several things

have been feeling a lot of things today. i asked s about the dia beacon and whether stuff in lived life reminds him of stuff in art, abstracted life he said no. maybe he didnt really say no, not perfectly no anyway, but i got the impression it didn't. that's comforting because it's an insecurity of mine that i fail to see the parallels to art in my life and so fail to suss out meaning, like a dreamer who hasn't gotten the memo about ravens and oncoming death. i live hoping and waiting to have all these movies and museums and books illuminate my stubbornly flat life. maybe s, other people don't either? but then why, why all this stuff, all these exquisite little emotions that then evaporate until some other thing i have sat down and gotten serious about stirs them up again, but only in relation to the other serious, sitting occasions? i don't ever CONSCIOUSLY think of paintings i have seen in museums, i do not do things that ever recall or evoke that francis bacon show i loved and FELT so well a couple years ago, or anything else. that sucks, because i like to imagine this stuff doesn't just evaporate to the artosphere where my actual life is not lived. then again, i'm sure it sneaks in unconsciously, and that's a hope.

i went to a mets game with steve and lisa and mitch which was super bizarre, because evidently people are still very serious about baseball. i think it's kind of like being inside the head of a little kid and so reliving my childhood. i know this head was once mine, but it isn't anymore and i'm amazed that it's a full fledged being in and of itself. the immersiveness of being in a ballpark, of being surrounded by all the insane ways in which people care is astounding. it feels like a religion that i no longer believe in but one whose rituals i can still watch with fascination. what SERIOUSNESS! and to know i once had it too! there were two fat white men behind us who really knew about baseball, who noted the stupidity of shifting the infielders right (i think it was right?) and pitching inside and who couldn't help, who LOVED to speak in announcer voices, insanely melodious, like something emerging from an cartoonishly twisted instrument. only people with as much time and as little to say as baseball announcers couldve invented such speech -- JuuuuuussSST a liiittle inside.

i was also struck by how sports mean winning and losing. when you don't care about either side, sports are constantly drowning you in pity for one person or another. any success means someone's failure, someone's average dropping or ERA going up, someone in danger of going to the minor leagues whose entire life is dedicated to baseball and succeeding at it. what a horrible thing to pit people against each other like that, of course they celebrate. what is sportsmanship with the barbarian fact that person's victory is another's defeat? and at least baseball is a team sport, so perhaps the intertwinedness of a whole team's destiny softens that absolute battle between a pitcher and hitter, but in any one on one sports, in tennis, for example, it's insane to expect sportsmanship, to expect people to not rave and murder and generally degenerate into children. if we ask them to care enough to do nothing in life but the sport they play, how can we expect them to treat it as if it were just a sport and not the single greatest arbiter of their worth as human beings? anyway, how can anyone get to that level without feeling that way, without investing themselves utterly? that would be as miraculous as sportsmanship itself. it's nice when it exists, think of the children, but it's totally unreasonable to expect. the repression sportsmanship requires is probably why they're all such basketcases with their streaks and neuroses and whatnot. sportsmanship ultimately requires you to have a sense of yourself outside of whatever you're doing, some reserve dignity that can sustain you in lieu of sports related dignity. this is usually possible because there is happily no competition in which we get defeated intellectually, romantically, physically etc. but when they're a professional athlete who can't even read for their dedication to expertly moving their body parts, what is that reserve?

k called me at the stadium and i was embarrassingly happy.

also, i watched closely watched trains again with s and didn't think much of it, a sort of lesser il posto. i think i loved it so much because i was horny and missed k.

need to change kitty litter

need to learn more about world

want to be complimented, coddled; want to prove self, be an adult -- adulthood is not having a backstop, the unqualified, bottomless support of something, someone (parents) else. adulthood is means having to fear being a totally SOLITARY wreck. adulthood means an end to the childhood that defies the laws of physics in that things will happen to you that you have not pushed, done to make happen, that nothing, NOTHING will happen to you if it is not you that does it.