see you soon k, stockholm

its the night before my flight back to new york. i just watched blade runner with k except that k was sleeping in my lap. it is a very interesting movie. shoving nails into ones palms to keep oneself alive, that is some rich symbolism.

it woulda been cool if they had made the replicants not follow a heinous replication of world politics, captained by blonde white man, brown haired grunt, female whores. i guess the movie couldnt but have done that, they are the world intensified, but it ends up reaffirming those ugly politics in how convincingly they fulfill those roles.

i am writing because i dont want to sleep. i have this stupid idea that if i manage to stay awake until i get on the plane that itll be better for my jetlag. dubious idea. there is nothing more seductive than sleep, there is no hunger, no sexual desire, no itch more tempting than sleep.

earlier i was thinking about how an itch, the lowly, vulgar itch is the finest, most precise, unreproducible act. no one else can itch your itches as you can your own, they will hurt you or leave you unsatisfied. they can kiss, caress, massage, tickle, these are the universal motions. tenderness is easy. and scratching, which can be mistaken for itching, is also doable by all, though a bit less rose petaly, its just a coarse caress. but the itch, that satiation, thats special shit.

oh my god i am tired. reading about oslo is a excellent way to rouse myself, that shit is a literal eye opener. that is fucking horrible. ill be there in a few hours, i have a stopover there on the way to new york.

k and i had polenta with saffron and mashed up corn that had been canned, which isnt a bad thing because thats always as tasty as anything ive ever known (i once ate an apple, parched and starving, in the country side of southern france that i thought to be the most delicious id ever eaten in my life. the locals i was with found it marked with the taste of industrial production. to them, it was clearly not plucked off a wild tree, which was what they wouldve found delicious, authentic, etc. I write this to explain, i suppose, that perhaps i no longer have, never had a taste for the wild thing anyway, the can is as real as i can handle, enjoy), and this adorable little salad k had spooned, following the suggestions of mark bittmann into fleshy halves of avocado, along with excellent grilled cheese sandwiches of which k said the onion couldve been fried separately.

i won at scrabble.

i have come to stockholm, an international city, and left with a new appreciation for nature. this is an odd place, full of klippadets (rocky beaches?) and actual forests and so many hills. i can feel the dynamite that civilized it. ks paper was just delivered, i thought someone was trying to break in or the shower curtain had collapsed. that was anxious. its 3 48 AM.

now reading about the horribleness in somalia. there is lots to keep you awake if you want it, this shit is incomprehensible, biblical without any of the meaning, any of the god. people have lives and livelihoods and then it doesnt rain for several years and then all their animals die and they walk through the desert for 20 days to a refugee camp that has nearly 400,000 people in it that was built for 90,000. there is every reason to be awake every night, how odd that one has to be awake to realize the reason one should be. so much to be unhappy about.

the birds here are real characters. the seagulls are throatier than usual, theres always some quivering emotion hanging in the air, some bird laughing or crying or buffooning. now 4 16. still very much want to go to bed but it isnt as acute any more. thinking about dadaab makes me think of lars von trier movies, of dogville. hes all i have to go by in imagining my hells on earth. im uncomfortably comfortable in our white supremacist, classist, sexist, capitalist world. this is a long night.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/10/11/101011crat_atlarge_gourevitch i guess i needed another boost of wakefulness and mr gourevitch really chips in. that is some brutal article. its about how humanitarian aid, without delving into the specifics of its stunting local governance and commerce, really backfires and can end up a really sordid business. there was a wonderful poem quoted about how a person, though doggedly helping you to find your camel doesnt ever want you to find your camel, ever. it is a blisteringly hopeless article. nothing good to be done for the poor, limbless children. saving lives may only prolong life taking wars, for example. ah what fucked, horrible shit. this is a hilarious night. k sleeps, breathes softly, like an organ in my body steadily churning out the happiness that runs in my veins. without her, lifes looking notably bleak. excited for this plane ride. extremely excited to be able to speak english with everyone i see. though i need to learn to speak spanish to get outside my hilariously well sealed membrane of privelige. i have a hard time talking to black people, i think, at least ones who arent named romeo, were tight ends at harvard and are half white french anyway.

iäve been up since five and im restless with a political consciousness. i have been struck with a sense that i should be involved in the governing of the united states. i have some passionate ideas about income inequality that are all the more passionate for their shallowness, and iäd like to deepen them. iäve been reading about progressive taxes and whether taxation actually slows economic growth and how 20% of the people in the united states have 85% of the wealth, and that the bottom 40% has .3%. this was an absurd thing to learn.

i have some doubts which iäd love to have explained. for one thing, i have this idea that there isnät enough money to go around. when we get excited about the top 20% because it makes for a spectacular statistic, that group bottoms out at around 100,000, which is a lot, iäm sure, but it doesnät seem astronomical, and redistributing a 100,000 downwards doesnät quite have the robinhood ring of rich to poor. jodi dean quickly dispatches with concerns about not enough money or something with snippets of CEO compensation, and if that is really all one needs to see then thatäs delightfully straightforward and let the robinhooding begin, but iäm not entirely sure about all that. more persuasive is her emphasis on the utter absence of a correlation between how well off the little people are with how profitable private business is, as manifest in the stockmarket.

basically iäve been reading that george orwell book and the thing is absolutely marvelous in that it describes a politically engaged person and makes that engagement the most obviously necessary thing. could there be anything more important than knowing what is up with your world (questionmark i cant find on this keyboard) no. and i love, LOVE his faith in people, or faith isnät the word, but his respect for the necessity of respecting them, of respecting their patriotism, their facts, his respect for democracy, in a word, and his disdain for the political isolationism and self loathing of the leftist intelligentsia of his age. gotta go with the people, respect them and nurture their allegiance instead of bemoaning the effectiveness of the monied competition. let the modern left wave the flag, reclaim the lapel pin, whatever. it doesnät serve any worldly purpose to do otherwise.

iäm in stockholm! iäm in kiraäs little apartment, and the äs stand in for apostrophes, and iäm sitting in the chair in which she skyped with me. it feels so natural and good to be here that i wish i was a little less at easeö (semi colon) itäs thrilling to feel out of place.

käs wearing a dress that looks like one from the alexander mcqueen show, and everything is small and tucked. her fridge and oven-microwave-toaster are in a closet. this place is so charming.

stockholm windows are separate in an old school way, all buildings of any size iäve seen havenät had those sheafs of modern glass. stigsbergsgatan.

you know, considering all i've been thinking about writing, about how it's parsing, framing and distilling, it's amazing that anyone can write a personal essay. how do you parse the personal? i feel like it would take majestic powers of self criticism to recognize that which is extraneous, for what is extraneous in one's own life?

that which gives things structure, what helps you put yourself in perspective are the experiences of other people; joan didion needs gawain and poets and the catchphrases of her husband. it puts things in perspective without which you have the blind, crippled extravagance of Synecdoche's theatrum mundi.

this is all to say that there's hope for me yet, i just need to read more, but not too much, because that's overwhelming too, but something in between. i'll figure it out, erring more on the side of reading. i've been luxuriating with my ideas about undead dust bunnies.

was watching the dogs, thinking about the way they would normally kick over the poop, do the nonchalant, return to the earth, but they can't now. as with the exorcism, we need not a little poo dance but an enormous poo infrastructure to deal. also how they sense ghosts, or at least what is creepy. watching them zoom together, unflinchingly to one specific spot on a wall is like someone who visits your house and gets transfixed by your cabinet, by a painting, by a piece of wall. things have an interiority, another level that we can't perceive and that's creepy as hell. that's ghostly.

dust is because things can't return to the earth. it makes us cough because its life cycle is unnaturally extended, it forms dust bunnies, zombies, instead of disintegrating into new, fresh matter. it's like the undead, toxic until it can rest in peace.

when dogs lose interest, when are they aren't being patted or fed or sniffing something that excites them they collapse onto their chins and everything flops completely. it's such slapstick living, they so literally embody however they feel. it's also terrifying when they start barking, or simultaneously turn their heads to the door because something has twitched. we think about the supernatural senses of animals with tsunamis and earthquakes, but it's much more than that. it isn't just world shaking events, they're rankled by so many invisible things. i feel like the oblivious guy getting his house burgled when they suddenly start yelping; they know things i don't, they see a totally different world. i've been acting silly all day trying to pretend to be a dog, to imagine how they see things, but i can't get past the anthropomorphized, animated version: hunger, sex, drool, and i suppose one really can't. what the fuck is going on in those little heads?

it's the sort of thing that makes you believe in ghosts. maybe not ghosts for us, but still ghosts certainly. how arrogant and blind must one be to only believe what we as humans can sense when your stupid half poodle thing is alert to all the world's mysteries? we're blind to so much.

dust

there's a frantic fear of death in how we relate to dust. there are jokes about what we're all becoming, and then 365 day a year calendars to keep the stuff at bay. Our couches and mattresses and bodies are all dying alike, losing our hair, skin and stuffing. No one would expect a snake to linger around it's old skin, there'd be something deeply perverse and cruel about forcing them together. it slithers away, itching, as from a funeral. And yet we've constructed containers where we're drowning in our dead selves, where it can't be renewed but only shoveled out of the door. And it makes us cough. We can't breathe for the unnaturalness of these memento mori. living in closed spaces makes organic stuff toxic. it makes US toxic, it makes us, this pooping, flowering, shedding organism, into something so putrid it makes itself gag. It's amazing that we've made ourselves hostages to our excretions. we don't give shit a chance to float in the wind, to get lost. we hoard and dump our waste as if we were monkeys that guarded mountains of shit because, for ritualistic purposes, they only ever dumped it down the waterfall. this is ultimately because of the sickening density of human encampments, and how hard the ground becomes under our heavy feet. the earth loses its power to compost when humans start stomping over it, let alone cementing over it.

dealing with waste is such an elaborate ritual, it's an exorcism in the modern world. the flush of a toilet is like a whirlpool for an enemy; we beat our curtains like we throw a drunk out of a saloon.

nothing is biodegradable in a city. dust is a luxuriant phantom, something that outlives itself. by what right does this flimsy, barely there thing grow? i guess by the same rights as the stars in those galactic nurseries. cities, hard ground, contained space are unwitting sanctuaries for these half dead bits, these zombies that should die, that should pad the nests of birds and should grow the future. but instead we're sheltering them and they repay us with asthma.

nothing is biodegradable in a city! it's all so violent! isn't it extraordinary how we impact garbage, how we light the leaves on fire, how we carry it so far away? this is supposed to be the fault of our non degradable industrial stuff, that styrofoam is our problem, but the fact is that nothing is degradable without our violence. the quick work of maggots is romantic compared to the hard hands of human sanitation. and so things get dusty.

imagine collecting up all the hairs and dead skin and bits of blood and pee and everything else that living makes you leave behind and making a little you out of it. i wonder how big it would be for an entire lifetime. AH! i bet by the time you turn 100 the shedded dead bits would make a large thing, a kind of growing zombie as you age, your own monument to your death. instead of a child outgrowing you, your own dead bits would finally stand taller and that would be all. what an idea. anyway! i write this because our contained spaces, our homes are shelters for the construction of these zombie homunculi. it's the same with couches, imagine building a zombie one from the fragments, so delicate and toxic, as eery as a dead little girl. they're so fragile, so ready to dissolve at the touch of a breeze, and yet we're growing them, these wicked unnatural creatures. and trying to keep them out we're frantic with HEPA vacuums and all the energy in the world. it's a filthy memento mori, it is. keep the windows open.

this would just be whimsical and odd, these zombie bits we're ever collecting, if it weren't for how toxic they often are. computers are more insidious in breaking down, you don't get miniature macs with the apple rotting and sagging, but PBDE's that infiltrate your breast milk and retard your children. INSERT OTHER PERNICIOUS SHIT HERE. And the other problem is that all these zombies attract a lot of dust mites that poop constantly and cause asthma and ruin that beautiful, creepy idea of dust made up of you and your things, a ragged undead version of your world. the tenants of that world end up being run of the mill, eminently alive, disgusting little things.