Some­times I think that these days are the com­pressed moments seen quickly, from the cor­ner of the eye, in the half-light of the past… a moment of falling asleep, or of see­ing the black win­dow and think­ing that it could be any­where out­side. Tonight, out­side, it’s a ras­cal vein of cold air, slip­ping up through the canyons; inside, it’s one of those nicest pools of calm– baby sleep­ing, daugh­ter sleep­ing, wife in the bath, dish­washer hum­ming, pen­cil lines and modal scales falling away, and one soft can­dle of light, here by the lap­top screen. There is a com­fort that per­vades the palm tree aerie tonight. Which is uncom­mon. Which is whole­heart­edly welcome.

I could move in so many dif­fer­ent direc­tions right now. I sup­pose that is part of my quiet joy — a moment of implicit poten­tial always makes me smile, and the ideas are all jock­ey­ing for posi­tion in line. In the end, I will prob­a­bly leave them– all of them. It is too late, and I am too far gone. But it is cer­tainly nice to have them.

We are capa­ble of see­ing our future, aren’t we? We can, should we choose, look ahead and see exactly where we’re going, right down to the tex­ture and qual­ity of the air, at night, some decade hence. I know this because I have seen this day, this night, before– and I knew (some­how, some­where, deep within) that I would expe­ri­ence this. I feel this is one shard of a vision from a night, long ago, in my East­hamp­ton attic. For one moment, I knew New York City was out­side my win­dow. Then, I could feel the soft, cool jas­mine air on my face. And then… well, much more.

If this seems cryp­tic, I apol­o­gize. I do not intend for it to be so. I mean this very lit­er­ally– we carry within us not just the seeds, but the vision, of our future. For some rea­son, we do not per­mit our­selves to be aware of it, most of the time. So it forces itself on us, in flashes, in moments where we lose con­trol of our sin­gle focus and let our con­scious­ness blos­som… For me, I see many things when I am entrained in a repet­i­tive task. For this rea­son, and this rea­son only, the work at the ‘deli’ in Waste­field was a gift– the repet­i­tive motion was like a dream invo­ca­tion. I was a shaman for 4 to 6 hours a day, that summer.

I do not under­stand it, I can­not always evoke it, and I cer­tainly can­not force the visions to be more sig­nif­i­cant. I see sim­ple things for the most part– drop­ping coins in a stair­well, telling my father it’s his turn to row, or a par­tic­u­lar taste of the air on some spring night in Cal­i­for­nia. Of course, it would be emi­nently more use­ful to see some major events.

But there it is.

I did tell you that it was late, and I would not be able to extend the proper hos­pi­tal­ity to the small pageant of ideas who got all dressed up for the night’s plea­sure. A long long year-and-a-half of bro­ken and shell-shocked sleep leaves me defense­less, at least when the caf­feine finally trick­les out of the sys­tem. And it is that time. Bled dry. So to speak.

So I look back through the many dark win­dows of past nights, hop­ing to catch my own eye– for I know I am look­ing for­ward, some­where back there, won­der­ing at this taste, this tremor, this vision. And I look for­ward, again, to see if I can make sense of the shapes in the dark.

We’re all sur­vivors, but who tran­scends sur­vival? –joan baez. His­tory is all about pol­ish­ing the edges and flat­ter­ing the ego, so don’t worry about that part of it while you’re doing the work. –todf

Tired.

My ears are buzzing like they’re filled with boar bris­tles. Elec­tric boar bris­tles. It’s been a long day.

My throat is a con­tin­u­ous lost sigh.

I am going to bed.

Try­ing to pull off the cob­webs of sleep, left­over from the long and spine-scraping week­end. When Iryna is sick, the whole world is off-kilter. Sleep was the first sac­ri­fice. Yes­ter­day, a nice “day off”, was con­founded by an over­taxed ner­vous sys­tem and a rogue stub­born­ness dae­mon that encour­aged me, through deli­cious whis­pered promises, to bang my head against the walls and book­shelves. Cof­fee, while tasty, was furtive and ret­i­cent to lend a help­ing hand, pre­fer­ring to nes­tle qui­etly some­where in the more saurian parts of my brain– kept my heart beat­ing, but that’s about all. I guess, in ret­ro­spect, that *that* was still pretty use­ful, and I am grate­ful, but when your hopes are for heaven while your body drags on the earth, that is a sub­tle form of hell.

Now, we (the dai­mon, the cof­fee gnome, the white noise ghosts, and the shadows-of-promise) are left with a dis­em­bod­ied feel­ing. Like a dream where you don’t notice you’re float­ing until you start try­ing to walk, and then you look down to see your feet ped­al­ing use­lessly in the air, a few feet above the ground. Good Morning.

SO I have fallen behind with my Gravity’s Rain­bow read­ing. I don’t know exactly why, but it’s not ‘catch­ing’ me like Infi­nite Jest did. Not yet any­way. There have been beau­ti­ful pas­sages thus far: the open­ing (“a scream­ing comes across the sky” stuff) pas­sage, and then the longer extended Slothrop devel­op­ment, with fam­ily his­tory and then the {I am guess­ing} key para­noia about the bombs hit­ting before the sound…

But, when the need arose tonight, my hands reached for the clas­sic Walden, which I have now read 3 or 4 times com­pletely, and is very much like an old and well-known friend who man­ages to sur­prise you each time you meet — there is a com­fort and depth there, and then lit­tle mir­a­cles under the skin. I read most of the House­warm­ing chap­ter, since it’s almost Octo­ber here and I see all the pump­kin stalls and tents pop­ping up– which is really the vec­tor here towards fall, since South­ern California’s weather remains warm and of course we have the bit­ter and bone-dry, parch­ing Santa Anas ahead. The sym­bols do a lot to coun­ter­act the desert-on-the-shore real­ity behind the curtains.

Any­way, quite dif­fer­ent than Pynchon’s text, Thoreau — while no lush auteur — man­ages to evoke with sim­ple clar­ity the crisp taste and smell of autumn in New Eng­land for me. It is enough to carry me on to bed.

So, after brew­ing up a mean cup of Vons© generic brand ‘euro­pean’ hot choco­late (which, embar­rass­ingly enough, is the best damn hot choco­late I have encoun­tered out­side of the gourmet Max Brenner’s stuff Katya bought me for my birth­day {but that is a milk/real-chocolate machine, whilst this is a water-based [and there­fore, slightly more effi­cient] mix}) I got right into try­ing to rework some pages in the new site/project I had out­sourced (to Moldova and Roma­nia) in an effort to get some seri­ous cod­ing. It’s in CodeIgniter, and it is my{our} first foray into frame­works, some­thing we {the dev team (see pic above of our work­place)} have eschewed up until now as a con­fus­ing overkill of code.

Any­way, this is me mak­ing a short story long. The res­o­lu­tion is, the trans­fer from the dev server to the live-mirror (penul­ti­mate home) server caused some wild train wreck with the rewrites. It took me about 4 hours to fig­ure it all out– that is, just to get it work­ing. I did not get a chance to actu­ally change the pages nec­es­sary for deliv­ery tomor­row. Now, I am rid­ing another wave of burn-out and have no desire to work, so it’s off to bed to face the reper­cus­sions in the morning.

Wait­ing on another upload, still sleepy, day­dream­ing about cof­fee, won­der­ing what the limit is, but more really feel­ing bit­ter and betrayed by the fact that, today, drink­ing cof­fee seems to have no stimulant-esque effect yet I am hit­ting that queasy-overdose-feeling.

Actu­ally, I just mean I am still sick, or sick again. I have Alice in Won­der­land on the brain, a bit, can’t explain why, most likely the Ther­aFlu©. In any case, throat is raw, head spins, I am wait­ing for some big chunky tar.gz file to upload, rumi­nat­ing on my pro­duc­tiv­ity which is def­i­nitely a mas­sively porous sur­face these days, think­ing ‘burn out’, think­ing ‘frac­ture’, think­ing ‘hun­gry’, think­ing ‘blood from a stone’. Think­ing ‘got to go now, chunky file uploaded’.

No Com­plaints

Strength and Honor

When Cre­ativ­ity Lapses, Appeal to Discipline