig excrement into a north carolina river was free. because every time the meat company smithfield spritzes its neighbors with a mist of feces it's free. because every time someone gets food poisoning from a diseased piece of meat it's free.

i mean, none of those things are actually free. if you own a house that's regularly spritzed with feces your house is significantly less valuable to potential buyers who aren't into that kind of thing. and when you spill 25 million gallons of shit into a river it's wont to kill every single fish in that river as well as make it, you know, lose that appeal for canoeing and romantic contemplation and such. and when you're sick for a day or two, you miss work and it costs something to spend a few hours with your head in a toilet bowl, even if it is hard to quantify exactly.

the problem is that these motley expenses have everything to do with how cheap meat is. they're absurdly varied and often, as with the head in the toilet, super hard to quantify. and they seem awfully far afield of the meat in question; you might not even know it was yesterday's chicken breast that did you in.

but it's because it was too cheap, because it was factory farmed, because it was produced in utterly fantastical conditions --  there's an anecdote (i guess you can call this an anecdote) about a small family working at a factory farm that drowned in a "lagoon" of pig excrement the size of many football fields and about 30 feet deep -- that all those other expenses happened. those externalities.

meat needs to cost more because meat DOES cost more, it's cost is just so sprawling that we can't see it, can't source it. it costs as little as it does because the industry producing it exploits to the last everything that isn't nailed down. this is getting vague now because i'm unprepared to launch into a grand critique of how bargains are never not born of evil and impunity elsewhere -- though sometimes right at home -- i've got all the indignation necessary but none of the organization of thought or specifics of knowledge necessary to definitively damn capitalism, the world, most people, etc. as beyond fixing.

this has been an angry and invigorating day. it's a bit sad how i never feel more alive than when i'm outraged.

stay tuned for my definitive opus on the wickedness of the world, to be completed sometime in the next sixty years; externalities is the key, key word.

the essence of it is that i've got no faith in convincing people, in the whole world eating less meat. this'll only change if it costs more. people will do nice things less if they're expensive. so that's what has to happen

the right to make noise for oneself

isn't it crazy how one can't just scream? it's an ironic nightmare, because it's the inverse of that storied fear: "no one can hear you." but in a city, it's kind of a suffocating thing to have all these anonymous ears enforce a certain decorum. one can scream among friends, i suppose. but on the street? in an apartment? i just want to scream because i want to let something out of myself. it'd be a scream for me, not for help. and i can't! i don't want a goddamn knock on the door! what a peculiar agony, what a tightness in my chest.

a body just feels a bit small sometimes, that's all. i'm sure jumping jacks would do the trick just as well, but they'd present their own difficulties with the neighbors; plus the leaping and clapping thing feels a bit stupid. it just doesn't smack of anguish, and i kind of relish feeling that.