i've been thinking about various ways to get back into blogging. the evening cigarette in the backyard is a fecund moment, but by the time i get back in front of the computer with my cup of tea i find i've lost momentum.

lists lend themselves well to writing without overthinking, and one of my main foci lately is what i eat and where it comes from. without further ado, today's goods consumed:

a cup of badly burned diner coffee
bagel with cream cheese

fake chiken burger on english muffin with cheese
glass of cranberry juice (from concentrate)

mexican takeout (nom nom nom!)
-rice & beans
-stolen bites of taco

a cup of excellent coffee
bowl of homemade fish stew
homemade sourdough bread
salad with greens and veg from my garden (and jon ronsani's garden, too!)

a homebrewed beer
some commercial beers

not so good on the locally made front today, although dinner was pretty spot on. baby turnip greens make an excellent salad addition: tender and slightly spicy.

walking into the darkened room at the tate, the mute windows invite meditation. like a church, the the view from a mountain that's surrounded by clouds.

the scrolls that monks gaze at

the utter silence of a cave

it's not the same, but it's a reflection, a reminder, a small piece of peace, like the spark of divinity inside us that reaches towards the ocean.

we need museums, because of course you don't get this experience from a postcard or a picture in a book. the museum makes the space for it, we compose our minds till we are receptive, we walk in and experience a particular sensation. rothko anticipated this, but he doesn't totally govern each person's reaction.

dreamed again last night, or maybe for the first time--my dreams often feel like sequels--of a farmhouse that was now an artists' bazaar and farmers' market (must be based on spoutwood). wandering upstairs through mazelike wooden-planked halls (adam's father's converted barn upstate) i came across the proprietress lying on a wooden bench, now in seclusion due to a terrible disease wasting her away, she looked like a horror movie extra with skin dripping down her face, she shook my hand and it felt like hardened latex.

we didn't get any cards at the office for several months, then a little bundle arrived in quick succession.

the author ran out of room to type each section on the small cards, and the final sentences, pencil-written, crawl back up along the sides to the tops.

The Joe Lose case 11-03=09 report by O.L. Gumshoe Jr. update

After shaking Joey down a few times, I finally got the break in the case I've been waiting for.Compiled a trail of evidence on the murderers son showing where he was and when.Soundtrack: I'll Be There by Micheal Jackson. As I reflected upon this, I began to examine the case from different angles.This was useful in determining his perspective.Like father, like son. Same emotional makeup.It afforded me a window inside the murderers mind so I could anticipate his next move and be one step ahead of him. To make this work, I had to pace myself. Not pushing too hard too soon.While I was gathering evidence,I had to make it appear as if nothing in his life had changed significantly.He couldn't handle too much truth too soon. Soundtrack: I am sailing. I am sailing through the dark night across the sea I am sailing to a distant shore, home to you. The realizations had to come over him slowly, little by little.Memories of past history between people builds trust in relationships and forms a bond.I was an outsider, unknown to him.I had reached a part of his subconscious mind. Establishing common groumd was no small accomplishment. It was a milestone.I realized it when his demeanor towards me changed. He seemed protective of me. Sights, sounds and even smells can trigger memories and cause an emotional reaction.It was the same voice that sang when he was a child.The most serious repercussion I had to consider was that Joey would lose respect for me and deny me the chance to continue the investigation.Lives are destroyed because people get tired of each other. Somebody wanted to be rid of the victim, because he knew the truth. Now, I know too.

anxiety that i'm not made to be a good bicycle racer is tightening my throat. i'm hunched over the keyboard feeling the tension running down in lines from my jaw through my neck as i respond to my coach's weekly e-mail in which he tells me i'm doing great.
it's eleven forty-five and i should be asleep not thinking about tomorrow's intervals.
the snake was deprived of water for a few days because he was coiled up right where his dish belonged and i was too distracted to fish him out, hissing in complaint, while i replaced it. he's dipping his head in now to drink through the rustle of his shed skin. another obligation that waits while i wallow in self-absorption. i think i had another dream of being bitten by snakes recently. no wonder--it's a lengthening, coiling fear, then a sudden shock. sometimes i dream of being struck again and again, unable to get away. but i never dream of being constricted to death.
my dad and i have been discussing the possibility of my buying an apartment. last night i called my mom, half in tears, complaining about my work and not knowing what to do, raging about the situation i've stepped into. today my dad sent an essay of an e-mail laying out the steps to undertake while i look for a home, and ending with his calm advice for dealing with work. he reminded me that he raised me to know that life is not fair, (which i recall as an invariable refrain in the background of my childhood setbacks and frustrations) and that knowing that, we do the best we can without taking each failure or difficulty as a sign of personal weakness or failure. his tone calmed me, and oddly, so did the reminder that he will always hold me up to standards i fear i won't reach. when i was growing up i felt that he didn't praise me enough. now i'm more inclined to feel that his patient indication of the next step to take, with the assumption that one never stops striving to improve, is far higher praise than some encouraging compliment on something i've already done.

seems like even the most unsentimental of my friends (i'm looking at you, tresler) are indulging in year's end state-of-the-union reflections. so it's a little silly and unnecessary, perhaps, to pretend i haven't been doing the same.
where to begin? 2009 began with me buying my first road bike and ended with me joining a racing team. so far, of course, i've been the weakest and most pathetic member of the team, but i'm going to bust my ass trying to get better until they kick me off.
work is a wellspring of an entirely different sort of challenges. i'm suspicious that i'm the sort of person who needs to feel under the gun and stressed out and at a disadvantage to succeed, in which case i'm going to do great at my job and bicycle racing, but my tmj and the coffee addiction will proceed at a corresponding rate.
i'm also idly entertaining the notion that i'm utterly cursed in love. all the little sparks have fizzled out with varying degrees of heat and light. perhaps more disappointing is how little i care. sure, i've felt flashes of rage and passion and affection, but nothing seemed to stick, and i'm left with this vague disappointment. and of course, like the writer hoffman in the opera tales of hoffman, which was an enormous pleasure to see the day after my birthday, it's not a curse but some inconsistency that exists in my head, or perhaps my heart. i don't want what i want. i don't commit. i want the ones that don't want me. i want the one i can't have. it'll go on that way until dumb luck strikes me on the head or until i resolve the internal conflict.
probably neither will happen in a year, but i'm sure the path will be interesting either way.

dreamed last night i had gotten tattoos everywhere. text, pictures. they were around my trunk, my thigh. all black, delicate lines. it didn't hurt.
probably memories of the acupuncture treatment from yesterday evening. the needles didn't hurt, but you felt them going in. pressure, a prick, and then an awareness that they were there. my back feeling like a map with an invisible message, the whole surface activated and sensitive. like fred sandback's yarn pieces that create invisible walls and planes by delineating their edges. you feel a strange resistance when you walk through the empty space between them.
the night before i had another bee dream. in the building where we were staying (memories of the mansion in rhode island where i spent last weekend) there was an enormous hive growing on the roof. the storm knocked it over. i went out to look at the empty husk, but the homeless angry bees were still guarding it. they swarmed me. i ran back inside, all stung up.

on the train coming home from philadelphia last weekend there was a somewhat interesting looking character in the seat next to me. we barely spoke until it was nearly time for him to get off, when he asked me if i was going all the way to new york, because he has a show going up there in a couple of weeks.
turns out he used to be a professor at sva, but now he's a medical student studying radiology. in his spare time he goes into the lab to put random things under the ct scanner and the resulting prints and videos are his art.
i finally went and checked out his website today. i guess i was expecting something more obscure and art-worldy from a former art school professor, but the sentence above pretty well illustrations the length and breadth of what he does. the videos are more interesting than the prints, just the object rotating 360 degrees on a loop. you can watch them twirl and twirl, glowing fluorescent green and magenta, filled with negative space. they're all ordinary objects. on the train he told me he has kids, and it looks like he's raided their toys for material. the little teddy bears and dogs and dolls are more compelling to me than anything else. their skins, the part that we identify with and cuddle and drool all over, are all shorn away. instead you see the seams where pieces overlap, and deep inside where they have little rudimentary skeletons or weighted fillings that allow them to sit upright, the little motor inside a dog that walks. it seems very sinister, like learning something about a friend you never wanted to know.

it was a good week. i’ve been working too much, and in a manic/frantic state at that. as much as i like to ride a jangly caffeine edge through the day from one problem to the next, it wears me down pretty quickly. a couple weeks of long, stressful days ending with book events ending with me blank-eyed drinking beer on the couch till two with my roommate jason, coinciding with an illness that kept me off the bike for a solid week, and i felt like i was losing my mind. worse, i was calling up close friends and telling them i was losing my mind, avoiding my family and snapping at my roommates. bleagh. oh, and insomnia.
when i felt well enough to get back on the bike it was like someone had turned the lights back on. it’s a dependency, for sure, but i’ll take it over smoking or getting wasted every night. unfortunately, cycling’s a habit that is not so compatible with attending all-night disco parties, now my second favorite thing, for which discovery i have to thank the gentle people across the pond at djhistory.com. we through a party jointly with them and white columns at santos party house for a book we’re distributing, a collection of weekly columns written during the heydey of disco. our book parties often involve wine and polite networking; rarely is boot-shaking involved, so this one had unusually good attendance from around the office. i’m proud to say that everyone got down. the personal life/work life barrier in our office is fairly weak, and that used to give me some little anxiety, but i‘ve since given up and embraced it. the music was joyful and fast and loud, and everyone danced like no one else was watching. it was such a release from the usual new york cynicism. i really enjoyed dancing with my new boss. we were sizing each other up a bit, i think he was surprised. my record nerd coworker and i stayed until the lights came on. another nice consequence of the cycling is that my dancing endurance is better than it’s ever been, way up from the smoking days. the next day at work was a total blur of zombie tiredness and pleasure memories.

tonight i went to a talk that my company helped organize. it was a talk between the french artist christian boltanski and the head of publications at the boston museum of fine arts. boltanski is one of those artists about whom i only know a little, but whose work i usually enjoy. he does massive installations, inventories, they're called. piles of folded clothes on shelves, blown up black-and-white photos of children's faces. there was a piece i saw at the little modern art museum in paris, a row of rooms you walked through, with all these multiplied objects stacked and lined up. the clothes piled against the walls of the first room effectively shut out all sound from the rest of the museum, so you felt like you were really inside the piece, rather that surrounded by lots of objects. anyway, my boss and i approached the event with some anxiety, afraid that no one would come or that the talk would be awkward. well, it wasn't crowded, but the talk was wonderful. the gentleman from the mfa had come prepared with plenty of leading questions, and boltanski was quite pleased to tell stories from his life sprinkled with little jokes, and to make pithy romantic statements about his philosophy towards artmaking. i belittle it to describe it that way because i enjoyed it enormously. in college our art history methods teacher one day brought in a prominent conceptual artist for us to interview who was so determined to be true to the conceptual nature of her art and the theories behind it that she wouldn't answer any of our questions and it was very uncomfortable for everyone.
i enjoyed most what boltanski said about the employment of the element of time in his work. if i understand him correctly, he likes to always have something in a piece that is time-based, some performative element or some action that takes place, something that passes and then is gone and cannot be recalled like we would turn back the pages of a book. talking about his inventories, he said they were inspired by ethnographic museums, in which all the objects that pertain to a person or people are displayed, everything but the actual person, and in the end they only underline that absence. and he picked up his glasses and said, if i put these glasses in a vitrine, they will be preserved, they will not be destroyed, but they will not be glasses any more, because glasses are an object that you use to see. once you put them away and prevent them from being used, they become a different kind of object. and he spoke of how this act, which he equated with the production of art, is fighting against death and decay, which is a very futile act.
i''m reading catcher in the rye for the first time, and on the subway ride home after the talk i read a passage in which the main character goes to the natural history museum. most of the new york he describes is unrecognizable to me, but i remember walking through the museum. he's talking about looking at all the vitrines, and he says:
The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, those birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.